The product of the brilliantly inventive and mischievous minds of 2012 “25 New Faces” Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer, the animated intergalactic basketball fantasia Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse! premiered last December at the Borscht Film Festival. The movie played at the Miami event run by Leyva and Mayer despite the pair having received letters from the NBA and Miami Heat player Bosh — played in the film by another 2012 “New Face,” Terence Nance — demanding the film be suppressed due to “an infringement of [Bosh’s] publicity rights, privacy rights, and common law trademark rights.” Now, wonderfully, the film […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 24, 2013Jillian Lucas and Lucas Leyva, two of our “25 New Faces” from 2012, are back at SXSW with their new short #PostModem after making their name at the fest last year with the mind-blowing Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke. Here they talk with Romain Thomassin as part of the Motionmaker series of Young Guns interviews with emerging filmmakers.
by Nick Dawson on Mar 12, 2013There’s been a lot going on with our current crop of 25 New Faces, so I thought I’d do a quick catchup of recent goings on. Firstly, four feature projects by 2012 alums are playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival: there’s a world premiere for Ornana’s first narrative feature, Euphonia, while Bassam Tariq and Omar Mullick’s evocative documentary These Birds Walk (a world premiere at True/False later this month), Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher (which was actually shot in Austin) and Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye’s archival doc Our Nixon will continue their fest circuit runs there. (Incidentally, Lane and […]
by Nick Dawson on Feb 7, 2013Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva screen their latest short, #PostModem, at the Sundance Film Festival this week, but today they’ve dropped “MegaMega Upload,” the music video that takes over the movie at one point. The filmmakers say of #PostModem, “[it’s] a comedic satirical sci-fi pop-musical based on the theories of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. It’s the story of two Miami girls and how they deal with the technological singularity, as told through a series of cinematic tweets.” I saw the short at Borscht 8 this year; Mayer and Leyva’s lo-fi riff on uploaded consciousness is super smart. Indeed, you […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 14, 2013I’ve not been posting as regularly recently as much of my focus has been on the redesigned Filmmaker website, which will be launching in the very near future. But, on this quiet Friday afternoon, I thought I’d take the opportunity to provide a few quick updates on the current class of filmmakers in our “25 New Faces,” who are a very productive bunch. Firstly, New Yorkers should head to MoMA this Sunday, October 28, for The White House Home Movies: Richard Nixon on Super-8, a screening which is part of the 10th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. There will be clips […]
by Nick Dawson on Oct 26, 2012The funny thing about film festivals is that there never seems to be enough time to talk about the films you’ve just seen. Distribution strategies, yes, industry gossip, most definitely, but the actual creative decisions and approaches involved in making the films themselves – barely! So the Grand Cinema’s mini-festival celebrating Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Tacoma, WA, last month felt like a truly rare treat. Bringing together 14 of the actors and filmmakers or filmmaking teams on the list, including myself and Katherine Fairfax Wright, my directing partner on Call Me Kuchu, The Grand Cinema scheduled […]
by Malika Zouhali-Worrall on Sep 5, 2012