In their latest short film, The Last Days of August, which depicts the slow-motion desolation of a Nebraska town economically denuded by online retail, prolific filmmakers Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck create a haunted visual poetry — a blend of formally arresting, incisively spare images and heightened sound design. The two filmmakers, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2010, began as shorts filmmakers and in recent years have directed arresting character-based, documentary-tinged features (God Bless the Child, When She Runs, and, for Machoian solo, The Killing of Two Lovers and The Integrity of Joseph Chambers). But throughout their […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 22, 2022One of my favorite memories of attending a decade-plus of True/False is from the 2015 edition of the now-defunct Neither/Nor sidebar, annually dedicated to a small retrospective with accompanying monograph. A selection of unknown-to-me Polish cinema programmed by Ela Bittencourt structured that year’s on-the-ground experience from my first screening, Marcel Łoziński’s 1981 How to Live, as hilarious as promised by its description: “In the 1970s, young Polish couple [sic] attend a government-sponsored summer camp where they learn to become the ideal communist family.” The sidebar produced a number of related beguiling sights, not least the now very senior filmmakers in attendance […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 21, 2022Recently announced as a European Capital of Culture for 2016, the picturesque western Polish city of Wroclaw (actually pronounced Vrotz-wav, thus rendering the title pun sadly unworkable) welcomed an extremely distinguished guest for its fifth annual American Film Festival: none other than flying POTUS Barack Obama. Well, it seemed so for a moment, but appearances can be deceptive. A closer look revealed the man to be Louis Ortiz, top Barack-alike and star of Ryan Murdock’s enjoyable Bronx Obama, which screened as part of the festival’s documentary slate. The personable Ortiz’s social ubiquity made for a pleasingly incongruous addition to a […]
by Ashley Clark on Oct 30, 2014Filmmakers don’t get to be moody loners. If you’re a painter or a writer, you have the option to go it alone. Sit in your room, bang out that first draft. Or, lock the door, stretch the canvas and go to it. Film is different: It’s rarely a solo pursuit, especially at the feature level. As filmmakers, we’re forced out of isolation and compelled to rely on others: producers, editors, sound people, lawyers, distributors. We’re team players, whether we like it or not. Paradoxically, though, at the end of the day we have an “auteur-biased” rewards system. With many films […]
by Esther B. Robinson on Oct 20, 2014Welcome to the 2010 edition of Filmmaker‘s annual survey of new independent film talent. Victoria Mahoney Writer-director Victoria Mahoney began her artistic career as an actress in theater and then film. “Shelly Winters was my teacher,” Mahoney says. “If you touched your hair too many times in her class, she’d come over and cut off your bangs. She taught me the gift of stillness.” After working off-off Broadway, Mahoney went to L.A., did a number of pilots, a few European films, and a season of Seinfeld (she played Gladys Mayo, owner of the clothing store Putumayo). But then there […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 20, 2010