Jennifer Phang's Sundance Frontier entry Half-Life received something of a critical honor recently when producer Mike Ryan, whose thoughtful and passionate reviews can be found at the new Hammer To Nail, cited the film as his favorite of the 34 he saw at this year's festival.

An excerpt:

We often see an art film that may leap around in perspective, mostly for rhetorical or comic effect, but it is truly rare to be carried emotionally through a film that tells a multi-perspective story through a seamless integration of naturalistic action, animation and self consciously artificial CGI compositing. Half-Life exists on a whole other, higher level of cinematic ambition than any other film at Sundance this year. It is formally inventive, deeply personal and emotionally compelling, all on a tiny indie budget! This is ambitious indie filmmaking at its best!

For more with Phang, check out this interview with her appearing on the KCPW Sundance podcast.

As a side note, Half-Life was one of two Park City films that received mentorship and support from the IFP Rough Cut Labs. The other was Tom Quinn's The New Year's Parade, which won the Grand Prize at Slamdance.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/31/2008 06:53:00 PM Comments (0)

Over the next eleven days, Anthology Film Archives, in association with Yale University, is hosting the first serious stateside retrospective of Olivier Assayas, one of the most consistently daring Gallic auteurs working today. He'll be at Yale today having tea with students and introducing the first American screening of his Boarding Gate, which played Cannes last year to mixed notices. Tomorrow he'll sit down with Kent Jones of Film Comment, one of the first American critics to recognize Assayas' work, for a long public chat before heading to Manhattan to introduce Irma Vep at Saturday night's Anthology screening.

It's poised to be a terrific month at the little downtown repository for Avant-Garde and other forms of non-pasteurized cinema. Right on the heels of the ten day Assayas retro, Anthology plays host to a Charles Burnett retrospective, featuring not only the recently rereleased Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding, but his forays into early 90s indiewood, To Sleep With Anger and The Glass Shield. Also on tap are a number of shorts spanning his entire career, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, his part doc part experimental deconstruction of the myths surrounding the slave rebellion leader, and an extremely rare revival of Billy Woodberry's 1983 feature, Bless Their Little Hearts, which Burnett shot for his UCLA classmate and friend.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/31/2008 09:48:00 AM Comments (0)

On the 25th anniversary of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Cinemart, the prize for the "best project" has gone to Sophie Fiennes' The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, a follow-up to her The Pervert's Guide to Cinema which also features philosopher Slajov Zizek. The award comes with a cash prize of 10,000 euros, which one guest at the party tonight quipped would be about equal to the film's first clip license.

Here's Variety's wrap-up of the event, and below is a clip from Fiennes's previous collaboration with Zizek.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/30/2008 07:59:00 PM Comments (0)

If you just bookmark this blog page and don't check the main site, head over there so as not to miss professor and critic Ray Carney's essay on Aaron Katz's Quiet City, which hits DVD stores this week.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/29/2008 09:21:00 PM Comments (0)

Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker, premiering here in Rotterdam, is Barbara Caspar's thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the '70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon. A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice. And with her appearance in several conceptual art videos in the '70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos and her piercings, Acker was also performance artist, proto riot grrl, and living link to the transgressive authors of the '50s and '60s U.S. and French experimental fiction scenes. Acker died of breast cancer in 1997 and now, just over ten years later, Caspar has made a film that captures the essence of both Acker the writer and Acker the person while arguing convincingly for the continuing relevance of her work today.

Caspar includes a lot of the conventions of the artist bio-doc -- interviews with friends and associates, archival footage, etc. -- in a film that covers in broad strokes the different eras of Acker's life. There's a lot here that I didn't know, from those conceptual art videos to her quite vanilla (and short-lived) marriage when she was 20. Perhaps one of the strengths of the doc is that I didn't think about what is left out, like some of her key relationships (her marriage to the composer Peter Gordon is not included here) and artistic endeavors (like her large-scale theatrical collaboration with Gordon, Richard Foreman, and David Salle, The Birth of a Poet) until the next day. In fact, Caspar doesn't discuss Acker's books with any great degree of specificity. She's all about capturing the broad strokes of Acker's ideas as well as conveying to the viewer the galvanizing, seductive and complicated nature of her persona. Caspar includes discussion of Acker's attraction to sexual masochism, the plagiarism charges against her, and her willful but misguided attempt to beat cancer by rejecting Western medical treatments, refusing to allow Acker to go gently into the good night of literary respectability.

In addition to the conventions of the artist bio mentioned above, Caspar creatively employs a number of other devices which are both bold, and, I think, rewarding. She includes crudely roto-scoped animated dramatizations of scenes from Acker's work, which play out in stark blacks, whites and reds underneath a voiceover reading Acker's prose. Even more interestingly, she often cuts to a series of interviews with young women, who look to be from about 16 to their early 20s, discussing what Acker's work means to them. There's something compelling about these women and the casual way they are shot and recorded. I ran into Caspar here and asked her about these scenes, and she told me the footage comes from casting tapes she recorded when looking for actors to play the girls in the animated sequences. It wasn't until post-production that she realized that the comments and passion of these young voices made the perfect argument for the continuing vitality of Acker's work. (Caspar also told me that she cut a more conventional version without this material for broadcast, but that the Rotterdam version is her "director's cut").

I knew Acker just a little bit in the late '80s, when I was the Programming Director at The Kitchen and Ira Silverberg, eloquent here in his discussion of her life and career, was the Literary Curator. She kindly agreed to play a philosophy professor in the first film I was ever involved with, Raul Ruiz's The Golden Boat, although I remember her laughing that the dialogue Ruiz had written for her represented a philosophical position that she pretty much disagreed with. Caspar's film beautifully captures the smart, funny and quite warm Acker I remembered.

There's a great moment in the film when Acker, lecturing in San Francisco in the early '90s, is asked what she thinks about cyber-sex. She admits to knowing nothing about it -- "I like relationships and I like flesh," she says. The question made me realize that she died near the beginning of the Internet Era and that so many of her issues, from polysexuality to new forms of literary creations, are now being explored actively online. It would have been fascinating had she lived to have seen where her work would have gone.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/29/2008 08:10:00 PM Comments (0)

The Four Eyed Monsters filmmaker is offering a handshake and a hug to the perpetrator if his stuff is returned.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/29/2008 05:11:00 PM Comments (1)

Over at her Thompson on Hollywood blog, Ann Thompson posts an email she received from indie producer and former distributor Jonathan Dana about "the surfeit of Sundance acquisition titles, many of which remain unsold at fest's end." He breaks the indie sphere down into three sections, from the studio specialty titles down to the out-of-nowhere surprises, and concentrates his commentary on the middle sphere, the professionally produced films with name actors that are financed by new money largely based on their presumed marketability. It's worth a read.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/29/2008 08:13:00 AM Comments (0)

Over at Filmmaker Videos, Jamie Stuart's latest short from the Sundance Film Festival is up. Starring George A. Romero, Ellen Kuras and Stacy Peralta among others, Stuart shows us how '08 Sundance looked through his eyes.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/28/2008 10:50:00 AM Comments (0)

Tuesday at Sundance I saw two documentaries back to back that each deals with one of this country’s most pressing and complex political issues. Josh Tickell’s Fields of Fuel tackles America’s reliance on imported fossil fuels while Patrick Creadon in his follow-up to Wordplay, IOUSA, wrestles with the exploding United States budget deficit.

Both films employ what is now a familiar doc style of exploring political and social issue subject matter: quick editing, talking heads, a chapter-by-chapter structure, use of humorous archival material, and energetic source cue-driven montages. Of the two films, Fields of Fuel is the slicker. It segues from a first-person history of its maker, an Australian-born alternative fuel activist, through a history of the fossil fuel industry to an upbeat final section that demonstrates the feasibility of converting to alternative fuel sources, most notably, biodiesel fuel that can be manufactured from everything from vegetable oil to, one day, algae.

