The non-fiction-centric awards body Cinema Eye Honors announced its nominees for 2018, ranging over 10 categories, such as directing, production, cinematography and, of course, Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking. Among the biggest recipients is Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap, which raked up a total of seven nominations — the most of any title this year. Others with multiple nominees include Robert Greene’s Bisbee ’17, RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers. The winners will be announced at the 2019 Honors Awards Ceremony on January 10, 2019, which will be held at the Museum of […]
by Matt Prigge on Nov 9, 2018As 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? Documentary is all about trying to divine order from chaos – be it finding a coherent retrospective story within five conflicting accounts of the same event, or hoping that something (anything!) with emotional or narrative substance will happen on your vérité shoot. On this film the struggle between chaos and order was exacerbated by our physical […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 27, 2018Two 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, 2018Three men make a remarkable discovery in Three Identical Strangers, a new documentary premiering at Sundance from Tim Wardle. The men, all strangers, learn that they are in fact identical triplets separated at birth. Wardle chronicles this real-life saga through dramatizations from the ’70s and ’80s, present-day documentary footage and studio interviews. To shoot the film, Wardle hired Tim Cragg, a DP with more than 40 credits as a documentary cinematographer. Cragg spoke with Filmmaker ahead of the film’s six screenings at Sundance about the challenges of filming Three Identical Strangers. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2018