FLY ATTACK! TOUR DE FOURS, EPISODE 4

By Scott Macaulay

A fly infestation, event-based audience building and a grape-eating contest at the Golden Gate bridge — they are all part of what is turning into the On the Road of indie film web series, Tour de Fours. The webisodes are Todd Sklar and Range Life Entertainment’s chronicles of their movie road tour in which four titles — Box Elder, In Memory of My Father, On the Road with Judas, and Registered Sex Offender – are presented by their makers in theaters across the country. For more on the tour click here.

… Read the rest

LEAKING SUNDANCE ’09?

By Scott Macaulay

Look forward to a blog post later this week or early next in which we print and comment upon the list of films accepted into this year’s Sundance Film Festival. And while word-of-mouth generally circulates that a few titles are in, for the most part filmmakers keep a lid on it until the list comes out. This year, however, leaks are occurring. Sean Means’s blog at the Chicago Tribune lists a few films that the filmmakers themselves have posted news of their acceptance. The blog for Cory McAbee’s Stingray Sam says that the director’s follow-up to The American Astronaut will be in the New Frontier section. Also, a number of blogs have reported that Scott Sanders’s blaxploitation homage Black Dynamite will be at the festival. It is described on the website like this:

This is the story of 1970’s action legend Black Dynamite. When “The Man” murders his brother, pumps heroin into local orphanages, and floods the ghetto with adulterated malt liquor, Black Dynamite is the one hero willing to fight all the way from the blood-soaked city streets to the hallowed halls of the Honky House.

Finally, Means reports, the website for Isang Lahi: Pearls from the Orient tips their Sundance selection.… Read the rest

DAN COGAN ON THE NEW SUNDANCE PREP

By Scott Macaulay

Over at Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film blog, Dan Cogan, producer and financier (his Impact Partners funds socially-relevant docs and features) posts advice for filmmakers who may, depending on a phone call they get this week, be looking to leverage the boost that a Sundance selection will bring them. Interestingly, the piece is titled “What Financiers Want Now,” suggesting a shift in the desired rhetoric of an indie film pitch. Rather than endorse the traditional high-risk/high-reward model of most indie-film business plans, Cogan and his company emphasize the filmmaker’s ability to mobilize the multiple smaller revenue streams that arise from a grass-roots strategy.

Reading Dan’s post I thought of how truly different it is today for a filmmaker heading to Park City as compared to ten years ago. Sundance has always been a crap shoot — a sizable percentage of films have always gone un-or-underdistributed. But for most films, the “Plan B” of self-distribution was a strategy that one arrived at six months after the festival. Today, many filmmakers would be best served by thinking about these issues before they hit Main Street, and doing so involves shifting priorities. Such traditional Sundance activities as postering Main Street, booking a party at the Riverhorse, and spending all one’s money on a traditional publicist may need to be augmented (or, depending on one’s budget, replaced) by activities that use a film’s Sundance presence as a launching pad for a grass-roots strategy. Dan’s post has several great pieces of advice, and while they are framed by the pre-Sundance story, they are just as relevant to many if not most filmmakers who aren’t making the trek to Utah.

Here is an excerpt. Read the complete article at the link above.

It strikes me that this is a particularly important moment in the indie film calendar for the Truly Free Film movement. Films are being quietly notified about acceptances to Sundance. It’s a moment of excitement for filmmakers and financiers alike.

And so right now it’s especially important to remember that the great fairy tale sale is only going to happen to a few films.

… Read the rest

AVI NESHER, “THE SECRETS”

By Nick Dawson

ANIA BUKSTEIN AND MICHAL SHTAMLER IN DIRECTOR AVI NESHER’S THE SECRETS. COURTESY MONTEREY MEDIA.

