Spaceship Earth
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Sundance Hits and Misses, Pandemic Edition
Yes, 2020 sucked. The worst year of our lives finally came to an end, and most independent films and filmmakers, like just about everything and everyone else, suffered. Grand Jury Prize winners were delayed, critics’ favorites were lost and buzzworthy breakouts, briefly the talk of Park City, remained in limbo, waiting for some nebulous future release date when movie theaters might re-open and vaccinated audiences might attend them. Normally, you could look back at a year’s worth of top Sundance titles, examine what became of them in distribution—as Filmmaker usually does—and glean some takeaways about the state of the marketplace. […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Feb 10, 2021 -
Are Virtual Theaters Here to Stay?
When Toby Leonard, programming director at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre, returned to the space for the first time since the COVID-19 shutdown began, a six-foot cardboard display for Never Rarely Sometimes Always struck his eye. Eliza Hittman’s film was four days into the first week of a planned platform release before it was pulled from theatrical exhibition and hadn’t yet made it to the Belcourt, but its physical teaser remained. “How many of these things were there and how many did they send around the country?,” Leonard wondered. Then he took it down. As exhibitors and distributors initially adjusted to no theatrical releases for […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 18, 2020 -
“While It’s Not About the Experience of Being Quarantined Per Se, It Taps into a Kind of Universal Experience”: Director Matt Wolf on His Moving Saga of Human Ambition, Spaceship Earth
“Theater engages the whole organism,” says Biosphere 2 Director of Systems Engineering William Dempster. “Movement, through emotion — [it] gives you insight into yourself. Building a foundation from which we could go on and do other projects.” Accompanying Dempster’s voiceover early in Matt Wolf’s engrossing and unexpectedly stirring documentary, Spaceship Earth, is black-and-white footage from the first public activity of John Allen’s band of “Synergists”: a traveling theater production called The Theater of All Possibilities. The artistic value of the production is indeterminate; seen in brief clips, it falls somewhere on the continuum between The Living Theater and an Allan […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 14, 2020 -
“You Always Hope the Film Surprises You When You’re Done”: Editor David Teague on Spaceship Earth
In 1991, a Texas oil tycoon funded an experimental project meant to test the limits of America’s technology when it came to space exploration (and colonization). Known as Biosphere 2, the project consisted of sealing eight people in an airtight terrarium in the Arizona desert meant to perfectly replicate the Earth’s natural atmosphere. Many of the findings of this project have been long destroyed, but documentarian Matt Wolf used a medley of archival footage and interviews with surviving Biospherians in order to capture the daily realities of those enclosed in Biosphere 2. Editor David Teague speaks to Filmmaker about the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 27, 2020 -
“I Wanted to Subtly Evoke Biosphere 2 in My Interview Shots”: Matt Wolf | Spaceship Earth
Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? Our film Spaceship Earth is comprised almost entirely of archival footage, but we did a number of interviews in studios across the country. The most important object for this film is a modular erector set of geodesic rods that appears out of focus behind all of our interview subjects. Production designer […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 26, 2020 -
Impact Partners Executive Director Jenny Raskin on Financing, Fellowships, and Following the Filmmakers’ Lead
From 2018’s feature doc Oscar winner Icarus, to 2019’s Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary recipient Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, to the Sundance Grand Jury Prize nabbing Of Fathers and Sons and Dina (in 2018 and 2017, respectively), Impact Partners has been behind some of the most critically acclaimed nonfiction work of recent years. The company’s winning streak, however, actually goes back a decade, all the way to 2010’s Academy Award for Documentary Feature recipient The Cove. And Impact Partners itself goes back even further. Founded in 2007 by Dan Cogan and Geralyn Dreyfous with a mission to bring […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2020
