Sundance Film Festival
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Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 3: Crime + Punishment, Monsters and Men, Bisbee ’17
I’ve written before about my fondness for local news: “a fun, seemingly randomized mash-up of crimes caught on security cameras, traffic and weather updates, forced banter, cooking segments, deep concerns about marijuana use and ‘reporting’ that’s thinly veiled support for the NYPD.” One segment in the latter mode still regularly replays in my mind: following the 2014 shooting of two NYPD officers, one channel — playing to that unflappable demographic which believes the police are always in the right — aired a particularly shameless segment in which a reporter found a seven-year-old black child to tearfully state how much he […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2018 -
DP Matías Mesa on Shooting Sundance Drama The Queen of Fear
The directorial debut of Argentine actress Valeria Bertuccelli, The Queen of Fear holds its world premiere at Sundance 2018 as part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. The film was co-directed by Fabiana Tiscornia and stars Bertuccelli as an actress set to open a one-woman show. Matías Mesa, the film’s cinematographer, has DP’d a number of Spanish-language shorts and features in addition to his camera operator work on Okja, Triple 9 and The Road. Below, Mesa speaks with Filmmaker about lighting a blackout sequence and the visual influences on The Queen of Fear. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2018 -
“How Are American Men Being Made?”: Director Bing Liu | Minding the Gap
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? It’s difficult to describe any part of the filmmaking process as not chaotic – Minding the Gap was by far the most difficult task I’d ever tried to take on. I was working on all these other projects and writing grants to fund the film and all the while my mom was fighting through a violent […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2018 -
“She Has Endured So Many Tough Situations”: Director Heather Lenz | Kusama – Infinity
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your work? In my experience, there will always be unexpected situations that arise and create chaos. That said, some people enjoy creating chaotic situations. Personally, I prefer to avoid such people. I see the job of a producer as being a job of clearing obstacles and making it as easy as possible to focus on the work that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2018 -
“How Are We Not Going Insane?”: Director Sandi Tan | Shirkers
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? It’s been my fortune to have been submerged in the sticky, sometimes pungent, always time-warping swamp of personal documentary filmmaking these past three years. My own narcissism (often in the form of horror at seeing/hearing myself on camera) has helped to blot out much of the real-life cataclysms the world has been experiencing since November 8, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2018 -
Zoë White on Filming Christina Choe’s Feature Debut NANCY Starring Andrea Riseborough
Zoë White has DP’d more than 30 features and shorts since 2004, including Stephen Cone’s Princess Cyd and Onur Tukel’s Catfight. Her latest work, NANCY, marks the feature debut of Christina Choe, a writer/director whose shorts have screened at Telluride and SXSW. NANCY tells the story of a struggling writer (Andrea Riseborough) who tells elaborate lies on the Internet to compensate for her creative failures. The film co-stars Steve Buscemi, Ann Dowd and John Leguizamo. Below, White discusses how she and Choe arrived at the film’s visual design. NANCY screens in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: How and why did you […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 2: Clara’s Ghost, Hale County This Morning, This Evening
For the second consecutive year, Sundance showed an Academy-ratio film with Ghost in the title, but Bridey Elliott’s feature directorial debut Clara’s Ghost is decidedly not A Ghost Story. Bridey stars along with father Chris, sister Abby and mom Paula (the only non-actor in the bunch, though she easily holds her own). The plot’s loose: sisters Riley (Bridey) and Julie (Abby) — former child stars as the Olsen-esque Reynolds sisters — come for a one-night visit home. Father Ted (Chris) has just lost his casting in a show being put together by Julie’s fiance and is feeling rancorous. Some magazine photographers come over to take […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 20, 2018 -
“The Rest of the Shoot Was Just as Unpredictable”: Director Alexandria Bombach | On Her Shoulders
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your work? When I packed my bags to meet Nadia Murad for the first time, I thought we were heading to Kurdistan. I was going to film the displaced Yazidis in camps north of Sinjar and possibly the mass graves where ISIS had murdered thousands of Yazidi people in 2014. It was July, so I packed for 120-degree […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2018 -
Mark Burnett and Nick Emerson on Editing Aubrey Plaza Comedy An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
Writer/director Jim Hosking premiered his short Renegades at Sundance in 2010 and returned to the festival in 2016 with his debut feature The Greasy Strangler. His second feature, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, premieres in the NEXT program at Sundance 2018. Luff Lin unites Hosking with a cast of comedy luminaries: Aubrey Plaza, Jemaine Clement and Craig Robinson, among others. The film was edited by Mark Burnett, who also edited Greasy Strangler, and Nick Emerson (Lady Macbeth, Starred Up). Filmmaker spoke with the film’s editing team about the film’s tricky tone, which teeters between absurdist and romantic comedy, ahead of Luff Linn‘s premiere […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 1: Our New President, Three Identical Strangers
Two things shape my Sundance coverage this year — one purely personal, the other macro. The personal was recently reading Christian Metz’s Film Language, the kind of text normally consumed in undergrad cinema studies (not my major) but belatedly a worthwhile book all the same; I wanted some new tools to think about movies, and this fit the bill. The opening essays are recognizably Barthes-ian contemplations of i.e. what makes the moving image more plausible than a still image and the middle gets mired in a lot of precise definitions of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic, but the finale is a surprisingly fiery, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 19, 2018
