Filmmaker is very happy to be sponsoring gumshoe director/journalist Jamie Stuart's annual take on the New York Film Festival this year. Here's his first piece: Stuart... with music; Schwartzman... without mustache; Anderson... sans sous-titres. Click here and enjoy.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/30/2007 10:00:00 PM

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The New York Film Festival feels especially airy and capacious this year, as if a wind had blown the doors wide open. Credit goes, in part, to Scott Foundas , J. Hoberman, and Lisa Schwarzbaum, guest curators who (along with chief Richard Pena and Film Society's Kent Jones) sculpted this year's lineup.

I sat down with Foundas and asked him if the films that made the cut marked a new direction for the venerable festival, which may or may not be looking over its shoulder at the ambitious over-reaching-and-corporatized Tribeca Film Festival. About half the NYFF lineup arrived without distribution, Foundas told me. Hardly surprising, since the market is currently so inhospitable for international fare, including works that in the past would have gotten picked up. So what's shifted over the years is not so much the NYFF itself, but rather the economic and cultural landscape. "And the role of the festival has changed," says Foundas, "because it may give New Yorkers their only chance to see certain films." The hostile landscape also explains, in part, the glut of festivals, which bring films to cities that might not otherwise see them.

While the committee dug deep into Cannes for this edition's lineup -- I counted 7 films -- it also made a concerted effort to favor films that didn't have U.S. distribution. "Sometimes it was a tossup between two films that might be similar," said Foundas. "But the film that wasn't going to show in New York otherwise got the edge."

As well, the question of balance figured heavily. An opener should be entertaining, not too long, with stars to walk the red carpet. And it helps if the filmmaker has a huge following in New York. Hence The Darjeeling Limited. Into the mix also went films the crix deemed "important and provocative," along with Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, which though subtitled, is also an accessible crowd pleaser. Not everyone on the committee is a fan of Brian de Palma, who's been tagged a low rent shock artist -- yet his Redacted was in the lineup from the start for its Brechtian reaction against media saturation, and effort to nail the role of cinema in digesting it.

Throughout the selection process a collegial spirit prevailed, for which Foundas credits Pena (now marking his 20th year at the helm). "Certain films are divisive, but you work it out," said Foundas. "Richard put together a committee whose opinion he respects. You're on a level playing field." Occasionally a film,such as Mr. Warmth, The Don Rickles Project, arrives on the committee's radar through the six degrees syndrome -- in this case, critic Dave Kehr happened to be a friend of director John Landis.

This year saw a surplus of good films. But would someone please tell me why the fest nixed The Duchess of Langeais by Jacques Rivette?

# posted by Erica Abeel @ 9/30/2007 12:43:00 PM

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Over at Videoblogging, anyone with a camera is invited to subscribe to the Lumiere Manifesto and create one-minute works in the tradition of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century French filmmaking brothers. They've fashioned their call into a Dogma 95-ish Manifesto that dictates how such minute-long pieces must be conceived and shot. (Hat tips: Warren Ellis and Boing Boing)

Here's are excerpts from the Manifesto that argue for the validity of this homage in today's times:

We believe instead that everyday video brings together a collective consciousness and experience through which we all come to view a universal existence and see “light” in the world, even through personal darkness. Film lacking context and artistic modification in any way beyond perspective, technology, and equipment is essential in an era of unrestrained, theatrical Internet TV. We do not believe filmmaker's geographical or psychological location to be an advantage any more than any other tool we can all employ. We believe in universal, important beauty and those who can attempt to replicate what their eyes and minds encounter. Inasmuch, Lumiere films require no explanation and are accessible to any audience with patience and an acceptance of the world we share....

...we believe in the personal viewing experience afforded by the computer as it enables an individual and private relationship between the viewer and the video. This intimate consumption is not one the filmmaker should attempt to overcome by collective viewings; instead, it should be embraced and public presentations of the work as cinema or a television broadcast should be rejected.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/29/2007 09:10:00 PM

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The 45th edition of the New York Film Festival kicked off last night at Avery Fisher Hall with a packed screening of Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Limited. Many present might well have worried about the caliber of this year's selection based on the opener. They shouldn't. From what I've viewed so far, overall, this looks to be a lineup of brilliantly realized films, reflecting the fest's mandate to show the creme of what's out there. And given the wide spectrum, with each film you're transported to a distinctive and arresting world.

"Darjeeling," though arresting visually and musically, also plays like a cinematic expression of arrested development. Three bros (Owen Wilson, Jason Schartzman , Adrien Brody hit the rails in India to reaffirm filial ties, find mommy, and shed their Vuitton baggage. The NYFF seems almost to fetishize this director (in fact, by rightfully rescuing Rushmore from Disney limbo and placing it in the fest, it put Wes on the map). The filmmaker himself is into fetishes that make up his precious, sollipsistic universe. At its best, "Darjeeling" serves up amusingly weird tschotchkes (like the mom-and-pop shrine adorning Jason Schwartzman's room in Hotel Chevalier , the "curtain-raiser" to the film proper). The actual train, which looks hand-painted, is a cabinet of wonders; scenes are meticulously composed; Anderson's musical choices are delicious, and so is Jason Schwartzman's hair.

That said, the dialogue dribbles out with stunning inanity and the schticks are mostly unfunny. I found more offensive than amusing Schwartzman's quickie with the Indian train hostess. You could say it flirted uncomfortably with images of the Ugly American and sex tourism, if it weren't, well, so preppy-abroad. Having viewed the film twice, in an effort to jack up my enthusiasm, I knew the third time round at the premiere to skip out to the Ladies during the brothers' attempt to rescue the Indian child who drowns. Yeah, I know, it's supposed to be clever, or revelatory, or something to switch tones on a dime, but I found the mix of quirky and tragic distasteful. At bottom, "Darjeeling" is about the world of rich white boys, a throwback to those 19th century aristos who owed themselves a trot around the globe. I say all this with trepidation because it's totally uncool not to "get" Anderson and this film -- hey, I liked The Royal Tennenbaums just fine!

After the premiere, what seemed like all of Avery Fisher spilled onto Broadway and surged like some invasion of the Mongols toward the opening night party at Tavern on the Green. It's an exclusive party, they can't all be going, I said to my friend the kultur maven, very distinguay in his tux. But they were. We had to battle a battalion of hotties with cleavage and ironed hair to get to the hooch.. Do events rent eye candy for the evening? The clever guests had gotten a leg up by skipping the movie altogether to dine early amidst the Tavern's Turkish whorehouse decor with faux Tiffany windows. You couldn't get near the Talent. Black and blue tuna congealed on plates on the VIP section tables reserved for them. Finally Bill Murray arrived, full of fun and quite drunk. Has anyone noticed how much Adrien Brody and Noah Baumbach resemble each other? Same artiste type we used to fall for at Vassar and Sarah Lawrence. Major egos, great in the sack, guaranteed to drive you up the wall ... I was hoping to see Asia Argento and her co-artist canine, but had to make do with Michael Musto and Sylvia Miles (looking and sounding identical to her role in Abel Ferrara's sleazy fun fest Go Go Tales). My fave guest: a mysterious lone woman wearing a hat with gigantic egret feather.

Weaving over the cobblestones at 1:30 A.M. in search of an elusive cab, we saw a middle-aged woman furiously power-walking. An example of New York's famous energy -- or maybe quiet desperation.

# posted by Erica Abeel @ 9/29/2007 03:59:00 PM

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Over at his Long Tail blog, Chris Anderson posts an email he received from Jeff Bach, an independent filmmaker at Quietwater Films regarding the viability of the "long tail" model for an independent producer. (In this case, it's a sports non-fiction producer -- Quietwater produces films on canoeing for boating enthusiasts).

Anderson posts the whole email, but here's an excerpt:

But the reality at this time for me and my company is that I need to find multiple large national distributors if I hope to even come close to making a living at this game. And I need to produce fresh content on a reasonably frequent basis. In short, I am a much smaller and more struggling version of the giants that have preceded me. I have the same issues and problems my predecessors did. The only thing that has changed is that I am trying to do it with an awareness of Web 2.0 and Long Tail and several other "New Media" phrases that you can insert here.

Your Long Tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace AS A CONSUMER. But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it is basically spelling out my doom. Other than your book examples which are still basically about VERY LARGE entities and aggregators, I am finding very few self supporting examples of independent Long Tail producers.

This quote resonated with me a week after the IFP Market and Conference. Departing filmmakers there seem to be split between those excited by the marketing and distribution possiblities Web 2.0 has to offer and those whose eyes are glazed over with anxiety at the thought of becoming niche-distributors and navigating this terrain on their own.

In the comments thread (included after the post on the link above), Bach elaborates on his email, and I hope he won't mind if I quote him at length because I think his discussion of indie wholesale versus retail marketing is relevant to a broader audience of independent filmmakers:

I think paying attention to the demographics of your retail buyer is important as well. For example, I could posit that my typical retail buyer is 40+, affluent, outdoorsy or married to someone outdoorsy. So far so good. But things get interesting when I consider that as my demographic ages, fewer and fewer of them are routinely on the internet in a buying mood, looking to discover a product like I have. They are out there though - but where? For the most part they are in a retail store discovering and then holding the product in their hand before they buy it. Which brings me back to the importance, for Quietwater anyway, of having national distributors and a shelf presence in retail stores. That part of the business then becomes wholesale, with a margin that is half or less of retail, so it makes the volume aspect of the business even more important.

Quietwater is working with two distributors and hopefully that will flesh out over time. I do need to put more effort into the retail (mainly online) side of things, but right now developing the wholesale segment is a bit more active. On the retail side, I built an e-store at Createspace.com. They have a "just-in-time" model that is very efficient and takes care of the credit card and shipping issues as well, which is very significant. Their cost is reasonable as well. On the frustrating side, their online store has Quietwater content buried in a very awkward browsing tree which results in non-existent discovery. Their browsing tree has no entry for "outdoor recreation", which is a real bummer. Quietwater products (a solo canoe DVD and a rec kayak DVD) are available via Amazon, which does a great deal on the discovery side, but they take a huge chunk of the total sale price. It is depressing to write but...a retail sale on Amazon yields less than a DVD sold wholesale. Is the benefit of discovery on Amazon worth the cost? This is partly why I'm doing more with the wholesale side of the business, it actually makes more $$/DVD than Amazon retail does!

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/29/2007 03:45:00 PM

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Earlier this week I saw the new Ryan Gosling movie, Lars and the Real Girl, in which the impressively versatile Gosling turns in a sweet, utterly convincing performance as socially regressed young man who finds a novel way of reintegrating himself with the world at large. Though the movie's central idea is a bit of a stretch, Gosling's sincerity in the role wins us over, and there is a particularly charming moment when he is lying in a treehouse in the woods, crooning an old fashioned love song. I was surprised how virtuousic his vocal performance was, but it turns out that Gosling is, like an alarming number of Hollywood's leading men, a keen singer who has quietly been pursuing a minor pop career on the side.

I couldn't find any mp3s of Gosling's warblings to post here, but I am going to take the opportunity to round up a few music-related movie tidbits that I've been meaning to mention. Firstly, there's Southland Tales: Richard Kelly's fear of the sophomore slump has kept the movie off our screens since its infamous premiere at Cannes in 2006 but, after a year of recutting, a new version of the movie played to a much more positive response at Austin's Fantastic Fest earlier this week, and will be on release from November 9.




The trailer (embedded above) makes the movie look sprawling, lavish and pretty out there, and but I think the trailer works particularly well because of the smart use of music. Things start out with the Pixies' seminal Wave of Mutilation, and come to a rousing finish with an epic song by the superb British band, Elbow, Forget Myself. (Click on the song titles to hear those tracks in full.) Moby has written the soundtrack for Kelly, and other musicians whose work appears include The Killers, Blur, Louis Armstrong and, um, Ludwig van Beethoven.

A band I've written about before is Ola Podrida, who are fronted by David Gordon Green's regular composer, David Wingo. Wingo has recently been recruiting indie directors to make promos for his songs, which started off with Michael Tully's video for Photo Booth. I then got notice from Joe Swanberg that his video for Run Off the Road is now online, starring one of our current 25 New Faces, Kentucker Audley. It's well worth checking out, and I'm also looking forward to seeing the next commissioned video, from The Guatelmalan Handshake director Todd Rohal. I bumped into Rohal last week at the IFP awards lunch, and he told me he expects it to be finished sometime in the next few weeks.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/28/2007 10:18:00 AM

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Over at their newly updated website, you can find some information on a workshop led by Jeff Silverstein at The New York Script Club. The event will take place on Thursday, October 11th and is open to the public for a fee of $10.00. The New York Script Club is a screenwriting support group that aids screenwriters with mentoring, motivation and networking opportunities.

Here's a press release:

Jeff Silverstein to host character writing workshop for
The New York Script Club

New York, New York – September 22,2007 – On Thursday, October 11th, The New York Script Club will offer a workshop specifically geared toward developing characters for film and television scripts. Led by Jeff Silverstein of Nehst Studios, this discussion will be held at 7 pm at 400 West 43rd St. in the Ellington Room on the 2nd floor.

The event is open to anyone for a fee of $10, however, space is limited. Interested parties must reserve a spot in advance via PayPal at www.nyscriptclub.org.

Jeff Silverstein is President of the Access and Learning Division of Nehst Studios. He runs the web network and is on the greenlight committee for features and media. Mr. Silverstein is also a screenwriter and consultant for scripts in development. Having attained a Masters degree from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, he has been involved with Writer’s Boot Camp, studied comedy with Neil and Danny Simon, and acting and directing at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.

Started in June of 2006, the New York Script Club is a free support group for all those interested in the art of screenwriting. It is open to writers of all backgrounds and skill levels, providing members with education, mentoring groups, motivation, and networking opportunities through bi-weekly meetings and writing sessions.

For more information on the New York Script Club or the upcoming event, please contact Ruthy Effler at ruthy@nyscriptclub.org.

# posted by Benjamin Crossley-Marra @ 9/27/2007 10:31:00 AM

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For those of you who don't regularly check the main page, which is now updated quite often with new content, including Nick Dawson's "director interviews," head over there and check out his latest: a lengthy conversation with Andrew Dominic, director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/26/2007 12:51:00 AM

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The Ann Arbor Film Festival is one of the United State's oldest forums for showcasing experimental films. Unfortunately, due to some backwards thinking politicians who are under the notion that cultural conscience is a show on MTV, the festival recently had to forgo their state funding. Why, exactly have they lost their funding? Well, for starters for their non-compliance with state regulations that proclaim any film that receives state funding should:

I: Not depict human waste on any religious symbols.
II: Not show the desecration of the flag.
III: Not depict sex acts.

