Sundance Film Festival 2015
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 3: The Wolfpack, Western and Dreamcatcher
I stopped taking notes after a while during The Wolfpack; I was feeling a bit too disturbed to keep at it and it seemed somewhat besides the point. Crystal Moselle’s first feature follows the Angulo brothers: six siblings, born to father Oscar, who for something like 15 years never left their LES apartment, save sporadic supervised summer walks. Oscar named them all Hare Krishna style — Govinda, Bhagavan, etc. — and amassed a collection of some 5,000 films, their sole meaningful connection to the outside world. They were homeschooled and lived in a state of fear — Oscar’s past/present (?) […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2015 -
Cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier on Shooting the Sundance Picture, Turbo Kid
From the RKSS filmmaker’s collective (Anouk Whissell, François Simard, and Yoann-Karl Whissell) comes the Sundance Park City at Midnight selection Turbo Kid, described by the directors as like “some lost crazy kids’ movie from the 1980s that’s somehow has just been rediscovered.” Post-apocalypse gore, BMX bikes and Michael Ironside — Turbo Kid looks back to iconic ’80s kids adventures to inspire, again from the filmmakers, “a whole new generation of warped kids (and crazy adults).” Below, cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier talks about how he got those retro looks and summoned the requisite nostalgia on a small budget. Turbo Kid premieres Monday, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2015 -
Five Questions for Welcome to Leith Directors Michael Beach Nichols & Christopher K. Walker
Documentary has a rich history of films by filmmakers who must honestly engage subjects with odious views. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher Walker stumbled across one such fellow in Craig Cobb, a white supremacist with a devious and possibly quite legal plan to produce a white power enclave in the American heartland. Premiering at Sundance in the Documentary Competition, their Welcome to Leith chronicles the story of the town of Leith against Cobb but also, implicitly, their own story of engaging their subject — who says he’s available for Skype interviews after the premiere. Welcome to Leith premieres Monday, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2015 -
Cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke on Shooting Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room
Ben Kasulke has literally dozens of credits on his iMDb page, but running throughout his career are collaborations with two directors: Lynn Shelton and, more recently, Guy Maddin. And what’s remarkable is how different those collaborations are. With Shelton, Kasulke affects a seemingly casual, on-the-fly naturalism, never allowing his cinematography to deflect from the actors’ moments. With Maddin, however, Kasulke is working in service to an entirely different aesthetic, one in which a film’s look is part and parcel of its meanings. In Maddin’s work, Kasulke’s lensing takes us far away from the present, back to times when film both […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2015 -
Sundance 2015: Mistress America and It Follows
Modern media has a perverse fascination with pinpointing the motivations of the millennial. When not publishing extensive reports on “hookup culture,” many publications are transfixed by the generation’s ostensible desire to simultaneously better themselves and the world, while still being unable to get it together and move out of their mom’s basement. With Mistress America, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig have created a precise portrait of a woman who embodies the ephemeral essence of a do-it-all, self-entitled millennial without dispensing any blanket, generational theses. This character, however, is not the film’s purported protagonist — that would be 18-year-old aspiring writer Tracy, played by a nicely understated […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 25, 2015 -
At Sundance Producers Brunch, Mark and Jay Duplass Offer Ten Pieces of Advice for Making Movies Today
Keynote speakers at today’s Producers Brunch at the Sundance Film Festival, independent powerhouses Jay and Mark Duplass issued a passionate and witty call to all the producers in the jam-packed house: keep making small movies. At an event that saw their own producing partner, Stephanie Langhoff, receive the Sundance Institute Red Crown Producers Award, they told producers to learn from their own decision to stay invested in the independent sector after receiving a measure of larger Hollywood success. Along with Sundance Dramatic Competition entry The Bronze, which Langhoff produced, the Duplass Brothers have, as executive producers,two other productions at the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2015 -
“My First Feature Film Since My Children were Born”: How to Dance in Ohio | Director Alexandra Shiva
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? How to Dance in Ohio is my first feature film since my children were born, so I originally set out to make it in NYC where I live with my family. Then my research led me to Columbus, Ohio and to this incredible community and story that I could not possibly pass up telling. I would say that the largest sacrifice I made in the making of this film […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2015 -
“You Can Make Films with No Money, No Support, No Talent”: Chorus | Director Francois Delisle
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? What’s the fear of not ending up with the film you really wanted to make compared with the fear of losing your freedom to express yourself? Chorus was made instinctively, with no constraints and with a great deal of freedom. Freedom that was built up and acquired over years, over many films and through good times and bad. I’ve often made mistakes, I’ve surrounded myself with the wrong people, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2015 -
Five Questions for Director Crystal Moselle of the Sundance Doc Competition Premiere, The Wolfpack
We all grow up with our own peculiar “kid logic,” a warped worldview shaped by the limits of our childhoods. We think our parents are normal. We think everyone is like us. But we know there are things beyond our own experience — countries we’ve never visited, people we’ve never met — and we build images of those places in our minds. Then, we grow up, and if we’re lucky, we get to go somewhere. We visit those countries, and meet those people. Gradually, the reality of new experience replaces the pictures we had painted with our imagination. We learn […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jan 25, 2015 -
Michael Almereyda on His Sundance Premiere, Experimenter
A happy surprise in the Premiere section of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival is a new feature from the prolific independent filmmaker Michael Almereyda. And yes, while Almereyda always seems to be releasing striking and important work, his new feature, Experimenter, does count as a surprise because in recent years that work has been mostly short films and documentary essay films. (One, the excellent Sundance winner Skinningrove, can be watched here.) Now, with Experimenter premiering at Sundance and the new Shakespeare-themed feature Anarchy, starring Ethan Hawke, opening soon, Almereyeda is seeing two theatrical releases in as many weeks — a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2015
