Sundance Film Festival
-
Solutions Based: Who Should Save Independent Film?
The Sundance Film Festival is a time for movie watching, deal making, talent scouting and, often, much soul searching about the state and future of the independent film industry. This year in particular there was no shortage of media coverage and conversations about distribution and the sustainability of the independent business. As Sundance CEO Joana Vicente told The Ringer’s “The Town” podcast, “Everyone is thinking about solutions… How can we help and figure out how all these films find a home, and what’s our role in the distribution exhibition piece?” For Sundance’s more commercial films—of which there were several this […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Mar 18, 2024 -
“14 Inches From a Very Personal Form of Murder”: Steven Soderbergh on Camera as Character and His Sundance Horror Film, Presence
A heady, elegantly-constructed ghost story, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has a bunch of half-buried threads, a couple of perfectly-timed scares, and a horrific close-up of an act of violence that mesmerizes the camera—just as horror films mesmerize their audience. The camera is the star here, and not merely because its sustained, floating movements, its sudden turns and retreats, its anxious hovering display the virtuosity of the operator who is also the film’s director, but because it is the titular character, the unseen presence whose half-life is disturbed and then engaged by a family of four that moves into a suburban house […]
by Amy Taubin on Jan 20, 2024 -
“Can Someone Who Uses a Wheelchair Access this Location?” | Amber Sealey, Out of My Mind
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? There was a practical aspect to choosing our locations and sets for Out of My Mind that is not usually at the forefront of filmmakers’ minds: Can someone who uses a wheelchair access this location and every aspect of this location? Our […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2024 -
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash Named Favorite All-Time Sundance Film
Over 500 members of Sundance’s filmmaking community took part in a poll that named Damien Chazelle’s jazz drummer drama Whiplash as their favorite film of the festival’s 40 years. World premiering at the 2014 festival, the film won Sundance’s Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic and Grand Jury Prize; U.S. Dramatic. Of note is that the film was based on a proof-of-concept short that itself won the top prize at Sundance only the year before. The other nine selections are similarly well-known pictures by directors who have gone on to stellar careers. It’s a list that includes the first features by the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2024 -
Form Follows Function: Noah Cowan on Three Winter Festivals Circa 1999
The following essay appeared in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1999 print issue and is being reprinted in remembrance of Noah Cowan. Cowan, a festival programmer, non-profit executive director and critic, was also Filmmaker‘s Contributing Editor and chief festival correspondent, and he passed away January, 25, 2023 in Los Angeles. “Festival strategy” has become one of the more annoying buzz terms of the American independent film “industry.” However, the presence of three major festivals, all distinctive and legendary, clustered together in the winter months demands, in fact, that any serious American independent filmmaker finishing a film in the fall recognize the need for […]
by Noah Cowan on Mar 16, 2023 -
Sundance 2023: 5 Seasons of Revolution, My Animal, Selected Shorts, The Tuba Thieves and Milisuthando
Before it started, one question about this year’s Sundance concerned attendance: what happens when a more-expensive-to-attend-than-most festival, held in a cold place during winter’s peak at a high altitude, offers the option to stream the bulk of its titles online days later? Brand presence on Main Street appeared to be down (one out of five awnings rather than every single one), and P&I attendance seemed to be as well—but, for many there, the answer was jamming out endless viewings on their tablet or laptop between venturing out for select IRL screenings. Whatever those combined, not-yet-disclosed industry-plus-public streaming numbers were, they […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 27, 2023 -
“Luckily, the Actor Tested Negative” | Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, Theater Camp
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? We were on an extremely tight 19-day schedule with a large cast of children who had limited hours they could work. The cameras basically had to be constantly rolling to maximize every second. One day, there was a COVID scare that put a two-hour hole in our day. We spontaneously made up a scene where our characters are writing the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
“The Sociohistorical Significance of a Black African Woman Holding the Camera in Her Hands”: DP Hankyeol Lee on Milisuthando
As both the editor and cinematographer of Milisuthando, the debut feature by Milisuthando Bongela, multimedia artist Hankyeol Lee confronted a unique set of challenges. In a film that blends a large quantity of archival material with material shot by the director herself, Lee’s footage was one of many types of footage in the mix. Below, Lee discusses her work on the film as a cinematographer. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? Lee: I first came onto the project as an editor. Milisuthando Bongela, the director, was looking for someone to edit a trailer for […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2023 -
Sundance 2023: The Eternal Memory, Joonam
In the first scene of The Eternal Memory, Augusto Góngora’s loving wife Paulina Urrutia wakes him and fills him, and viewers, in on what’s going on: she’s an actress, they’ve been married for some time, he has Alzheimer’s. It’s easy to imagine that, for obvious reasons, they have this exchange a lot; for a certain kind of conscientious documentarian who wants expository information without staging it, Alzheimer’s might function as a sort of present, insofar as it provides an organic reason to have characters reiterate the same facts daily until the right delivery has been captured. In Maite Alberdi’s documentary, Góngora first […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2023 -
Sundance 2023: Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV, Sorcery
In celebrating a radical artist via conservative formal means, Amanda Kim’s Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV represents a familiar contradiction. Paik’s legacy as a video artist and sculptor of television towers hasn’t yet gotten the full-length doc treatment; as a textbook talking-heads-plus-archival assemblage, Kim’s movie is easy to envision becoming a PBS staple. The film is fueled by a genuine desire to introduce his work to a wider audience, and it may well serve that commendable purpose; as an example of the current biodoc form, it’s slow going. Like many such works, it opens with a montage that’s essentially a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 24, 2023