When a kind reminder that the Civil War is over didn't deter the politicians stance, the festival decided to take matters into their own hands and are trying to raise the money themselves. And they're going to sue the pants off the state for grossly violating the first amendment, but more on that at a later date.

But what you can do now is log onto their website and make a small donation in the name of art, cinema and politics. You'll feel good about doing this because you're supporting the filmmaking community, you get to vote to make the festival volunteers do something outrageous and a small percentage goes to the wildlife federation.

Here's a further press release:

Censorship Controversy

The Latest Update
In March 2007, the Ann Arbor Film Festival – working in conjunction with the ACLU of Michigan – filed suit against the state of Michigan in an attempt to overturn arts funding legislation that we believe is unconstitutional according to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The suit was in response to a movement by a small group of state legislators who used the rules to prohibit the AAFF from receiving state arts funding.

While the case is still pending, the Festival is working hard to recover from the loss of funding and the strain of defending itself against those who seek to abridge our right to Constitutionally protected speech. But there’s a lot more work to do – both in protecting the rights of artists and in returning the AAFF to a healthy position as one of the world’s leading showcases for cutting-edge films that provoke, challenge and inspire.

The Whole Story
In early 2006 an essay written by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy – a group that is opposed to all state funding of the arts – used the frequently provocative films we screen at the Festival to attack all public arts funding. The essays says, “one person’s highpoint of artistic achievement may be deemed a cesspool of silliness by another,” and then goes on to name several films that were screened at the AAFF.

After the essay was published, a small group of state legislators, claiming that taxpayer dollars were going to fund “pornography” at the Festival, used Michigan’s Constitutionally-suspect arts funding language in a political grandstanding maneuver that singled out the Ann Arbor Film Festival for special treatment. Our past-due funding was pulled and they attempted to pass new legislation preventing the AAFF from receiving any future state arts money.

In response, the Festival’s board of directors voted unanimously to forego state arts money as long as the vague and restrictive guidelines were in place. The board felt it was more important to uphold the Festival’s artistic integrity and protect the expression of its exhibiting filmmakers than it was to accept dollars that limited artistic expression.

But the decision wasn’t an easy one. The AAFF had been getting money from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs for over ten years and, until the Mackinac Center published its essay, no one had ever found our films problematic before. We are an international festival and we take pride in the diversity of people and ideas the AAFF draws to Michigan. All of us at the Festival believe in protecting the rights of our participating filmmakers and that they should be allowed the full range of Constitutionally protected speech to express their artistic vision.

Economic Benefits & Cultural Tourism

Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Contribution to Michigan’s Culture and Economy

According to the June 2006 Economic Impact of Arts and Culture Report (pdf), a healthy arts community is an asset for economic development and helps attract the educated, creative work force that businesses and states seek to attract. As a local Festival that attracts work, artists and audiences from countries all over the world, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is a prime example of that.

While the overwhelming majority of small, community arts organizations in Michigan rely on their local communities and audiences to support their work, the AAFF is an economic engine that brings money into the state from across the United States and the globe. For example, in 2006, the Ann Arbor Film Festival received over $58,000 in submission fees – our single largest revenue line – yet only 5% of those fees came from Michigan filmmakers.

But the festival does more than draw money into the state through submission fees from the international filmmaking community. We bring audiences as well. In the past two years, the AAFF hosted 79 filmmakers from outside of Michigan – 14 from outside of the United States. In fact, at the 44th Ann Arbor Film Festival, we hosted filmmakers from five continents. And we know there are more – non-filmmakers who come from all over the world to attend the Festival – we just don’t track them.

Christen McArdle, the Executive Director of the AAFF, talked about attending our filmmakers’ reception the Saturday of Festival saying, “I was sitting at a table with filmmakers from Rwanda, the United Kingdom, Canada and New York. None of them had ever been to Michigan before; all were having a great time and enjoying the festival, and all of them talked about coming back.”

Visitors to the AAFF spend time and money at local restaurants, hotels, clubs, bars and retail stores and when they return home, they’ll tell their friends, neighbors and family members about the wonderful experience they had in Michigan.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest festival in North America showcasing independent and experimental film. As a non-partisan festival created to celebrate film as an art form, we exhibit work that challenges ideals, pushes techniques and styles in artistic expression, and celebrates cultures and countercultures from around the world. Since our founding in 1963, we have screened works by filmmakers like Kenneth Anger, Brian DePalma, Barbara Hammer, George Lucas, Yoko Ono, Gus Van Sant, Will Vinton and Andy Warhol.

And while our programming has represented a wide variety of viewpoints over the years – including those of the far left and far right and avant-garde and mainstream themes – and we are justifiably proud of the role we’ve played in bringing alternative viewpoints and glimpses into other cultures to Michigan, we’ve also played a key role in bringing visitors to Ann Arbor and dollars into the state and local economies. Your support in continuing to help us do so is both needed and greatly appreciated.

See you at the Festival!

# posted by Benjamin Crossley-Marra @ 9/25/2007 08:41:00 PM

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Janus Films will be unveiling two new pristine prints of Albert Lamorisse's endearing films The Red Balloon and The White Mane. An interesting figure of the 20th century, Lamorisse is probably best known for creating the board game Risk, although he was an avid photographer, documentarian and filmmaker. He would go on to win the Palm d'Or for The Red Balloon at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. He died in a helicopter crash over Iran whilst shooting a documentary in 1970. Janus films will kick of a 30-city tour of the double feature at New York's Film Forum on November 16th.

Here's the schedule so far:

Nov 16 – 23 - NYC Film Forum (matinees only on the last weekend.)
Nov 23 – 29 - LALandmark Nuart
Nov 23 - San FranciscoLandmark
Nov 23 BerkeleyLandmark Shattuck
Nov 23 – 29 - ChicagoMusic Box
Nov 23 - BostonLandmark Kendall
Nov 23 - SeattleLandmark Varsity
Nov 23 - DC Landmark E Street
Nov 23 - Nov 25 - DetroitDetroit Inst. of Art
Dec 1-2 - Ithaca Cornell Cinema
Dec 21-27 - DenverStarz Film Center
Dec 22 - Jan 2 - Westchester Jacob Burns matinees
Dec 14 - NashvilleBelcourt
Dec 14 - AtlantaLandmark Midtown Art
Dec 14 – 20 - St. LouisLandmark Tivoli
Dec 16 - HonoluluAcademy of the Arts – One Day Only!
Dec 21 – 27 - HartfordReal Artways
Jan 4-6 HoustonMuseum of Fine Art
Jan 5-6 - Cleveland Cleveland Cinematheque

# posted by Benjamin Crossley-Marra @ 9/25/2007 04:40:00 PM

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Last week, during the 29th annual IFP Market, I had a chance to sit down with Documentary Spotlight programmer and director, Milton Tabbott. We talked about the state of nonfiction these days and IFP's unwavering dedication to helping independent filmmakers develop their vision and craft, the market and conference being just one way in which the organization shepherds artists through the obstacle course of making, finishing, exhibiting and selling their film.

Filmmaker: How many years have you been culling through the nonfiction submissions that come into the market?

Tabbot: I started as a volunteer [for IFP] in ’95 and then I came on staff in ’96. So since ’96, I’ve been bringing in work, both narrative and documentary. Since 2004, we’ve separated the Documentary Spotlight into its own program.

Filmmaker: Why is that? These days, I’m noticing a lot of strongly narrative programs including full documentary strands in their programming.

Tabbot: We always had documentaries and we always had the same number of documentaries competing in the market. Up until, and through 2003, there was always a small portion of documentaries with producers who had a track record and such, included in No Borders. It became a little complicated because they were at different stages. On the narrative side, they were all at script stage. And on the documentary side, they were always in progress. And that was a time when there was growing interest in documentary, from both the industry and the public. So, the thought was to take those in-progress documentaries out of No Borders and give them targeted access to buyers who were looking for nonfiction. I think there was a concern, at the beginning, that buyers would be overwhelmed with the numbers because we have 60 works-in-progress, but it hasn’t turned out that way. And in 2004, we had the buyers requesting one-on-one meetings. We inform the industry right after we make our selections and we start churning out the publications. We've also added this compilation DVD of all the projects so that they can target what’s relevant to them.

Filmmaker: Do salespeople come for a combination of narratives and docs?

Tabbot: There have always, and continue to be, companies that are looking for both. But, post-Capturing the Friedmans, Spellbound, and a whole explosion of nonfiction films that did well theatrically, you started having companies like Focus Features and Paramount Vantage and others looking for documentaries that might work in the theatrical market. There was an increase in the traditional distribution arena that joined the usual suspects--the broadcasters and those other companies like 7th Art Releasing, THINKFilm, HBO, A&E IndieFilms, the international broadcasters--that started out of the gate with a lot of documentaries.

Filmmaker: There’s a strand here that’s covering the doc hybrid, or what’s being called nonfiction film--films that incorporate a lot of narrative elements in building the story. Is that tricky? What do you do with those?

Tabbot: It depends on what the balance is in the film and how it's being marketed. In the past two years, I’ve seen more focus on the story in documentary—what is the story? What is the narrative arc? There’s been a movement to think about that during production and to consciously build the film to play more like a narrative film. There's thought behind that while they’re following the story. Taking that one step further, we have a couple of projects in the market this year that I would say feel like narrative films but are documentaries. One is called "21 Below" that follows a family in Buffalo, New York and another, from what we’ve seen so far, is going to be a really terrific documentary called “A Rubberband is an Unlikely Instrument.” It’s not a music doc but it follows this musician in Brooklyn coping with his various life issues. It feels like an American indie with a European sensibility. He's [the director, Matt Boyd,] constructing it just like a narrative film. It’s a first-time feature for him. But, it’s also a hard film for buyers to get a bead on.

Filmmaker: What tends to happen with projects like that?

Tabbot: I try to tell them [the filmmakers] that they may not be popular at the dance right away, but once these films start with their festival screenings, that’s when their life is going to start. They’re going to need that buzz and that stamp of approval that comes with getting into the major festivals.

Filmmaker: Are there certain filmmakers that you, personally, track—watching artistically and creatively what they do, knowing that what they’re creating might change the whole landscape of documentary?

Tabbot: There are all kinds of documentaries. The majority of the group that’s here are still, for the most part, very social-issue driven. But what really does appeal to me, too, are those filmmakers challenging the form. I reiterate over and over at the filmmaker orientation, that the reason they’re here is that their work is really, really good. And there’s also very good work that we just couldn’t accommodate. It doesn’t mean those films won’t get in next year. We try to choose films that are ready to be exposed. Because there’s such a big group of key people from all the companies here looking at product, if you show it before it’s ready, that’s the impression that you’re going to leave behind.

I want to include films that are doing something different. Even if they’re not the most commercial projects, I feel they should be in some kind of documentary forum. . . . I’m a programmer, at heart, so anything having to do with the content of film or helping filmmakers is what I’m interested in. I’d be perfectly happy having a little theater somewhere to program—I know that’s a bit old school these days, having a brick and mortar theater.

Filmmaker: Has the programming here changed in any way in the course of your tenure?

Tabbot: I think part of it is us and part of it is the filmmaker. We try to structure the market as an extremely professional forum and I think the filmmakers step up to that. What you see in the documentary community is a mix of newcomers and veterans. It’s very rare for a documentary filmmaker to be able to go out and make his or her next movie without having to ask for money. It’s the reality; everybody deals with this.

Filmmaker: Do you think there ever will be any kind of governmental commissioning entity in our country that will act as a fund for independent filmmakers? Or is that too pie-in-the-sky?

Tabbot: I do think that is a bit pie-in-the-sky.

Filmmaker: Is that why you encourage co-productions? What is behind making the No Borders strand such a prominent feature of the market?

Tabbot: It’s because filmmaking can be a very isolating endeavor—it's a lot of working on a Final Cut Pro system on your laptop in your bedroom and sending out intermittent missives to people, but not having any clear guidance. There are a number of forums like this one, but not really anything in the US quite like what we try to do. The idea is to bring all these people together for an intense four to five days of opportunity and connection—that’s basically why we do it. For me, the struggle is not being able to find good work. But we do have a certain reputation at this point for careful curation and tapping if off at a certain number of participants. The challenge is keeping up with who the new players are, where the new money is, if there is any, and who’s got it. The narrative world is still a much more attractive world to most buyers.

Filmmaker: Who are some of your favorite nonfiction filmmakers right now?

Tabbot: Some of the films that I personally respond to are either very traditional or totally non-traditional. This past year, there was a film that I thought was fantastic by a narrative filmmaker who did a doc, Rob Devor’s “Zoo.” It was a documentary told in a narrative style—it’s almost totally imagined. Those are the kinds of films that get me excited. The thing about documentary filmmakers is that you rarely see the same thing from the same filmmaker from year to year. Each project can take many years to produce and finish.

Filmmaker: What venues or festivals do you hit that you really enjoy from a programming perspective?

Tabbot: I love going to Full Frame. It’s like a little oasis of nonfiction in a very intimate environment. I hope to get to True/False; I hear great things about that festival, again in terms of great programming and great community. The doc world community is really special. A filmmaker over at the Doc Spotlight, who had had a series of good meetings yesterday, told me, “It’s amazing how many nice people gravitate to documentary, on both the buyer side and the filmmaker side.” It's not unusual for me to watch a film by a filmmaker I haven't yet met and respond strongly to it. And when I do finally meet him or her, not surprisingly, there’s an affinity there.

Filmmaker: Do you think your job is going to get easier or harder, in terms of how this market is going to run in the future?

Tabbot: I think that any kind of major growth already happened a few years ago, as I said earlier. I’m always a little leery about such intense interest and what kind of life cycle it might have. This business is still driven by commerce and still driven by theatrical, especially for those who are working in the longer form—that aspiration, that hope of theatrical is still very pertinent, for both filmmakers and buyers.

Filmmaker: Is the online film marketing and distribution explosion something that you think will serve up quality content on a consistent basis?

