HAPPY NEW YEAR!

By Scott Macaulay

Happy New Year, everyone, and best wishes for a great ’07 from everyone at Filmmaker.… Read the rest

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

By Scott Macaulay

We’ve got no snazzy holiday photo, cute graphic, or cool short film (see “Christmas Blackout,” below)… just good wishes for everyone. From all of us at Filmmaker, we hope you are well and having a great holiday!… Read the rest

GARRETT SCOTT DOCUMENTARY DEVELOPMENT GRANT

By Scott Macaulay

Thom Powers emailed the below, an announcement of the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant, so created in memory of the talented documentary filmmaker and wonderful, passionate and engaged person who passed away this past Spring.

What: This grant funds first time documentary makers for travel and accommodations at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, April 12-15, 2007. For four days, grant recipients will be given access to films, participate in master classes and be mentored by experienced filmmakers. TWO filmmakers will be chosen for the grant in its first year.

Deadline: Applications must be postmarked by February 5. Applicants will be notified by email in mid-March.

About the Grant: Garrett Scott made a distinctive mark in documentary films during his short career. Without any formal training in film, he directed Cul De Sac: A Suburban War Story, examining the case of a methamphetamine addict who stole a tank from an armory and went on a rampage through the San Diego suburbs. The film prompted Filmmaker Magazine to cite Scott as one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film. He went on to make Occupation: Dreamland, co-directed with Ian Olds, about U.S. soldiers in Falluja, Iraq. It won prizes at Full Frame and the Independent Spirit Awards. Both films were broadcast by the Sundance Channel. In 2005, Scott died of a heart attack at age 37.

Scott’s work examined how the forces of state power and economics impact individuals. Stylistically, his films broke convention, giving audiences new perspectives on familiar milieus like suburbia or war torn Iraq. He was a beloved member of film communities from San Francisco to New York City and several points in between.

His friends, family and colleagues established this development grant to help other emerging filmmakers reach their potential. The grant’s selection committee looks especially for filmmakers who somehow fulfill Scott’s example, by bringing a unique vision to the content and style of contemporary documentary making.

Criteria: Applicants must be a U.S. citizen or green card holder, living in the continental United States; any age 18 or older. By “first time filmmaker,” we mean someone

… Read the rest

CHRISTMAS BLACKOUT

By Scott Macaulay

Check out Jamie Stuart’s holiday card, below, wishing us all a good holiday season.

… Read the rest

A NEW HUMANITY

By Scott Macaulay

If you only bookmark this blog and don’t regularly check out the main page, click over to Jason Guerrasio’s web-only interview with Alfonso Cuaron, whose Children of Men opened yesterday.

Here’s Cuaron in an excerpt:

I hope young people will see this film. I mean my generation, we blew it. I think we grew up in a world that was pre-idyllic, and we saw the world collapse in front of us and we tried to believe that it was not our fault, that it was not our responsibility. We felt powerless about the situations as if they were very overwhelming and there’s a certain sense of guilt involved in the whole thing. Younger generations, they were born in a world that went to shit already so they have a completely different perspective of what’s going on. I really believe in the evolution of human understanding that’s happening in [the younger] generation and the generation to come. My intention was to take [the viewer on] a road trip through the state of things and then once you go through this journey for you to try to come up with your own conclusions about the possibility of hope in a world like this. At the end I cannot dictate a sense of hope for anybody because a sense of hope is something that’s very internal. We wanted the end to be a glimpse of a possibility of hope, for the audience to invest their own sense of hope into that ending. So if you’re a hopeful person you’ll see a lot of hope, and if you’re a bleak person you’ll see a complete hopelessness at the end.

… Read the rest

CINEMATECH’S TECH TEN PIVOTAL EVENTS

By Scott Macaulay

I’ve been working on a piece for the next Filmmaker, a kind of year-end review of significant business developments in the world of independent film. Many of them are on Scott Kirsner’s “10 Pivotal Events of 2006,” which he’ just blogged over at his CinemaTech.

Check out his commentary and if you like it, consider downloading his e-book, The Future of Web Video: Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers, which is a straightforward and sober primer on the current state of distributing video through the web. In addition to a chart listing revenue opportunities for independent producers, the book contains solid advice on how to think about the creation of work with an eye towards web distribution.… Read the rest

A NEW HUMANITY
By Jason Guerrasio

CLIVE OWEN AND JULIANNE MOORE IN CHILDREN OF MEN.

Set in 2027, Alfonso Cuarón’s latest picture, Children of Men, takes place in a bleak England where it’s been 19 years since the last baby was born. Mankind’s future seems grim, and most of the world has devolved into anarchy. Random security checks and bombings have become an everyday occurrence as Great Britain franticly tries to protect its island from illegal immigrants.

