Sundance Film Festival
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 4: Experimenter, Station to Station and Listen to Me Marlon
It’s been far too long since Michael Almereyda’s last feature, 2009’s dreamy diary film Paradise; his 2015 return with not one but two features (the Ethan Hawke-starring Cymbeline adaptation Anarchy is set for release later this year) is overdue and very welcome. Experimenter, a pared-down biopic of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, ostensibly exists to hit the career highlights, but it’s far from standard issue. As in his career (the writer said with all the authority conferred by a quickly read Wiki), the film begins with, and is dominated by, Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments. The “teacher” sits on one side of a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 27, 2015 -
Five Questions for Directors Bryan Carberry & Clay Tweel of Finders Keepers
An eccentric Southern tale that feels like a Harry Crews-scripted edition of Storage Wars, Finders Keepers tells the story of two men battling — in courts of law and public opinion — over the ownership of a severed foot. The foot belonged once to John Wood, amputated following a small plane crash that also killed Wood’s father. When Wood failed to make payments to his storage unit, it became the property of local North Carolina huckster Shannon Whisnant, who parlays his contested ownership of the foot into a roadside tourist attraction. Directed by Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel, collaborating for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2015 -
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 -
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 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 2: Tangerine, Z For Zachariah and Pervert Park
Sin-Dee (Kiki Kitana Rodriguez) sits on one side of a donut shop booth, her best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) on the other. The camera’s on the table, restricted to shot-countershot looking up, with large windows setting both in sharp urban relief against different halves of a large L.A. intersection. With rapid cutting back and forth reminiscent of the dashboard cams in Kiarostami’s 10, Tangerine‘s opening is both intimate and epic, and it’s exciting to see all this space so clearly laid out behind the two. There’s a micro story being established and simultaneously the introduction of a landscape to be explored: an instant […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2015 -
Five Questions for Rick Alverson of Sundance NEXT Premiere, Entertainment
Let’s all be inspired by Rick Alverson and agree to ban the very concept of “sympathetic character” from our movie-viewing brain. We’re all fixated on this idea, that we have to “like” characters and “connect” to them. Instead, let’s just decide to be interested in watching what is put before us, and let’s let ourselves enjoy having our expectations for how we want to feel while we’re sitting in a movie theatre get subverted once in a while. Alverson — a musician as well as a filmmaker — has made three feature films before this, his latest, Entertainment. Each one […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jan 25, 2015 -
“There is Good Fear and Bad Fear”: The Hallow | Director Corin Hardy
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? Fear presented itself in so many guises throughout the making of my film, to me and I’m sure to everyone on the crew — mainly, I believe, as a result of pressure and communication and miscommunication. I guess I realised that to help everyone, myself included, to conquer “the fear” and instead concentrate on doing the best, most efficient work (and hopefully enjoy it along the way), I had to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 25, 2015 -
Five Questions for Western Directors Bill and Turner Ross
“Ravishing cinema verite” is how the Sundance catalog describes the work of Bill and Turner Ross, whose elegiac American portraits crackle with a lovely lo-fi buzz. Following their New Orleans-set music travelogue Tchoupitoulas, the brothers immerse themselves here in Western within a world considerably tougher — two towns on either side of the Mexican border grappling with the sudden onslaught of cartel violence. Below, we ask them about incorporating that criminal storyline into their film and sticking with the same camera for three pictures. Western premieres today in the Documentary Competition of the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: Your documentaries have […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2015