Tabbot: (shrugs and laughs) I’m so old school! Hopefully, yeah, but whether it’s going to be a pipeline or an influencer of the form? It’s still hard to tell. I think there could very well be people who are new filmmakers, or there are people who have been working in nonfiction film for a while, that aren’t even thinking about this kind of structure [theatrical] because they’re young and they’re attuned to that kind of marketing and distribution. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

We hold an orientation for local filmmakers who are going to take projects to Hot Docs in Toronto [which takes place in the spring]. I was talking to Whitney Dow, the co-director of “The Two Towns of Jasper.” I had him share his experience pitching up there at the forum and he said, “It’s the best of times and the worst of times for documentary, in that there’s a lot of people doing a lot of good work, and there's a lot of interest in that work. But there’s still no money.” That side of things hasn’t kept up—there are still the same outlets out there with the same funding profiles they’ve had for years.

But people struggle and struggle to make their film and then you see the work. And due to enormous creativity, resourcefulness and perseverance, that work and sacrifice definitely does pay off.

# posted by Pamela Cohn @ 9/23/2007 08:28:00 PM

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Here's a Google link to a conversation that Scott Kirsner from CinemaTech had during the IFP Filmmaker Confernece with Brett Gaylor, a Montreal-based filmmaker who is exploring new modes of collaboration for documentary filmmaking. I'm also embedding below, but if you go to the Google page you can download the 12-minute piece in a format suitable for playing on your iPod or PSP.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/22/2007 11:14:00 AM

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Over at his Docs that Inspire, Joel Heller has posted an MP3 download of Scott Kirsner's IFP Filmmaker Conference panel on digital downloading for filmmakers.

Here's what he has to say about the conference/podcast:

Kirsner is arguably the most engaging panel moderator on the new media scene, both because of his knowledge of emerging distribution platforms and the persistence he brings to asking panelists tough questions and keeping things moving along. Panels such as this one are a vital service to filmmakers, who are faced with an overwhelming array of online distribution possibilities in new media landscape that's evolving at warp speed.

This podcast is a complete unedited one-hour audio recording of the panel discussion featuring Peter Broderick (Distribution Strategist at Paradigm Consulting), Kathleen Powell (Vice President, Worldwide Programming, Jaman), Jana Augsberger (Filmaka.com), and Kelly Devine (Manager, ReFrame Project). You can read more about this panel—along with Kirsner's commentary on several other IFP panels—at his blog CinemaTech.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/21/2007 01:02:00 PM

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I've posted previously about Jonathan Lethem's "Promiscuous Materials Project," in which he allows filmmakers, songwriters and playwrights free adaptation rights to some of his short stories. Now, Lethem has a page on his blog in which he notes which artists have taken him up on his offer. An, in the cases of many of the songwriters, he posts streams of their work. Check it out. Among the film news: Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher is making a short fllm from Lethem's story "Interview with a Crab."

Related: Lethem also announced that he would give the film rights to his latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, to the director with the best proposal for its adaptation. It would be a free option with money due only when the film received distribution. On the news page for the book Lethem announces that Greg Marcks, whose previous film was 11:14, was awarded the option. "Greg's ideas for the film are really terrific, and I'm excited to see him try to make it," Lethem writes.

Marcks is currently working on The Gift, an international thriller set in Bolivia.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/21/2007 12:36:00 PM

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So the highlight for me here at IFP was the opportunity to meet so many filmmakers and other creative people. I'm at the HBO party right now in the Puck building... I'm sitting on a couch hanging out with these two really kewL sound designer/composer types originally from France but now NY based. Thierry and Frederic are definitely holdin it down on the creative tip.

One of the coolest projects I heard about was from Jason Smith from Chicago with his film "The Jack MacKey Project" I'm a closet hiphop_head so I loved the idea behind his film. An MC was challenged to create an entire album in 24 hours, the d00d did it and apparently it was quite mega_ILL. This is Jason and I hangin out by the IFP DIY couch.


Since this will be my last post from the IFP I'd like to thank everyone at the IFP and everyone at Filmmaker magazine for letting a professional weirdo like myself take part in the festivities. Fellow blogger Alicia attacked me physically and threatened further mental and emotional trauma if I did not include this hyper professional photo of us both. In my personal life I usually never do what women tell me to do but in my like... professional life I make exceptions.


I'll speaking at the picnic conference in Amsterdam in Tuesday if anyone is going to be in the neighborhood and my film is playing in London on October 1st. If you want to see why I was invited here go pickup my DVD and allow your head to be exploded by le ultimate strange!!!

# posted by M dot Strange @ 9/20/2007 08:28:00 PM

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"What do you do for exercise?"
"Tiddlywinks. And an occasional anxiety attack."

- Woody Allen, Melinda and Melinda

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About the Author:

Tze (pronounced "Z") Chun is a writer/director working out of NY and LA. His short film Windowbreaker played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. His feature film You're A Big Girl Now is currently being produced by Jeremy Kipp Walker of Journeyman Films (Half Nelson, Maria Full of Grace). He was asked by this blog's editors to send some dispatches from attending IFP's International Co-finance market No Borders. He hopes he does a good job.

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Hey everyone, sorry about the lag time. Here's a play-by-play of my experience at No Borders, IFP's international co-finance market.

DAY 0: Saturday

Took three days off my job in LA and took the red-eye back to NY to present my project You're A Big Girl Now at IFP's international co-finance market No Borders. Spent a Saturday walking around Soho and Union Square with my girlfriend, then picked up the thirty-five pound box of scripts, lookbooks, and project overviews that William Morris messengered over to her office (I didn't want to make her carry it… I'm a gentleman). My producer Jeremy Kipp Walker is in Arizona shooting Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's follow up to Half Nelson and can't make it to IFP, so I've decided to go alone, but armed to the teeth.

Got a bad night's sleep. Still jetlagged.

DAY 1: Sunday

Woke up late and groggy then overcompensated with caffeine. I know I've drunk too much coffee when my interior monologue starts sounding more and more like Patrick Bateman's voice-over in American Psycho.

Today is orientation day! Feels like my first day at school. I even got hazed by a couple of the older writer/directors. Good thing I don't have any milk money to steal. At the kickoff brunch, got to see the ever wonderful Susan Boehm and Amy Dotson, who run No Borders and Emerging Narratives, respectively. If you don't know Susan and Amy, they're the ones been working round-the-clock to put the market together. Also saw Durier Ryan, who wrote the piece in 25 New Faces about me.

Met up with No Borders veteran Karin Chien (The Motel, Robot Stories) to get some advice. Karin's been helping me informally with You're A Big Girl Now, both with notes on the script and budget estimates. The best advice she gives me is not to sweat it. No Borders is about making the initial connection and seeing if this is a relationship you want to continue.

At noon, Susan gave us some pointers and the co-presenting partners (list here) give a small speech about what they do. The gist is that if you're from any country other than the US, you can get a lot of money to make your movies.

Some familiar faces. Michael Kang (The Motel, West 32^nd) and his producer Jamin O'Brian (who I met at Tribeca All Access this year) were there with their new film Sea of Tranquility. Jamin met the writer Chris Newberry last year at Emerging Narratives! Also, Priyanka Kumar, also a TAA alum, was there with her project The Flicker's Dance.

DAY 2: Monday

First full day of meetings. The way that No Borders (and Emerging Narratives) work is they have a group of small tables where 30 minute meetings are scheduled. They send out a dossier with project information, and companies and individuals request meetings with you. Everyone refers to it as 'speed-dating.'

All of the No Borders projects have some financing in place, so the conversations are less pitch-oriented, more about where you hope the project will go, what distribution you'd like for it, how you came up with the budget numbers, etc. Most of the time, the companies have requested meetings with you for a certain reason: subject matter, budget, or the filmmaker's previous track record.

Since my film is a modestly budgeted Cantonese-language period film. I found myself mostly in meetings with companies with equity financing or a film fund in place who were looking for a slate of films for the next year. Also met with a few film sales companies that wanted to take a look at the script and possibly advise about preselling foreign territories. I try to keep my pitch short, show the lookbook, discuss the budget and potential audience for the film, then ask some questions about the company I'm pitching to. Even if this project isn't right for the company I'm pitching, it's good to keep in mind who they are, what they're about, what type of projects they get involved in.

Some new faces who skipped orientation showed up yesterday. Sophie Barthes (fellow 25 faces and 2007 Sundance shorts alum) and my producer's partner Paul Mezey were there with their project Cold Souls. Oh, also this morning, John Hadity gave a great talk on international co-financing where he explained different type of financing – equity, supergap, gap, primary, mezzanine, and… vestibule?

I brought too many hard copies of my script. My back hurts.

DAY 3: Tuesday

Second full day of meetings. Met up with Cinetic Media madman Dana O'Keefe, who AD'd a short film of mine five years ago. Also, Alex Orlovsky (Half Nelson, Blue Valentine) of Hunting Lane. This is my second day of nine half-hour meetings, but I feel fine, I think. One of the great things about No Borders is that the companies choose to meet with you, and not the other way around. Because of this, there's a near absence of the Creative Executive glazed-look reaction when you're pitching. These are all companies that are truly interested in finding out more about independent film and independent filmmakers.

At night I went to my one extra-curricular event, run by the Florida Film Festival. I'm also keeping up with my day job as a staff writer on Cashmere Mafia. Calling my sometimes writing partner out in LA. Started missing NYC for the first time.

DAY 3: Wednesday

Started missing NYC hard. Just two meetings set up through IFP. Met with a London based distribution company that might want to put up half of the budget in exchange for China distribution rights. Trying to follow up as I go. Had to run back home to pack up so I could get some sleep before my flight tomorrow. Didn't get to say goodbye to most people. Gave Susan a huge hug. I think she was initially worried that Jeremy couldn't do the meetings with me, but said she got some positive feedback about my pitch and presentation.

All in all, a fantastic experience meeting with all these companies in one place. Really inspiring to see all these producers, filmmakers, and production companies making interesting films. Filmmakers that I'd admired from afar and got to meet face to face. Companies whose logo I would see in front of some of my favorite films.

DAY 4: Thursday

Took the 6am plane back to LA and was back in the writer's room by 10am. Trying hard to edit all my posts and realizing what a bad writer I am when I'm tired. Hope they make sense. If they don't, e-mail me.

# posted by Tze Chun @ 9/20/2007 06:58:00 PM

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If you are in New York this weekend, consider going to see Larry Fessenden's Iceland-set, environmental/exisentialist horror movie The Last Winter, which is playing at the IFC Center. Manohla Dargis gave the film an amazing review in the New York Times.

She wrote, in part:

It’s amazing what you can do with a low budget, an expansive imagination and a smooth-moving camera. (A fine cast helps.) An heir to the Val Lewton school of elegantly restrained horror, wherein an atmosphere of dread counts far more than a bucket of blood and some slippery entrails, the director Larry Fessenden is among the most thoughtful Americans working on the lower-budget end of this oft-abused and mindlessly corrupted genre.

Apocalyptic in title and tone, “The Last Winter,” written by Robert Leaver and Mr. Fessenden, breathes fresh air into a stale setup (an isolated group gone stir crazy or something) by insisting that our everyday horrors aren’t a matter of arid news reports but of feverishly real, terrifying life.

And if you haven't checked out the Filmmaker.com main page (which you really should, because there is a lot of new web-only content there), here's a link to Damon Smith's interview with Fessenden.

An excerpt:

Filmmaker: Do you find it hard writing for horror audiences considering that you’re not giving them the gory stuff most fans are clamoring for?

Fessenden: No. [Laughs] Costa-Gavras maybe, but all that is political. By chance, I’ve made two movies about environmental issues and I can honestly say that is quite rare. There is a tradition in some horror movies of the revenge of the beasts — with frogs and God knows what — but my model is much more traditional. I’m influenced by Scorsese’s movies and Roman Polanski, who has that subtle sense of dread in his films.

Filmmaker: How do you think people will respond to The Last Winter?

Fessenden: I’ve really carved a very strange place for myself — the pursuit of the uncanny. I really think the uncanny is what we live every day, and to express that is so cool. The axe murder in an absolutely shocking and horrifying event, but it only happens to a few of us. We can obsess on it, and that’s fine, but what’s intriguing is the peculiarity you live with every day. The little nicks and cuts, as opposed to the huge axe murder—those are things that we do to ourselves and we’re doing right now. There is no more symbolic feature in our lives than the fact that we are ignoring this thing that is killing us. It’s just madness.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/20/2007 06:51:00 PM

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Tomorrow, Friday, is the final day of the IFP Filmmaker Conference, and it's both free and open to the general public. From 9:00AM until 10:30AM panelists will discuss issues surrounding fair use in documentary film, the limits of, benefits from, and restrictions around E&O insurance, and specific issues that have arisen in various docs having to do with fair use. It's at the Puck Building in New York at Houston and Lafayette. Anybody working in documentary film today has to know about these issues.

Here's the schedule:

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 21st - FAIR USE IN DOCUMENTARY FILM

FAIR USE 101 9:00 - 10:30AM
Michael Donaldson, Principal, Donaldson & Hart

E & O & YOU 11:00AM - 12:30PM
Peter Jaszi , Professor, Washington College of Law, American University
Debra Kozee, President, C&S Insurance

FILMMAKER FAIR USE ROUNDTABLE 1:00 - 2:30PM
Anthony Falzone, Executive Director, Stanford University’s Fair Use Project
Kirby Dick, Director, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
Alex Gibney, Director, ENRON: Smartest Guys In The Room, Taxi to the Dark Side
Lesli Klainburg, Director, Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema, Indie Sex: Censored
David Van Taylor, With God On Our Side, Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/20/2007 04:17:00 PM

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For those of you who haven’t been able to check out the Filmmaker Conference going on this week, IFP has been uploading video interviews with some of the panelists to the IFP MySpace Page.

They’ve got interviews with John Sayles and Maggie Renzi, producers Gill Holland and Peter Saraf, and everyone from Sunday’s MUSIC MAKES THE MOVIE PANEL, including Moby, Tom DiCillo and music supervisor Tracy McKnight. They’ll be uploading more videos throughout the week, so keep checking back!

To see the Conference panel lineup for Thursday and Friday, go to www.filmmakerconference.com.

