Filmmaker Magazine | The Magazine of Independent Film

The Guide

READ: Kristian Fraga & Mike Scotti on Severe Clear, which opens this weekend
WATCH: SXSW Sneak Peek - Mars
IN THEATERS: Dave Boyle's White on Rice in NYC this weekend

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DIRECTOR INTERVIEWS

BONG JOON-HO, MOTHER
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 Livia Bloom
Mother, the latest film by South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho, is an inky affair. The humor is dark and the sky is a soggy shade of gray. The bumbling characters have limited prospects, and when love exists, it’s intense and deranged enough to kill for. The central relationship in the film is ...read more
BILL JENNINGS, HARLEM ARIA
Wednesday, March 03, 2010 Brandon Harris
The desire to be an opera singer is a career path that the broad majority of Americans would probably treat with some skepticism. If you come from Harlem, that skepticism is probably more palpable than most places. Yet the protagonist of Bill Jennings’ winning first feature Harlem Aria finds ...read more

more director interviews...

WEB EXCLUSIVES

THE DOCUMENTARY CHALLENGE’S FIVE-DAY WORK WEEK | By Stewart Nusbaumer
Monday, March 01, 2010
Are you addicted to large oil drums of coffee? Feel alive only when you’re a sleep-deprived stumbling zombie? Relish your emotions ripping from ice berg to flame thrower? Then you are made for the International Documentary Challenge. Started in 2006, the International Documentary Challenge is a ...read more
VIEWING ZEITGEISTS AND THE BEST U.S. INDIES OF THE DECADE | By Jason Sanders
Thursday, December 31, 2009
To try to recall your favorite films from an entire decade (and then to limit them to only ten titles) is to immediately set yourself up for uncertainty and ridicule: first off because it’s hard enough to remember what you saw ten days ago, much less ten years ago, and secondly because to ...read more

more web exclusives...

OUR VIDEOS

NEW BREED VIDEO REPORT FROM PARK CITY

We and The Workbook Project team up to film this open discussion on the new ways indie filmmakers can get their work to audiences.

FESTIVAL COVERAGE

PALM SPRINGS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | By Graham Flashner
Friday, January 15, 2010
Now in its 21st year, the Palm Springs International Film Festival Festival (Jan. 5-18) continues to be the place to be seen for foreign film Oscar contenders, 41 of which screened in this year’s Festival. U.S. films, for the most part, take a distant back seat, since most serious American ...read more

PLUS: Festival Ambassador - The latest news from the film festival circuit

more festival coverage...

THE BLOG

AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO SXSW
Thursday, March 11, 2010 Jason Guerrasio
Over at indieWIRE check out their guide of the best spots to eat, drink and shop while in Austin. Updating the list from last year, they also have contributions from people who know the lay of the land: Matt Dentler, Janet Pierson, and Austin native, director Bryan Poyser. (And head over to our SXSW page to read a guide to follow SXSW through social media.) Here’s a few of my favorite picks from the iW guide. BEST TEX MEX: Overall the top place for Mexican food was the highly recommmended ...read more
DIY DAYS COMING TO NYC… BUT NEEDS YOUR HELP
Thursday, March 11, 2010 Jason Guerrasio
The Workbook Project and the New School will present the first ever DIY Days in New York on April 3. This roving conference of talks, presentations and workshops on all things DIY (co-founded by our Culture Hacker columnist Lance Weiler) has been free to the public since its inception over three years ago, but because of the sudden loss of a sponsor it’s looking for the support of the indie community to help raise $3,000. Learn more about DIY Days and the campaign they’re doing here ...read more
COMPETITION TITLES ANNOUNCED FOR TRIBECA ‘10
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 Jason Guerrasio
Announced earlier today, the 9th annual Tribeca Film Festival announced their Competition roster and films in their Showcase category for this year’s fest, which takes place April 21 – May 2 in New York City. Some of the highlights include Alex Gibney’s work-in-progress screening of his doc on Eliot Spitzer and (get this) Vincent Gallo lending his voice in the animated film, Metropia. Full list of films are below. World Narrative Feature Competition “Buried Land,” directed ...read more
HOW TO SIT ON A PANEL
Tuesday, March 09, 2010 Scott Macaulay
Just in time for SXSW is this blog post from Mark Suster, an “entrepreneur turned VC” who blogs at “Both Sides of the Table.” Titled “Making the Most of Sitting on Panels,” it begins like this: “Many of us in the technology, media and VC world sit on panels at lot. Many of them are painfully boring.” I have to agree. I’m not a big fan of panels for some of the same reasons that Suster cites. Most panels are too big. By the time everyone ...read more
KATHRYN BIGELOW’S HAIR… METAL
Tuesday, March 09, 2010 Scott Macaulay
When I put together the clips for the “Young Person’s Guide to Kathryn Bigelow,” post below, there is one thing I left out. While scanning through her clips I did come across this music video for New Order’s “Touched by the Hand of God.” I don’t think I had ever seen it before, and I’ll confess that I initially stared at it trying to figure out if it was conceptual parody or whether New Order had had a mid-’80s hair-metal band image makeover ...read more
NO GAY (OR DRUNK) CHARACTERS IN THE SUNSHINE STATE…. PLEASE!
Tuesday, March 09, 2010 Scott Macaulay
As the current Massa Meltdown demonstrates, a lot of crazy talk can come out of legislators’ mouths. (For some of that crazy talk, I will definitely be tuning into Glenn Beck tonight when Massa is on for the full hour.) So when I was forwarded this link from Think Progress about a Florida state representative, Stephen Precourt, proposing a change to Florida’s film tax incentive that would deny the credit to films espousing “non-traditional” family values, I assumed it ...read more