Avi Nesher seems to have had two careers as a filmmaker rather than just one. Nesher’s dual identity partly stems from the fact that the Israeli writer-director spent most of his childhood and teenage years in New York and only returned to the country of his birth after attending Columbia University. Once back, Nesher wasted little time in establishing himself as one of the brightest young figures in Israeli cinema with hits like The Troupe and Dizengoff 99 (both 1979). In 1985, Rage and Glory, Nesher’s film about the 1940s Israeli terrorist group the Stern Gang, caused massive controversy and the level of hysteria prompted him to leave for Hollywood. Feeling unconnected to American social issues, Nesher opted for a career as a director of old school B-movies and turned out titles like Timebomb (1991), starring Michael Biehn, and the Drew Barrymore vehicle Doppelganger (1993) throughout the 1990s. In 2003, he returned once again to Israel where he immediately reestablished himself as a critical favorite with the 60s-set crowdpleaser Turn Left at the End of the World (2004), one of the biggest Israeli box office hits of the past two decades, and the experimental political documentary Oriental (2004).

With his latest film, The Secrets, Nesher continues his current focus on Jewish identity, and once again shows a tendency to deal with provocative material. Co-written with polarizing female playwright and stand-up comedian Hadar Galron, the movie centers on a Jewish seminary in the sacred town of Safed where two students, bookish, headstrong Noemi (Ania Bukstein) and free-spirited French teen Michelle (Michal Shtamler), take it upon themselves to use kabbalistic rituals to help a dying woman, Anouk (Fanny Ardant), find forgiveness for the dark deeds in her past. Nesher’s film ably combines in-depth theological ideas with audience-friendly melodrama as he puts the spotlight on orthodox Jewish society’s designation of women as inferior creatures while also tackling themes of religious fanaticism and sapphic sexuality. Despite Nesher’s sometimes titillating treatment of the lesbian angle, to his credit … Read the rest

SUNDANCE EXPANDS ART HOUSE PROJECT

The Sundance Institute today announced the expansion of Sundance Institute Art House Project, a partnership with art house cinemas nationwide to build audiences and develop a supportive community of theatre owners committed to independent film. In its fourth year, the Art House Project this year includes a specially-selected series of short films from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Go to the participating theaters’ websites below to learn more about when the films are showing.

The shorts program includes:

MAN (directed by Myna Joseph)
FCU: Fact Checkers Unit (directed by Dan Beers)
Sikumi (directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean)
I Love Sarah Jane (directed by Spencer Susser)
W. (directed by The Vikings)
Spider (directed by Nash Edgerton)
Your Truly (directed by Osbert Parker)
Dennis (directed by Mads Matthiesen)
my olympic summer (directed by Daniel Robin)

Participating Theatres are:

BAM, New York, NY, www.bam.org
Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, TN, www.belcourt.org
Broadway Centre Cinemas, Salt Lake City, UT, www.saltlakefilmsociety.org
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA, www.coolidge.org
Enzian Theater, Orlando, FL, www.enzian.org
Hollywood Theatre, Portland, OR, www.hollywoodtheatre.org
International Film Series, Boulder, CO, www.internationalfilmseries.com
Jacob Burns Film Center, Pleasantville, NY, www.burnsfilmscenter.org
The Loft, Tucson, AZ, www.loftcinema.com
Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, MI, www.michtheater.org
The Music Box, Chicago, IL, www.musicboxtheatre.com
Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK, www.okcmoa.org
The Palm, San Luis Obispo, CA, www.thepalmtheatre.com
Pickford Cinema, Bellingham, WA, www.pickfordcinema.org
Rafael Film Center, San Rafael, CA, www.cafilm.org
Ragtag Cinema, Columbia, MO, www.ragtagfilm.com
Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville, ME, www.railroadsquarecinema.com
The Screen, Santa Fe, NM, www.thescreen.csf.edu… Read the rest

DUBAI FEST TO OPEN WITH W.

The fifth edition of the Dubai Film Festival will bow with Oliver Stone‘s W. on Dec. 11. Stone was at the festival previously with World Trade Center.

Other gala screenings this year include Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire, the world preem of Palestinian director Najwa Najjar‘s Pomegranates and Myrrh and Iranian helmer Majid Majidi‘s Song of Sparrows.