# posted by André Salas @ 9/20/2007 01:06:00 PM

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As we pass the half-way point, I want to thank all of our guest bloggers -- Pamela, M. Dot, Alicia, and Brandon -- who've been covering the IFP Filmmaker Conference. But as GreenCine pointed out today, there are other places to get your vicarious Conference fix. The Film Panel Notetaker has several long and detailed accounts of the various panel discussions. And Scott Kirsner has several long posts as well on his CinemaTech blog. In one, while listening to THINKfilm's Mark Urman discuss the challenge of publicizing a film in the internet age, Kirsner goes web-surfing to the THINKfilm site and realizes that, like most distributor sites, it does not allow bloggers and other "non-registered media" easy access to press stills and publicity materials. Kirsner says that correcting this would allow the distributors a low-cost way to service the army of bloggers who, for some films, might be an even more potent force than the MSM.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/20/2007 11:04:00 AM

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Today, the market and conference is focused on nonfiction filmmaking. It's a bit quieter than the last couple of days, with most of the staff off-site prepping for the filmmaker awards luncheon in a few hours at Chinatown Brasserie just down the street.

The day started with the "Public Television in the 21st Century" panel moderated by International Documentary Association's executive director, Sandra Ruch. She was joined by Claire Aguilar of ITVS, Kathy Lo of PBS' Independent Lens, Simon Kilmurry of PBS' POV and, the very charming, Christoph Jorg of ARTE. Ruch encouraged the panelists to provide practical advice to the audience on how to submit to these various broadcasters--the whos, whats and wheres of navigating the process each series or channel has for their annual programming.

Documentary folks, as a rule, are much easier to access than people who produce and buy fiction and also tend to be extremely forthcoming and open about their process selection and any other issues or questions a filmmaker might have. They will give you their email, their phone number, their time and attention. But, as with most things discussed here, the onus is on the filmmaker to do the necessary research and present as professional a package as you possibly can when you're ready to go through their submission process. You don't want to get kicked out of the pile due to not doing your homework--it's a waste of everyone's time, especially yours. And be prepared to submit to the same entities several times. Ruch says, "Don't be discouraged. If they're writing you back inviting you to re-submit, take that as a positive sign and try again."

Also this morning, Thom Powers, nonfiction programmer of the Toronto International Film Festival will talk to Participant Productions' Diane Weyermann for the last "A Conversation With. . .".

There are four more panels throughout the day with the superstars of the doc world--filmmakers, programmers, and executives working exclusively in nonfiction. And, there is also a focus on doc/narrative hybrids, a burgeoning category discussed frequently in the nonfiction filmmaking community.

And tomorrow, the whole day (free to anyone who wants to attend) is devoted to Fair Use in Documentary--"Fair Use 101" with Michael Donaldson (who, literally, wrote the book on these issues), "E&O and You" (errors & omissions insurance) and, finally, a "Filmmaker Roundtable" continuing the discussion about these essential issues for film producers.

# posted by Pamela Cohn @ 9/20/2007 10:24:00 AM

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Just had to add a note to today's stuff: I attended the "Show Me the Money" panel, as anticipated. Great, articulate group, as usual, peopled by the industry's most pioneering film execs, and all went well--people were amusing and pithy and all that stuff a good panelist does.

I've attended many, many panels at this fest and usually when they're over (and this is a packed house, mind you), just a few people wander up to talk to the panelists as they step down from the podium

Well, this group didn't even get a chance to lift their asses off their chairs, let alone step off the podium. They were mobbed. At last, at last! Someone can explain where the hell we might get some stinkin' money, already, oh happy day.

I found it very touching and sad. If I ever strike it super-duper rich some day (don't get excited; it's not that likely), I will give a huge chunk of my cash away to artists, filmmakers, craftspeople, musicians, anyone that creates something from the best of their brain and their soul. Promise.

# posted by Pamela Cohn @ 9/19/2007 06:46:00 PM

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A couple of popular festivals had parties last night on the east side to kick off the '08 season. The Woodstock Film Festival, October 10 - 14, has a great program scheduled this year and some of their sponsors, including indiepix, hosted a little shindig at Libation to fete filmmakers and staff. This young fest is very popular with filmmakers, as is the True/False Film Festival. T/F hosted a special screening of one of last year's faves, Super Amigos by Arturo Perez Torres at the IFC Center. Chicago 10 director, Brett Morgen, did a Q&A with Torres following the screening, followed by an intimate party on Broome Street with all the usual suspects in attendance.

This morning at the market, the UK Film Council and UK Film Council US hosted a preview of new work from film projects supported by the Council's New Cinema Fund, followed by a brunch in the lobby of the Angelika Film Center. An excited Lenny Crooks introduced the show reel with scene selections, trailers, and screen tests of projects currently in production, most of which looked fresh, provocative and exciting. I was especially taken with Chris Waitt's A Complete History, Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane (gorgeous cinematography), Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching (also gorgeous) and Noel Clarke's Adulthood. Good stuff.

Crooks, the new head of the Fund said that over the course of the next three years, he's very keen on creating collaborations with UK and US indie filmmakers/producers. With 14 films currently in production, he's anxious to fill a near-future slate with quality independent fiction and nonfiction co-productions.

After brunch, I went back downstairs to watch a work-in-progress doc called Paolo by filmmaker Andrea Franco Batevsky. Then back to the Puck Building for a sit-down with IFP's documentary programmer and Doc Spotlight director, Milton Talbott. In a few days, on this blog, I'll be posting our conversation about the current state of nonfiction, and how the documentary strand at the market has changed and grown over the years.

I followed Milton over to 4th street where the doc spotlight meetings were taking place--a smaller, quieter (but just as intense) version of the narrative and No Borders meetings between sales agents, producers, filmmakers and financiers. Judith Helfand was there representing Chicken and Egg Pictures, as was Diana Holtzberg of Films Transit International (both as a director/producer and an acquisitions and sales agent). I also saw Peter Broderick and others conducting meetings. As I was leaving, a very excited sales agent came running up to Milton and shared the news that she'd just closed a great deal with a documentary filmmaker.

I met Simon Kilmurry, the executive director of PBS' POV series in the elevator on the way back down to the lobby and we chatted on the walk back to the Puck Building. He'll be one of the panelists for the "Public Television in the 21st Century" panel tomorrow as part of the market day that focuses on documentary. I interviewed one of his team members recently, producer Yance Ford, for Renew Media. You can read the interview here.

I spent the afternoon in the viewing library and watched these WIP docs: Samantha Buck's 21 Below; Cathryne Czubek's A Girl and a Gun; Virginia Williams' Frontrunner; and Matt Boyd's A Rubberband is an Unlikely Instrument (Jem Cohen's partner-in-crime and a wonderful filmmaker in his own right).

Some great panels coming up this afternoon: "Show Me the Money": Where are today's indies under $2 million finding their budgets? Learn how independent filmmakers find the money--through grants, private foundations and fiscal sponsorship programs--they need to get their movie made.

Following that will be the last panel of the day moderated by indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez called "The State of Independents." How has independent film changed in the last five years? Where are we headed--and how can distributors and independent filmmakers work together to tweak old platform models in a landscape of shrinking windows and increasingly elusive audiences to get their work seen by global audiences?

Eugene is pulling double-duty today. After the panel, he'll be heading over to the Apple Store in Soho to have a conversation with filmmaking partners Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente at 7:30. Also tonight, Rooftop Films, in conjunction with IFP, will be hosting a free screening of "Sneak Previews from the IFP Narrative Rough Cut Lab." Live music and never-before-seen films under a clear autumn sky--sounds good to me. Come out and join the festivities.

# posted by Pamela Cohn @ 9/19/2007 12:56:00 PM

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One of the thangs to do here at this IFP biZ is to take meetings. After some hyper professional meet and greets this morning with development exec types I decided skip out on my final business meeting of the day and instead meet with NY based filmmaker Janice Ahn.

I saw her excellent short film "Stutter" at the Cinequest film festival in San Jose, Ca earlier this year and wanted to meet her. Its great to be able to meet so many other filmmakers here at IFP... there are a ton of really interesting films in development here. The coolest one I've heard about so far is a doc about an MC who was challenged to make an entire album in a day. He stepped up to the challenge and apparently its like...ILL. I'll try to chase down the Chicago based filmmaker who made it and post his info here.

# posted by M dot Strange @ 9/18/2007 06:40:00 PM

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Having listened to several panels yesterday, I decided to start my day viewing some WIP (works-in-progress) documentaries in the viewing library and am hoping to catch some more screenings at the Angelika, as well. Today's focus at the market is international in scope with the thought that forming co-productions to finance, produce and distribute your film might benefit you greatly in all kinds of ways.

There are a lot of great companies from all over the world here at the market participating in the No Borders strand. Tomorrow morning, the UK Film Council's New Cinema Fund is hosting a special showcase of their upcoming projects, followed by a brunch. Lenny Crooks, the new head of the Fund will host, along with its senior executive, Himesh Kar.

(In fact, behind me right now, M Dot Strange is dazzling a small audience of Asian and European producers with his material (shown off his laptop, natch) and holding forth in his energetic, articulate manner about all things DIY--a great ambassador for independent filmmaking, if ever there was one.)

This morning I viewed samples of the following projects in the Spotlight on Documentaries--Works-in-Progress: Matthew Kohn's short Site Specific: The Legacy of Regional Modernism; Matthew Wallin's I Die Daily: The Making of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle (it took Barney nine years to create his full cycle and took Wallin ten to do this doc--I'll have an in-depth interview with him on my own blog soon); Brittany Huckabee's The Mosque in Morgantown; Jennifer M. Taylor's New Muslim Cool; Troy Word's The Presence of Joseph Chaikin; Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton's The Road to Nasiriyah; Marcia Jamel and Ken Schneider's Speaking in Tongues; and Peggy Stern's Upside Down and Backwards. All these projects look amazing--I'm looking forward to seeing the finished films and speaking more to these filmmakers.

After lunch, I sat in on the "Navigating Foreign Film Festivals" panel with representatives from Rotterdam, Berlin, the UK Film Council and IFC. Lenny Crooks of UK Film Council said that a "good, creative producer should pursue these partnerships." He's looking for the emerging first time filmmaker making his/her signature film and is interested in sustaining long-term relationships. "The passion of the filmmaker is the most important thing; that's where it starts with me and that's a privilege a lot of funding entities don't have." He also believes that festivals are the best way to find an international audience.

Marit Van Den Elshout of Rotterdam feels that it's not necessarily the best strategy to hit the big festivals if you have a little film. She stresses that it's important to do your research and learn about the different "signatures" or brands all these festivals have. For instance, Rotterdam gives a lot of attention to experimental work. These days, presenting your project as "an American independent" is rather meaningless, really. Festivals stand for something quite specific and are an alternative to mainstream programming. Good festival programmers task themselves with adjusting the balance of what gets programmed in more traditional outlets and this means that things get more competitive for an American filmmaker, not less. Your work is being gauged against the best of whatever is coming out of Asia, Europe, the Middle East or South America. And every festival programmer, of course, wants to find a project to champion and nurture its development--it's a point of pride for them to make those magical discoveries and showcase them at their festivals.

This afternoon, a really cool program took place in the Puck Building lobby called "Raw Word," sponsored by Brooklyn-based Raw Word and Kodak. Sidetrack Films' Jared Moshe was responsible, in part, for this new program by bringing in the Raw Word-ers, a Brooklyn-based arts group. There was a presentation of 5 - 10 minute excerpts from the scripts of the six Emerging Narrative Screenwriter Award finalists read by professional actors, cast specifically for this reading by Laura Verbeke (Flight of the Conchords). This is all new material that the writers got to test in front of a live audience filled with film executives and fellow writers. The winner will receive a $5,000 grant. The projects are: Ryan Lakenan's Get A Life Desmond Jones, Don Handfield's Jason Scott, Nir Paniry's Kamikaze Dolls, Christina Beck's Perfection, Kathy Christopherson's The Wind Effect and Avi Weider's Zeroes and Ones.

# posted by Pamela Cohn @ 9/18/2007 11:14:00 AM

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At a pair of panels on the state of U.S. film festivals and the strategies filmmakers should bring to their film's festival life, Gabe Wardell of the Atlanta Film Festival and SXSW's Matt Dentler made the analogy alluded to in the title of this post, making light of the fierce competition that exists among the major winter and spring festivals to be the first place to shed light on bold new American independent feature films.

Representatives of each were there at the second panel, including programmers from Sundance (David Courier), Slamdance (Sarah Diamond) and Tribeca (David Kwok). Each stressed the unique strengths and programming concerns of their festival while seeming very much at peace with the currently jam packed festival scene, where any spring weekend two or three major regional film festivals may be showing the same films that these festivals have recently premiered. While everyone was quite cordial, Diamond couldn't help but mention the antipathy that has largely characterized the relationship between the Park City festivals. "It's nice that we get to sit next to each other on a panel and open the dialogue a bit." said the programming director of the insurgent festival Robert Redford once referred to as "parasitic". A few pointers from the programmers on submitting films to their festivals:

- The essentials: Make sure your disc works. Fill out the submission form completely. Get your film in as early as possible. Don't send multiple cuts; send in the film when it is complete. Don't send extraneous materials the programmers have not asked for. Don't hassle them with excessive phone calls or emails ("If premiere is like losing your virginity, submitting is like courtship." reiterated Dentler.)

- "Align yourself with people who have your best interest at heart." Dentler said, referring to the situation many films completed after the Sundance deadline face, when trying to choose between Tribeca and SXSW, but also alluding to the fact that filmmakers should try to play festivals in which the programmers are clearly passionate about their films, so as not to get lost in the shuffle of a large festival.

- For shorts: Premiere status is largely unimportant, but the shorter the better. "Its easier to program a 12 minute short than a 20 minute short." said Diamond.

At the sunday afternoon panel, sales reps Jeremy Walker and Ronna Wallace joined Wardell, ThinkFilm acquisitions exec Ben Stambler and "In Search of a Midnight Kiss" director Alex Holdridge in a discussion of what steps filmmakers should take to bring industry awareness to their projects. Most stressed the need to "build a narrative" for your film, be it by taking iconic stills that capture the essence of the film, making clips for TV and online media that are durable enough to work outside the context of the film and knowing the film well enough to discern weather it will play better in front of a big crowd, or on a distribution exec's DVD player at the Racquet Club.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 9/17/2007 06:23:00 PM

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This morning at 10am I was on a panel called "Turning your viewers on" Luckily I was able to keep my pants on unlike a panel I was on at a questionable function I attended to generate funds for my next film at an event earlier this year. After the panel a woman came up to me and congratulated me on being a satanist even though I don't remember pledging my soul to our all mighty overlord of darkness during the panel. I've taken up temporary residence on the couch outside the entryway to the panels so if you want to chat with a professional weirdo please stop by. The couch is now the official IFP DIY filmmaking couch. Here are some of todays guests on the M dot Strange IFP DIY couch show.... Brian Chirls of team Four Eyed Monsters stopped by and we talked about alternative theatrical distribution strategies...

