Archive for February, 2010
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
As Paul Devlin’s article on his film BLAST! in the current issue of Filmmaker notes, films that touch on issues of faith and religion can be tricky sells in the independent film world — even as filmmakers like the Kendrick Brothers work outside of the independent community and find success with their explicitly faith-based films.
Here’s a feature narrative on Kickstarter that caught my eye that explores issues of belief and non-belief. From the page on Faith, by Eli Daughdrill:
The film is a personal, independent narrative that takes a sensitive but critical look at at religion in America. FAITH follows two different people and the evolution of their belief in god after personal tragedy befalls them both.
Chris is a devout, fundamentalist Christian whose son is bi-polar. When prayer doesn’t work, and his son commits suicide, Chris’s worldview is thrown into disarray.
Betty is a teacher at the local community college who grew up in the church. With a father who was both Pastor and philanderer, Betty dismissed religion as hypocrisy and simplistic fable. But she just found a lump in her breast. As she faces her own mortality, the attraction to some kind of higher power might be too strong to ignore.
FAITH juxtaposes two narratives to uncover the ways we are pulled towards – and away from – God. The film exposes the hypocrisy and arrogance of fundamentalist Christianity while exploring the need to call on a higher power during times of crisis.
The film will be shot in and around California’s Central Valley, which forms the setting and ideological backdrop of the story. Eli Daughdrill, the film’s writer/director, grew up on an Almond ranch in the valley and knows the people and place very well. The characters in the story are fictional but certainly feel like real residents of the valley.
… Read the rest
Friday, February 26th, 2010
Here’s the trailer for “25 New Face” filmmaker Lena Dunham‘s second feature, Tiny Furniture, which premieres in the narrative Competition at SXSW.
From the Vimeo page:
22-year-old Aura returns home after college to her artist mother’s loft with the following: a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her YouTube page, and no shoulders to cry on. Starring Dunham and her real-life family, Tiny Furniture is tragicomedy about what does and does not happen when you graduate with no skills, no love life, and a lot of free time.
Tiny Furniture Trailer from Lena Dunham on Vimeo.… Read the rest
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Damon Smith interviewed The Most Dangerous Man In America directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith for our Director Interviews section of the Website. The Most Dangerous Man In America is nominated for Best Documentary.
As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, tart excerpts from the Nixon White House tapes, and noirish recreations into riveting, revelatory political drama. The name “Daniel Ellsberg” probably doesn’t trigger the same flurry of associations as Deep Throat, the shadowy antihero of the Watergate scandal, but it should: An ex-Marine, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and highly respected analyst at the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg leaked a 7,000-page study detailing the top-secret Southeast Asia policies of five presidential administrations to the New York Times, resulting in a landmark court case, attempted cover-ups, and a nasty smear campaign, all culminating in the ignominious resignation of President Nixon. To be sure, the spy-grade story of the Pentagon Papers controversy has a lot of rich angles, including government secrecy, first-amendment rights versus executive privilege, and the rise of the national security state. But it’s also a conversion tale deeply concerned with the burden of conscience that Ellsberg felt as a government insider to tell the public what he believed they had a right to know, and his desire as a newly minted dove to change the course of the Vietnam War.
Part journalistic exposé, part overdue homage to one of the last century’s most notorious whistleblowers, Most Dangerous Man is a pressurized piece of filmmaking, resonating with issues (civil rights, the press, the conduct of war) still worrying the national conscience. With considerable flair backed by exhaustive research, Ehrlich (The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, 2001) and Goldsmith (… Read the rest
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art have announced the films selected for this year’s New Directors/New Films.
In its 39th year, the series, taking place March 24 – April 4 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center and the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at MoMA, will screen 38 films from emerging filmmakers.
Richard Press‘s documentary Bill Cunningham New York will be the opening film, while acclaimed Canadian writer-director Xavier Dolan will close ND/NF with the New York premiere of I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mère).
For tickets and more on ND/NF, click here.
The full list of films are below.
OPENING NIGHT
Bill Cunningham New York
Richard Press, USA, 2010; 84 min.
In a city of dedicated originals, New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham stands out as one who both captures the essence of the singular personality and clearly represents one himself. Entering his ninth decade, Cunningham still rides his Schwinn around Manhattan, putting miles between his street-level view of personal style and what the titans of fashion will come to discover down the road. This heartfelt and honest documentary turns the camera on one who has so lovingly and selflessly captured the looks that have defined generations, and the events and people that captivate our beloved New York.
Wednesday, March 24 – 7:00 p.m. (MoMA)
Thursday, March 25 – 9:15 p.m. (FSLC)
CLOSING NIGHT
I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mère)
Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2009; 96 min.