We’re first introduced to Tickell as he tools across the country in a biodiesel-fueled hippie van, filling up each night at a fast-food restaurant by siphoning used frying oil. After quickly interjecting a note of personal tragedy (his mother suffered nine miscarriages after she moved the family to “a cancer corridor” in Louisiana where illness rates have spiked due to oil industry pollutants), Tickell proceeds to hopscotch through a dizzying set of facts and histories. The invention of the diesel engine; the growth of the oil industry from Standard Oil to Exxon; global warming; the financial health of the US. auto industry; government tax subsidies to fuel-inefficient vehicles; hybrid cars; 9/11 and U.S. energy policy; the Iraq War; peak oil; ethanol; solar power; green start-ups — all are covered in Tickell ’s breathless montage. Like Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, Fields of Fuel tempers its alarmism with a final emphasis on the positive and the possible. I knew little about biodiesel fuel going into this movie and I left impressed with how much has already been done in both the States and around the world to implement it and other practical new forms of energy.

As a filmmaker, Tickell knows how to cleverly structure non-fiction subject matter. Early in the film he employs a clip from the TV show Dallas, discussing how the program presented to him as a child in Australia a fantasy vision of the U.S. Later we meet Dallas star Larry Hagman, who now powers his home through solar power and is a critic of the oil industry his show so glamorously depicted. Tickell is usually one-step ahead of viewers, anticipating and countering the questions we’ll inevitably pose in our minds as the film progresses, although he doesn't address recent arguments by environmental groups, including Oxfam, who argue that biodiesel fuel production contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and increases world poverty.

In terms of its moviemaking, Fields of Fuel has its occasional faults, which mostly occur when Tickell clumsily tries to illustrate the coolness of biodiesel energy. Shots of smiling kids testifying as to how great biodiesel fuel smells, a “hipper than Hasselhoff” German biodiesel activist rapper and, most egregiously, two music-video styled sequences in which Tickell attempts to co-opt patriotic post-9/11 imagery in service of his eco-cause have the creepy enthusiasm of “morning in America” campaign ads. And the soundtrack contains so many sentimental songs of uplift – obvious tracks from Moby, Sheryl Crow and the soundtrack of Heat, for example – that it sometimes feels T1’d-in in from the lobby of a W Hotel. But for the most part, Fields of Fuel is an achievement, an energetic and entertaining doc that not only informs audiences but also leaves them with a concrete vision of how to advocate saner public energy policies while implementing practical changes in their own lives.

Compared to the issues discussed in Creadon’s doc, America’s reliance on foreign oil seems like a minor problem. IOUSA deals with not just the U.S. budget deficit but also related topics ranging from America’s trade deficit and savings shortfalls to our shrinking dollar and loss of global economic leverage. Like Tickell, Creadon zippily cuts from a range of interview subjects, including taxpayers, government officials and, also, annoyingly, clueless kids who are asked to guess how big the budget deficit is (answer: $8.6 trillion). The film’s human through line comes in the form of U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, who lectures across the country about the catastrophe awaiting future generations of Americans if the U.S. doesn’t begin to balance its budgets and reduce its deficit. The film also focuses on the activities of the Concord Coalition, an advocacy group comprised of members of both the centrist Brookings Institution and the right-wing Heritage Foundation – political opponents brought together by the looming disaster.

IOUSA is most successful when it finds ways to entertainingly and concisely convey decades of economic history through animated charts, archival photos, and, even, a Saturday Night Live skit. In one sequence a penny is rolled up and down a rollercoaster of a bar graph, illustrating how the budget deficit expanded and sometimes contracted across wars and social program expansions. But while Creadon references some of the customary explanations for the budget deficit, he mostly analogizes the U.S. to the proverbial maxed out consumer who can’t stop spending until his credit card implodes.

IOUSA’s press notes state, “This film is not an endorsement of any political party or political candidate,” and indeed, Creadon’s film initially appears non-political and intended to simply raise awareness about the deficit issue. But here’s the thing — framing a discussion of the health of the U.S. economy by focusing solely on the budget deficit is inherently an idelogical act. “Deficit hawks” can be found all across the political spectrum, but they are most often found on the right and among those seeking to cut social spending and entitlement programs. (Indeed, the recently passed Medicare prescription drug benefit is given a few whacks in IOUSA.) The film is “inspired by” Empire of Debt, Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggins's book that discusses the U.S. debt crisis from a right/libertarian viewpoint and places it within a larger critique of America as an “empire” that has overextended itself in both domestic and foreign policy. Creadon has left out most of the book’s “America as empire” argument, but he has uncritically embraced their argument regarding the deficit. You’d never know from IOUSA that not every economist is as worried about the deficit as Walker is. In fact, the word “Keynes” – as is John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose work discussed the economic benefits of deficit spending, is never uttered in this doc. Also not included are any of the many contemporary academic economists who might argue against the film’s theories. There’s no real discussion of the large deficits of other Western nations as a percentage of their GDPs, and while the trade imbalance with China is talked about, more nuanced globalist arguments that look at the interdependency between U.S. borrowing, the American consumer, and the development of the Chinese as a trading partner are not. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is interviewed, and the film salutes the Clinton administration for managing revenues and spending in order to balance the budget… without mentioning the technology-fueled economic boom that led to the increased taxed revenues that allowed the budget to be balanced during this time. And because the film avoids ideology, that also means that it avoids politically charged but necessary discussions of just how our deficit got to where it is today. You won't hear in this doc anything about “starving the beast,” the phrase describing right-wing efforts during the Reagan era to deliberately create a deficit crisis in order to force cuts in social spending.

But the film’s refusal to present more than one side of the deficit issue is not its most problematic element. I don’t have to agree with every aspect of Creadon's deficit doom mongering to accept that, in the absence of a crystal ball, his is a valid argument. IOUSA’s main problem concerns its final message to its viewers. Let me back up. I suspect that if you ask the average man on the street if the U.S. should have a balanced budget, that person would say yes. Ask if that person’s Social Security payments should be reduced, or if his taxes should be raised, or if a favorite government program be axed and you’d get a different response. IOUSA throws around terms like “leadership” when discussing how we get out of the deficit mess, but it doesn’t include a discussion of the types of initiatives a real leader on this issue would be forced to propose. It concludes by simply imploring readers to “write their elected officials” and demand that the deficit issue be addressed. Unlike Tickell’s film, which ends with a detailed breakdown of how we can wean ourselves from foreign oil, IOUSA punts when it comes to the public policy specifics needed to resolve the problem as the film formulates it. (Indeed, in a recession, which we are probably in right now, cutting the deficit by the obvious methods — decreasing spending or raising taxes — is probably disastrous economic policy.) The only clue as to just what kind of deficit strategy is recommended by Creadon, Walker, Bonner et al comes, coyly, in the form of an end-title song:

Nick Lowe’s "Cruel to be Kind."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/27/2008 05:08:00 PM Comments (0)

Any festival you go to there's going to be one film that most people don't get and just spend their time discussing why they didn't like it and question why it was ever made. Chusy (Anthony Haney-Jardine)'s Anywhere, USA has become that film at Sundance '08... but I'm in the minority. I thought it was one of the most fun viewing experiences I had there. Now, I won't say that I got what Chusy's three-part so-called autobiography was about because I don't know if there's anything to get. All I know is he has a bizarre imagination, gets great performances from amateur or non-actors and the man loves mustaches.

Guided by a smooth talking narrator, we enter Chusy's America with stunning shots of empty rooms that will shortly be inhabited with strange characters. Chapter one is PENANCE, here we come to a trailer park where at 2:00 in the afternoon Gene (Mike Ellis) walks into his trailer for his weekly beating by his wife, Tammy (Mary Griffin). It's simple really, Gene overreacted and now Tammy gets to beat him with a tennis racket every Tuesday. What did he do? Well, he and his redneck R/C racing midget friend Ricky (Brian Fox) overreacted when they found a pistachio nut in between the couch cushions and came to the conclusion that Tammy was having an affair with an Arab man. Seeing the pistachio is the nut of the Middle East. What follows can only be described as plain weird. LOSS is the title of the second chapter. In it, Chusy's daughter Perla Haney-Jardine (the only professional actor in the film) plays a seven year old girl who realizes there's no tooth fairy and goes through a painful incident to realize there really isn't one. Then there's the third and final chapter: IGNORANCE. And it's just that. At times bordering on inappropriate, without giving it away all I can say is a man (Ralph Brierley) who has reached to the heights of the financially elite, thanks in part to his well crafted beard, becomes bored one day and while chewing on a steak comes to a realization.