Then Lance Weiler(The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma) stopped by and proceeded to explode Filmmaker Mag's Jason Guerrasio and my own head with his hyper ultimate interactive narrative ideas... Lance is a real innovator... check out his WorkbookProject for mad info....ahem...WESTSIDE!

# posted by M dot Strange @ 9/17/2007 03:24:00 PM

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With six panels and a full day of screenings at the Angelika starting today, the second day of the market heated up with many people buzzing around, checking in, having a bit of breakfast and setting meeting schedules for the day in the lounge.

I attended the 11:30 keynote of the day, a conversation with Tony Liano of Crackle. Interviewed by our own blond Scott Macaulay, Liano held forth on all things content and distribution on the web. Liano is the head programmer at this Sony Pictures Entertainment Company-owned, San Francisco-based online entertainment network and distribution pathway company.

Liano, who started in advertising, followed that by a stint at Microsoft as both a creative and a techie. When the Canon XL1 came on the market, he and his producer brother looked at it and thought, “No excuses—time to create.” And so he directed a documentary and became a filmmaker for the first time. He also has an MBA and started to explore distribution scenarios for content that had nowhere else to go.

He says that Crackle (the revamped, re-launched Grouper) wanted to marry the bottom-up approach (where there's no real context for anything and few rules as to how the site is structured or what kind of content they showcase, a la YouTube) to a top-down approach (where content has a branded destination and clear distribution pathways with specific audiences in mind). Crackle consists of several designated channels with their own branding, look and content strand.

Clips from the popular Mr. Diety were shown. The company discovered the director online, acquired 10 episodes and are producing another 10. Liano says, “Traditional content development is dying a slow death in the industry.”

When asked why more independent filmmakers aren't using services like Crackle, Liano admitted that there might be a downside, but probably a small one, and that due more to less-than-intelligent strategies on the part of the filmmaker than the pitfalls of uploading your content on the site. Short, specific content can have a lot of impact and the branding of your film can start in earnest by using this strategy. Because the service is not really fit for finished feature-length films, chances are the content you put up on the site would just be a "teaser" anyway. And as Liano says, "We all have 10 bad movies in us; get them out on the web! We [Crackle] are acting as a sort of Farm League for Sony—we’re constantly looking for up-and-coming talent. Sony’s watching Crackle and they’re noticing what’s good and who’s getting attention." Sony development deals can be the prize or FAME award for top content on each channel.

So, there is great potential for audience building. Positive revenue streams and other financial “success” for the filmmaker, as with most companies like this, remains to be seen. No one’s making a lot of money yet.

And if you do have a finished film, you're probably thinking more along the lines of film festival strategy and luckily enough (ah, those wily conference programmers), there was a panel that followed this conversation with some of the top festival programmers in the country right now. I popped in after securing an interview with Doc Spotlight head, Milton Talbott. I'll be talking to him more on Wednesday.

Moderated by Sharon Swart of Variety, panelists included the ubiquitous Matt Dentler of SXSW, David Kwok of Tribeca, Sarah Diamond of Slamdance, David Wilson of True/False (an increasing fave among filmmakers) and David Courier of the Sundance Institute. I also spied Tom Hall and Holly Herrick of Sarasota and Mark Rabinowitz in the audience. Now that Toronto has wrapped up, many film journalists are making their way back to New York for the market, the New York Film Festival and several other functions and premieres happening this time of year. In the spirit of helping the first-time filmmaker, advice was very straightforward and practical, since navigating festival submissions is one of the first steps you take once your film is nearing completion--time to get it out into the world and, like everything else associated with being an independent, learn the ropes as you go.

Next up was the Creating Content for New Platforms panel moderated by Shooting People's Ingrid Kopp, another programmer extraordinaire. Her words of wisdom, right off the bat: marketing and distribution strategies, which these new technologies and platforms can provide, should be part of the creative process of making your film. Again, a lot of wild west, huge potential, we're all still figuring it out kind of talk from heads of companies that are taking advantage of a huge technological push in how original content is produced and marketed. You can check out iThentic, Without a Box, Panasonic's new film initiatives, and MTV New Media (really not in existence yet). It behooves filmmakers to try and keep tabs of who's cropping up where, and which company is morphing which way to keep up with it all. Go on these sites or contact a representative of the company to see whether it's a place that makes sense for you and the kind of content you produce. These companies are searching for good content, so help them find you.

Next up, a subject near and dear to our little blogger hearts: 21st Century Film Journalism moderated by Jason Guerrasio with Dennis Lim (Cinema Scope), James Israel (indieWIRE), Jonathan Marlow (Cabinetic) and Jody Arlington, whose PR agency works with major festivals like AFI/Discovery's Silverdocs in Maryland. The discussion centered on what best strategies filmmakers can use these days to reach out to the film press. Media is relationship-based, just like all things in this business. Be specific about who your contacting and why, and make sure they know they've been hand-picked by you because you know that they are the type of people who write about your kind of film. Sounds very elementary, but a lot of people get to the festivals and that's where the work ends for them. What these folks are saying is that that's just the beginning and should be used as a good launching pad to promote your film in all the right places. Arlington recommends getting a press agent or publicist when your film does go to a major festival to help navigate the terrain, and, of course, to work with the festival press office. Pay attention to what they need from you and get it to them on time and in the manner they're requesting. With a little diligence on your part, you can help a good PR department or liaison help you get notice for your film even beyond the festival's run.

Okay, panel-ed out.

Uptown we go for a screening of John Sayles' Honeydripper near Lincoln Center, followed by a party hosted by Filmmaker at Providence, formerly Le Bar Bat--tres glam. The bottom line is that John Sayles and his producer/partner, Maggie Renzi, are still doing things their way, just like they've always done, from casting their films with some of the finest actors of our day, to telling Sayles' stories exactly in the way he wants to tell them, critics and everyone else that think their opinion matters, be damned. So that's very admirable, indeed. Dubbed "The King and the Queen of Independent Film" by Michelle Byrd, Renzi and Sayles were just thrilled to have a lot of family and friends in the theater supporting their latest endeavor and getting to show their work in front of an appreciative audience.

Post-screening, walked the few blocks downtown to the party in the company of Scott Macaulay and S.T. VanAirsdale, two charming gents, who escorted me to the afterparty for the film and a celebration of the 15th anniversary of Filmmaker Magazine. Scott said, "Ah, the 15th is easy; it's the 2nd and 3rd ones that should be celebrated the most!"

AJ Schnack bought me a glass of Cab at the bar (he's in town doing some press junket stuff for the theatrical release of his beautiful film Kurt Cobain About a Son), and I finally met Mr. Jared Moshe, in person (someone I've only emailed and spoken with on the phone). I also met in person, for the first time, filmmaker Jesse Epstein months after I posted an interview with her on my blog (which was brand new at the time), and talked to some filmmakers with projects in the market. Just your typical crowded, noisy New York party--fun.

Happy birthday, Filmmaker.

# posted by Pamela Cohn @ 9/17/2007 01:58:00 PM

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The IFP Filmmaker's Conference is this week at the Puck Building (I'm moderating a talk with Crackel's Tony Lisano in about an hour) and you'll see some new and other familiar faces on the blog this week. Several filmmakers and journalists will be reporting in everthing from the various panels and events to their own experience navigating the Conference with their projects. So, check back often this week...

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/17/2007 10:02:00 AM

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John Sayles and his producer (and wife, and actress) Maggie Renzie decided that the Conversation With them at the IFP Conference would be called "So, You've Got Four Weeks." They got a whole five weeks to shoot their new film Honeydripper (clips of which have been appearing on this blog for months). Starting with a lesson on scheduling, the pair laid out how they've been able to keep going for almost thirty years making movies on the cheap; "carving sculptures out of gravel," as Renzie put it. They remember showing up at the IFP Market twenty-seven years ago with The Return of the Secaucus 7 and hoping someone would tell them what to do next.

Some hard-earned pearls of wisdom:

- Don't derail the whole day's work for the sake of one sexy spontaneous idea.
- Maintain endless, excessive, outrageous amounts of communication with your creative team, so they know everything you know. Sayles distributes extensive bios of every single character .
- Don't waste time on master shots.
- Know when it's good enough and move on.
- Know when it's not good enough; don't keep shooting if a scene isn't working. Come back another day, even at the cost of a lesser scene.
- Never let an actor know you're frustrated. Take the pressure off by having the DP pretend to change a lens or something, so they don't think everyone's waiting on them.
- Add an interruption in a long static scene to change everyone's eyeline.
- Watch good movies with the sound off to see how they were put together.

Hearing Sayles and Renzie tell their production stories was like watching someone solve very complicated math problems without a calculator.

You can watch video lessons from Sayles by clicking "Interviews" here at johnsaylesretro.com.

# posted by Alicia Van Couvering @ 9/16/2007 10:04:00 PM

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Hallo I'm professional weirdo M dot Strange... the animated feature film "We are the Strange" that I made in my bedroom made its world premiere at Sundance 07. It just won the Golden Prize for "Most Groundbreaking Film" at the Fantasia Film Festival 07 and like Filmmaker Magazine chose me as one of they're hella ultimate 25 new face thangs this year even though I was the only d00d hiding his face.

Ok mega intro aside... I'm sitting in the IFP lounge here consuming beverages in green bottles and talking to my fellow filmmaker Aaron Umetani. Since I made my name through massive youtubeAGE I might as well embed a city reppin video cause thats how us fools from the yay area do thangs WHUT!!


So this week I'm a be bloggin bout the panel I'm on...meetings I'm taking and just general nonsense because thats what professional weirdo's do. I'll give you a first hand look into the life of a filmmaker who producer's treat like some hot chick they're trying to sleep with DAMN Cause the proof is in the pudding and my pudding is like OVER 9000!!!

# posted by M dot Strange @ 9/16/2007 08:51:00 PM

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Over at his Variety blog, "The Circuit," Mike Jones writes in his Toronto wrap-up about an encounter with one of the Canada/U.S. border crossing officials:

The border agent at the Toronto airport held me at the desk, studying my business card. He was trying to think up the title of a film he'd seen long ago. He'd scoured the internet for it and come up empty. As the line grew behind me, he described it as a story of a man abused by his wife. It involved drinking, a child, poverty, and more drinking. He leaned forward, pointing his pen, saying - "Abuse happens to men, too, you know."

I sensed some experience there and quickly agreed, pushed back the business card, and told him to email me his research and I'd see what I could do. He waved me through, saying, "I know it played at the festival one year. It must have, you know?"

I wonder if he was the same agent I had. Upon returning from the festival, I was asked, customarily, what I did. "I'm a journalist and a producer," I replied. He paged through my passport, typed a few keystrokes into his computer and stared at the screen. "I see you've produced a bunch of movies," he said. Yes, I replied, before saying that I was surprised that whatever new Homeland Security border-crossing measures have been ennacted go so far as to link movie titles to passport numbers. "No," he laughed, "I'm looking at IMDb! Have a good trip."

Just another Toronto film fan.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/16/2007 06:16:00 PM

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Checked in and registered this a.m. at the Puck Building where the 29th IFP Market and Conference takes place. It's not too late to come out and see screenings at The Angelika Film Center on West Houston, or attend one of the many panels happening all week with the coolest cats in indie filmmaking right now, from all disciplines--I think the panels will be a big draw for most. The theme for the day was "Making Your First Feature," which is friendly and welcoming, as it should be.

I also checked in with the No Borders strand and attended the introductory panel with 11 of the participating partners, introduced by Michelle Byrd. There are 37 projects participating this year, both US and international productions in various phases of completion, all looking for co-financing deals. It's the only international component of the market and almost 900 meetings were already set by opening day for these projects; there are going to be some very busy people this week. Several of these companies have projects in the market that they are supporting, as well.

I spoke briefly with No Borders curator, Susan Boehm about this year's projects, and I will be speaking with both partners and filmmakers about their experience here over the next few days. There's an impressive lineup of projects from both established filmmakers and first-timers. For a very comprehensive glance of who's here this year, you can go to the IFP web site and click here. Most of the panelists were jet-lagged, but obviously excited to be here and all will be staying the entire week, which is a good sign that this is an important market, small though it may be.

I went to the "Music Makes the Movie" panel which was very well-attended. It was a stellar panel made up of Doreen Ringer Ross of BMI, director Tom DiCillo, Tracy McKnight of Commotion Records, composer Anton Sanko and musician Moby. None of these folks was a shrinking violet when it came down to expressing how each of them believes that your music makes your movie, more times than not, and to really consider strategies as to how you can use that music in your film all the way through production. In other words, if you can avoid using temp music before officially scoring your film, do. Moby also said, "Be adventurous, not lazy. Use unconventional music. It'll be a better cost and will make a better film. Be innovative. Don't pander to the marketplace."

After that, zipped back up to the 7th floor to talk to more filmmakers participating in the No Borders strand. Meetings were quietly, but intensely, taking place behind me in a walled-off section where people could have a bit of privacy, but still take in the excitement of negotiating as your peers look on, and carve out some mutually-agreeable international partnerships to make the movies we all want to see. They just need some moola and good guidance to get there, and that's the hope that most bring to the market. I'll try to grab some quick downloads from folks as I see them wobble in a daze to Subway to get a sandwich before they take more meetings.

The event, as far as I've been able to tell, is organized beautifully, with quietly efficient minions running around making sure everyone's happy. We'll see how the staff maintains its composure as the market goes on, but one gets the feeling that this is it--they, too, are excited by all the amazing projects there and have great cheerleading chops for filmmakers.

Caught the 4:00 p.m panel "Finding Your Audience." The panelists are part of a group of real pioneers of online-based, fan-based DVD services, blogs, communities, etc. Will Battersby and Tory Tunnell of Safehouse Pictures moderated panelists Brent Hoff of Wolphin, director Todd Rohal, Karina Longworth (who looked like a superstar girl reporter), Mark Rosenberg of Rooftop Films, and John Vanco of IFC Center. The proposition put forth was: "With box office numbers down, increased competition for audiences and a myriad of media platforms vying for viewer attention, what distribution models help independent filmmakers get the most out of their projects both creatively and financially?" An issue, by the way, that I'm exploring with increasing frequency--coincidence? Don't think so.

