Sundance Film Festival 2020
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“The Film’s Main Characters: Ren, Stimpy and John K”: Directors Ron Cicero and Kimo Easterwood | Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story
Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? The opening of Happy Happy Joy Joy proved challenging. For an audience unfamiliar with Ren & Stimpy, we needed to get them up to speed as quickly as possible as to the show’s significance while simultaneously introducing them, and providing insight into, our main character, John K, the series creator. Shooting inserts of vintage television sets amongst the hundreds of […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 28, 2020 -
“You’ve Gotta Kill Your Darlings”: Editor Adam Carter Rehmeier on Dinner in America
Adam Carter Rehmeier certainly enjoys “the pressure of wearing a lot of hats,” and his latest film, Dinner in America, comes as no exception. Serving as both writer and director, Rehmeier also worked as editor of his feature, which premieres at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. The story follows an unlikely duo–a punk rock singer on the run from the law and his band’s biggest fan–on an absurd and comedic journey through the suburban Midwest. Here, Rehmeier deconstructs his similarly trying journey through the editing process, breaking down the ways in which the film’s score helped […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 27, 2020 -
Sundance 2020 Dispatch 3: Some Kind of Heaven, Black Bear, The Fight
The Villages—a planned retirement community approximately 130,00 strong in Florida—has, its happiest residents say, “everything”: an orthopedic clinic, karate classes, a bank, etc. There’s overlap here with limited American ideas about what, exactly, the Good Life might look like as cruelly/accurately imagined in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, whose community for the shrunk-down to live out the rest of their lives is a strip mall adjacent to character-less suburban sprawl. Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven, which explores The Villages through three subjects, isn’t here to either celebrate or roast a community established, as its founder explains in archival footage, to suggest a kind […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2020 -
“You Might Think it’s a Fun Work About Pizza, But It’s Really a Meditation on Mortality and Gentrification”: Director David Shapiro on his Sundance Premiering Doc Series, Untitled Pizza Movie
Before there was the no-budget Best Buy scam (scoring equipment by cycling through 30-day return policies) there was the Crazy Eddy scam — same deal, except that instead of the corporate anonymity of Best Buy’s Death Star big box there was a scrappy local circuit embodied by a screaming man feigning mental illness on late-night television. (“These prices are insane!!!!”) And before there was Eater, Grub Street and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown there was Eat to Win, a kind of punk foodie travelogue in which friends David Shapiro and Leeds Atkinson tooled around New York City with their Crazy Eddie […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2020 -
Impact Partners Executive Director Jenny Raskin on Financing, Fellowships, and Following the Filmmakers’ Lead
From 2018’s feature doc Oscar winner Icarus, to 2019’s Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary recipient Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, to the Sundance Grand Jury Prize nabbing Of Fathers and Sons and Dina (in 2018 and 2017, respectively), Impact Partners has been behind some of the most critically acclaimed nonfiction work of recent years. The company’s winning streak, however, actually goes back a decade, all the way to 2010’s Academy Award for Documentary Feature recipient The Cove. And Impact Partners itself goes back even further. Founded in 2007 by Dan Cogan and Geralyn Dreyfous with a mission to bring […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2020 -
Sundance 2020 Dispatch 1: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets; Epicentro; Olla
There will be time and occasion, I’m sure, during this year’s Sundance Film Festival to go big picture: to attempt to take the temperature of independent film in 2020, once again fuss over what that designation could possibly mean at this point and so on. But let’s skip that for now: for this year’s first dispatch, I have the rare of pleasure of leading with enthusiasm, and I’d like to lean into that. Barflies mistranslate William Blake’s exhortation to see the world in a grain of sand as “study the human condition through endless hours sitting at the bar”—if in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 24, 2020 -
Sundance 2020 Dispatch 2: Exil, The Earth is Blue as An Orange
In the very first scene of The Social Network, Rooney Mara tells Jesse Eisenberg that he may go through life thinking that girls don’t like him because he’s a nerd, but “that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” That line rang through my head all through Visar Morina’s Exil, Komplizen Films‘s first Sundance world premiere, and was directly echoed near its end by Sandra Hüller—star of Komplizen co-founder Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, here the long-suffering wife of Albanian immigrant Xhafer (Misel Maticevic), who’s convinced he’s being discriminated by German society. “Did it ever occur to you that it’s not because you’re […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 24, 2020 -
“The Film I Imagined on That First Read Came to Life Before My Eyes in the Edit”: Editor Patrick Lawrence on Scare Me
In Josh Ruben’s Scare Me, two strangers, stuck in a secluded cabin during a power outage, tell each other scary stories to pass the time. As tensions rise and fears are heightened throughout this horror-comedy, Fred must also face his own insecurities as a writer. The film’s editor, Patrick Lawrence, discusses the challenges of best showcasing the performative scary stories that make up the film, as well as the ways in which his background in music has influenced his editing style. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 24, 2020 -
14 Films Not to Miss at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival
Always a bellweather for the health — artistic as well as business — of the American independent film scene, the Sundance Film Festival began yesterday in Park City, Utah, preceded by more than the usual amount of pre-fest news and drama. On the positive front, Sundance 2020 is something of a launch party for a new documentary financing and production company, Concordia, formed by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and former Participant Media production president Jonathan King, in partnership with Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective. One quarter of the Documentary Competition slate boasts the Concordia logo. And then distressingly there’s Oprah Winfrey’s withdrawal as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2020 -
The Sundance Question: What Prop or Piece of Set Decoration is Particularly Integral to Your Film?
Each year Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see past years’ questions and responses, click here.) This year’s question: Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? (Check back daily during the festival — new answers are uploaded each day throughout the festival.) “It is An Object That Should Not Belong to That World”: Maite […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 23, 2020
