KURT KUENNE, “DEAR ZACHARY: A LETTER TO A SON ABOUT HIS FATHER”

By Nick Dawson

DIRECTOR KURT KUENNE WITH ZACHARY BAGBY IN KUENNE’S DEAR ZACHARY: A LETTER TO A SON ABOUT HIS FATHER. COURTESY OSCILLOSCOPE PICTURES & MSNBC FILMS.

Since he was a boy, making films has been at the very center of Kurt Kuenne’s life. He fell in love with the movies as a kid growing up in Silicon Valley in Southern California, and already at the age of seven began trying to emulate his heroes by shooting films on Super 8 and then later VHS cameras, using friends and family as actors. Kuenne studied film at USC’s prestigious School of Cinema-Television (where he won the Harold Lloyd Scholarship in Film Editing), and there wrote and directed the short Remembrances (1995), which drew praise from Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. After graduation, he completed a degree in movie music composing, also at USC. Kuenne made his directorial feature debut with Scrapbook (1999), an intense drama about two brothers, and followed it up two years later with the documentary Drive-In Movie Memories. In addition to scoring movies, since 2004 Kuenne has been working on a series of comedy shorts, including The Phone Book and Slow (both 2008), which have played extensively on the festival circuit and won numerous prizes in the process.

Kuenne’s latest movie, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, sees him return to non-fiction with one of the most searingly personal films in recent memory. It centers on the tragic story of Dr. Andrew Bagby, a lifelong friend of Kuenne’s who was killed in 2001, and follows the Bagby family’s quest for justice after the prime suspect – Bagby’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Shirley Turner – fled to Canada to escape prosecution. The film loosely takes the form of a letter addressed to Zachary, Bagby’s son who Turner was carrying when he was murdered, as Kuenne interviews all of the dead man’s friends and relations in order to let Zachary know about his father. The film is essentially all Kuenne’s work – he wrote, directed, shot, narrated, produced, edited, recorded the sound and wrote the score – and … Read the rest

SHORTSNONSTOP AWARDS BAD HEAD DAY

The Canadian Film Centre and SHORTSNONSTOP Mobile Festival announced this week that this quarter’s best short film is Mexican filmmaker Karen Weiss‘s Bad Head Day. Weiss will be awarded a $1500 cash prize.

Launched in 2007, SHORTSNONSTOP is in its second year and awards a $1500 cash prize each quarter to the best short film selected by an international jury. Learn more on how to submit your film, here. Next deadline is Jan. 15.

Weiss’s Bad Head Day

… Read the rest

AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL

Originally posted on the Filmmaker blog, here’s Graham Flashner’s coverage of the Austin Film Festival.

posted 10/21/08

It’s not often that a movie receives a standing ovation at the end of a film festival screening. The only time I saw it happen was at Cannes for Haskell Wexler’s Latino, a film with anti-American sentiments. But Danny Boyle’s exuberant Slumdog Millionaire received a similarly rapturous greeting after its Austin premiere.

It’s a feel-great story about Jamal Malik, an impoverished orphan from the streets of Mumbai who’s one question away from winning the 20 million rupee jackpot on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and is arrested by police on suspicion that he must be cheating. The quiz show proves to be a framing device for Jamal to flash back on the events that shaped his life – events that enable him to answer the game show questions. At the heart of the movie is Jamal’s attempts to reconnect with the love of his life, Latika, who he was separated from as a child. The power of love to transcend a life of struggle and hardship is one of the film’s most resonant themes.

Written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), the film won the Audience Award at the Toronto Fim Festival, and has been generating steady buzz ever since, as it winds its way to its Nov. 28 U.S. release. Most everyone I spoke with the following day had the dazed look of people still caught up in a magical experience, the kind only a great film can deliver.

Boyle was a busy man at Austin, honored with the Extraordinary Contribution To Film Award and rushing from one luncheon to the next. I managed to catch up with him for a few minutes between engagements. In person, he’s friendly, unassuming, and bursting with the kind of hyper-kinetic energy that defines his visual style.

Filmmaker Magazine: Watching the film, it’s like we’re plunged into the streets of Mumbai with these kids. How did you capture the action so vividly?

Danny Boyle: I … Read the rest

SHORTSNONSTOP AWARDS BAD HEAD DAY

By Jason Guerrasio

The Canadian Film Centre and SHORTSNONSTOP Mobile Festival announced this week that this quarter’s best short film is Mexican filmmaker Karen Weiss‘s Bad Head Day. Weiss will be awarded a $1500 cash prize.

Launched in 2007, SHORTSNONSTOP is in its second year and awards a $1500 cash prize each quarter to the best short film selected by an international jury. Learn more on how to submit your film, here. Next deadline is Jan. 15.

Weiss’s Bad Head Day can be found here.… Read the rest

TOURIN’ WITH RANGELIFE

By Jason Guerrasio

You may recall Scott’s “Midwestern Rhapsody” post in mid Oct. about Todd Sklar and the other filmmakers who are doing a DIY tour with their film. Here’s another video diary from the guys.

… Read the rest

AASIF MANDVI TO HOST GOTHAMS

By Jason Guerrasio

IFP announced today that The Daily Show With Jon Stewart‘s correspondent Aasif Mandvi will be hosting this year’s Gotham Independent Film Awards on Dec. 2.

