The Yes Men
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“The Need to Crowdfund is a Major Curse, Indeed”: The Yes Men on the Changing Funding Landscape
Over at the Creative Capital blog, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men have posted a sober essay about the changes they’ve seen in the documentary funding landscape since 2000, when they received one of the organization’s first grants for their feature, The Yes Men. Two films and 15 years later, the two are still at it — creatively agitating for social change while producing actions and making documentary films. Their latest film, The Yes Men are Revolting, directed with Laura Nix, opens June 12, and it mixes their trademark anarchic political humor with more ruminative passages reflecting on […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 27, 2015 -
Five Questions for The Yes Men Are Revolting Director Laura Nix
Five years after political superheroes the Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano) made everything all right in The Yes Men Fix the World, our planet seems pretty screwed up again. So, once more the two hit the airwaves, corporate board rooms and tabloid front pages in The Yes Men Are Revolting, directing their activist wit towards the issue of climate change. Along the way, they are joined by Laura Nix, who produced the previous film and this time directs alongside them both. Nix’s directing credits include The Politics of Fur and The Light in Her Eyes, and below she […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 5, 2014 -
Positive First Impressions
Documentary filmmaker Farihah Zaman shares the secrets of the Good Pitch.
by Farihah Zaman on Jan 17, 2013 -
The Yes Men Are Revolting… and Crowdfunding
We’re making a new movie called The Yes Men Are Revolting – and we’re crowdfunding it on Kickstarter. We hit our initial goal of $100,000, but now we’re trying to double that. Why the new goal? Because we’re enacting a super-ambitious transmedia distribution plan that will take advantage of everything we learned so far about filmmaking and making a difference. Releasing our last movie on a shoestring budget was such a monumental task that we swore we would never do it again. But now is never. We endured the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York, and now we have […]
by The Yes Men on Nov 28, 2012 -
Chris Smith, The Pool
VENKATESH CHAVAN IN DIRECTOR CHRIS SMITH’S THE POOL. COURTESY VITAGRAPH FILMS. Chris Smith is an interesting conundrum, a filmmaker who brings a narrative verve and energy to his documentaries and approaches fiction films with the delicate restraint and remove of a documentarian. A graduate of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s film program, Smith first appeared on the scene in 1996 with American Job, a low-key narrative feature loosely based on the work experiences of the film’s star and co-writer, Randy Russell. During the editing of that film, he met Mark Borchardt, an oddball wannabe horror filmmaker who became the subject of Smith’s […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 3, 2008 -
ENEMIES OF THE STATE
Sitting here editing the latest issue of Filmmaker, I came across this interview segment from Andy Bichelbauer, the “Yes Man” featured in Chris Smith’s outrageously entertaining political doc The Yes Men forthcoming this fall from United Artists. The Yes Men are a group of political performance-art provocateurs who infiltrate government and NGO-type events and pose as World Trade Organization officials. But lately the group has been having problems dealing with the implications of the Patriot Act, which broadly construes a variety of behaviors as potentially terrorist acts. Within the art world, the first casualty is that of Steve Kurtz, a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 19, 2004
