There is a camp for everything. Dance, wrestling, Jesus — you name it, your kid can camp it. In Judd Ehrlich’s charming Magic Camp, the kids have no desire to be the next LeBron James or Sidney Crosby, however; they want to be like one of the Davids, Blaine or Copperfield. Held each summer in Bryn Mawr, PA, Tannen’s Magic Camp, a spinoff of the famed Gotham magic store, teaches teenagers, mostly boys, the fine art of making a rabbit disappear into their ear or a wand suddenly appear in their hand. You think it’s difficult to saw someone in half? Just […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 27, 2013Since IFP and Filmmaker began programming the reRun Theater in Brooklyn, we’ve been trying to bring audiences great films, but also do it in an interesting and different way whenever possible. One of the ideas that we came up with to bring a little variety to proceedings was our Secret Film Club, which kicks off tonight. In the next week, we’ll be playing 11 films over five different nights. The screenings will all be free. But we won’t be telling anyone what the films are. Cryptic clues will be distributed to give you something to go on, however, the first […]
by Nick Dawson on May 17, 2013During the fall, Filmmaker magazine organized a traveling screening series showcasing the work of this year’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” which included a fantastic show at the IFC Center. Tonight, the 25 New Faces series returns to NYC for a week of screenings at the reRun Theater in Dumbo, with the festivities kicking off with an excellent shorts program followed by an opening night party. Screening this evening are shorts by Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari (Aquadettes), Desiree Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann (3 episodes of their web series The Slope), Julia Pott (Belly), Ian Harnarine (Doubles with Slight […]
by Nick Dawson on Dec 14, 2012Nearly 10 years in the making, Habibi is the semi-autobiographical first feature from 2010 “25 New Face” Susan Youssef, a tale of forbidden love between two Palestinian students who find it impossible for their affection to overcome the rigid conventions of class in Palestinian life and Israel’s ironclad security regime. With Israelis and Palestinians again in actively violent conflict, the film couldn’t be more newsworthy, but Youssef’s low-budget aesthetic ingenuity (she couldn’t shoot in Gaza, but faked it admirably) and a remarkable performance from Maisa Abd Elhadi, as the young woman at the center of multiple circles of conflict (family […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 16, 2012Director and photographer Jacob Krupnick was waiting for a spark to ignite a major creative project, and it came when he was listening to All Day, the 2010 album by mashup maestro Girl Talk. Krupnick’s debut feature, Girl Walk // All Day brilliantly utilizes the entirety of the album, using it as both soundtrack and inspiration for an epic, feature-length music video, the story of a young dancer (Anne Marsen) who escapes for the day to New York City, turning the great metropolis into one big, ever-moving stage. Along the way, she regularly crosses paths with both The Creep (John Doyle), a weirdo in […]
by Nick Dawson on Nov 1, 2012In Sophia Takal’s Green, a couple of young, New York sophisticates travel upstate in order to research a book on sustainable farming, but when a working-class local woman becomes the object of their affection, jealousy and sexual gamesmanship threaten to ruin their relationship. Mining the insecurities that persist amongst young lovers is not necessarily new ground, but Takal, working with her fiance Lawrence Levine and roommate Kate Lyn Sheil, invests the storytelling with a moody disquiet, an emotional honesty and a jarring sense of foreboding that elevate the film above so many of its predecessors. Widely deploying the color of envy in […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 7, 2012While in Cannes I bumped into critic and programmer Aaron Hillis, who told me about the new Brooklyn-based endeavor he’ll be starting upon returning home — running a video store. Hillis, who already programs reRun, the independent cinema and gastropub located in Filmmaker’s building in DUMBO (and currently playing Contributing Editor Brandon Harris’s debut feature, Redlegs), recently bought the established Cobble Hill business Video Free Brooklyn. At a time when the independent film world is obsessed with VOD, downloads and streaming, Hillis is time-traveling back to the world of plastic cases, late fees, and, on the more positive side, savvy […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 28, 2012(Your Brother. Remember? opens for a theatrical run in NYC at the reRun Gastropub on Friday, April 6, 2012. Visit the film’s Facebook page or Oberzan’s official website to learn more.) For those of us who, as adults, continue to take the preposterous cliff-jump that is making movies with nary a paycheck in sight, there are almost certainly VHS/Hi-8/mini-DV tapes hidden somewhere that contain our earliest “work.” Most of this “work” can be categorized as such: backyard/basement/garage variations on—or outright recreations of—whatever big-budget spectacles we had most recently encountered. As a combination performance artist/filmmaker in his mid-30s with just two […]
by Michael Tully on Apr 5, 2012I first met Zach Clark last October when his excitingly subversive, sex-scene-less SXSW hit Modern Love Is Automatic opened Pornfilmfestival Berlin (where my own short The Story of Ramb O had its premiere). Since we barely had the chance to chat in the buzzing, jam-packed Moviemento hub, I was thrilled when I heard recently that Clark’s follow-up Vacation! (pictured above) was already on the festival circuit and would be playing theatrically at Brooklyn’s own reRun Gastropub Theater in May. Finally I had an excuse to find out what makes this offbeat yet seemingly well-adjusted director of a feature about a […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 13, 2011Opening today at Brooklyn’s gastropub theater, reRun, is David Lowery’s first feature, St. Nick. Here’s Alicia Van Couvering’s introduction to her interview with Lowery for Filmmaker at the film’s festival premiere: There is almost no dialogue in the first half of David Lowery’s feature debut, St. Nick. A young boy and a girl enter an abandoned house, clean it up, build a fire, forget to open a window and fill the house with smoke, figure out a chimney and watch the embers turn into flames. They sleep, they forage for food; somehow they survive, until reality starts bearing down on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2011