John Vanco says that, "Our competition is the couch," when he speaks of the indie movie house he runs and talks about not being able to emphasize enough that grassroots marketing, in any way you can, is what's going to make or break your distribution and exhibition deals. So here's some effective grassroots marketing from Guatemalan Handshake director, Todd Rohal: this first-time feature director, created a fictional character named, Tony Clifton. Clifton is Rohal's "booking agent." Different email address and everything. And the ultimate defining factor? "He uses emoticons; I never would." But he said it was effective in having to be both creative- vision-man and dollars-and-cents-man. Difficult in the best of circumstances, indeed when you don't have a track record to speak of and no money of your own. Even Todd's hometown movie theater in Ohio turned him down. That's harsh.

At the end of the panel, the panelists got to plug themselves a bit, which I think is always nice--after all, they're donating their time. To find out more about their companies, you can click on the names above and learn more.

Short day, but long week ahead. More tomorrow.

# posted by Pamela Cohn @ 9/16/2007 03:56:00 PM

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I left Toronto Thursday for a gig in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, I planned that last day around a mid-day screening of Claude Chabrol's uber-bourgeois A Girl Cut in Two. In this geriatric male fantasy, young ,weak-willed weathergirl Ludivine Sagnier services both her lovers: a much older celebrity novelist and a handsome sociopathic heir cum mama's boy. For the former, she also dons submissive fantasy outfits. Benoit Magimel as the junior dandy borrows way too freely from Robert Walker's murder swapper in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, then shamelessly chews the scenery. The portrayal is as overdone as the film itself, and Chabrol is responsible.

Today, the festival, more or less noncompetitive, announced the ancillary awards that are doled out. All, it turns out, went to movies from either Canada or Latin America.

I was shocked to learn that Rodrigo Pla's Mexican film La Zona garnered the FIPRESCI (international critics) prize. (They selected from the Discovery section.) After a fabulous opening shot in which a crane carries the camera from a trashy trailer in poor man's land over a security wall into a wealthy, restricted residential community, the film rings false (and rather commercial for a critics prize).

During a power outage three youths from the wrong side scale the electrified barrier, enter a house, and kill an elderly woman in the course of a robbery. Some self-anointed neighborhood vigilantes shoot two of the culprits but a third escapes and is nowhere to be found. The vigilante movement escalates; the majority stifles those who speak out. The angelic teen son of one of the mob leaders hides the much-sought-after boy and is appalled when the worked-up residents attack him mercilessly. A lone cop challenges such frontier-like justice, but the wealthy have his boss in their pockets. A Mexican colleague confirmed the ludicrousness of the situation--plus the film lacks depth.

Guy Maddin's exceptional My Winnipeg [pictured above] deservedly took the Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film and its $30,000 booty. A surreal essay on the director's hometown, the film links bizarre "historical" anecdotes (frozen horse heads poking out of the snow, a stacked Golden Boy contest) with Maddin's psychic baggage, including a domineering mother whose face is blown up as large as the breast in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex. Maddin has deep affection for Winnipeg, even if he claims that "demolition is one of the city's growth industries."

I did not see the other winners. After all, there are 350 films. Here goes:

Best Canadian Short Film: POOL, Chris Chong Chan Fui, Canada/Malaysia ($10,000)

Citytv Award for Best Canadian Feature Film: Continental, un film sans fusil, Stephane Lafleur ($15,000)

Diesel Discovery Award: Cochochi, Israel Cardenas, Laura Amelia Guzman, Mexico/United Kingdom/Canada ($10,000)

Artistic Innovation Award (chosen from Visions strand): Encarnacion, Anahi Berneri, Argentina ($10,000)

Cadillac People's Choice Award: Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg, Canada/United Kingdom ($15,000)
First runner-up: Juno, Jason Reitman, USA
Second runner-up: Body of War, Ellen Spiro, Phil Donahue, USA

# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/15/2007 07:31:00 PM

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Here's a link where you can either download or stream Francis Ford Coppola's first film in over a decade. I must admit, I can't wait to see it. The High-Def looks amazing and what I can tell from the trailer, the film appears haunting and captivating. Already prepping another project in Argentina, this could mark a comeback for Coppola that would act as a bright twilight to an amazing cinematic career.

# posted by Benjamin Crossley-Marra @ 9/13/2007 04:04:00 PM

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Two films concerning the life of Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali were announced as going into production today. Not to worry, neither film will attempt to cover the the artist's entire life, Little Ashes pertains to the relationship between Dali, Lorca and Bunuel when they were young students in Spain and is to be directed by Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor).

From the Hollywood angle, Cillian Murphy has just signed on to star opposite Al Pacino in Andrew Niccol's Dali & I: The Surreal Story. This film will focus on Dali between the years 1960-1980 when he quit being prolific and started becoming flamboyant. Murphy will play the famous art-dealer Stan Lauryssens against Pacino's Dali.

# posted by Benjamin Crossley-Marra @ 9/13/2007 03:06:00 PM

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Over in the Director Interviews section of the site is a conversation I had last week with Craig Zobel, one of our current batch of 25 New Faces, about his fine debut as writer-director, Great World of Sound. The film is released this Friday, and one of its most memorable moments features The New National Anthem, a song written by one of the film's characters, Kyndra Kent. The fantastic lyrics were written by Zobel's co-writer, George Smith, and you can listen to an mp3 of the song here, as performed by David Wingo, who wrote the melody.

At the same time, you should definitely check out an excellent video for the song Photo Booth by Wingo's band, Ola Podrida. It was directed by Michael Tully and stars another director, Todd Rohal. Both Tully and Rohal were in our 25 New Faces last year, and are also both buddies with Zobel's best friend, David Gordon Green.

Fans of Green's work will know that Wingo first came to prominence with his gorgeous score for George Washington and has since written music for all of Green's subsequent films. With the recent success of Ola Podrida, who released their debut self-titled album last spring, Wingo has been able to start commissioning promo videos for songs from his album, like Tully's for Photo Booth. Next up will be Joe Swanberg's take on the song Run Off the Road, which stars Kentucker Audley (another of this year's 25 New Faces). The video was shot while both Swanberg and Audley were in New York for the IFC Center's recent The New Talkies: Generation DIY season, and the fruits of their labors should be up at the Plug Research site by the end of this week. Swanberg wrote me that he is "really proud of it," and I personally can't wait.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/12/2007 08:38:00 PM

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Here are two outstanding films that deal in very different ways with zones of armed conflict. The first, French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder's Terror's Advocate [pictured above], is a documentary; the other, New York-based Lee Isaac Chung's Munyurangabo, is a fiction based on the genocide of 1994 that took place in Rwanda, where he shot it.

Pal of Pol Pot, courthouse defender of Klaus Barbie, freelance terrorist Carlos the Jackal, many of the worst African dictators, and even Milosevic, Jacques Verges, the subject of Terror's Advocate, is one of the world’s most enigmatic figures. Born to a Vietnamese mother and a father from Reunion Island, a French possession off the coast of Africa, Verges has a completely gallic persona, but one laced with extreme confidence and pretense. He is a compelling, if intellectually repugnant, figure, not unlike Uganda's Idi Amin Dada, whom he filmed a couple of decades earlier.

Schroeder peppers the film with a symphonic score. It’s structured in high-energy fashion around interviews with ex-terrorists, witnesses, and experts, as well as clips from Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. For Algeria’s war of independence was the starting point of Verges’s bizarre legal career. At the time he was a Communist and anti-colonialist, to the left politically. He even married Algeria’s La Pasionaria, Djamila Bouhired, whom he saved in court from the death penalty. Then he disappeared for eight years in the 1970s, possibly as a Chinese agent in Cambodia, but no one knows. A Maoist sympathizer, he reinvented himself as counsel to terrorists (Magdalena Kopp, for example) and the most powerful despots one could imagine. He even worked for the East German Stasi. Even so, he is well-regarded for his legal skills.

Chung’s astonishing debut feature is about reconciliation more than a decade after the Rwandan genocide took 800,000 lives. He shot Munyurangabo for $40,000 in 11 days with all parts played by non-professional locals, whom he wisely allowed to improvise. Unlike Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April, Munyurangabo plays out the horrendous conflict (Hutus massacred Tutsis and moderate Hutus) on an intimate scale, without the foreign stars the other films found de rigeuer.

Two teen boys, a Hutu and a Tutsi who have been living together and earning little in the market in Kigali, venture to a village where the Tutsi plans to kill the Hutu man who had murdered his father in 1994. On the way through the verdant countryside, they stop at the Hutu boy’s family farm, where an older generation’s attitudes cause the two friends to recognize their ethnic difference for the first time. Chung frames his characters with doorways, windows, and slits without it seeming forced. Ultimately the Tutsi boy renounces revenge.

# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/12/2007 08:02:00 PM

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What was reassuring at Monday night’s Fortissimo Films party and Tuesday night’s Rotterdam reception was the presence of movie directors from nations of relatively small population or stunted economic development who are not even blips on the radar of the U.S. publicity divisions and agencies that steamroll through the Toronto festival. I had lively conversations with filmmakers from countries such as the Philippines and Australia. The access to most American and other First World directors is mediated by the marketeers. Everyone loses. Anyone for symbiotic nurture?

My interview with Todd Haynes this afternoon, set up as it was by the p.r. people at the Weinstein Company, was, however, totally satisfying (and will be in print later). The Portland-based director has always been a lovely, smart, and cheerful guy, someone I’ve known since the early ‘80s. I had just come out of a packed press/industry screening of I’m Not There [pictured above], his new Bob Dylan collage that had shared the Special Jury Prize in Venice. (Rant: A lot of industry, or “product,” people work their Blackberrys, lights aglow, during the projections. Is this a way for reviewers, or any cinephile, to see films? Separate screenings, please. Press and industry appear to have different priorities.)

As a rule, I do not set up interviews until after I have seen a film—it’s a disservice to the filmmaker and to me—but with Haynes, I felt it worth the gamble. And it was. I’m Not There is brilliant, a visual and aural feast that is so complex in structure that it boggles the mind that he or anyone else could stitch it together. He interweaves six actors portraying various personas of the mutable singer and cultural icon in a nonlinear fashion, integrating as well the music of Dylan and a few others. And he places it all in the very real context of the American socio-political situation in the ‘60s and ‘70s, using both archival and recreated footage. The personal and the political are not separate.

The six actors, including a black youth and a woman, are vehicles in an approach that deploys artifice to attempt some understanding about the enigmatic singer. (There are, of course, sequences that are more “realistic.”) Images are magnified on walls, text suddenly flashes on the screen, circus and other performers appear out of nowhere. Sure, Haynes was enamored of artifice in Superstar, Poison, Velvet Goldmine, and Far From Heaven, but he amplifies the strategy here. Todd Solondz’s Palindromes was unsuccessful in its use of multiple actors for a single character, but Haynes’s gamble pays off. He also includes some fabulous fantasy sequences. This is Far From Naturalism.

Variety stupidly deemed it something only for Dylan fans. So much for the trades.

The other great film here that eschews realism is Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. Produced by Canada’s Documentary Channel, it is outrageous, illogical, hilarious, and imaginative, in short, Maddin in top form. Though it purports to be a doc about his home town, the film is really an exercise in fantasy stream-of-consciousness. Winnipeg becomes a hotbed of myth and scandal rooted in the past, not to mention the setting for Maddin’s own primal dilemmas. While his surrogate character is making a movie, trying “to film my way out of Winnipeg,” we get scenes of his overbearing mother and his siblings that are never far from his take on the city itself. Here the personal and the historical are inextricably linked.

Haynes and Maddin understand that the fake can be truer than verite. Brian de Palma does not. In the superslick Redacted, he creates a faux-documentary about the U.S. military in Iraq, zeroing in on the notorious rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and some of her relatives in Samarra by some horny, vindictive soldiers. I do not doubt the director’s sincerity, but none of the footage comes close in impact to the multiple fine real docs shot by brave docmakers with strong conviction in actual battle zones. De Palma’s actors—at checkpoints, in barracks, overdo it: This feels like a bad middle-school audio-visual film about venereal disease or the value of homework. What really pisses me off is the depiction of the two main transgressors as semi-insane oddballs. The only honest depiction in the film is the sequence of actual war photos that serves as a coda.

Redacted shared the Venice prize with I’m Not There. So much for the validity of juries.

# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/12/2007 09:54:00 AM

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Not counting the masterpieces in Toronto that premiered in Cannes—Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra, Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, and Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park—two of the best films are very different studies in naturalism that are, coincidentally, both directed by actors: The Visitor [pictured above], by New York-based thesp Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent); and Jar City, from Icelander Baltasar Kormakur (The Sea, 101 Reykjavik), who no longer performs. McCarthy subtly captures New York City with nearly 100% actual locations, the exteriors as well as the interiors, whereas Kormakur heightens his South Icelandic setting with exaggerated landscapes that scream “pathetic fallacy.”

In The Visitor--over which international sales agents and domestic distributors are going nuts in Toronto--an understated Richard Jenkins plays Walter, a lost and lonely Connecticut widower who stumbles upon a couple, illegal aliens, staying in his Manhattan pied-a-terre. They are an extroverted young Syrian man who plays the djembe, something like bongos, in occasional gigs and his guarded Senegalese girlfriend, a street vendor of jewelry. The repressed Walter gradually opens up, learns the djembe, and helps his new friends, especially when the man ends up at a federal detention center and his mother (the great Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass) arrives at the apartment.

With a seamless and unobtrusive style that underlines dramatic high points merely with a change in camera set-up or a cut at an unexpected moment, McCarthy wraps important social issues in an engaging and moving character-driven narrative. The film is a multiculti isomorph of A Star Is Born: As the couple’s opportunities in the States diminish—the man is faced with deportation--Walter, under the spell of the gifted Syrian, opens up as a human being. Their misfortune begets his epiphany, though not in a negative way. The presence of the mother finishes Walter’s transformation: He allows his heart to be touched.

McCarthy says they made the film in 28 days for less than $5 million. His exteriors matched the interiors, something unusual in filming today. “You create a consistency,” he maintains, “while the budget determines the aesthetic.” Rather than point to a bogeyman in the unjust immigration process, he reveals a faceless bureaucracy that begs analysis. “Many of these centers are privatized, and they hire people from the surrounding depressed communities to do the work,” he explains. Shared music becomes the vehicle for cultural exchange and understanding, and McCarthy brilliantly formalizes the process through montage and mise-en-scene. Learning the djembe is a way for Walter “to be present in his life.” The Visitor is at once heartbreaking and hopeful—not an easy balancing act.

