Creative Capital, the granting and artist support organization, announced today its 2015 awardees in the categories of Moving Image and Visual Arts. Out of 3,700 submitted proposals, 46 projects were funded with the 50 supported artists ranging in age from 28 to 80. More than half our women, and and more than half identify as non-European American. Among the grantees are a number of artists who will be recognized by the Filmmaker readership. Here are just a few of them. Veteran director Michael Almereyda receives his first Creative Capital grant for a series of short films based on Italian folktales. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2015Starting this week, I’ll be posting a round-up of stray news items and articles — mostly film, though not all — that caught my eye. Let’s get started: • The great Michael Almereyda’s short film Skinningrove won the short film jury award at Sundance this year, and now you can watch it at the New York Review of Books. It’s about 15 minutes of photographer Chris Killip discussing and showing mostly unpublished photos of the titular Yorkshire village from the ’80s. • Here’s an interesting obituary for Thomas C. Senesac, owner of Chicago’s Acme Prop Rental, a company which got […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2014With its famously catholic tastes and sprawling slate, the International Film Festival Rotterdam is a place to get lost. A week into its 10-day run, a fairly subdued 42nd edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam has unfurled a smattering of buzz-worthy world premieres and its usual mix of budding talents from unusually farflung spots on the globe, high-art provocations, exhaustive considerations of an emerging national cinema or two and obscure auteur retrospectives. However, I’ve found that it’s always the surprises here that grab you, little films you’d otherwise never see except in this context, that make the trip worthwhile. I […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 30, 2013Tonight the winners of the short film awards for the Sundance Film Festival were announced. The Grand Jury Prize went to Polish director Grzegorz Zariczny’s The Whistle, while two directors known for their feature-length work — Damien Chazelle and Michael Almereyda — also picked up awards. The full list of winners is below: The Short Film Grand Jury Prize was awarded to: The Whistle / Poland (Director: Grzegorz Zariczny) — Marcin, a lowest-leagues football referee who lives in a small town near Krakow, dreams of better times. At his mother’s urging, he decides to change his life and find himself a girlfriend and a better job. […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 23, 2013I haven’t done one of these in a while, so a few of these links are less than current. In any case, here are some links of interest from my Instapaper archives. First, Instapaper itself, and its founder Marco Arment, got some love from today’s New York Times. In The Paris Review, filmmaker Michael Almereyda collects largely unseen and uncollected photographs by William Eggleston. He writes: William Eggleston’s color photographs are among the most widely viewed, and widely admired, in the medium. But I wanted to survey Eggleston’s unseen, unpublished work—his B-sides, bootlegs, unreleased tracks—and to that end I made […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 12, 2010A STILL FROM DIRECTOR MICHAEL ALMEREYDA’S PARADISE. COURTESY POST FACTORY FILMS. As he himself puts it, writer-director Michael Almereyda loves to make movies like a fighter likes to brawl, and over the course of his directorial career he has sought out an intriguing variety of creative challenges. Born in 1959 in Overland Park, Kansas, Almereyda spent his formative years in the Los Angeles area, where he discovered cinema and became a voracious moviegoer. Almereyda attended Harvard as an art history student, but dropped out in order to pursue his film career. He made his debut with the short film A […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 24, 2009