Many of the characters are interconnected in the stories and some of the gags find their way into the others bringing a Pulp Fiction-like quality to the film. The biggest knock on the movie though is its running time (123 min.). The viewer with extreme patients (like yours truly) is the one who will make it through, though the PENANCE story has constant laughs, the film kind of hits a roadblock at LOSS and takes a while to start up again.

But the performances, cinematography, trippy score and just the flat out strange stories are worth taking the ride. I wouldn't be surprised if the film gains a cult following on the regional fest circuit.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/27/2008 12:51:00 AM Comments (0)

Below is the complete list of Sundance 2008 Winners:

Grand Jury Prize: Documentary
Trouble The Water -- directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal

Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic
Frozen River -- directed by Courtney Hunt

World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary
Man on Wire -- directed by James Marsh

World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic
King of Ping Pong (Ping Pongkingen) -- directed by Jens Jonsson

Audience Award: Documentary
Fields of Fuel -- directed by Josh Tickell

Audience Award: Dramatic
The Wackness -- directed by Jonathan Levine

World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary
Man on Wire -- directed by James Marsh

World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic
Captain Abu Raed -- directed by Amin Matalqa

Directing Award: Documentary
Nanette Burstein for American Teen

Directing Award: Dramatic
Lance Hammer for Ballast

World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary
Nino Kirtadze for Durakovo: Village of Fools (Durakovo: Le Village Des Fous)

World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic
Anna Melikyan for Mermaid (Rusalka)

World Cinema Screenwriting Award
Samuel Benchetrit for I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster (J'ai Toujours Reve D'Etre Un Gangster)

World Cinema Documentary Editing Award
Irena Dol for The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary
Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring for Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Excellence in Cinematography Award: Dramatic
Lol Crawley for Ballast

World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary
al Massad for Recycle

World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic
Askild Vik Edvardsen for King of King Pong (Ping Pongkingen)

Documentary Editing Award
Joe Bini for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award
Alex Rivera and David Riker for Sleep Dealer

Special Jury Prizes

World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic
Blue Eyelids (Parpados Azules) -- directed by Ernesto Contreas

Special Jury Prize: Documentary
Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo -- directed by Lisa F. Jackson

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, The Spirit of Independence
Anywhere, U.S.A. -- directed by Chusy Haney-Jardine

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, Work by an Ensemble Cast
Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald and Brad Henke for Choke

Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking
My Olympic Summer -- directed by Daniel Robin
Sikumi (On the Ice) -- directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean

Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking
Soft -- directed by Simon Ellis

Shorts Jury Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking
Aquarium -- directed by Rob Meyer
August 15th -- directed by Xuan Jiang
La Corona (The Crown) -- directed by Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega
Oiran Lyrics -- directed by Ryosuke Ogawa
Spider -- directed by Nash Edgerton
Suspension -- directed by Nicolas Provost
W. -- directed by The Vikings

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/26/2008 11:39:00 PM Comments (0)

In addition to the competition, juried and audience prizes conferred during the festival, several Sundance co-sponsored special-category prizes are also awarded.

During a Jan. 26 invitation-only reception at the Sundance House in Park City, the $20,000 Alfred P. Sloan Prize was awarded to writer-director Alex Rivera for his debut feature, Sleep Dealer. The film is described in festival programming notes as a “fascinating and prescient work of science fiction.”

The prize, provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes a feature film depicting science or technology as a thematic focus, or a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. Previous recipients have included Mark Decena’s Dopamine, Primer by Shane Carruth and Chen Shi-zheng’s Dark Matter.

A committee of five film and science professionals selected Sleep Dealer for “its visionary and humane tale of a young man grappling with a technological future in which neural implants, telerobotics and ubiquitous computing serve a global economy rife with fundamental challenges and opportunities, and for its powerful and original storytelling and direction.”

Rivera had previously workshopped the film at the 2000 and 2001 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program Labs, and is a prior recipient of the Sundance/NHK award and an Annenberg Feature Film Fellowship. Acknowledging the ongoing support of Institute programs, Rivera noted that “Sundance has been at the side of this project for seven years.” Sleep Dealer debuted in the Dramatic Competition at this year’s festival.

The day before, the Sundance Institute and NHK, Japan’s largest broadcaster, presented the winners of the 2008 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards, selected from a group of 12 finalists.

The four winners were Alejandro Fernandez Almendras (Chile) for Huacho, Braden King (USA) with Here, Radu Jude (Romania) -- The Happiest Girl in the World -- and Aiko Nagatsu (Japan) for Apoptosis. Nagatsu noted that “there are not any awards like this in Japan, so I’m inspired very much.”

The annual award was created in 1996 to honor visionary directors from four global regions (Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan) and support the development and production of their winning narrative feature scripts.

Each director receives a $10,000 cash award and a guarantee from NHK to purchase the Japanese television broadcast rights for their projects, as well as ongoing staff support from the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program with seeking financing and distribution of their films.

# posted by Justin Lowe @ 1/26/2008 07:37:00 PM Comments (0)

The curtain came down on the 14th Slamdance Film Festival last night with a ceremony to announce winners in fifteen categories. Tom Quinn's standout The New Year's Parade, a clear favorite among a pedestrian narrative field, walked away with the grand jury prize, while Greg Kohs' Song Sung Blue won both the jury and audience awards for documentary. A full list of winners follows:


Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature

Prize: $15,000 Credit at Filmworksfx

LP3 Pictures Grip, Electric, and Studio Package ($15,000 value)

$3,500 Credit on legal services from Pierce Law Group, LLP

Winner: "The New Year Parade" directed by Tom Quinn


Special Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Feature

"How To Be" directed by Oliver Irving


Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature

Prize: Panasonic HVX200 Camera

$10,000 Credit Filmworksfx

$3,500 Credit on legal services from Pierce Law Group, LLP

$500 Credit from Discmakers

Winner: "Song Sung Blue" directed by Greg Kohs


Special Jury Honorable Mention for Documentary Feature

Winner: "My Mother¹s Garden" directed by Cynthia Lester


Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short

Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX

Winner: "Blood Will Tell" directed by Andrew McPhillips


Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short

Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX

Winner: "The Ladies" directed by C.A. Voros


Grand Jury Award for Best Experimental Short

Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX

Winner: "Doxology" directed by Michael Langan


Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Short

Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX

Winner: “Son” directed by Daniel Mulloy


Special Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Short

Winner: “4960” directed by Wing-Yee Wu


Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature

Prize: $4,000 Credit from Filmworksfx

Winner: "The Project" directed by Ryan Piotrowicz


Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature

Prize: $4,000 Credit from Filmworksfx

Winner: "Song Sung Blue" directed by Greg Kohs


Global Audience Award for Best Anarchy Film

Prize: $2,500 Credit from Filmworksfx

Winner: "Rock Garden" directed by Gloria Kim


Spirit of Slamdance Award*

Prize: Jagermeister Gift Basket

Winner: "Woman in Burka" directed by Jonathan Lisecki

*Awarded by the 2008 filmmakers, for exhibiting passion and talent as a filmmaker, commitment to the independent community, and enthusiastically embracing all Slamdance has to offer.


Award for Best Feature Length Screenplay

Prize: $7,000 cash

Winner: "The Wonder Girls" by Anthony Meindl


Award for Best Short Screenplay

Prize: $500.00 cash

Winner: "Easy Pickins'" by Will Hartman


Award for Best Teleplay

Prize: $5,000 cash

Winner: "Stage Six Pandemic" by Barbara Marshall


Award for Best Horror Competition Screenplay

Prize: $10,000 cash prize and a production deal with Angel Baby Entertainment & Maverick Films

Winner: "The Punished" by Tony Mosher


Creative Excellence Award for the Horror Screenplay Competition

Prize: $1,000 cash

Winner: "Child in the Dark" by Damian Lahey & Ian Ogden


Kodak Vision Award for Best Cinematography

Prize: $10,000 worth of Kodak film (16mm or 35mm)

This is the 11th year Kodak is sponsoring the Kodak Vision Award at Slamdance

Winner: "Portage" cinematography by Sascha Drews & Ezra Krybus

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/26/2008 12:37:00 PM Comments (1)

Though documentaries are always what I'm most excited about when I go to festivals, none at Sundance really jumped out at me this year... except one.