Jar City is a thriller focusing on genetic propensities in Iceland, an island of 300,000 that has a limited gene pool. A private company is creating a database of questionable ethical merit of Icelanders both living and deceased in an attempt to track inherited diseases. A worker at the firm loses his four-year-old daughter to a neurological illness that has been passed down—but how? Simultaneously, we see a ne’er-do-well man who has been bludgeoned to death. How are these two events connected? Time becomes compressed: The fact that the murdered man had infiltrated the family’s genetic structure two generations back precipitated the passing of the illness through the family line. Cemeteries and a department called Jar City, in which fetuses and dead children occupy formaldehyde-filled glass bottles, contribute to a somber tone, aided by the funereal chants of a police choir and other mournful music. A driven detective tries to solve the case, which develops in a Hitchcockian manner, never devoid of humor. All the while, Kormakur foregrounds the neglected south side of Iceland, a region of simple, quirky farmers. He uses long lenses to bring majestic mountains to the fore and focuses on the lava, rather than the stereotypical glaciers one sees in most films from the country. He says he has been influenced by the Icelandic painter Kjarval, who painted such natural items as moss and lava. “I’m not keen on waterfalls,” he says drily.

Kormakur wants to give visibility to the South. “I wanted to focus on the people in the tiny villages,” and he does so with affection. The detective orders a sheep’s head-to-go at a drive-in and we watch him eat it, eye first, at home. He orders the exhumation of the body of the bereft father’s young sister, who had died at the same age as his daughter 30 years before, in order to prove a connection with the murdered man. “He knows in his heart he is doing wrong, crossing the line to disturb the dead,” says Kormakur. “He is digging into God’s ways.”

Both Kormakur and the detective are ambivalent about the computerization of each of our genetic characteristics. “It’s disgusting that we can discover our grandmothers’ secrets,” says Kormakur. “On the other hand, these companies are doing good things in terms of tracing diseases.”

IFC First Take picked up Jar City during Toronto. Kormakur, who won the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary in July, tells me that Americans have expressed interest in remake rights and in him as a director. “They want me to do horror!” he says with a mix of surprise and disgust. “But in my film the crimes are motivated! I’m lucky I produce my own films. Most foreigners go to the U.S., make some crap, and go back home.” For now, he is happy on his farm in Northern Iceland.

# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/11/2007 12:46:00 AM

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Over at his blog, Anthony Kaufman posts a letter from Ted Hope saluting Mike Ryan, who was named one of Variety's 10 Producers to Watch.

He begins:

Despite -- or maybe because of -- working in the film business, it is rare that I encounter the individual that is clearly driven by passion for film, knowledgable on a wide range of subjects, has a cultivated and constantly evolving aesthetic, and lives and breathes in accordance with principals and politics that they have fully thought out and committed to; to me all those things should be up on the PGA website as requirements for producers (but they are not), but they are all aspects of Mike Ryan.

Nice to see Ryan, whose recent film is Liberty Kid, get some well deserved recognition.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/10/2007 08:44:00 PM

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The 64th Venice Film Festival can be proud of this year's film selections, but watching the award ceremony from the press room is indicative. The prizes provoked anger, embarrassment, and everything in between. Ang Lee took home his second Gold Lion in three years for Lust, Caution [pictured above], and was roundly booed, as was Brad Pitt, named Best Actor for The Assassination of Jesse James. Last year it was difficult to accept Ben Affleck and Best Actor appearing in the same sentence, and the jury's preference for Brad Pitt's somnolent, ponderous faux-heroic performance over some truly remarkable actors provoked the same sensation. Brian De Palma, whom many believed should have taken home Best Picture for Redacted, favored by the press, had to make do with Best Director, about which he was more than gracious. There was near-unanimity about the choice of Cate Blanchett as Best Actress for her role in the Bob Dylan film, I'm Not There, and Nikita Mikhalkov's superb film 12 was a favorite for Best Picture. In Venice's tradition of often creating awards to appease those left out, Mikhakov received a "Special Lion for his body of work," and Abdellatif Kechiche was given a Special Jury Award for his La Graine et le Mulet. And other films that deserve recognition, for their skill in portraying the horrors of war and injustice, like The Valley of Elah, It's a Free World, Michael Clayton, and more---what will be their fate at U.S. box offices where their subject matter may count more than their quality?

# posted by Belle N. Burke @ 9/10/2007 03:49:00 PM

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At the ROM theater at the Toronto International Film Festival, separated by a long night, there were two new, singular documentaries about opposite sides of the world. Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti’s Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World closed one day and opened another at the theater. Although they are different in style and subject, together the films showed the insanity of Earth better than the news ever could.

In its World Premiere last night, Heavy Metal in Baghdad played great to a public crowd. The doc follows the Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda as they try not only to survive in the war torn city but to practice and eventually get gigs. Directors Alvi and Moretti (of Vice magazine and their online film channel VBS.tv) give a brave and unique look into the Iraqi situation. Proudly lo-fi, and all the stronger for it, the film shows how totally fucked the band is, stuck in a homeland that doesn’t really exist, where you can live 15 minutes away from your best friend yet go six months without seeing them because you could get killed outside of your home.

Alvi and Moretti jumped into the city headfirst and created a powerful portrait of the situation by not analyzing the entire state of affairs but by giving you an insider, personal portrait of the band members and their lives there over three years. They pulled off a public show but eventually bombings get their practice space and the city gets so out of control its difficult to even meet each other.

Although the directors specialize in gonzo journalism ethics, the film is refreshingly down-to-earth. While other journalists on the ground are stuck in hotels or with troops for safety, Alvi and Moretti say fuck it, hire bodyguards and drive around. They go all over the intense city, but also acknowledge that it’s freaking scary from minute to minute.

The QnA was humble and informative, more about the band now being stuck in Syria under daily threat of being deported back to Iraq rather than the tiring “what camera did you use” questions. The filmmakers hope to get enough money and support to literally save the band members and their wives and kids. In a touching moment, one of the early band members was introduced, present in the audience, safe from the world in the film. Hopefully HMIB will play festivals around the world, as its personal story can be more enlightening than detached television experts reporting. More on the film in the next issue of Filmmaker. (You should also go to their website for more info or to donate to the band - heavymetalinbaghdad.com)

Werner Herzog’s new documentary Encounters at the End of the World had a press and industry screening to open today at ROM. The legendary director, known for going to incredibly dangerous places in order to film, went to Antarctica to profile the scientists working and living there. Herzog used his branded style of luscious images of nature covered by his accented voice-of-god diary narration, both humorous and prosaic.

While other documentaries have gone to this rarely seen part of the world, in Herzog’s hands it becomes about the magical underworld. The scientists are not boring nerds, but world travelers and poets. One man working is a trained linguist, living in a place where no language originates. Another man takes a break from his welding to explain his Apache royal heritage. A woman doing research relates tons of stories of near deaths in various countries, including going from city to city in a sewer pipe that was on the back of a truck, a free ride. Meanwhile the surroundings above and below the ice look like outer space, filled with new species found every day. Herzog takes Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and gives it existential balls. He comes to the conclusion that nature will not put up with humans forever, sooner or later taking the Earth back from us.

Made in different worlds, both films bring sobering reality to audiences. HMIB is lo-fi with a harsh metal soundtrack. Encounters is slick with dreamy, mysterious sounds. One set in a once-bustling city destroyed by politics with people running for their lives. The other in one of the most remote places on Earth with idiosyncratic professionals looking for new life. Both show you individual stories within gigantic conditions, overwhelming you as a faraway land becomes strikingly close. But they also inspire you with their brave approach to go there.

Every 15 minutes or so, the subway runs audibly under the ROM theater. The deep rumbles fit both films well.

# posted by Mike Plante @ 9/09/2007 02:11:00 PM

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Alfonso Cuaron's latest film is playing at the Toronto Film Festival, but you can see it now, for free, online, below... It's his collaboration with Jonas Cuaron and author Naomi Klein that accompanies Klein's latest book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing summarizes the book's thesis thusly:

...present-day global capitalism took hold when its advocates learned to exploit disasters. After a disaster (war, tsunami, terrorist attack), you can push your agenda for worsening labor conditions, looser regulation, and pocket-lining exercises (Enron, Halliburton) while the reeling, disaster-struck population of the world has its attention elsewhere.

Klein attributes this technique to Milton Friedman, who is reported to have said that "only a crisis -- real or perceived -- produces real change." She connects this idea to the fundamental notion underpinning CIA torture techniques (as reported in CIA interrogation manuals from 1963 and 1983) -- to produce a state of shock in which the victim is out of control of her faculties, a "suspended animation" that can be exploited to get victims to do things that violate their own ethics or beliefs.

The Guardian is posting a series of edited extracts from the book -- here's the first. And the book has its own website, full of resources, including a filmography of the sources Klein used in her research.

The short film itself is embedded below. Here's Klein's intro:

"When I finished The Shock Doctrine, I sent it to Alfonso Cuarón because I adore his films and felt that the future he created for Children of Men was very close to the present I was seeing in disaster zones. I was hoping he would send me a quote for the book jacket and instead he pulled together this amazing team of artists -- including Jonás Cuarón who directed and edited -- to make The Shock Doctrine short film. It was one of those blessed projects where everything felt fated."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/09/2007 10:41:00 AM

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I simply can not view a lot of films and socialize much at big festivals, but once in a while, I feel the urge and accept the best offer, if there is an offer to accept. I didn’t make the cut for last night’s IFC dinner, so I halfheartedly agreed to attend a more casual affair organized by a prominent sales agent for about 10 people—all male. There were trade journalists, filmmakers, and publicists at the table in a restaurant that was selected not for its considerable ambience and delicious cuisine but for its proximity to a club on Yonge Street called Remington’s (with the sub-title “Men of Steel”).

After eating we walked there and entered a den of men, most of whom were ogling the muscular go-go boys (most, I’m told, are straight) who dance on a little stage and strip down to their birthday suits. For $20 Canadian one could purchase a lap dance in an upstairs booth. The exchange rate being what it is, I did not even think to experiment—who sits on top of whom?—but I have the feeling that I will remember the evening for much longer than I would recall another distributor’s dinner. At least I have grist for the New York cocktail (no pun intended) party mill.

On the subject of same-sex interface (again, and I mean it, no pun is intended, really), I had looked forward to Parvez Sharma's long-in-the-works study of homosexuality in the Muslim world, A Jihad for Love. This is a daring, groundbreaking venture, since the subject is taboo in most Muslim societies. Essentially the film is a chronology of stories of gay men and lesbians, loosely divided between those who deal with their sexuality in the home country and those who, for reasons of safety or ease of lifestyle, have become part of a gay/lesbian diaspora.

The most probing subject is the South African imam Muhsin Hendricks, an intellectual who relates his development as a devout Muslim and as a gay man. Most of the other stories, however, do not go very deep, and in some cases border on exoticizing the cultures. Probably the biggest problem is the pedestrian nature of the filmmaking itself. To be brutally honest, it looks like a school project, with a few pretty exteriors tossed in.

More successful in the exploration of alternative sexuality is Argentinian director Lucia Puenzo’s XXY [pictured above], a fiction in which an intersexed (formerly known as a hermaphrodite) 15-year-old who has been programmed to identify as female finds maleness creeping into her persona and desire. A fine young actress named Ines Efron plays Alex, an only child whose parents have moved from Buenos Aires to the Uruguayan coast to avoid the stigma of difference. They do not really understand Alex’s needs; neither does a couple they invite to visit with their teenaged son (the man is a plastic surgeon who has operated on intersexed people before).

When Alex plants her flag in the willing boy’s backside, we begin to understand her dominant proclivity—though she is in some ways comfortable having the organs of both sexes. Puenzo films neatly, without fuss, letting the camera follow the characters. XXY is timely, and it’s lovely to see a cinematic plea for tolerance that is cinematically competent.

Tonight Fox Searchlight is throwing a bash, but I am going to be a good soldier and meander over to the Varsity to catch a late movie. I hope you don’t think I was considering a return to Remington’s. After all, I was dragged there.

# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/08/2007 09:06:00 PM

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Who says Canadians lack edge? (At least according to some of my fellow New Yorkers. Never mind that I am from Texas, but let's keep that between us, okay?)

In Thursday's edition of the daily published by the Toronto International Film Festival, a fellow called Nobu Adilman published a piece declaring himself director of the event--big news, I am sure, for co-directors Piers Handling and Noah Cowan. He claims that the festival "has never had a non-white director, nor anyone under 5'11"." (Adilman is half Asian, half Caucasian, per the article.) For a huge festival that tries to balance esoteric art fare with star-laden (and often sub-par) Hollywood movies, he offers a solution: "I will institute a one-year moratorium on Hollywood films: Every red carpet needs to be vacuumed." And he will not allow inertia to creep in. "If things get dull, I will ply an up-and-coming filmmaker with drugs and alcohol to sprout another Fassbinder. I will fund revolutions in foreign lands to provide fodder for young artists to reflect upon their countries' hardships."

Satire, yes, and with a bite--something sorely lacking in the Canadian film that inaugurated this 32nd edition of the festival last night. Jeremy Podeswa's Fugitive Pieces [pictured above] is the antithesis of Adilman's prose. It is so enervated that even its fragmented editing is soft. Podeswa adapted Anne Michaels's novel about a young Jewish boy in Poland who sees the Nazis kill his parents, but does not know the fate of his beloved sister. He is raised by a Greek archaeologist who finds him in the Polish forest while on a dig, then takes him first to Hydra, then on to Canada. The great actor Rade Sherbedgia is so magnetic as the surrogate father that his performance only highlights the black hole at the core of the enterprise. It's all so, so...careful.

I detest the use of the term Lite to characterize anything other than beer or soda pop, but Fugitive Pieces is Hollywood, make that Hallmark, Lite. Still, it is to the festival's credit that it opened with a Canadian picture whose most recognizable actor is Stephen Dillane. Adilman must be a happy, if unemployed, fellow. And revelers at the afterparty at the Exhibition Space of the Liberty Grand Entertainment Complex enjoyed themselves, no matter what they thought about the film.

The Holocaust has been a hovering presence over Israel and its policies, both domestic and foreign, since it became a state three years after World War Two was over, and the Nazis' concentration camps became common knowledge. Israeli director Amos Gitai, a politicized filmmaker who does not shy away from controversy, has created a fiction, entitled Disengagement, about the forced withdrawal of the ultra-religious Jewish settlers in Gaza by the Israeli military in 2005. I doubt it was Gitai's intention, but to me the movie sympathizes too much with those who had to leave: Never mind that they were part of an illegal occupation.

