Christened Megunticook (“great swells of the sea”) by the long eradicated Penobscot Abenaki native American tribe that first lived in the region before it took turns being in the hands of the French and British during colonial times, the town of Camden, Maine is these days primarily a summering community for the northeast’s wealthy; its tiny population of just over 4,000 triples in size between Memorial and Labor Days. No wonder — the natural beauty of the place is quite stunning. It’s rolling hills and mountains, those great swells of the sea the PA’s were referring to, are covered in […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 4, 2013Manhattan has its big dog festivals, while across the East River in Brooklyn, home to the country’s greatest number of independent filmmakers, several fests are aspirating to the top ranks. Not in a A-List cookie cutter way, but uniquely, in their own way. The number of documentaries at the fifth annual BAMcinemaFest remained limited. Out of 25 features nine were docs, and out of 14 shorts nine were docs. Events were likewise limited, with some filmmakers organizing their own post-screening get-togethers in local bars. But what continues to lift the stature of this festival is not number of movies or number […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Jul 2, 2013Several of the films from this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival dealt with themes of community. Two films in particular that focused on question of community were Patrick Creadon’s If You Build It and Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s Remote Area Medical. In both cases, we are introduced to both the pleasures and the complexities of providing resources — medical or educational — to rural communities that have been neglected in recent years. If You Build It depicts the efforts of Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller to introduce a design-oriented curriculum to rural Bertie County, North Carolina, and to […]
by Chuck Tryon on Apr 8, 2013Documentary filmmaker Farihah Zaman shares the secrets of the Good Pitch.
by Farihah Zaman on Jan 17, 2013It often feels as though a solid 75% of film industry members that I meet in New York have filtered through the IFP at some point; as a long ago employee, intern, or volunteer, or as a patron of the film market, which has gone by various aliases over the years. These days it falls under the umbrella of Independent Film Week, which I had the opportunity to attend this year as my film Remote Area Medical—which my partner Jeff and I are deep in the process of editing—was accepted into the Spotlight on Documentaries section. As I proudly told […]
by Farihah Zaman on Oct 3, 2012In the late spring of 2000, I found myself across a desk from one Milton Tabbot (currently IFP’s Senior Director of Programming, for the unfamiliar) in an office plastered with movie posters in the West Twenties. I was a few months away from finishing college and, unsure of what exactly to do with myself, had applied on a whim to a position at an organization called the IFP. I wasn’t sure exactly what this shadowy group did, but I knew I’d heard of it; the job was a marketing gig, and involved a big upcoming event called the Independent Feature […]
by Jeff Reichert on Sep 20, 2012Last week at the the Los Angeles Film Festival, our very own Lady Vengeance, Farihah Zaman, premiered her documentary short Remote Area Medical, co-directed with her husband Jeff Reichert, himself a filmmaker (Gerrymandering) and film journalist. The film — which is embedded below — was made as part of the Focus Forward series, for which 30 filmmakers have been commissioned to make three-minute documentaries. There is, however, a feature-length version of Zaman and Reichert’s film in the works, to be released in 2013; to stay updated on its progress, “like” its Facebook page and follow @RAMmovie on Twitter. In a […]
by Nick Dawson on Jun 25, 2012