JOHN MARINGOUIN, “BIG RIVER MAN”

By Scott Macaulay

Interview by Alicia Van Couvering

Filmmaker selected John Maringouin as one of our “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2006 after seeing Running Stumbled, the filmmaker’s hilarious and disturbing film documenting his own reconciliation with his estranged father. This year he brought his remarkable film Big River Man to Sundance, a film several years in the making that documents the Amazon River expedition of Slovenian endurance swimmer Martin Strel.

Strel’s stated mission is to bring environmental awareness to the rivers he swims, which have included some of the most polluted on Earth. Maringouin sets out to follow Strel’s expedition and to paint a portrait of this main, combining shots of Strel swimming by dead bodies and tales of the near-fatal infections he has endured, with his commitment to drinking two bottles of wine every day, his proclivity for waterslides, compulsive gambling, excess weight and advanced age. He is wildly famous in his native Slovenia, his face plastered upon billboards, but is so poor that he barks at his son to steal the breadbasket from a formal luncheon. The man is truly larger than life, and the adventure he is preparing for will probably kill him.

What follows is not your average redemptive sports film. Strel genuinely loses his mind, and comes very, very close to death. His crew goes completely insane. All the while his 24-year-old son and manager Borut keeps him going, devoting his life to Strel’s quixotic, masochistic addiction to the swim. Of course, Maringouin (with partners like Molly Lynch, his producer and wife) was on that boat too, and talked to us after Sundance about losing your mind with priest puppeteers along with everything else he wishes he could have kept in the movie.

Big River Man will be playing in New York City this weekend. Alicia Van Couvering spoke to John Maringouin at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Filmmaker: How has it been having Martin with you at Sundance? He recovered?

Maringouin: People just couldn’t get enough of him. Standing ovations at every screening. When Martin did Q&A’s, I think it was really … Read the rest

FILMMAKER GETS A FACE LIFT

By Scott Macaulay

If you’ve reached the blog through our home page, you will have probably noticed that Filmmakermagazine.com has received a face lift. Gone is the checkerboard of boxes and in its place is a front-page carousel and three-column design that hopefully directs you to our content a lot better. On the home page you’ll now find “The Guide,” in which we point you to interesting things to read, stream or hyperlink to. There are also links to our most popular content of the month as well as regularly updated Editors’ Picks of content we don’t want you to overlook. And, of course, there are our Web Exclusives, Director Interviews, Load and Play and original Filmmaker Videos. We’ve also added a long overdue blogroll with links to some of our favorite colleagues and a box pulling in our Twitter feed.

Thanks to webmaster Michael Medaglia and Managing Editor Jason Guerrasio who spearheaded this upgrade. And please let us know your thoughts. This isn’t a formal 2.0 — more like a 1.5 — so we’re interested in hearing what works for you, what doesn’t, and what design and organization suggestions you have to make this site a better place to visit. Feel free to comment below.… Read the rest

ARTHOUSE CINEMA AS A SPECTATOR SPORT

By Scott Macaulay

As we head into the quarter finals, it’s Italy, Russian, Germany, India, China, Iran, Africa and Japan… all competing in the Auteurs World Cup 2009. Combining two of the world’s favorite spectator sports — soccer and arthouse cinema — the good folks at The Auteurs have come up with a fun competition that focuses attention on regions as well as films. It doesn’t cost anything to participate, but you have to have seen the films. So, use this opportunity to see Chantal Akerman’s Toute une Nuit, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Moshen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence.… Read the rest

CALLING ALL SUNDANCE FILMMAKERS

By Scott Macaulay

The Sundance selection will be announced this week, and we’ll have it posted here on the blog as soon as it’s released. If you are a filmmaker lucky enough to get in, please keep us at Filmmaker informed of all of your publicity and distribution outreach efforts. Many if not most of you will have publicists, and they will be in direct touch with us. But for those of you doing other things in addition to or perhaps instead of conventional publicity, let us know. Particularly, links to Twitter feeds, blogs, RSS updates, etc. are appreciated. As in previous years we’ll be building a standalone Sundance page and will make an effort to feature filmmaker-generated content. And, if you are using Sundance to launch not only your film but its own DIY distribution, definitely reach out to us so we can both cover and publicize your efforts.

You can always email me at editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com, and, of course, you can also post responses in the comments thread below.