Juliette Binoche, who is battling Nicole Kidman in the race to see who can do more work with the world's artiest, most intellectual filmmakers, stars as an Israeli-born woman in Paris who returns to the country of her birth to find the daughter she gave up for adoption 20 years before. Yes, she ends us wandering through Gaza in her pursuit of the girl, who is now a full-fledged Orthodox Jew confronted by those mean Israeli soldiers. Being an Oscar winner and therefore valued prop, Binoche wanders through an Orthodox settlement, even among praying men in a synagogue for no discernible reason, and it is clear from reaction shots in several scenes that she hasn't a clue what people addressing her in Hebrew or Arabic are saying. These misfires and Gitai's usual pretense irritate.

It is unseasonably hot in Toronto, so the theaters offer a nice respite. Many of the movies that seem to be most interesting are screening this weekend, and the parties get going as well. Not to sound like poor Miss South Carolina, but "personally, I believe" that the films will get better and better, from the greatest hits of Cannes to the multiple world premieres. And if they lack edge, I'm going to....boycott backbacon. How's that?

# posted by Howard Feinstein @ 9/07/2007 06:35:00 PM

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And now... for fans of the baroque, gothic-industrial nightmare that was Saw III...

Lionsgate has just announced that ethereal/classical singer Sarah Brightman will be starring as Blind Mag in the upcoming feature, Repo! The Genetic Opera. Brightman has just finished recording the soundtrack, and will commence filming in mid-Sept.

Repo! is an avant-garde, horror/rock opera movie directed by director Darren Lynn Bousman, notorious for directing Saw II, III and (forthcoming) Saw IV.

Set in a post-apocalyptic and stylistic comic-book world, with a "wall-to-wall" soundtrack described as "a mix of industrial with opera", it's sure to appeal to the gothic set. Many musicians, including Jane's Addiction and Nine Inch Nails, are collaborating on the project.

No word on whether or not Repo! will be as explicitly violent as the Saw films, but I think Brightman's blue-haired, PBS fans may want to pass on this one.

# posted by André Salas @ 9/07/2007 05:09:00 PM

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A week ago on Indiewire, Agnes Varun posted a "Doc Filmmakers Guide to the IFP Market," which is full of solid advice from Market vets to help you navigate the upcoming conference (Sept. 16 - 19).

Today, on the Renew Media blog, she posts a follow-up: the entirety of a 1,200 word piece by Tracy Heather Strain, a seven-year Market vet. It's full of practical advice that anyone attending the Market should read.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/06/2007 11:31:00 PM

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In what Gregg Goldstein of The Hollywood Reporter proclaims a "seismic shift of power in the independent film community," CAA agent Bart Walker, previously the head of their NYC film office and rep to such directors as Sofia Coppola, Julie Taymor and Julian Schnabel, has left the agency to join Cinetic Media. THR reports that Cinetic's John Sloss and Walker will form a new division, Cinetic Management.

From the joint statement Sloss and Walker released:

We see Cinetic as a new kind of service company, one that will create innovative structures that benefit filmmakers as well as financiers so that their creative and economic goals are realized.

Filmmakers and financiers have an unprecedented opportunity to take greater control of the process, from creation to consumption. We are dedicated to being instrumental in that evolution. Cinetic's move into management is a strong step in the direction of bringing artists into close proximity with ownership, finance, sales and distribution.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/06/2007 07:21:00 PM

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The 2007 Venice film festival is showing serious, high-quality films rich in diversity, yet what Sleuth, starring Michael Caine and Jude Law, Michael Clayton, with George Clooney in the title role, and The Assassination of Jesse James...... with Brad Pitt have in common is either the absence of women in the cast or the lack of a love story. Also dominated by men is Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and Woody Allen's atypically dark drama, Cassandra's Dream.
Asian films, however, haven't abandoned sex, as attested to by Ang Lee's much-publicized Lust, Caution.
The U.S. presence here is strengthened by Brian De Palma's Redacted and Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah, both concerning the war in Iraq, but there are also serious contenders from Russia, France, and Italy for the top prizes, as well as many---too many to see!---very good films shown out of competition.

# posted by Belle N. Burke @ 9/05/2007 06:00:00 PM

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There are three things I look forward to every morning: Starbucks, the indiewire newsletter and the filmick blog update (once a week the Filmmmaker Magazine and IFP newsletters are also good reads!). Filmick is a great resource that compiles industry trade news, rumors and buzz and often times the information is culled from hundreds of sources throughout the net.

Check it out.

# posted by Benjamin Crossley-Marra @ 9/05/2007 03:34:00 PM

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Ronnie Bronstein's film, co-hosted by Lodge Kerrigan... a rare screening, tonight, IFC Center/New York, 7:30.... see you there.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/05/2007 11:31:00 AM

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It's a funny thing, the blogosphere. When I was in at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, I wrote about an amusing little incident involving Judd Apatow and Billy the Kid director Jennifer Venditti. At the awards party, where Venditti won best documentary, Venditti mentioned that she had seen my post, and then subsequently put something on her own blog about what I had written. In an increasingly ridiculous series of events, Cinematical then blogged about Venditti blogging about my post, and then Matt Dentler blogged about the Cinematical blog. I am now completing the "blog circle" in the hope that things do not get even more out of hand.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/05/2007 09:55:00 AM

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Perhaps because Gross doesn't write for a daily outlet but more likely because the erudition of his criticism is genuinely thrilling, the occasional essays on film by screenwriter Larry Gross pack a punch within our metacritic'd, tomato-splattered blogosphere. Here he is with an early appreciation of Todd Haynes's I'm Not There that's just gone online at Film Comment.

"How can a work not give us politics and yet be so political?" he asks in a piece that opens by quoting Jean-Godard, and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari and ends by considering how Haynes's film fits into a moment signified by other recent Gross favorites (Zodiac, Inland Empire, and Syndromes and a Century). His opening paragraph is below, but read the entire piece at the link.

Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There is an essay-poem on the myth and history surrounding the career and music of Bob Dylan. Allusively complex, it’s also a Finnegans Wake–like meditation on Sixties film culture. Haynes’s references to films like Masculin-Féminin, Petulia, A Hard Day’s Night, 8 1/2, and Darling are not film-historical erudition for its own sake but serve to underscore that Sixties cinema was always already influencing the cultural-political reality from which Dylan sprang. Rather than one more recitation of biographical anecdote, Haynes’s conceit is the construction of a kind of ur-Dylan substance that is drastically collective, a-chronological, and non-psychological. Six Dylan alter egos circulate through the film: Cate Blanchett and Christian Bale are the nearest-to-literal incarnations, with Richard Gere as a mix of Dylan and Billy the Kid, Ben Whishaw as Dylan by way of Rimbaud, and Marcus Franklin, a 10-year-old African-American, embodying Dylan inhabiting the persona of Woody Guthrie. Finally, Heath Ledger plays a movie star haunted by the experience of having recently played “Dylan” in a film within the film. Haynes has previously tried constructing Chinese boxes of allusion, quotation, and pastiche in Superstar and Velvet Goldmine but he masters this strategy in I’m Not There. The film’s thematic center of gravity is the tragicomic success-and-failure of Dylan as a political prophet.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/04/2007 05:04:00 PM

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Okay, here's a link to an Ain't It Cool News report that links to the trailer of a film I'm really excited about seeing in Toronto: Dario Argento's Mother of Tears, the conclusion of the trilogy that began with the brilliant Suspira and Inferno. The early word on the film, which stars Asia Argento, Udo Kier, Daria Nicolodi, among others, is good.

For those who don't know the first film in the series (and since the Mother of Tears trailer is not able to be embedded), here, below, is the charmingly old school U.S. trailer for <Suspira. I first saw this horror masterpiece when I was in my 20s, and mostly I got off on the nightmare logic of its story but also its incredible design, use of color, the hyper-saturated film stock, and the overcranked Goblin score. But check out the comments on the YouTube page -- this moive scared people. The comment thread is full of people who were terrified by this trailer as children and are now seeking it out for some kind of mid-life catharsis.

craybeeo6 posts:

i was 6 when i saw this on tv and i was also alone (parents both worked, had to fend for myself alot). all i remember is that i went running and screaming down the stairs and out of the house to my friend's house a couple of house down. i thought that skeleton head lady was after me. it's one of my most vivid childhood memories and this is the first time i've seen the trailer since then.

grazatt is less nostalgic, however:

This traumitized me when I was 4 years old.I would like to find the pig's asshole who designed this trailer and thought it was a good idea to put it on network tv. I would like to kick him in the balls over and over until he pukes!!!

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/02/2007 04:42:00 PM

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John August wants you to see his new movie, The Nines... twice.

At his blog, he's posted a downloadable commentary track which you can listen to on your iPod as the movie unspools. (It's too distracting to do on your first viewing, he says.)

He writes:

One of my favorite moments of the Sundance premiere was listening as progressive waves of audience members realized that a story Hope Davis begins telling in Part One is, in fact, not a story at all. Hearing the little gasps, those who hadn’t yet caught on became more vigilant, wondering what they were missing.

It was a reminder that we make movies for an audience, not merely a consumer.

Yet there are some things a movie theater can’t provide, aspects which only work on DVD. The pause button, for example. Subtitles. Audio commentary.

But in the age of iPods, there’s really no reason why audio commentary has to be relegated to DVD.

(Hat tip, CinemaTech.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/02/2007 11:59:00 AM

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One of my favorite websites, Boing Boing, has just undertaken a re-design. The site is a lot cleaner and easier on the eyes now, all the better to scope out eccentric pieces like this article in the Denver Westword News about the historical end date of the Mayan calendar, Freemason conspiracy theory, the New World Order... and the Denver airport?

It's all knitted together by a filmmaker -- producer Nick Weidner, who, with his partner Sharron Rose, made 2012: The Odyssey. Westword's Jared Jacang Maher, who writes about Weidner's appearance on KHOW's Coast to Coast, explains:

Weidner, a filmmaker and freelance journalist, is on Noory's show to promote 2012: The Odyssey, a new documentary that connects Weidner's previous work uncovering the secrets of ancient alchemy with a growing interest in the year 2012 as a historical "end date" for the world as we know it, a kind of new-age Armageddon. Some conspiracy buffs predict this end/beginning nexus will generate a telepathic wave of harmony throughout humanity; others see signs that 2012 will be fraught with fire and warfare. The date comes from the ancient Mayan calendar, which marks a day in December five years from now as the conclusion of the 5th Sun. Weidner has found evidence in monuments built by alchemists and Freemasons that they were not only aware of this Mayan prophecy but have been secretly preparing for 2012 for generations. His film examines a 150-year-old cross in France, a Stonehenge-like structure in Georgia and Masonic connections in Washington, D.C. It concludes at Denver International Airport, where Weidner shows the capstone located in the terminal's Great Hall — a name that's no accident, since Masonic temples call their main meeting rooms by the same name. Engraved in the marble facade is a coffee-cup-sized icon of a square and compass, symbols of the Masonic order, with the words "New World Airport Commission." Weidner associates this with the New World Order, an autonomous behind-the-scenes government that manipulates global events and communications.

"And my feeling is that the Denver airport is some kind of cathedral to these guys, a cathedral to the world that they're making," Weidner tells the listening audience.

The film's trailer can be found at the link above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/01/2007 07:59:00 PM

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Over at his Hot Blog, David Poland has excited early words about Todd Haynes' I'm Not There at Telluride.

An excerpt:

I also think this movie is a classic example of one where the first viewing is really just a toe in the water. If ever there was a movie made for the DVD era, this is it. (I wouldn’t bother to try to watch any longer clip than four minutes on an iPod… even the larger screen version due this Christmas.) Haynes & Moverman find a richness in this 10 year sliver of Dylan’s life – again, a conventional biopic choice to narrow the breadth of the story that is not really consciously on the surface of the film, which never feels like any conventional bio-pic – that is further set throbbing by Haynes’ choices as a director.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/01/2007 04:24:00 PM

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Women in Film and General Motors have launched Traction, a new website "for and 'by' women in the industry." There's already a ton of stuff on the site, including a great interview with Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Pierce by filmmaker Kirby Dick, a blog by the "Two Kids in the Balcony" (Jessica Silver-Greenberg and AJ Strasser), and a column entitled "The Virtual Mentor" which offers industry advice. In its debut, Film Finances Senior V.P. Marion Spiegelman discusses the process of bonding a picture.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/01/2007 04:14:00 PM

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Over at his increasingly essential Workbook Project, Lance weiler posts an audio podcast with Bomb It director Jon Reiss. I liked Reiss's film, which starts off as a straightforward doc on the origins of urban graffitti art and then, as it globetrots to five countries, subtly morphs into a compelling essay on the changing nature of public space. Hear what Reiss has to say at the link above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/01/2007 03:27:00 PM

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Louis Hau has a solid piece in Forbes on the current skirmish between GE/NBC/Universal and Apple's iTunes. If you're not up on it, NBC has notified Aplle that it will no longer sell its television shows over the iTunes store. (It has also announced its own streaming and download site, Hulu.)

Hau notes that NBC's notice of termination occurs while negotiations are continuing and that, in the end, a deal may be worked out even as the network's long-term strategy may be away from the pay-to-download model:

Apple wants as much video content as it can get to continue driving sales of the iPod, especially given the company's struggles to get more than a handful of film studios to provide movie downloads.

Moreover, if you believe the rumor mill, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs is expected to unveil a new line of video iPods during a press conference next Wednesday. Even though iTunes' video downloads are dwarfed by its music sales, they remain an important selling point for Apple's most important product.

Meanwhile, NBC wants to remain on iTunes because Apple has proved to be the only major online vendor capable of selling video and audio downloads in any significant quantity. Even Google gave up on paid video downloads earlier this month. The market-dominating position of iTunes also explains why Universal Music continues to sell songs there despite its much ballyhooed decision in July not to renew its annual contract with Apple.

While TV networks have a vested interest in remaining on iTunes, the online store will likely end up being less important to them over time. Rather than focusing on selling downloads of their programming, the strategy being pursued by NBC, News Corp.'s Fox, CBS, Disney's ABC and Viacom's MTV and Comedy Central is increasingly emphasizing the sale of advertising to keep their content free.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 9/01/2007 03:06:00 PM

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