Sundance Film Festival
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Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 2 (Abby Sun): I Was a Simple Man, Strawberry Mansion, Cryptozoo
The Sundance Institute has been running producer and director labs since 1981, even before taking over and renaming the former US/Utah Film Festival in 1985. In that sense, the projects coming out of the Feature Film Program (whose founding director, Michelle Satter, is still in charge), Indigenous Program and Documentary Film Program are just as important a marker of Sundance’s effect on the US film ecosystem as the platform provided by the festival. When I programmed film festivals, I tracked their press releases as closely as official lineup announcements. This year, 16 projects in the festival were officially supported by […]
by Abby Sun on Jan 31, 2021 -
“The Colors and Textures of Being a Teenage Girl”: Director/Cinematographers Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt on Cusp
Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt’s Cusp embeds itself with a trio of teenage girls, all sustaining best friends, over the course of a long, alcohol-sodden rural Texas summer. Relationships come and go, but cycles of systemic sexual abuse and misogyny structure the lives of its indefatigable protagonists. As photographers, Hill and Bethencourt speak to acting as their own cinematographers, lighting from the Texas sun and capturing the textures of teen girl life. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hill and Bethencourt: We […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“I Think I was Just Hip to Loneliness Before Everyone Else Was”: Writer/Director Jane Schoenbrun and Composer Alex G on the Sundance-Premiering We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
She’s turning into plastic. He feels like his body is being taken over by an indescribable entity. Another discovers grotesque clusters of gray pustules suddenly colonizing the terrain of their body. These individuals are documenting themselves in the throes of The World’s Fair Challenge, an online role-playing game that dares those bold enough to participate to draw blood, watch a neon-soaked strobing video and record the ensuing horror that eventually consumes their corporeal vessels. Casey (played by Anna Cobb in her debut role), a nondescript yet quietly rebellious teenager living in a perfectly captured amalgamation of American suburbia, becomes the […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jan 31, 2021 -
Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3 (Vadim Rizov): El Planeta, Luzzu, Taming the Garden
I generally strive to be a well-informed viewer; in the case of Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta, however, I was perhaps better served by going in uncharacteristically ignorant. I didn’t really know anything about Ulman besides the fact that she’s a performance/video/web-artist, so I wasn’t picking up on any of her debut feature’s connections to the personas developed on Instagram, galleries et al.. Instead, Ulman’s debut feature, shot in the town of Gijón, where she grew up, registered as exactly the type of movie I like, a droll comedy formally descended from Éric Rohmer. Rohmer’s legacy doesn’t just lie in delicately shaded […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 31, 2021 -
“These Girls Say So Much with their Faces”: Director/Editor Parker Hill on Cusp
Parker Hill and Isabel Bettencourt’s Cusp embeds itself with a trio of teenage girls, all sustaining best friends, over the course of a long, alcohol-sodden rural Texas summer. Relationships come and go, but cycles of systemic sexual abuse and misogyny structure the lives of its indefatigable protagonists. Hill, who also served as Cusp’s editor, discusses the project’s winnowing down, working with a consulting editor and learning to let go of footage. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hill: Impatience, stubbornness, and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“The Pandemic Meant There was Nothing to Do All Summer Except Sit at Home and Edit”: Directors Parker Hill & Isabel Bethancourt | Cusp
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? Making our first feature in 2020 was definitely a rollercoaster. In some ways the pandemic meant there was nothing to do all summer except sit at home and edit, which was a very intense process, but it was helpful to fully immerse ourselves in the footage day in and day out. We were definitely fortunate to have something to focus on at home. In post production, it was certainly challenging to work with so […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“The Subjects in Our Film Brought a Lot of Life Back to My World”: Editor Hannah Buck on Searchers
Dating’s complicated arc during the pandemic has been lovingly captured in Pacho Velez’s documentary Searchers. Whether on Grindr, Tinder, or any other app, the question “what are you looking for?” varies from person to person amid the chaos of mid-COVID New York City. Editor Hannah Buck addresses the challenge of introducing the director as a subject of the film and the value of mediated experiences. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Buck: In 2019 I was the consulting […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“You Can Feel the Operator Behind the Camera”: DP Corey Hughes on All Light, Everywhere
In the era of surveillance, what does it mean to be on camera? Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere investigates the nature of objectivity, physics, and policing from a scientific and sociological perspective, questioning much the way an essay might. DP Corey Hughes shares what he brought to the film from his experience with music videos and the physicality of image capturing devices. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hughes: I met Theo in Baltimore in 2017. At that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“There Were so Many Parallels and Contrasts”: Editor Jeppe Bødskov on President
Camilla Nielsson’s President tells the tumultuous story of Zimbabwe’s 2018 general election, the first since the country attained independence that Robert Mugabe was not a candidate. It is in many ways a follow-up to Nielsson’s 2014 film Democrats. Editor Jeppe Bødskov discusses his ongoing collaboration with Nielssoni. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Bødskov: I worked with Camilla Nielsson on her previous documentary Democrats. So, I knew her already. I know quite a lot about Zimbabwe and about […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“Without Realizing it, I Made a Movie That Obeyed the Rules of Social Distancing”: Director Jane Schoenbrun | We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? My film was shot just before the pandemic (wrapped March 1 2020—what luck!), which is a fact that the few people who have seen it so far sometimes find hard to believe. The movie is quite concerned with isolation. It is about characters who never leave the house, whose main form of social connection happens through screens, who exist in a virtual realm that is sort of real and sort of unreal. While writing […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021