Brit filmmaker Chris Waitt came to Park City with a delicious doc that's so funny and superbly structured it's hard to believe that it's non-fiction, but he insists that it's all real.

In A Complete History of My Sexual Failures Waitt has recently been dumped, and having never been good with women he takes the moment of emptiness to examine why his life has been full of failed relationships by deciding to look up his old flames and ask them what went wrong.

Armed with a boom mic, huge headphones and a tattered wardrobe, Waitt sits down with his exes (many of them very reluctant to do the interviews) to get the brutal truth about what was wrong with him. Some hated his tardiness to everything, some hated his self-absorption, one was so turned off by him that she stopped dated white people completely and one hated him so much that she would not be filmed for the interview and would only reply to his questions via a computer that would generate automated responses.

But the film isn't just watching Waitt (who also has a puppet show in the works at MTV) crash and burn, during his journey of inadequacy he decides to use the Internet to score some dates. On one where he gets the girl back to his flat a new problem is revealed as Waitt can't close the deal. This begins a sub plot that brings Waitt to a hypnotist, abusing Viagra and a trip to a sado-masochist in a scene that's filled with so much full-frontal hilarity it's hard to imagine how the scene will work once the ratings board gets its hands on it.

With a mix of Borat and Michael Moore, A History of My Sexual Failures can certainly find an audience.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/25/2008 07:30:00 PM Comments (0)

I've still got most of my Sundance commentary to get up and I'm on my way to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where I'll try to file some short reports on the fest and the concurrent Cinemart, which is a great financing conference that plans, this year, to begin a dialogue about how it can be reshaped for the future. (Full disclosure: I'm on the CineMart's Advisory Board.)

From the festival's Tiger Daily:

Eschewing conference and panel formats and instead deploying the tried and tested device of brainstorming towards a consensus, IFFR management and industry experts will sit down this weekend to thrash out how future CineMarts will be shaped. Or to quote the event’s remit: ‘how can CineMart position itself in a world in which the way cinema is produced, distributed and watched changes all the time, and in which digital opportunities offer filmmakers new ways of getting their films made and seen?’

‘This discussion of our future marks the beginning of the new-style CineMart’ comments CineMart head Marit van den Elshout. ‘But our future shape will not be determined in one festival, or one year. I think that it’s important to keep the discussion open. We always try to look at our own festival in a critical way, and that’s why I hope that this discussion will throw up some interesting stuff for us.’

Van den Elshout confirmed that CineMart is looking to install a ‘New Style’ section that will dovetail with the existing project-based format; one that will embrace and encourage, ‘daring new business models, using innovative platforms of distribution and marketing to reach audiences. There is no blueprint for filmmakers to say what the rules are if they want to self-distribute their film,’ she stresses. ‘Or to attract an audience through the internet and then get some revenues back. So I had the idea of incorporating this small digital section within CineMart.’

Sunday afternoon’s debate kicks off with a presentation of three innovative projects by Dutch and international digital filmmakers. These are Mini Movies by Femke Wolting and Bruno Felix (Submarine, the Netherlands), Jeremy Nathan’s Clam (DV8, South Africa) and Illuminated by Josh Store (Illuminated Productions, USA). The afternoon think tank sessions will assess the future focus of the IFFR and CineMart – the basic steps a filmmaker can/should follow in deploying net-based methods to ply their trade, and how national and European funding bodies can accommodate filmmakers within these new business models.

‘It’s not as if we want to re-shape CineMart completely, to throw away the old and start something new,’ Van den Elshout stresses. ‘The core of CineMart is still going to be the projects. Even though they are traditionally-financed, narrative, art-house cinema projects, we still have 800 people coming for them. But I think it’s important to bend things a bit. The good thing about being around for so long is that you can fine tune yourself every year, and that’s why I think CineMart is working so well.’

In the meantime, you and I can both check out GreenCine's coverage of the festival.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/25/2008 06:16:00 PM Comments (0)

While Jamie Stuart has been here at Sundance shooting the goings on, NPR has been shooting him for a short video segment that's now up on their website. We have no idea what Jamie will turn in this year, although we do know that it won't be all shot in the Albertson's parking lot.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/25/2008 02:20:00 PM Comments (0)

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden return to Sundance with another intimate portrait, this time looking at baseball, particularly a Dominican player and how the game not only can change his life but his family's as well if he plays to his potential.

Outside of documentaries, independent filmmakers rarely focus on sports, but you can tell Fleck and Boden are baseball fans, and being a baseball addict myself (three weeks till spring training!) it's fun to see a sports film that isn't sensationalized for widespread appeal. Their film Sugar shows the harsh reality of trying to get into professional sports and is the most realistic narrative film about baseball that I can ever remember seeing.

The film begins in the Dominican Republic at the Kansas City Knights' facility (Films love to use Knights as a team name. The team Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs played for in The Natural was named the New York Knights.) where on the mound young right-hander Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) throws fire as he mows down batter after batter. Nicknamed Sugar for his love of the sweets and the ladies, he finds himself the envy of his small village and on the cusp of going to the States to show his talents to the big club. After a scout shows him how to throw a knuckle curve -- a devastating off-speed pitch that adds to his fastball -- he's called up to spring training with the professional squad in Phoenix.

Though players of Dominican decent are the vast majority in today's game, we see it's still a huge adjustment for them to play for a big league team (though in the Dominican Sugar and the other players take English language classes to learn much-needed phrases like "I've got it," "line drive," "fly ball" and "home run") and dealing with temptations they've never encountered before -- like the hotel minibar.

Sugar wins over the Knights coaches and is put on the club's Single A minor league team in Iowa. There in the farmland horizon where you're lucky to find a Spanish station let alone someone speaking it, Sugar shows if he has what it takes to make it in the pros and give his family back home much-needed financial stability.

Boden and Fleck continue the style they used in Half Nelson and Gowanus -- handheld, intimate camerawork and a limited score -- to capture Sugar's journey which is part fish-out-of-water, part rags-to-riches, but always intriguing and at times heart wrenching to watch, whether you're a baseball fan or not.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/24/2008 07:37:00 PM Comments (0)

Here's a short piece on Clark Gregg's Choke, one of the few Sundance pics to have secured a deal mid-festival. (Hat tip: Hollywood Elsewhere.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/24/2008 12:05:00 AM Comments (0)

Sharon Swart and Mike Jones in Variety are reporting that Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, a character-based thriller starring Melissa Leo which was the first film I saw at Sundance and one of the best, has sold to Sony PIctures Classics for a low-to-mid six-figure sum. I'll try to get some further thoughts about this film up on the blog before the end of the festival.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/23/2008 11:41:00 PM Comments (0)

Mon, Jan 21st 7pm
Thurs, Jan 24th 12:30pm

View from the Bridge - the first documentary feature about post-war Kosovo. Sometimes hopeful, sometimes tragic, the struggle to make peace in Kosovo opens a profound window into the human cost of the politics of hate, and reminds us that the ultimate responsibility for peace lies within us all.

Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?

Laura was a kilometer from the Gaza strip, shooting her new documentary about Israeli musicians who continue to make music (even rehearsing in bomb shelters) while under daily attack from homemade rockets fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza. John was in the decidedly more comfortable position of shooting tabletop food shots in Bermuda.

Getting into Slamdance was exactly what we needed, and we were thrilled to get in. Though Sundance is great, it's kind of like a really expensive dinner by a famous chef; Slamdance is more like the best comfort food ever from a roadside diner. For a film like ours, which was basically made on our own dime with an amazingly devoted team of filmmakers, getting recognition from a festival like Slamdance somehow seemed perfectly right. We're very grateful for the chance to screen here.

When did the two of you begin collaborating on the project?

