Writer/director/actor Marianna Palka has appeared at Sundance to present a feature (2008’s Good Dick), a documentary short (2014’s The Lion’s Mouth Opens) and to serve as a Sloan Juror. She returns to Park City in 2017 with Bitch, her surreal new film on the crumbling of a nuclear family. Palka hired DP Armando Salas to shoot the film, which stars Jason Ritter, Jaime King and Palka herself. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Salas spoke with Filmmaker about the film’s seriocomic tone, visual influences and its toughest scene to shoot. The film will screen four times at Sundance this year. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2017There were movies. Some, like New York Times film critic (and my fellow SUNY Purchase Film alum) Manohla Dargis, said there were too many — even before she saw any of them. Sales, at least during the festival, weren’t robust; perhaps some of the weary execs, including a couple she overheard dishing on their inability to sit through American Hustle while in line for a theater, are taking her advice and sitting on their pocketbooks. Perhaps we’ll find some of these movies on VUDU or Seed&Spark or NoBudge. Maybe someone will tap an unexpected and unforeseen audience outside of the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 26, 2014Two worthy Kickstarter projects have uploaded new trailers illustrating opposite but effective approaches to fundraising. The first is an irreverent long take for Jocelyn Towne’s I Am I, a first-person address from the director aided by a bed full of guest stars, including Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter and producers Cora Olsen and Jen Dubin. The second is a new trailer for a project I’ve posted about before: Alix Lambert and Jill Peters’s He/She/He. Here, dialogue is withheld, and a beautiful piece of source music juxtaposed with the stunning images conveys the emotional power of the project. He/She/He is in its […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 2, 2010Marianna Palka’s Sundance Competition feature Good Dick has just premiered on Hulu. When he interviewed Palka for Filmmaker in 2008, Nick Dawson wrote: The intrepid Palka makes her big screen debut as writer, director and producer with Good Dick, an unusual and surprising film in which she also stars opposite Ritter. The pair play the movie’s lonely, unnamed protagonists, a sweet-natured, hapless video store clerk and an awkward, reclusive young woman who rents pornographic videos from him. Smitten, he forces himself into her life, determined make her love him despite her seeming ambivalence. The decidedly unconventional (non)relationship between these two […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 4, 2010WRITER-DIRECTOR-ACTRESS MARIANNA PALKA AND JASON RITTER IN PALKA’S GOOD DICK. COURTESY MORNING KNIGHT / PRESENT PICTURES. Still only 27, Marianna Palka has achieved notable success early in her career because she knew what she wanted and showed an adventurous spirit in going out and getting it. A first generation Polish Scot, Palka grew up in the depressed working class Glasgow neighborhood of Maryhill, where at an early age she displayed an interest in theater and cinema. In her teens, she began making what she calls “video art” projects which depicted the world around her, such as By My Very Self, […]
by Nick Dawson on Oct 10, 2008I wished I had 10 percent more silence while making the film. [PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 11:30 am — Racquet Club, Park City]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2008