Archive for February, 2010
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
As a theme in Western art, sibling rivalry is as ancient as the Hebrew Bible or the internecine blood feud that shapes the destinies of two sisters in Sophocles’ Antigone. In her utterly absorbing family portrait Prodigal Sons, which won the FIPRESCI prize at the 2009 Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Kimberly Reed (“25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Summer 2007) revisits this archetype with honesty and courage, grappling with questions of identity as she details how life-changing transformations have affected her relationship with adopted brother Marc McKerrow, a soulful hard-luck character who has long felt he was living in her shadow. The wheels are set in motion with Reed’s decision to attend a high-school reunion in her hometown of Helena, Montana, with Marc, from whom she’s been estranged for over a decade. Then comes the first big reveal: Kim is transgender and used to be Paul, a popular, all-American high-school quarterback and model student, evidenced by a quick shuffle of old family photos and degraded home-video footage. Marc’s own transformation hinges on the head injury he suffered in a car accident on his 21st birthday, which has resulted in seizures, wild mood swings, and explosive outbursts that a cocktail of meds keeps only partly under wraps. As Reed (who narrates) tries to reconcile the past she’s labored so long to forget, Marc—a beautifully expressive, entirely self-taught pianist—decides to seek out his birth legacy and turns up a rather startling connection to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Full of surprising revelations and agonized turnabouts, Reed’s film is impressive as a personal document about self-definition and as a uniquely intimate tale of searching compassion.
Filmmaker spoke with Reed about past selves, gender transition, and the ethical challenge of representing family members on film.
Prodigal Sons opens Friday in New York City.
DIRECTOR KIMBERLY REED. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.Filmmaker: I read that, initially, you wanted to make a film about your adopted brother Marc’s search for family ties. How far along were you in the filmmaking process before you became part of the story?
Reed: It was really from … Read the rest
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Here’s the just-released trailer for Elijah Drenner’s American Grindhouse, which plays SXSW next month.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
American Hardcore filmmakers Paul Rachman and Steven Blush have a new project: Lost Rockers, a documentary “about great musicians overlooked by pop culture.” From the project’s Kickstarter page:
LOST ROCKERS… offers insight into what it takes to “make it,” and why so many of equal talent to famous stars fall through the cracks. The film tells the life stories of these forgotten artists — of different eras, genres, creeds and orientations — from their doomed paths to fame to their ultimate redemption. You’ll experience amazing music you can’t believe you never heard.
LOST ROCKERS has only just begun. We’ve shot our first four interviews (Gloria Jones, Jake Holmes, David Peel and Dr. israel) with many more to come, including famous rock stars commenting on their lesser-known contemporaries. Completing our research and moving into the post-production phase will require travel across the US, UK and Europe.
I don’t know whether it’s the subject matter, the success of American Hardcore, or the fan base of the filmmakers, but they are already 38% of the way towards their goal of $15,000 just after the start of their campaign. You can join up with them by clicking below.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
The Wall Street Journal-hosted Venture Capital Dispatch blog linked to my article yesterday about the closing of independent film distributor and festival website service business B-Side Entertainment. Scott Austin’s piece focused on comments made in the piece by CEO Chris Hyams and President of Distribution Paola Freccero about the company’s fate at the hands of the VC funding model. The executives said that B-Side was on the road to being profitable but couldn’t deliver large enough returns in the time period desired by financier Valhalla Partners.
Austin points to another B-Side investor: original Series A-funder Mike Maples, Jr. and his VC firm Silverton Partners. Maples and his firm invested $3.1 million in B-Side in 2006. Last week, Maples gave a talk at the Future of Funding conference about “Thunder Lizards,” companies who, he said, “think different than other kinds of cmpanies. They exist to be huge in a very important future market, and there is no Plan B.” The talk has generated a lot of buzz in the VC community.
From TechCrunch :
The talk is highly entertaining and thought provoking. He argues against the notion that startups that want to have a huge exit need to raise big money, noting that Microsoft raised just $1 million and eBay just $5 million, in venture capital.
He says small startups can be hugely disruptive, and have proportionally huge exits. he calls these companies Thunder Lizards. He’s talking about Godzilla, which eats his competitors and disrupts like crazy. These are the market leaders, he says. Second place is boring.
This is an entertaining talk, and it’s a great window into the priorities and desires of a certain type of tech investor. Among the things Maples talks about are the imperative for new companies to be different than their competitors and for companies to have huge potential markets.
Venture Capital Blog recommends the talk for entrepreneurs. I’ll recommend it to those who are seeking investment from these kind of entrepreneurs. It’s just under an hour long and you can watch it below.