Theo, played by Clive Owen, spends his days in a drunken haze, often escaping the city to smoke pot with his old hippie-friend Jasper (Michael Caine) in the country. But when he’s abducted by a group of refugee freedom fighters headed by his old lover Julian (Julianne Moore), his perspective on life quickly changes. Julian wants Theo’s help transporting a young girl named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) out of the country. Theo soon learns Kee is pregnant and is being brought to The Human Project, a group working towards the creation of a new society. But transporting the girl to the people who can possibly save mankind won’t be easy…

Loosely based on P.D. James’s novel, Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) creates in Children of Men both a heart-pounding futuristic thriller and, like all good science fiction, a complex meditation on the politics of today, most notably the debate on immigration. Shooting handheld with minimal cutting during the action sequences, Cuarón successfully thrusts the audience into the center of the action, turning scenes like a 12-minute roadside ambush into a creative tour-de-force.

Cuarón took time out to talk about the film, his motivation to make it and why he feels his generation “blew it.”

(LEFT TO RIGHT) CLIVE OWEN, DP EMMANUEL LUBEZKI, AND DIRECTOR ALFONSO CUARÓN.

Filmmaker: How did you become interested in adapting and then making Children of Men?

Alfonso Cuarón: It was when I realized that the premise of the book, the premise of infertility and humanity, could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope that I feel humanity has [today]. … Read the rest

REVERSE ENGINEERING

By Scott Macaulay

I’m a big Michel Gondry fan, just as much so after viewing the YouTube video below which treats his latest frippery, the “Michel Gondry solves the Rubik’s Cube with his Feet” YouTube clip, as a modern day Zapruder film, playfully debunking it in the process.

… Read the rest

FOUR EYED MONSTERS WINS UNDISCOVERED GEMS FILM SERIES

By Jason Guerrasio

Susan Buice and Arin Crumley‘s Four Eyed Monsters has won the 2006 Sundance Audience Award for the eight-month long indieWIRE: Undiscovered Gems Film Series. The series’ co-presenters The New York Times and New York-based digital cinema network Emerging Pictures (co-founded by IFP Board Member Ira Deutchman), in association with the California Film Institute and The Sundance Channel, made the announcement last night. Winning the prize gives the movie the opportunity for a theatrical release through Emerging Pictures and a TV premiere on Sundance Channel. The award is valued at $100,000.

The Undiscovered Gems Series is based on indieWIRE‘s annual list of the top 15 films from major festivals that don’t have theatrical distribution. The film series began in April 2006 with Jem Cohen‘s Chain, followed by the Duplass Brothers‘ Puffy Chair in May, Georgia Lee‘s Red Doors in June, Andrew Bujalski‘s Mutual Appreciation in August, Kyle Henry‘s Room in September, Paul Cox‘s Human Touch in October, and Massaker, a film by Monika Berggman, Nina Menkes, Lokman Slim and Hermann Theissen, in November.

Through Emerging Pictures’ digital network, the Undiscovered Gems collaboration this year brought one film per month from indieWIRE’s list to 20 screens across the country. The winner was determined by audience balloting at each venue.

With the support of Sundance Channel, an audience award competition began this year to help provide the winning filmmaker with an opportunity of a theatrical release in New York, LA, and a minimum of five other US cities in 2007, as well as an exclusive TV broadcast on Sundance Channel.… Read the rest

SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES 2007 SCREENWRITERS LAB PROJECTS

By Jason Guerrasio

Below is the list of feature film projects accepted to the annual Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab. The Lab, which has grown to become as prominent in the indie world as the Festival, has an impressive list of past projects including Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Requiem For A Dream and Raising Victor Vargas. And in January recent projects from the Lab like Four Sheets To The Wind, Red Road and Year of the Fish will have their moment to shine as they all will be playing at the Festival.

The projects selected for the 2007 January Screenwriters Lab are:

THE BOOK OF INTERNAL GRAMMAR/Nir Bergman, writer/director, (Israel)
Set in the early 1960′s, THE BOOK OF INTERNAL GRAMMAR tells the story of ten-year-old Aaron, son of holocaust survivors, who struggles to cross the elusive boundary from childhood to maturity despite his body’s refusal to grow.

CIRCUMSTANCE/Maryam Keshavarz, writer/director, (U.S.A./Iran)
CIRCUMSTANCE tells the story of how a single event – a soldier’s death at the Iran/Iraq border – irrevocably connects the lives of four people across continents.

COLD SOULS/Sophie Barthes, writer/director, (U.S.A.)
In the midst of an existential crisis, a famous American actor stumbles upon a Soul Storage, a private lab offering New Yorkers a relief from the burden of their souls.

DOG SECURITY/Jorge Gaggero, writer/director, (Argentina)
In a society that fosters fear and paranoia, a family takes measures to protect their home only to find themselves mirroring the violence they were trying to escape.

THE GIRL/David Riker, writer/director, (U.S.A.)
A young mother from South Texas is thrown into an unexpected and life-changing journey when her attempt to smuggle immigrants across the border goes terribly wrong.

GREEN/Peter Craig, writer/director, (U.S.A.)
Gil Green, whose only accomplishments in the past two decades are smoker’s lung and an orange belt in karate, has his life completely disrupted by his presumed-dead brother, who returns home after a 19 year absence with some highly ambitious plans.

HAITI CHERIE/Patricia Benoit, writer/director, (U.S.A./Haiti)
Three refugees from Haiti start a new life in the United States, but shedding the past is impossible when it is marred … Read the rest