Update: I have a Google Wave account and have been trying to figure out how to get more engaged with it. It struck me that a collaborative thread in which filmmakers share their strategy and marketing ideas, discuss their promo materials, link back to their own publicity efforts could be a cool one. Having been a producer on nine Sundance films, I’ll definitely have my own two — our four — cents to throw into the mix. So, let me know if you are Park City bound and on the service. I’m at: scottmacaulay AT googlewave.com. And, if you are not on Google Wave but are sincerely interested in contributing, have a Sundance film, and feel like you have the time to tackle the learning curve, email me and perhaps I can get you an invite.

2nd Update: I’ve added a new “Park City 2010″ category to the Forums with a Sundance section, Slamdance section, and general Park City section. In the first two, you can post info about your own films traveling to the festivals or just inquire and speculate … Read the rest

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

By Scott Macaulay

From all of us at Filmmaker, Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers. Hope everyone has a great holiday. The blog will be back over the weekend and next week with the Gotham Awards, the Sundance Selection, the beginnings of our Decade End surveys, and more…… Read the rest

JOHN HILLCOAT, “THE ROAD”

By Damon Smith

In life and art, John Hillcoat takes the road less traveled. Born in Queensland, Australia and raised in the United States, Hillcoat got a crash course in mid-sixties American music and culture from his parents, who took him to folk festivals where Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and old-time blues musicians left a distinct impression. “As a young kid, I was thrown into the sixties in America, which was an unbelievable period, and my parents were very swept up in the civil rights movement,” he recalls. “I remember going on marches and seeing the profound upheaval of that time.” Hillcoat returned Down Under as a teen and, having soaked up the influence of Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, as well as Canadian author Michael Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid remains a touchstone), began making short films. While bouncing around Melbourne in the late ’70s, he met Birthday Party front man Nick Cave, who became a close friend and, many years later, an important collaborator on Hillcoat’s critically acclaimed Aussie western The Proposition (2005), which the rock singer wrote and scored. “He watches more films than anyone I know,” says Hillcoat, explaining their natural affinity. “Whereas in my free time I’m listening to music, so there’s another connection I think works.”

In his three previous features, Hillcoat has adopted a more visceral approach than his hippie-youth history might imply, immersing us in a series of isolating environments, whether physically constraining (a barbaric prison in Ghosts…of the Civil Dead), emotionally claustrophobic (a New Guinea jungle town in To Have and To Hold) or, in the case of The Proposition—a brutal, late-19th-century parable of justice filmed in the outback—austere and forbidding. Mired in obsessions of one kind or another, his characters also push back against such enforced limitations, displaying all the paradoxes and complexities of human nature in their quest for freedom. His latest is The Road, a harrowing, gray-scaled adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee ) heading South to the … Read the rest

JOANA VICENTE NAMED INTERIM IFP HEAD

By Jason Guerrasio

As the search for a new IFP executive director continues, indie film producer Joana Vicente (who with her husband Jason Kliot have made independent movies with their labels, Open City Films, Blow Up Pictures and HDNet Films) has been named the interim head of the non-profit organization according to a release sent out today.

Vicente, who is a member of the committee looking for a new head of the IFP, will join IFP next week to work on the transition with Michelle Byrd, who has lead the organization for the last 12 years and announced her departure back in June.

The IFP is the publisher of Filmmaker Magazine.… Read the rest

GIVING AWAY NORTH BY NORTHWEST

By Scott Macaulay

Ask me my favorite Hitchcock film and I’ll shoot you back the obvious answer: Vertigo, the director’s cinematic and fetishistic embodiment of romantic obsession. Ask me the film I’d be most likely to pop into my DVD player and re-watch for fun and I’ve another obvious answer: North by Northwest, his smart and stylish paranoid thriller, which he made the following year. And while Vertigo inspired a whole rash of erotic thrillers in the ’90s — Basic Instinct and all its imitators — North by Northwest‘s sly take on the American security stake feels perfectly of the moment.

The good folks at Warner Bros. Home Video have offered three copies of the new North by Northwest 50th Anniversary Special Edition to DVD to Filmmaker readers. Available in Blu-Ray and DVD, the disk contains two new documentaries: “The Master’s Touch: Hitchcock’s Signature Style” consists of interviews, clips, and behind-the-scenes footage discussing the key elements of Hitchcock’s filmmaking. In “North by Northwest: One for the Ages,” directors Guillermo del Toro, William Friedkin, Curtis Hanson, and Francis Lawrence share their interpretations on the film’s importance and its influence on their own work. The Blu-ray Book also contains 44 pages full of photos, film facts and ‘insider information.

