Sundance Film Festival 2015
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Hits & Misses: How Seven Films from Sundance 2015 Performed
The health and identity of American independent cinema has always been difficult to gauge and define, but Sundance is our default arbiter and explainer. Of course, indie film exists far beyond the limits of Park City in January, but the festival gives the nebulous American indie sector a test sample — and as any scientist will tell you, that’s the first step in making an accurate hypothesis. So what can the films of Sundance 2015 clarify about the state of American indies, now and in the future? Some trends can be attributed to random cycles and one-time events, but there […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 20, 2016 -
Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015 -
Benson Lee on Returning to His Independent Roots with the Sundance Comedy, Seoul Searching
Korean-American filmmaker Benson Lee won the Jury Prize at Sundance with his Competition Drama, Miss Monday, in 1998. A decade later he returned with Planet B-Boy, a critically-acclaimed, commercially-successful doc about breakdancing crews competing in an international competition. Lee’s success with Planet B-Boy led to both a studio deal and a career setback. Battle of the Year, a Sony production based on B-Boy, was as critically derided as the doc was praised, and it was a commercial failure to boot. This year, Lee returned to the site of his Miss Monday success — the Sundance Film Festival — with an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2015 -
Cinematographers Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk on Shooting the Sundance-Winning Doc, Meru
Over a period of years, three climbers — Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk — make repeated efforts to scale a 21,000 foot peak in Northern India, Mount Meru. Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Meru is the chronicle of that quest, a story of not just mountain-climbing athleticism but also friendship and camaraderie. The winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Meru, strikingly, was lensed by two of the film’s three climbers, with one of them suffering severe injuries on the climb — an accident that is part of the film’s story. Below, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2015 -
Director/Cinematographer Matthew Heineman on Shooting Sundance Award-Winning Doc Cartel Land
A tense, cinematically-styled verite documentary about the Mexican drug wars, Matthew Heineman’s Cartel Land was one of the big winners at Sundance this year, nabbing both the Directing and Cinematography Awards. Strikingly, both positions were filled by the same person: Matthew Heineman, who also produced and edited. (For Cartel Land, Heineman shares the d.p. credit with Matt Porwoll.) Below, the multi-hyphenate talks about why, for him, shooting isn’t entirely about the image; why being his own d.p. calmed him down during the tenser moments of production; and the benefits of capturing a flat image through Canon Log. Filmmaker: How and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2015 -
Six Women Directors Discuss Filmmaking, Their Countries and Their Sundance Premieres
In and out of movie theaters, buses, cafes, after-parties, and the crowds of Main Street, the conversations at Sundance Film Festival are exclusively about movies. The fact that the cinematographer of the film you are trash-talking is probably standing behind you is negligible. There is an unrestrained and unforgiving buzz of reviews in Park City, Utah. It’s less that everyone is acting like a critic and more that everyone is just obsessed with talking about film. If you’ve been to theater camp, that’s the vibe. It’s not that I wasn’t excited to see movies and flaunt my personal ratings like […]
by Taylor Hess on Feb 6, 2015 -
“That’s a Wrap!” The 414s Director with a Sundance Post-Mortem
Well, that’s a wrap! The Sundance Film Festival came to a close this weekend, and my filmmaking partner, Chris James Thompson and I are already back with our families in Milwaukee. We attended three of the five scheduled screenings for our film, The 414s: The Original Teenage Hackers. The week was sometimes intense, sometimes boring and often enlightening. By our second day it became clear why people love the Sundance Film Festival; the film screening portion of the fest is pure cinema. The hot and sweaty pop-up theaters are always full as volunteers pack in human bodies like Tetris pieces, […]
by Michael Vollman on Feb 5, 2015 -
“I Ripped Up Millions of Sprocket Holes”: George Lucas at Sundance on Building His Empire
“Why should we use all this equipment and all this stuff when we can make it better?” In this excerpt from a recent Sundance panel on “The Power of Story,” George Lucas once again attempts to explain how his loathing for the Hollywood apparatus led to the creation of a special effects empire that enabled a whole new super-strain of Hollywood blockbusters. In his narrative, Lucas had to create a special effects house because none existed, and he had to get into the toy licensing business to prolong the life of his movies inn the market place, and he had to create […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 3, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 5: The Chinese Mayor, Cartel Land and City of Gold
The vast world of Chinese independent documentaries was finally acknowledged by Sundance with the inclusion of Zhou Hao’s The Chinese Mayor. That’s not to bag on the festival for an anomalous oversight: this exciting and politically urgent strain of films has been happening for 15 years or so but not often acknowledged by U.S. festivals at large. This is a very good starting point. The mayor of Datong, Geng Yanbo, confesses that he’s happiest with communing with China’s past, so it makes sense that he plans to revitalize the country’s most polluted city by restoring its ancient wall, part of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 30, 2015 -
“Ideas Just Disappeared”: Cloro | Director Lamberto Sanfelice
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? The day before the first day of shooting I went with part of the crew to the location were we would start shooting the following day. It was in a rather desolated area with just a few big old trees, which in normal circumstances I would find fascinating. But on that day as I was looking around all of a sudden I could find nothing interesting to shoot there. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 30, 2015