Laura started working on the project after she met a UN aid worker named Diane Brown who told her about the situation in Kosovo. Production was originally slated for spring of 2002 (without co-director John Ealer), but just before the crew left there was a wave of ethnic riots in Kosovo, and they could no longer gain entrance to the country. With the project on hold, Laura embarked on another huge project, a retrospective film about the Soviet Jewry movement called "Refusenik" (which premiered in December 2007 at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival.) When John, who worked as a cinematographer on Refusenik, heard about the idled Kosovo project, he was intrigued. In 2003, he re-wrote the treatment for the project, focusing on the bridge in Mitrovica and hence the title, VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE;" new treatment in hand he and Laura were able to secure a small seed grant from the Pacific Pioneer Fund.

A year later, in August 2005, with enough grant money in place to only pay for the plane tickets, Laura, John and cinematographer Sarah Levy left for Kosovo to shoot what they thought would be a fund-raising trailer for the doc. But having a protracted pre-production period and very limited funds (read: maxed out credit cards) turned out to be a blessing in disguise. All the research coupled with the remarkable abilities of Albanian producer Behar Zogiani and Serbian producer Jovica Miljkovic blossomed into 15 of the most arduous, yet amazing shooting days of our lives. When we got on the plane to head back to the states, we knew we had enough material for a feature.

Why has tribalism amongst the ethnic groups of the former Yugoslavia persisted with such force?

That's obviously a really tough question, with no easy answer. But when politicians keep drawing distinctions instead of looking for common ground, when people are focused on the past instead of looking to the future, and when the voices of the people in the center are drowned out by the screamers of extremism, you have the start of a recipe for this kind of cyclical violence. One of the things that we touch on the film is that history has been used as a weapon to divide people in Kosovo for hundreds of years. If Serbs and Albanians chose to look for their common heritage and build their common future and forget what happened 600 years ago, that would be a start in breaking the cycle.

I think you also have to look at the history of the region, it's an area that's been conquered and re-conquered over and over. Spending so many centuries under the Ottoman Turks, I think the "tribal instinct" may have developed as a way to preserve the primacy of the local culture in the face of such a strong outside presence.

Have you shown the film in Kosovo?

Yes. We took an early cut of the film to Kosovo in January of 2007. We felt a responsibility to the people who had shared so much of their lives with us to let them see and comment on the film before we finished it. Over and over as we were filming, people commented that news crews came time and time again only to "film and go home." We wanted to film and come back, to share our film with the people and get their feedback.

Originally, we fantasized about having a big multi-ethnic screening in Mitrovica near the bridge, but the security problems were too much to overcome. In the end, we had two screenings, one in Pristina for an all-Albanian audience, and one in North Mitrovica for Serbs.

The two screenings were very, very different. Since Kosovar Albanians are very pro-American -- and because our Albanian producer, Behar Zogiani did an amazing job reaching out to the community there, there was a ton of interest in the movie in the south. We were getting interviewed on the radio, on TV, there were articles in the newspaper leading up to this big screening.

The venue was the old national theater, a big old communist era building with seats for about 350 people, but no real movie screen, nor any real digital video projection system. We had to find someone who had stitched together what looked like a dozen bedsheets to create a screen, and Behar found a local businesswoman who had bought a really bright projector for doing outdoor advertisements, but who couldn't use it because her screen was in tatters.

The night of the screening came, and I swear, it felt like almost everyone in Pristina came. There were news crews from Germany, from Reuters, from the UN. There were dozens of US solders from Camp Bondsteel who had driven for hours to get there. There were prominent politicians, lots of important folks from the UN and the OSCE. People were standing in the aisles - the place was packed to the gills.

To add to the drama, I have to give you a little bit of technical context. Because the Albanian dialect spoken in Kosovo, known as Gheg, is very difficult to translate for anyone not born in Kosovo, we couldn't really finalize the subtitles until we got to Kosovo for the screening. This, you can surely imagine, led to a very interesting post-production flow. Basically, I brought a hard drive with a quicktime of the entire movie on it, and basically edited the subtitles with Behar in the days before the screening. Even if it was technically possible, there was no time to output the film to tape. So here we were with a packed audience of 500 people and I was playing the film out of my laptop! (Gotta give kudos to Apple computer here...) Literally tears of joy came to my eyes when I pressed play and everything went off without a hitch.

We weren't really sure what to expect from the audience as they watched the film; they seemed to get it, reacting as we hoped. I remember as the credits rolled what an amazingly emotional moment I felt it was, like we had shared something amazing with this entire community. We stepped up to the stage for a question and answer session, and one of our favorite characters in the movie stood up and asked a question.

Of course, it was in Albanian, so we couldn't understand it, but Laura and I, basking in that post-screening euphoria, thought he was saying how much he liked the film.

Then came the translation: "You spent hours filming me and there's only a few minutes in the film. Why didn't you put in the part about the Serbs stabbing the pregnant woman in the stomach? Why didn't you put in the part about them killing my dog and cat? Were you just trying to be fair to the Serbs?"

We were of course, a little speechless. I think I answered something like "Well, we did put in the part about how you buried the bodies of your friends and family killed by Serbs, bodies without arms, legs and brains, with their name on a slip of paper in a plastic bottle so they could be ID'ed later."

It just got worse from there, really, as we stood up on stage and were verbally attacked by many people - people who we later found out were well known for having extreme viewpoints. They accused us of trying to be "too" balanced and in doing so, unfairly representing the situation.

At one point, a young man stood up and chastised the audience that they hadn't even watched the film, that they weren't even trying to get it, so wrapped up everyone was in their own political viewpoint.

Anyway, we had a videographer filming the event. I got the tape from him and promptly labelled it "The Kosovo Bloodbath." To this day I'm too scared to watch it. We think our Albanian producer, Behar, who's simply one of the most remarkable human beings on the planet, actually got death threats after the screening, though he's never admitted it to us directly.

The next day was the screening for Serbs in Mitrovica. This event was a lot lower key, as the UN had warned us not to publicize it at all, otherwise they couldn't guarantee our safety.

Only problem was, we had spent so much time working to get the Albanian subtitles right for the first screening that we hadn't had time to get the Serbian subtitles ready. We had already had the entire dialogue list of the film translated into Serbian, so it was just a matter of cutting and pasting all the titles into Final Cut Pro on my laptop.

Long story short, Laura and I spent the day furiously typing titles into the computer, only to see the time approaching when we would have to leave the hotel for the drive to Mitrovica.

We were already running late when we finishing inputting. Problem was, we still needed to render out the movie, which would take about an hour. Well, the drive to Mitrovica takes about an hour...

And so we found ourselves in Behar's old Opel, itself a veteran of the war. Laura behind the wheel, me with my laptop - and hard drive - plugged into the cigarette lighter, rendering away. But the cigarette lighter was broken, and the plug wouldn't stay in unless I held it there.

So there we were, driving at night across nightmarishly bumpy, dark Kosovo roads, Laura at the wheel of the old stick-shift Opel and me bent over trying to make sure the cigarette adaptor didn't pull loose. I turned to Laura: "Whatever you do, don't let the car stall." She just sneered.

The titles finished rendering just as we were parking the car in Mitrovica. We had to park on the south (Albanian) side of the bridge, of course, since the car had Kosovo plates and would likely get stoned if we drove it into the north. So we packed up the computer and hard drive and walked across the bridge to the screening.

The reception from the Serbs was pretty chilly overall, but we didn't get a chance to get a lot of feedback from the Serbs in the audience as we were advised that it probably in our best interests NOT to have a Q & A in North Mitrovica.

The post-mortem of all this craziness is this: The European Planning Team for Kosovo, the group taking over responsibility for the province from the UN this year, has adopted the film as part of its training protocol for all its member states, telling us that they thought it was the most compassionate and balanced portrayal of the situation there. They actually bought 27 copies of the movie - one for every member state. We also screened at the Camp Bondsteel, the big US military base in Kosovo, where we got an amazing reception.

What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?

One of best decisions we made was bringing on Bill Haugse (Hoop Dreams) to edit the film. He has such a gift for the lyrical and poetic, he nailed the tone we were going for right off the bat. That part was easy...

As the title suggests, the film is really a collection of stories, so the biggest challenge was really how to organize and arrange them to make a cohesive and compelling film. It was quite a struggle, to try to make an honest portrayal of the place without biasing the audience one way or the other. Flash cards flying all over the place, the movie taken apart and reassembled over and over again trying to find the alchemy that would make it all stick together.