Director Xavier Dolan’s cri de coeur bracingly exposes the limits of love. Dolan himself plays the lead character, Hubert, a fiery creature full of lust and venom. His burgeoning (homo)sexuality is distinctly and intensely at odds with his mutually parasitic maternal relationship. The more Hubert and his aggravatingly conventional mother (Anne Dorval) realize they cannot continue to live as child and parent, the more they are drawn to each other. Their intimacy can only manifest through vicious arguments, lending an Albee-esque absurdity to their encounters. Dolan brilliantly situates the violence of the relationship within an exquisite filmic structure, allowing … Read the rest
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
FEBRUARY – shot on the Canon EOS 550D / Rebel T2i (preprod unit) from Nino Leitner on Vimeo.
From filmmaker Nino Leitner.
This short film, FEBRUARY, was shot on a pre-production unit of the new Canon EOS 550D / Rebel T2i. This is UNGRADED footage straight off the camera (converted to ProRes LT first for easy editing). I used a “flattened” picture style as outlined by Stu Maschwitz on his blog.
Check out his blog for a detailed review of the camera, which comes out next month and is priced at $799.… Read the rest
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Big news out of Sundance tonight: Keri Putnam, former President of Production at Miramax Films and Executive Vice President at HBO Films, has been named the new Executive Director of the Sundance Institute. The position was previously held by Ken Brecher, who left Sundance last April.
Keri is well known to many of us in the independent community for her leadership at Miramax and HBO, where she opened the door to both new directors as well as established veterans looking to explore new ideas that wouldn’t fly in the mainstream studio system. Among the films she has been involved with are Elephant, There Will Be Blood, Adventureland, The Laramie Project, Lackawanna Blues, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and If These Walls Could Talk. Keri, who I have worked with, is smart, passionate and dedicated, and this is, I think, a great choice for Sundance. Congratulations to both Keri and the Sundance Institute.
The complete press release is below.
Los Angeles, CA – Wally Weisman, Chairman of the Board of Sundance Institute, today announced the appointment of Keri Putnam as the Institute’s new Executive Director. Putnam, who recently served as President of Production for Miramax Films, the Walt Disney Company’s specialty film division, has an extensive background in independent film production and acquisition, as well as years of experience in programming. Based in Los Angeles, Putnam is expected to start her new position in mid April reporting directly to the Institute’s Board of Trustees.
“Keri Putnam has a passion for the arts, a leading profile in the film community, and a stellar reputation for her intelligence, creativity, collaboration and leadership at the highest levels of business,” said Robert Redford, President and Founder, Sundance Institute. “Working together to expand our international presence, connect to new audiences, and experiment with emerging areas of artist support, I have every confidence Keri’s knowledge and talent will be critical to the fulfillment and expansion of the Institute’s mission and vision in the years ahead.”
Added Mr. Weisman, “The exceptional health of Sundance Institute afforded the Board the opportunity to take
… Read the rest
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Of all the people I know — artists, musicians, filmmakers — who make dark, dark things, the French director Philippe Grandrieux is the sunniest. In person, he projects a passionate joy about his filmmaking craft, and the disturbing events contained within his films are not projections of surface-level angst or garden-variety emotional torment but rather philosophical inquiries into our relationship with Nature, our bodies, and our selves. To hear him talk about his work is to realize that he comes from a line that includes De Sade, Blanchot, and Bataille as well as later post-structuralists like Gilles Deleuze. (Grandrieux’s bloody work puts a different spin, in fact, on Deleuze’s concept of the “body without organs.”)
And then there’s the other side of Grandrieux’s work, one that, these days, is dominant. (In fact, my last paragraph’s fixation on physical violence is perhaps unfair, because after his debut film, Sombre, which is about a serial killer, the violence in Grandrieux’s later films, La Vie Nouvelle and Un Lac, has been growing more abstract and metaphoric in its presentation.) I’m speaking of demanding optics of his films, his interest in pushing the extremes of what is visible on the film screen. Sombre, which has what I can honestly say may be the best opening of any film ever, is photographed several stops under, and his latest, film, Un Lac, is also a literally dark film in which the projected image has the density of a sculptural object.
Here, at The Auteurs, is Glenn Kenny on the challenges of Grandrieux’s work:
The sure-to-be controversial centerpiece of sorts of this year’s Film Comment Selects screenings is a three-film retrospective comprising fiction features by French director Phillipe Grandrieux. So exacting and precise is Grandrieux with respect to the creation and projection of the cinematic image that he’s been known to try to have the exit lights in theaters blacked out at screenings where he’s in attendance. The immersion in total darkness is said to be particularly crucial to his latest picture, 2008′s Un lac. The Grandrieux immersion occurs on Wednesday,
… Read the rest