Stay tuned to filmmakermagazine.com for coverage of this year’s fest.… Read the rest

HOLLYWOOD IN THE UAE

Originally posted on the Filmmaker blog, here’s Scott Macaulay’s post on the Tribeca Film Festival’s launch of a festival in Qatar.

With Robert DeNiro announcing that … Read the rest

MOVIEMAKING ON THE CANON EOS 5D

By Scott Macaulay

Billed as the first short film shot on the new Canon EOS 5D still camera, here is “Tokyo Reality.” Hat tip: Movie City Indie.

Tokyo Reality (Canon 5D MarkII) from utsuru on Vimeo.… Read the rest

HARVEY MILK AT 575 CASTRO STREET

By Scott Macaulay

New on the FilmInFocus site is “575 Castro Street,” a short film by San Francisco filmmaker Jenni Olson (The Joy of Life). The film contains images shot on the set of Gus Van Sant’s film over which audio from the real Harvey Milk is played.

Excerpted from her director’s statement, which can be read in full at the link above:

The visuals of 575 Castro St. (the play of light and shadow upon the walls of the Castro Camera set for Gus Van Sant’s Milk) harken back to those gay short films of the ‘70s: The films that passed through Harvey Milk’s hands to be processed and developed. The films that inaugurated an event that would grow to become not just the largest LGBT film festival on the planet, but a media arts non-profit dedicated to serving filmmakers and audiences in myriad ways.

One of the first films I got to see when I attended my first Frameline festival in 1989 (looking for films to curate for my queer film series in Minneapolis) was Warren Sonbert’s Friendly Witness. That same year I also got to see my first queer experimental works by filmmakers like Su Friedrich, Abigail Child, Barbara Hammer and Ulrike Ottinger.

These are the cinematic visions that have shaped and sparked my own vision — first as a curator, and then as a filmmaker myself. It is fitting that the style of 575 Castro St. should match the style of the pioneering gay films that Harvey Milk helped to develop (in all the meanings of that word).

For me, the joy of my films is found in the poetry of the static image —in the experience of time passing on film, undistracted by plot, actors, dialogue and other narrative conventions. An internal drama is evoked in the sensitivities of each viewer who is open to the subtleties of these mundane shots that are almost bereft of movement and sound. So quiet, so still. All the better to showcase the range of emotions evoked by Harvey Milk’s words.

The audio track is an edited

… Read the rest

RANDALL SHARP, HENRY MAY LONG AND MAX RICHTER

By Scott Macaulay

Over on the main page, check out Alicia Van Couvering’s interview with Randall Sharp, director of the indie anomaly Henry May Long that plays at New York’s Sunshine Theater this week. I call it an anomaly, because you don’t see many elegant turn-of-the-centry period dramas arising from the Gotham indie scene. Here, Sharp tells Van Couvering why she chose to set her tale in 1887:

I felt like setting it in that period would wake up the story again. Otherwise it’s just another guy shooting heroin, another gay guy who loved a straight guy. Also it’s a way to say, have we really come that far? These people are suffering back in this period, and there are people suffering in exactly the same way, today. Some guy messed up and spent his father’s money, accidentally started taking Laudanum, I mean have you not heard that story last week? Problems with your social position, with not being rich… these are universal, timeless problems. I thought that maybe people could look at the story with a new eye, because it was set in another world. We wanted to set it in that period to show that people back then are exactly the same as they are now. Death walked next to them more than it does now, but basically people are the same, bumbling through their lives trying to get love.

To me, the 19th-century is the tipping point of the modern world. It’s like the last time we had one foot in the past and one foot in the future. 1887 is only a few years before World War 1, and then only a few years after that until the atomic bomb. Some people’s lives spanned that entire period, from what could really be the pre-industrial past to what was the modern future.

Henry May Long is scored by the great Max Richter, whose “H in New England,” contained in a truncated “ring-tone” form on his new 24 Postcards in Full Colour, can be heard on the film’s website. In a previous post, I wrote about the great compositional … Read the rest