The other huge problem was figuring how much historical context to put in the film. We definitely needed something in the film to orient the viewer, but we also were determined to make a film that wasn't a history lesson, but an emotional and psychological representation of present-day Kosovo.

Any other projects in the pipeline?

Laura's rolling out Refusenik simultaneously with View from the Bridge, while at the same time starting work on her new film about "music rom the bomb shelter" that I mentioned above.

Meanwhile, Towards Darkness, an independent film I DP'd starring America Ferrera, is being released theatrically this spring, and I continue to shoot features, commercials, and docs.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/23/2008 09:45:00 PM Comments (0)

Fri, Jan 18th 12:30pm
Mon, an 21st 9:30pm

Following the unusual connection made between four workers at different stages of their lives, Under the Snow captures factory life in a way rarely seen: personal, flirtatious, introspective.

Tell us about the premise of Under The Snow? What informs it and when did you conceive of it?

Most of the times it is up to us to change our reality. Hard situations can become, lots of times, better with small changes. Under the Snow proposes game, as a way of changing things. The idea came up while Maitena was working at a snow chains factory. I, started working at that factory just to earn some money and have afternoons free to dedicate to my film projects. I didn´t expect anything but the money at the end of the month. It wasn´t a pretty or very creative job, waking up at 5 am and doing the same thing for 8 hours in a cold and ugly factory. However, I found that I could live life in there, that those eight hours weren´t useless, but eight hours to live, to make friends and to have fun during that "ugly" job. Just little changes in the way of working could become that grey factory into a colourful one.

What we're the biggest challenges in creating the look and texture of the images?

Honestly, the main challenge was having almost no crew and no lights. Besides, "Under the snow" takes place in the winter and we had to shoot it in the summer. We didn´t want that the lack of money forced us to have a determined style, we didn´t want to refuse to have a camera car, or dolly, we didn´t want to use hand held because is cheaper, so we made a creative effort and we designed and made a dolly, a camera car and we used natural light as much as we could. So we could have the style we wanted and not the style of no having money determined.

Tell us alittle bit about your background, both as people and filmmakers?

Candela is from Argentina, while Maitena is from Spain. We met at UCLA Extension in Los Angeles, studying film. We became friends and also we worked together in some short films, where we realized that we were a very good working team. In 2004 we created a production company in Pamplona, Spain, to start creating and producing our own projects.

Is the film playing Slamdance largely the film you initially imagined, or did you find it in the editing process?

Definitely, is the film we initially imagined. Since we were writing we knew exactly what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it. Every scene and every shot had its purpose, we found new lights in the editing process, but the film we imagined remained the same.

Can we expect more of the same, or do you plan to work in other genres and forms?

There will be some elements from "Under the snow" in our next movies because of our own style of telling and making films, but we will use the genre and form that is better for the story we want to tell.

What projects are down the pipeline?

Actually, our next project, which we are rewriting now, has nothing to do with "Under the snow" relating to genre and form. It is a romantic comedy we are planning to shoot in october/november 2009 in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Pamplona (Spain).

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/23/2008 09:36:00 PM Comments (0)

Sun, Jan 20th 11am
Wed, Jan 23rd 2:30pm

A young couple go to a deserted lake for some time alone and during a walk in the lakeside hills a past indiscretion is confessed.

Tell us about the premise of The Whole Day Through? What informs it and when did you conceive of it?

What I think is the base of the film is my relationship to the place I am from, Saskatchewan. In that sense it’s a regional film and I am proud of that fact and I think it’s a strength maybe even radical. I watch a lot of world cinema too and have heavy influences from some of my first loves like Bergman and Antonioni, but recently I have been drawn towards the Taiwanese New Wave, particularly the films of Hou Hsiao Hsien and Tsai Ming Liang. In this way, I have two forces pulling me in different directions, one desire to make films for my hometown and another to make films for the Cannes’ and Toronto’s. The film is almost the literal translation of those feelings, the desire to be free and unencumbered while simultaneously craving the familiarity and stablity of home.

What we're the biggest challenges in creating the look and filmic texture? Why 35mm?

When you work with black and white film you have a range from deep blacks through shades of greys to brillant whites. The ideal is to have that range in every shot. Lea Nakonechny, the cinematographer, did a fantastic job getting that range using mostly available light and creating the moonlite night scenes. The other great attritbute of B+W is that patterns and textures come to the fore and when you’re making a film of static shots you can’t rely on camera movement for visual flair so you start bringing in different textures for visual excitement.

The choice to shoot on 35mm was because I have great respect for the medium and for the filmmakers who used it before us. When you go to the cinema and see your 35mm film print projected on the big screen you feel a part of a great tradition. We (Arid Sea Films) went out and bought an old ’68 Arri 2C 35mm MOS camera, the same Stanley Kubrick used back in his heyday, and used it to shoot the film. The camera is a tank. It’s a simple mechanical device so it’s completely fixable and usable forever.

What are the biggest challenges that you face as a short filmmaker in a world that prioritizes and commercializes feature filmmaking in ways that shorts aren't?

The biggest challenge is always the expectation that your film is a stepping stone. I’ve had comments made to me that I shouldn’t be wasting my time with shorts ’make features that’s where the money’s at!’ I am a part of the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative and they make a couple dozen shorts a year and the films are so important to the community and the filmmakers that it makes the above comment seem ugly and repressive. Short film may not be important in the mainstream, but on the local level it’s vital to a communities sense of identity.

Tell us alittle bit about your background.

I am from Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada and have lived in the province for my entire life, save the last eight months in Montréal. I was educated at the community college in Swift Current and then moved onto Regina, the capital, where I studied film production. By age ten I had snared and killed several gophers, by age thirteen I was driving double-axle grain trucks for harvest, and by sixteen I owned a bar in a small town named Elrose. I also played hockey, was on the school wrestling team and played baseball in the summer. Now I make film, art video and performance art.

Can we expect more of the same, or do you plan to work in other genres and forms?

The next work will be taking the concept of the static image to the next logical step - cinematic stills.

What projects are down the pipeline?

The next project will be a short film from Lea Nakonechny. We take turns at Arid Sea Films with productions, so I have to wait a couple years to direct again.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/23/2008 09:31:00 PM Comments (0)

This week, I attended the Sundance panel, Alternative Storytelling For New Digital Media Platforms at the New Frontier on Main. The panelists were:

Wendy Levy (Moderator), Bay Area Video Coalition
Claire Aguilar, Independent Television Service
Bernhard Drax, Life4-uTV
Nick De Martino, American Film Institute
Elspeth Revere, MacArthur Foundation
Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield, Hoodlum Entertainment
Susanna Ruiz, Darfur is Dying

In this clip, Susanna Ruiz points out value in the massive volume of media content on the Internet, even as most of it is "crap." The crap serves both as a repository of content to be reinterpreted and placed in new contexts (the "remix culture") and as its own art to be judged by many groups of individuals, rather than by a select group of gatekeepers.

Moderator Wendy Levy follows with mention of curation. She says, "we're trying to get away from YouTube and more into spaces where we find trusted guides." I don't think getting away from YouTube is exactly how I'd put it, but rather that there is a need to serve both the curation and aggregation functions.



I am reminded of discussions I had this week with friends at YouTube and Wholphin DVD.

YouTube, like the rest of Google, has indicated that it will never create content, and its curation of content is even limited to featuring a few videos on the front page and in the different sections (Film and Animation, Pets & Animals, etc.). The value that audiences and content creators find in YouTube is mainly transactional: easy and fast posting, searching and viewing of (and advertising on) videos. YouTube is a platform, which has been expensive to create, but is vastly scalable and essential to many.

On the other end, there is Wholphin, a DVD magazine of short films, published quaterly by McSweeney's. The Wholphin team, consisting of only two people, travel to film festivals and solicit submissions to see hundreds, if not thousands of short films. They meet many filmmakers personally and pay all of them for the rights to license their films. It is a painstaking process that is most certainly not scalable without sacrificing quality, but the start-up capital costs are comparatively low. The delivery of the resulting DVD - published only four times a year, in high-end packaging, graphic design by Dave Eggers, with a booklet of "liner notes" - reflects the desired audience experience, completely the opposite of YouTube.