North by Northwest is newly remastered in 1080p from the original VistaVision elements. From the press release:

The arrival of North by Northwest on Blu-ray is a landmark event in home video history, as it marks the very first of the famed director’s films to become available on this state-of-the-art format. Accordingly, the film has received a meticulous restoration and remastering especially for this occasion with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging scanning the original VistaVision production elements in 8K resolution. The resulting presentation reveals a depth of field and clarity never before possible, only serving to heighten every thrill-packed moment of this beloved classic.

Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, co-starring Jessie Royce Landis, Leo G. Carroll and Martin Landau, the stylish, action-packed espionage caper was written by Ernest Lehman, with music by Bernard Herrmann. Nominated for three Academy

… Read the rest

“GOMORRAH”

By Rupert Chiarella

Matteo Garrone’s masterwork Gomorrah is notable for what it is not. There is no macho camaraderie amongst thugs in social clubs as seen on The Sopranos. And there is nothing romantic about ‘the life’ of mobsters. While American audiences have been accustomed to the portrayal of gangsters having facile access to money, power and women with seeming impunity, they will be treated to a coarser, realistic depiction of the Naples crime syndicate known as the Camorra. Based on the eponymously named novel by Roberto Saviano, Garrone’s film bears more than a passing resemblance to socio-economic and cultural milieu of Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God, where squalor, death and hopelessness reign with no end in sight.

Five non-interrelated storylines take place in a colorless, prison-like Neapolitan housing project, itself a fiefdom of rival Camorra gangs. There is Pasquale, the fashion tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo), two young wannabes, Ciro and Marco (Ciro Petrone and Marco Macor), Franco, the waste management specialist (Toni Servillo), Don Ciro, the mob-bagman (Gianfelice Imparato) and Toto, the small associate (Salvatore Abruzzese). Each attempts to get on with their lives, knowing full well, there is no escaping from the tentacles of the Camorra, which influences every single one of their choices. None of the characters will have serendipitous encounters with each other and none can run to the government, which is noticeably absent, as is perhaps God in this part of the world. Each accepts as a fact of life, the Camorra as omnipresent and omnipotent. Either work with evil or be eliminated. Gomorrah focuses on the attempts of the victims to do what they must despite it all. Wider American audiences may not take to the lack of Hollywood flash in the film, but it will give them pause to think. They will think about the social conditions in which so many people live and shame the government into taking decisive action against organized crime.

The most fascinating of the DVD extras is the 60-minute segment entitled Five Stories, providing the behind scenes making of documentary for each of the … Read the rest

“THE NEW YEAR PARADE”

By Jason Guerrasio

For his debut feature Tom Quinn took the hours of footage he shot of family and friends talking about dealing with divorce for a psych class as inspiration to create a touching story that meshes domestic issues with the culture of his native South Philadelphia.

After placing 13th in Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade, which is held every New Year’s Day where local clubs in elaborate costumes compete for prizes and bragging rights, the South Philadelphia String Band are stuck in a rut as their losing ways have gone on for decades now. For Mike (Andrew Conway) and his son Jack (Greg Lyons) the pain doesn’t subside when they head home. Mike and his wife Lisa (MaryAnn McDonald) are separated and Jack and his younger sister Kat (Jennifer Welsh) are just starting to feel the tear in the family.

With a gritty handheld look, shot by Quinn, and great performances by Lyons and Welsh, the film follows a year in the life of the family as they struggle to stay together and Mike and Jack try to bring the string band back to its prominence. Quinn uses real Mummers and engrosses us in their community to create an authentic piece of regional filmmaking.

Along with directing and shooting, Quinn, a 25 New Faces alumni, also wrote the screenplay, edited, and produced the film (along with Steve Beal). Winner of the Grand Prize award at Slamdance in 2008, The New Year Parade was also nominated for our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards the same year.

Features include Quinn’s interviews he conduced of people who have gone through their parents getting divorced, a making-of piece, and a history of the South Philadelphia String Band and the Mummers.

Carnivalesque Films releases the DVD this week.

See larger image

List Price:
$24.95 USD

Used from:
$8.75 In Stock

Release date November 23, 2009.

… Read the rest