Named one of our 25 New Faces of Independent Film this year for his upcoming project, 7 to the Palace, which he stars and co-wrote, Mandvi was recently in the Ricky Gervais-starrer Ghost Town and appeared in episodes of The Sopranos and Sex and the City.

But he’s best known for his witty fake reporting on The Daily Show and will certainly have a lot of material to play with come Dec. 2. Interesting sidenote: fellow Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac stars in Medicine for Melancholy, which is up for the Breakthrough Director award that evening.

IFP also announced the first batch of confirmed presenters at the awards: Amy Adams, Marisa Tomei, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Clarkson, Mira Nair, Richard Jenkins and Melissa Leo.… Read the rest

THE SKY IS JUST FINE, THANK YOU

By Jason Guerrasio

For those who enjoyed the excerpt we put up of Scott Macaulay‘s roundtable discussion on the current state of independent film from the Fall issue, one of the participants, Ted Hope, was on NHPR’s “Word of Mouth” this week and continued the thinking that he voiced for the magazine and at his keynote address at the Film Independent Filmmaker Forum: the truly free filmmaking community will survive.

… Read the rest

MILK PREMIERES IN SAN FRANCISCO

By Scott Macaulay

Executive producer William Horberg attended the premiere of Gus Van Sant’s Milk last night in San Francisco and writes about it on his blog.

An excerpt:

It was almost 37 years ago that Harvey Milk, the subject of the film, moved to the Castro District from New York City and set up his camera shop there with his boyfriend Scott Smith, at what was to become ground zero in a cultural movement and struggle for respect and equal rights for gay people that, despite the major victories Harvey and his supporters achieved before his untimely assassination, as he became the first openly gay elected official, and won an improbable victory over the ignominious Proposition 6 and its sponsors Anita Bryant and John Briggs, still reverberates today. (Who could miss the eerie resemblance between two faces of evil separated by a generation: the well-coiffed All-American act of intolerance agent Bryant and a certain designer-clad hockey mom of today?)

So here we were, one week before an election that not only marks a decisive moment in our nation’s history, but also finds us fighting against another major assault by the forces of bigotry and intolerance in a California state referendum, which is Proposition 6, repackaged now thirty years later as Proposition 8.

As Martin Luther King famously said in a speech titled Where Do We Go From Here: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” But clearly it only bends because of the efforts of good people who keep fighting the fight.

… Read the rest

FILMMAKER’S GUIDE TO HALLOWEEN HORROR

By Scott Macaulay

For those of you planning a Halloween viewing party, the staff of Filmmaker has compiled thoughts on seven films guaranteed to generate chills.

Inside. If you watch a lot of horror films, at a certain point you being to feel that you’ve seen it all. I did… at least until I saw Inside. This French shocker is part of a new wave of Gallic horror that includes films like Haute Tension, Frontieres, Calvaire and Them. For me, it’s the most extreme and transgressive of the bunch, mostly due to its relentless, remorseless elaboration of its queasy premise: a pregnant woman, who we are introduced briefly when she’s involved in a car accident, finds herself stalked at home on Christmas Eve, the morning before she’s due to be admitted to the hospital to deliver her baby. The film owes quite a bit to the classic “woman alone in a house” genre that began with Wait Until Dark, but here the real threat is felt in utero as Beatrice Dalle plays a black-clad stalker whose designs on our heroine’s baby are expressed in three short words: “I want one.” When so many horror films don’t go far enough, Inside may actually go too far. No foreshadowing, implication, or theoretical possibility contained within its premise goes unexplored. There are CGI fetus reaction shots and by the middle of the film there has been as much blood and strewn tissue as most films manage in not just their first installment but also their sequels.

I argued with someone who felt that if this film had been directed by someone like Gaspar Noe it would have been a lot better because it wouldn’t have felt like a horror film. And while Inside is very well acted and has moments of real subtlety, it is, definitely, a horror film — the filmmakers are very confident pushing the limits of the genre. I’m fine with that. The genre trappings here — the cutting, the camera placement, even the film’s strange detour into zombie-ism at one point — provide much needed elements … Read the rest

PLANNING FOR THE BEST CASE FESTIVAL SCENARIO

By Scott Macaulay

If you’re one of, probably, about 3,000 feature filmmakers who have submitted your features to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, then you are beginning to think about that best-case scenario: getting in. After the acceptance rush fades, you will realize that the whole process of finishing your film, scheduling the festival, and devising a publicity and marketing plan is a lot of work. To help you out producer Ted Hope, who has a lot of first-hand experience, has been posting this week on this Truly Free Film blog a series of pieces on the different stages of the process. He calls them “Film Festival Plan A.”

His first post is entitled “Logic and Strategy.” From the blog:

People are going to hear about your film when it plays at a major film festival; their “want-to-see” will be at its highest point when folks are talking about the festival in traditional media, online, and through conversation. What are the options before you headed into a festival in order to exploit this want-to-see? This is the reason you are headed to the festival, isn’t it?

Click on the link to read the whole post and then work forwards through the rest of the entries.… Read the rest