These two models complement, rather than compete with each other, and neither can be dismissed. I'm looking forward to exploring ways in which the two can work more tightly together.

# posted by Brian Chirls @ 1/23/2008 01:47:00 PM Comments (0)

As I didn't get into Park City until Sunday night, I've been playing catch-up for the most part, trying to get the pulse of this year's fest (which for the most part hasn't been the feeding frenzy in terms of deals as last year), and trying to see as many films as possible (and hitting some parties). So far Daniel Barnz's debut feature Phoebe In Wonderland has stuck in my mind the most. Barnz was named one of our "25 New Faces" this past summer so I knew a little about him and his work before going in, but it's one thing to read someones work on paper and gratifyingly another when it translates even better on screen.

With amazing performances by Elle Fanning, Patricia Clarkson and Felicity Huffman, this fantastical look at a young girl's medical illness, how her parents and teachers deal with it and how Alice In Wonderland relates to it all is entertaining, gripping and beautifully crafted.

Fanning (sister of Dakota) plays Phoebe, an imaginative girl who wins the part of Alice in the school rendition of Alice In Wonderland, and in her stress to play the part begins to show OCD-like tendencies, but her parents and teachers are either too naive or too scared to recognize it.

In a tour-de-force performance by Fanning (do the Fanning siblings do any less?) we see her deteriorate before our eyes but Barnz creates a Heavenly Creatures-like world in which she travels into as Phoebe finds solace in the Alice in Wonderland characters. As the film moves on fantasy overtakes reality leaving to a conclusion that many may feel is a little too campy but it's the journey you take to get there that's the thing that kept me into it.

Barnz's screenplay and the production design brings out the feel of watching a stage play, so having stage vets like Clarkson, Huffman, Bill Pullman and Campbell Scott raises the bar.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1/23/2008 08:45:00 AM Comments (0)

When they announce the nominations later this week for most innovative Sundance party, the films Half-Life and Portland are sure to get mentioned.  Eric Singeltary of Iconoclastic Features arranged to host a party in a yurt, half way up the mountain at The Canyons ski resort. Transportation included a ride in a Snow Cat along a thin windy trail with a wonderful view of the steep slope below. The yurt, a large circular sturdy tent on a platform, came equipped with a full bar, an extensive chocolate fondue and a wood burning stove.  Robert Zimmer, producer of Half-Life and Eric even had a raffle with prizes from Adobe and The Canyons resort. Kudos for thinking outside the box.

# posted by Ian Gilmore @ 1/23/2008 07:48:00 AM Comments (0)

Writer and d.p. David Leitner sent us this report about two new cameras that can be seen here at the Sundance Film Festival.

Located in the basement of a small commercial mall on upper Main Street across from the Egyptian theater, the annual Sundance technology showcase known as New Frontier on Main is particularly worth a visit this year due to two product introductions poised to rock the world of low-budget HD indie production. Word is already out about Sony's EX1, a Handycam-type camcorder bearing both XDCAM EX and CineAlta logos for a strikingly low $7,790 suggested retail price. In a nutshell, EX1 features three 1920x1080 1/2" CMOS sensors, a built-in Fujinon zoom with both mechanical and electronic control, choice of 25Mbps format (equivalent to HDV) and higher-quality 35Mbps format (full 1920x1080 recording), capture to new flash-memory PCExpress cards called SxS (half the size of P2), and a workflow already supported by Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 and Premiere Pro among others. OK, that would be banner news by itself, but Sony is also introducing at the end of February a follow-up (not replacement) to the Z1 (still in production) called the Z7 ($6,850), as well as a shoulder-mount version of the Z7 called the S270 ($10,500). The Z7 and S270 are shot through with breakthroughs: three 1/3" CMOS sensors; HDV, DVCAM, and/or DV to both tape and -- get this! -- Compact Flash (i.e., simultaneous recording of HD and SD); interchangeable lenses including Sony's new Digital SLR Alpha still lenses; and a sharper, finer-grained viewfinder than that of EX1. Moreover, all three of these new HD camcorders -- EX1 and Z7/S270 -- feature greatly improved sensitivity to light, fully matching Sony's PD150/170 series. If you don't believe me, put their sensitivity to the test in the dark, club-like environment of the New Frontier on Main.

So... why would Sony introduce two professional Handycam-type camcorders at the same time, at about the same price? Could it be that one was designed by the CineAlta design group that brought us the F900 and F23 while the other was designed by the prosumer division in a gesture of intra-corporate one-upsmanship? Speculation aside, the EX1 has been mobbed at New Frontier. For my money, however, the real showstopper is its smaller neighbor, a Z7 mounted with a 7mm Zeiss DigiPrime, Fujinon 2/3". to 1/3". optical adapter, and Chroziel follow-focus with matte box. All of these and more --including Sony's remarkable new compact PCM-D50 flash-memory audio recorder, which I'm already using to record voiceovers for an indie feature I'm producing -- will be on display through Saturday, the last day of Sundance. So work your way down to the basement of the mall on upper Main Street and check them out for yourself -- and don't forget to peek through that glorious Z7 color viewfinder! -- David Leitner

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/23/2008 01:23:00 AM Comments (1)

... over at the Filmmaker Director Interviews.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/23/2008 01:03:00 AM Comments (0)

I met with Perla Haney-Jardine (Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Dark Water) at the party for her new film Anywhere, USA. Among a cast of new actors, along with first-time director/writer dad Chusey Haney-Jardine and first-time producer/writer mom Jennifer MacDonald, Perla was one of the most experienced hands on set. We discussed what it was like to work on a family film, as well as her Sundance experience and the film's prospects for distribution.

# posted by Brian Chirls @ 1/23/2008 12:30:00 AM Comments (0)

Sad, sad news about a great actor who meant so much to the film community. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and friends.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/22/2008 11:35:00 PM Comments (0)

It happened maybe a day later than last year, but the acquisitions floodgates have opened a bit at the Sundance Film Festival. But it wasn't the typical first-weekend films that enthused distributors. In Variety, Ann Thompson is reporting that Focus Features has bought Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2, which debuted at the unsexy time of Monday at 5:30 in a deal she pegs at over $10 million for worldwide rights. The film stars Steve Coogan as an English teacher who writes a sequel to Shakespeare's play in other to rescue the school's theater department. Perhaps more significantly, the film is directed by an established director, Andrew Fleming (whose Dick is one my favorite underrated comedies) and scripted by South Park writer/producer Pam Brady. The deal is Focus's first film festival acquisition in quite a while, and it comes on the day that the company's Atonement received a Best Picture Oscar nom.

Thompson and Sharon Swart have two other announcements: Fox Searchlight has bought Clark Gregg's debut feature Choke for a reported $5 million (for the world minus a few territories) and Overture Films, whose first release, Mad Money, debuted this past weekend, has picked up U.S. rights to Mark Pellington's Henry Poole is Here, which stars Luke Wilson and Radha Mitchell, for a reported $3.5 million

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 1/22/2008 03:23:00 PM Comments (0)

At the halfway point at this year's Slamdance Film Festival, few films have emerged as consensus favorites among festivalgoers. So far, the documentary competition seems to boast a much stronger roster of titles than the narrative side. Although it hardly qualifies as a market, in this year of cautious buyers in Park City, no films have picked up significant sales buzz, the way The King of Kong did at last year's festival, where it sold to Picturehouse before its first screening.

Among the strongest titles on the doc side are Adjust Your Color: The Truth About Petey Greene and a harrowing account of a man who simply would not leave his severely flooded New Orleans neighborhood in Katrina's wake, Holdout. Especially thought provoking is Cynthia Lester's My Mother's Garden, which takes an unflinching look at the director's mother, a Polish immigrant afflicted with a form of OCD known as Hoarding Disorder. The film chronicles Cynthia and her disparate siblings attempt to help their wayward parent, whose house is filled to the brim with trash and barely valuable collectibles. Her compulsion is unforgiving and we sense the loneliness and emotional insecurities that have fed her disorder in a conventionally structured doc that tracks the effects of the intervention staged by her children.

