Spring 2014
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Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW & True/False
Sundance By Scott Macaulay “Can’t we just try to have a good time?” The plea so often heard when going on a family trip — or an evening out with a couple you don’t like so much, or when indulging your partner on a trip back home — is terrible advice for a journalist attending a film festival, especially Sundance. You see, as long as your tickets are in order, you can quite easily have a good time at the Park City festival. By “good time,” I’m speaking in film festival terms, which means “see good movies.” The destination for […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2014 -
Sharing The Grief of Others
One of 2011’s best independent films, Patrick Wang’s debut In the Family almost didn’t get discovered. After being rejected by the top festivals, Wang premiered regionally, at the Hawaii Film Festival and San Diego Asian Film Festival, before four-walling New York City’s Quad Cinema, where sterling reviews from everyone from Filmmaker to The New York Times jumpstarted a 30-plus-city DIY theatrical tour. If In the Family was one of those “out of nowhere” films, Wang is determined that not be the case for his follow-up feature. For The Grief of Others, based on the novel by Leah Hager Cohen and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2014 -
A Collective Will
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead “You are cordially invited to the first installment of Film Fatales — a monthly get together of amazingly talented female filmmakers,” began the email I received from Leah Meyerhoff soon after I moved to New York. “We are reaching out to you because you have written or directed a feature film and we hope to share in each other’s talent, stories and laughter.” This email came after several conversations Meyerhoff had with veteran filmmakers she […]
by Danielle Lurie on Apr 28, 2014 -
Cash Poor, Creativity Rich: The No-Money Manifesto
These days, anybody with a film production blog is calling for a revolution. The call to arms takes many forms. Some strident, some prescriptive. All are calling for big, big change. But to my mind, a revolution can be pretty simple. It can start with just a simple change of perspective — or even a mantra. Here’s mine: There’s No Money. I know, I know, this is not news. Thanks to blogs, Twitter feeds, and other social media, we’re inundated with musings about the independent film apocalypse and the poverty of our filmmaking class. But clearly, the individual’s lack of […]
by Esther B. Robinson on Apr 28, 2014 -
Gaming the System
Like their counterparts in film and music, game designers love a good award show. This year the International Games Festival awards were swept by a game that had critics raving all year and will surely go down in history as the first game to make suspense and heartache out of pushing papers and cross-checking documents. Lucas Pope, who left blockbuster studio Naughty Dog to go it alone, calls Papers, Please, his first commercially released game, a “dystopian document thriller.” On first glance, documents may seem like an odd center for a thriller of any kind, but then again in this […]
by Heather Chaplin on Apr 28, 2014 -
Let There Be Natural Light
“Fuck it, I’m going for it.” That, says cinematographer Yves Bélanger, was his response when presented with the challenge of shooting Dallas Buyers Club using only natural light. But aided by the ALEXA digital camera and his freewheeling director Jean-Marc Vallée, Bélanger handily shot the entire film without the heavy equipment usually associated with movies starring the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner. No tripods, no lighting kits. His only artificial source of illumination: a small Kino Flo he used at the beginning of each day to shoot his color charts to make sure the color balance was correct. […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Apr 28, 2014 -
Editor’s Letter
As we shake off what has been a wretched New York winter, we’re delighted to have Jenny Slate, the brilliant actress, comedian and — for fans of subversive squeaky-voiced animation — the co-creator of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On grace our Spring cover. We picked Slate for our list in 2011, and at that time, one of her accomplishments was starring in a high-wire-act of a short, Obvious Child, by the young director Gillian Robespierre. Now that short has been expanded — brilliantly — into a feature that makes fantastic use of Slate’s ferocious stand-up chops. Made independently, produced […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2014 -
Load & Play
Caveh Zahedi In One Fell Swoop By Peter Rinaldi DVD is not dead. It’s the new vinyl. Unconvinced? Perhaps a six DVD set of an important and influential American director’s films, most of which have never been released on video, will change your mind. Factory 25’s “Digging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi” might be the most comprehensive collection of an independent filmmaker’s work available in one set: five feature films, over two dozen shorts, a feature-length series of video letters, and a plethora of extras, all housed in a handsome 100-plus page hardcover book … oh, not […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2014 -
Super 8
1. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace A former associate editor at n+1 whose politicized beat has included everything from localized Occupy movements to contemporary classical music, Nikil Saval turns his attention to office life in his first book. From the origins of corporate discontent in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” through Frederick “Speedy” Taylor’s turn-of-the-century efficiency innovations up to (inevitably) “The Office,” Saval takes on the white-collar workplace from a variety of angles: the changing workspaces themselves, the demographic makeup of the people within them and their pop culture representations. 2. Kimono Kimono scrapes selected information from websites directly, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2014
