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As I pull up to the front of the convention center, a man in a fluorescent vest struggles with some orange cones. I roll down my window to see if there is room in the parking garage, but before I can ask he says. “We’re full. Twenty thousand people, too many cars. Welcome to VidCon.” As I try to talk, the long line of vehicles behind me begin to honk. Drowned out, I drive off. It was only five years ago that more than 1,400 YouTube creators and fans crammed into a hotel in Century City, Los Angeles. The first […]

At some point in your career, things are going to break your way — you’ll be lucky enough to have your crowdfunded labor of love generate some heat at a big festival. Or your short film will go viral. Or maybe you’ll sell a hot spec or make the Black List. Whatever happens, you’ll land managers and agents, and people in L.A. will want to meet you — and not a minute too soon, because you’re four months behind on rent and need to pay for T-shirts for all your backers. It’s time to meet studio execs looking to hire […]

1 Blockchain If a group of computer scientists and financial technicians are right, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto’s most-celebrated creation may not be a peer-to-peer technology that lets you buy online contraband — Bitcoin — but rather its underlying invention. The blockchain is a shared transaction database that permits verification without a centralized authority, and VC funds such as Union Square Ventures are already predicting the computer science breakthrough will revolutionize everything from banking to voting to the law. 2 You Won’t Remember Dying Recorded in a single day in 1971, this under-known deep cut from the psych-rock vaults was the […]

“We are all very much making Garrel’s film. He would have been happy to film at my place, or right nearby, using my clothes. Not to be realistic but for simplicity’s sake, because none of that counts for much. No colors. Nothing shiny. Elizabeth, the costume designer, and I are sometimes disconcerted by his flat rejections, right down to the stitching (too shiny).” — The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve, Catherine Deneuve, 1998 Though arguably less known than his model and actor son, Louis, Philippe Garrel is one of the great French filmmakers. He was considered a prodigy when he […]

A collaborative work made by 10 former students, Winter, Go Away! is one of the most exciting documentaries to come out of Russia in recent years. Taught by Marina Razbezhkina, producer and guiding force, graduates of the School of Documentary Film and Documentary Theatre in Moscow grappled with 1,000 hours of footage and a set of restrictive dictums — the institute bans the term “artist” as well as the use of interviews and talking heads — to create a mosaic-like depiction of the 2011 Moscow winter protests. It’s just one of several fascinating collaborative films to emerge from a slowly […]

This interview with Rick Linklater about his Boyhood originally appeared as the cover story of our Summer, 2014 issue. As the film wins Best Picture from the New York Film Critics’ Circle, is is posted online for the first time. Time, along with its cousin memory, are among modernity’s great artistic subjects, with the title of Proust’s masterwork, In Search of Lost Time, articulating the journey of countless authors, playwrights, and filmmakers to creatively capture the sensations and meanings of our rapidly receding past. Among the latter have been directors whose films have reached for these passing years with any […]

Ryan Green’s son, Joel, was diagnosed with terminal cancer just before his second birthday. There were surgeries. Chemo. Joel’s eyes turned in. He lost his hearing. After work done on his spine, he had to learn to walk again. But he didn’t die, and Green wanted to show the world “the miracle” that was his son. That Dragon, Cancer, due out later this year on the Android console OUYA, is hard to play. It’s not hard because the controls are difficult, or because there are millions of screens of data to manage or because of puzzles that hurt your brain […]

In 2008, Jake Perlin launched his specialty repertory film label The Film Desk with the first U.S. release of Philippe Garrel’s 1991 I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore, a compressed tragic romance doubling as a eulogy for the director’s ex, Nico. Perlin followed with reissues of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Susan Sontag’s Promised Lands. Today, Perlin thinks that adventurous opening trio still represents the kind of movies he wants to reissue. “I go after movies I’m interested in, and part of my interest in them is that I can make prints.” With a few exceptions made for films where […]

Moments before writing this Editor’s Letter, an email landed in my inbox — a check-in from a writer/director who appeared in our very first edition of 25 New Faces, way back in 1998. That edition featured, among others, the actor Peter Sarsgaard, directors Jessica Yu and Jamie Babbit, d.p. Amy Vincent, and film composers Nathan Larson and Craig Wedren. All still active, as is the email-writer, Christina Ray Eichman (now just Christina Ray). “Some years are busy and some years are really lean,” she writes, “but there’s nothing that I’d rather be doing. I’ve done everything from directing and writing […]