At a Q&A following the film, Eugenia joined her daughter, stressing that the roots of her problems, which she claims to have been fully aware of before she was forced to seek treatment, rest in her coming of age amongst scarred Holocaust survivors. Not quite as wrenching or aesthetically provocative as Capturing The Friedmans, the film nonetheless is a sneakily powerful portrait of a family torn asunder by secrets, mental illness and denial, with several of Cynthia's siblings having been unaware of just how out of hand Engenia's disorder had gotten until Los Angeles officials threatened to take her house. It's an honest and mature look at a troubled woman, engaging it's subject's neuroses with humor and concern, suggesting, without malice, how her instability led her children down precarious paths that they have seeming recovered from gracefully.

Although the narratives have been a shallower pool, with disappointments ranging from Frost, a brisk Cameron Crowe rip-off that can't hit all of its telegraphed genre beats with anything resembling nuance or style, to The Project, the Brooklyn indie film within a Brooklyn indie film that follows a trio of white filmmakers attempting to document the lives of dope dealing inner city black kids with increasingly exploitative and personally dangerous results, Tom Quinn's magnificent The New Year Parade has easily assumed the mantle of film to beat in the narrative competition.

Rough around the edges, with a temp score that uses Elliot Smith's soulful downer ballads to better effect than Good Will Hunting, the film delves into a year in the lives a a disintegrating family in South Philadelphia's Irish enclaves. Something of a naturalistic, blue collar The Squid and The Whale, the pic revolves around the effect of an infidelity and the power struggle that ensues between parents, as they fight a proxy war through their children. Quinn, who wrote, directed, shot, and edited himself with a bare bones crew, has made a consistently touching movie in which all of his characters, even the most flawed (which, like Baumbach's marital strife narrative, is the mother) are seen with empathy. Quinn creates a recognizable and multi-textured world for his characters to inhabit; South Philadelphia is clearly a place he has thought much about, one tinged with decay and regret, but also love, humor and beauty.

The New Year Parade brims with wonderful glimpses of spaces the cinema rarely visits. Quinn, whose deftness with performers equals his eye for authentic detail, uses real South Philly marching bands, has his characters visit Geno's Steaks and he depicts the unraveling of the family against the backdrop of the implosion of Veteran's Stadium, incorporating into the film a series of places and cultural events that resonate in this working class milieu. Unlike so many bourgeois filmmakers condescending to poor or working class characters (see The Project, or the much hyped Ballast over at Sundance, but more on that somewhere else), seeing their lives as mere vacuums of pain and aesthetic playgrounds in which the filmmakers can work out their own complexes of guilt and lack of understanding in narratives weighed down by arty pretensions, THe New Year Parade, with its flat narrative, subtle sensitivity to class, gently crafted performances by non or marginal actors and its rough hewn yet entirely appropriate hand held camerawork, does many of the things American Independent films have traditionally done well.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/22/2008 12:38:00 PM Comments (0)

Sat, Jan 19th, 10:45pm

After witnessing the brutal murder of his family, plumber Jack Brooks is left with an unquenchable fury that he is constantly fighting to control. One night, Jack attempts to fix a professors old, rusted pipes, but unknowingly awakens an ancient evil.

Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?

White: I was at a shopping mall in Vancouver and I was thrilled we had gotten in, I then immediately called Jon and Trevor to share the news, and started thinking what could we do to stand out at the festival.

How were you able to find financing for the project?

White: We had private investment and we were very lucky that our investor believed in us and supported us.

What debt does the film owe to the tradition of schlocky horror cinema? What film or filmmakers provided some influence?

Knautz: The film was certainly influenced by classic 80’s horror films such as They Fly, Gremlins and the Evil Dead Trilogy. We wanted to make something reminiscent of those kind of movies so CGI was out of the question.

How did Mr. Englund become involved?

Matthews: Robert was our number one choice for the role, we knew that he had a big following from Freddy Kreuger and we were all hugely influenced by Nightmare on Elm Street. We sent him a demo and he enjoyed our short film “Still Life” we then sent him a draft of the script and he signed on.


What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?

Knautz: Shooting the monsters was difficult. Though they looked great, there were certain things I needed them to do that would unfortunately make them look corny. So the biggest challenge in post was to hang on the monster shots long enough so that they would feel menacing, but not too long so that they would feel fake. There were times where my editor and I just had to bite the bullet, for the most part I feel the monsters work well.

Any other projects in the pipeline?

Matthews: Currently we are developing several original ideas into scripts, we are also looking into doing a remake as well as optioning some books. We will be producing a new feature film this year.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/21/2008 09:34:00 PM Comments (0)

Sat, Jan 19th, 4:30pm
Thurs, Jan 24th, 11am

In this tragic farce, Kate, after failing the bar exam, realizes that law is not for her. With no sense of a life-plan, she takes a job house cleaning and at first finds comfort in the repetition and routine of the work, but repetition and routine only go so far.

Tell us about the genesis of the project and your preoccupations as a filmmaker.

I thrive on work. So, on a practical level, ANECDOTE came about because I was just about to finish post-production on my third film, and the anxiety of being without another project to fall into was enough to start me writing again.

I'm interested in characters that have a fixed view of the world, but a view that's at odds with reality. When this is the case there are only two possibilities for the character, either giving up on reality or giving up on ideas. I find it depressing when the character gives up on ideas. In this story, the character follows her rigid ideas to the bitter end, and I suppose that's just as depressing, but at least she acts out of her own will -- I find some hope in that.

Where were you when you found out you'd gotten into Slamdance? How did you react?

I was in my apartment in Paris, and I guess I was happily shocked. This was made with a crew of three (the director of photography, the production designer, and myself) for no money, and it's thirty minutes long, which most say is too long for a short if you actually want it to get into a festival.

How were you able to find financing for the project?

Equipment and props were borrowed; there wasn't one rental. It was shot in my hometown – in locations that I knew I had access to, so the only costs were food and transportation. The budget ended up being around $1000, and I was able to borrow this from my family, who are kind and crazy enough to believe in a return one day.

Do you consider yourself a cinephile? What debt does the film owe to other films or filmmakers provided some influence?

Certainly, I'm an addict.

For this particular project, I was watching and re-watching the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Eric Rohmer, Nicholas Ray, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (but he's a constant).

Also, I put into a practice a lot of what I learned from the filmmaker, Julia Loktev, whom I interned for while she was in pre-production for DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT: namely, that you should produce a film as you see fit, big crews are a myth, and video has an integrity all its own.

Why Black & White?

First, because I love black and white video – the tonal range of the grays is so rich – and it's very rarely used. Secondly, black and white immediately makes things seem remote. Since the story concerns a cleaning woman and takes place in very average middle-class houses, I wanted to make it both beautiful and remote so that the viewer might notice what a strange place this average world can be.

What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?

With my three previous short films I had to reconstruct the story almost entirely in the editing room. This was not the case with ANECDOTE – this one actually matched the script. Here, the challenge was the sound. I had to do lots of ADR (not in a studio, but in my parents' basement) and foley hundreds of sounds.

Is this your first time on the festival circuit with a short?

Yes.

Any other projects in the pipeline?

Of course. A feature called THE BLIND. It's the story of the doomed relationship of a young couple and their inevitable descent into marriage. I'm currently seeking funding.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/21/2008 09:13:00 PM Comments (0)

Mon, Jan 21st, 10:45pm

Based on the popular comic series from Imperium Comics, six troubled teens and their optimistic youth ministries pastor are returning from a character building retreat when their van is crippled during a raging storm and they find themselves hopelessly stranded in the middle of a remote southern legend: the Trucker’s Triangle.

Timothy Dolan

Where were you and how did you react when you were told you'd been accepted to Slamdance?

I was actually in the middle of writing for my current project and I got a call from the Producer, Jonathan Bogner, telling me that Trailer Park of Terror had been accepted into Slamdance. I was totally pumped. Selected by one of the biggest film festivals in the country? Shut up. I stopped writing and started celebrating. Then that annoying little voice in the back of my head began to chide me, saying, "Why aren't you writing, Tim?", so I put down the glass and started writing again.

How were you able to find financing for the project?

If I was lost in the Mojave I would want Jonathan Bogner there with me. I mean, if he can find water the way he finds money to finance films, I'd set up camp. The guy is amazing.

Why trailer parks?

Mainly because the film is based on the comic book series of t