The world’s oldest profession proves stressful and arduous in The Foxy Merkins, director Madeleine Olnek’s follow-up to her zany “fish out of water” black-and-white debut Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. By having much of her work featured at the Sundance Film Festival throughout the past 10 years, Olnek has developed a prominent voice in the queer filmmaking community, and The Foxy Merkins finds her once again working with some familiar faces (Dennis Davis, Alex Karpovsky, Lisa Haas and Jackie Monahan) and locations. The film is a buddy comedy for an underserved audience, observing the misadventures of Margaret (Haas) and Jo (Monahan), two New York-based lesbian hustlers often found hopelessly hooking […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 5, 2014The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker Magazine‘s parent organization, announced the first five projects to get weeklong theatrical runs at the state of the art Made In NY Media Center’s theater as part of the Screen Forward program. Starting October 17th, the program will give filmmakers in the process of self-distribution the unique opportunity to gain a much-coveted NYC theatrical week-run, with IFP working with each filmmaking team on comprehensive audience engagement and grassroots outreach strategies, publicity support, coverage in Filmmaker Magazine, and a revenue split to all participating filmmakers. The fall slate includes: Josephine Decker’s Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely; Paul Harrill’s Something, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 18, 2014“How elaborate is the camera?” The Foxy Merkins director Madeleine Olnek texted me as I was walking to photograph her with her female laden crew at Columbus Circle. “We would like to stage ourselves being hit by a cab,” she explained simply and obviously. As it happened, a few months prior to making The Foxy Merkins, a film about lesbian hookers, Olnek was in a taxi driven by a woman named Debbie. They got to talking and Debbie threw out the “If you ever need an [insert random gender, race, or career here]” phrase filmmakers always get. In Debbie’s case it […]
by Danielle Lurie on Jan 21, 2014Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? As I playwright […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2014The most exciting film festival in America gets underway next week. The prestigious Sundance Film Festival will unspool more than 120 new features, shorts, documentaries and innovative media projects in Park City, Utah from January 16th to 26th — showcasing, as always, a hefty slate of LGBT films for the edification of the citizens of Utah and the visiting masses. With the Sundance stamp of approval chances are good that you’ll be seeing many of these have some kind of release in 2014 (whether at your own local LGBT film fest, art house theater, digital platform or else on DVD). […]
by Jenni Olson on Jan 14, 2014