Spring 2020
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Air Rights
In 2010, Eric Austin made a bold choice. The Texas-based father of three quit his day job as a sales rep to focus solely on his side hustle, flying unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)—commonly known as drones. He had a three-month job lined up on a Disney-produced show in Hawaii piloting his single-rotor helicopter adorned with a Canon 7D. In those few months, he would earn more than in a year at his old job. But before Austin ever spun his blades, he was grounded. Inundated by aerial permit requests and unable to get definitive guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Mar 17, 2020 -
The Right Time to Sell? Pinpointing Trends in Independent Film Sales
Just as the marketplace for independent features is shifting on the distribution side, so is the world of film financing. Since 2009, raising financing for low- to mid-budget films has been in a state of flux, a series of changes now culminating in the dominance of streaming platforms, which are disrupting traditional territory-based sales models while also employing inscrutable algorithmic methods to guide their purchasing decisions. “The middle has dropped out, and budgets are getting smaller,” says Matthew Helderman, partner in BondIt Media, which provides credit financing for film and television productions. Projects that a few years ago might have […]
by Tiffany Pritchard on Mar 17, 2020 -
Team Building: On Wanda Bershen and Film Safety Nets
On September 28th, 2019, Wanda Bershen died quietly, alone and under fairly tragic circumstances, after being rushed to the hospital from a rehabilitation facility on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 75 years old, and very few people were aware of her passing. This piece is one part obituary for Wanda—a remarkable woman who certainly deserves to be remembered lovingly in Filmmaker—and one part urgent call-to-action for our industry to have a long-overdue discussion about a difficult and troubling topic: the lack of safety nets, resiliency and end-of-life supports in place for aging independent film professionals. The vast […]
by Marc Smolowitz on Mar 17, 2020 -
Her Decision: Eliza Hittman on Her Observational, Intimate and Necessarily Political Never Rarely Sometimes Always
“It’s so important for me to be thinking about a movie all the time,” says writer-director Eliza Hittman, reflecting on her creative process. “I don’t spend so much time sitting at a computer. I want to walk around, be in locations, spend my Saturday on a handball court or in a park or in Port Authority and respond to the environment.” Evidenced by the authenticity and truthful immediacy—laced with deeply neorealist touches—of her films, there must be something to this observational method of writing the burgeoning American auteur calls “experiential.” It births a singular high-stakes quality that guides It Felt […]
by Tomris Laffly on Mar 17, 2020 -
Messing With the Medium: On the Textured Pleasures of the Handmade Film
Last summer, filmmaker Jennifer West and I were invited to talk at Femmebit, an LA-based triennial celebration of media made by women. I had been thinking about materiality and mediamaking practices, and Jennifer is known for a stunning body of work centered on physically manipulating strips of film. We decided to call our event “Messing With the Medium: Radical Materiality in Feminist Media” and challenged each other on stage in a battle of clips, each of us presenting a visual example of some sort of feminist creative intervention, along with a two-minute argument for its contributions to an expanded history […]
by Holly Willis on Mar 17, 2020 -
There’s Something in the Air: With The Vast of Night, Director Andrew Patterson Reinvents the UFO Movie
Director Andrew Patterson’s film The Vast of Night, which premiered to great acclaim at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival, is informed by many genres and influences but beholden to none of them. Part Twilight Zone–esque sci-fi tale, part young adult romance, part David Fincher–inspired suspense movie with a dash of The Last Picture Show’s small town poetry, it is most of all a haunting and startling debut feature that teaches the audience how to watch it as it progresses—which means it not only rewards but demands repeat viewings. Set over the course of one night in 1950s New Mexico, The […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 17, 2020 -
Conceiving the Future: The Prescient Lynn Hershman Leeson
There’s no question that Lynn Hershman Leeson is a prescient artist and filmmaker. Prescience is even a theme in her work, one she grapples with as a double-edged sword. Impossible to measure except in retrospect, it is a lonely quality to have in the present. After Leeson rocketed to art stardom following a 2014 career retrospective at the ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany, her success was widely praised as “overdue”—another word that culture’s Cassandras are used to hearing. It seems unwise to disentangle her originality and influence from her tenacity and patience. Her 2019 interactive installation “Shadow […]
by Joanne McNeil on Mar 17, 2020 -
The Low Down: Is Microbudget Production the Response to the Industry’s Devaluation of the Dramatic Feature Film?
There are conflicting opinions regarding the budget cutoff for the category commonly referred to as “microbudget filmmaking.” Sometimes referred to as “no-budget,” “ultra-low-budget” or “nano-budget,” the term refers to an increasingly popular level of filmmaking below “low-budget” that emerging filmmakers as well as, in some cases, veterans engage in. When Venice’s Biennale College Cinema was started eight years ago, the budgets of €150,000 (about $162,000) awarded to each filmmaker seemed low. And indeed, while makers of films—ambitious pictures such as The Fits, H., Memphis and This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection—produced through that program struggled with the budget […]
by Mike S. Ryan on Mar 17, 2020