Thunder Lizard by Mike Maples Jr. from Adeo Ressi on … Read the rest
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
A often stunning and certainly never less than riveting meditation on the coming of age of an Arab/Corsican criminal in the unforgiving French penal system, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet is that rare bird that feels utterly at home as an art house blockbuster (its pedigree includes the Grand Prix in Cannes, multiple European Film Awards and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film) and as a potential crossover hit. It follows a young prisoner named Malik (a terrific Tahar Rahim), who enters jail as little more than a homeless petty thief, but after being taken under the wing of a ruthless Corisican gangster (Neils Aerup), slowly builds an empire of his own. While drawing comparisons to classics of the genre such as Goodfellas, it is an expertly observed, deeply humane piece of crime cinema than has few antecedents.
The fifty-eight year old Audiard, who’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a touchingly sincere remake of James Toback’s Fingers, was a success in Europe and on these shores, has quickly joined the ranks of France’s most acclaimed directors. We caught up with him and Rahim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where A Prophet made its final fest circuit victory lap before opening in the states later this month.
WRITER-DIRECTOR JACQUES AUDIARD.Filmmaker: When did you come across the material that became A Prophet? What drew you to it?
Audiard: We got a script from a producer friend of ours in the beginning, by Nicholas Peufaillit. It took place somewhere else, somewhere different, with people I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything prisons, about Arabs, about Blacks. So I was interested in it.
Filmmaker: This is not the typical circumstance that French cinema spends much time in.
Audiard: typical circumstance in which way?
Filmmaker: At least in America, we don’t often associate French cinema with crime dramas, with depictions of minorities or prisons.
Audiard: It’s true, but its odd in a way. It was only after the fact, after writing the script, that we realized, “we don’t make movies … Read the rest
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
B-side Entertainment, the Austin-based tech and distribution company that provides website services to film festivals, is closing. The company, which launched a New York-based distribution arm just 13 months ago, lost its funding from venture capital fund Valhalla Partners in late 2009. “We have spent the last four or five months looking for a [financing] alternative,” B-Side CEO and founder Chris Hyams told Filmmaker. “But we reached the end of our cash before we could secure new investment. We had to shut the company down.”
B-Side laid off the majority of its staff last week and throughout the weekend notified its filmmakers and festival partners. In the coming weeks Hyams and core staffers will seek new homes for B-Side’s films and its online festival scheduling service, Festival Genius.
In an interview, Hyams, President of Distribution Paola Freccero, and V.P. of Marketing Liz Ogilvie discussed the history of the company and recent events. Hyams launched B-Side in 2005 after working in the software industry as V.P. of Engineering at Trilogy. “I had spent 15 years in the software business, building huge websites for Fortune 500 companies,” he said. “At the end of 2004, Wikipedia was taking off and showing how groups of fans could create the largest encyclopedia in the world. I believed something like that could work in the film business. The goal was to build a business that connected directly with audiences — to help films be financially successful, and to do so in a way that was fair and transparent to filmmakers.”
B-Side’s first round of funding came from an early-stage VC fund in Austin, Texas. Said Hyams, “The [funders] said, ‘We don’t know anything about the movie business, but we think the idea of applying information science to a business with no access to that is intriguing.’”
The company’s initial thrust was in developing online festival guides that added social networking functions — audiences would rate films and trade recommendations — to a fest’s traditional assortment of informational and schedule materials. Said Ogilvie, “By doing the back-end of film festivals, B-Side used technology in order to … Read the rest
Monday, February 22nd, 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. Nick Dawson interviewed Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Burma VJ is nominated for Best Documentary.
Danish cinema currently has numerous talented fiction directors – everybody from Lars von Trier, Christopher Boe, Ole Bornedal, and Susanne Bier to Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lone Scherfig – and now Anders Østergaard is bringing attention to the country’s documentary output. Born in Copenhagen in 1965, Østergaard studied at the Danish School of Journalism, graduating in 1991, before deciding to eschew a career as a journalist to become a documentarian. Throughout his career, he has been concerned with the boundaries of non-fiction and with the idea of documentary itself. Østergaard’s debut film, Gensyn med Johannesburg (1996), was about filmmaker Henning Carlsen’s return to the eponymous South African city, where 35 years earlier he had shot the docudrama Dilemma. Since then, Østergaard has become particularly interested in documentary reenactments: he recreated the death of Swedish jazz musician Jan Johansson in Troldkarlen (1999), and in Tintin et Moi (2003) he used 3D animation to explore the previously two-dimensional world of Hergé’s cartoons. In 2006, he scored a big hit in his home country with Gasolin’, a portrait of the Danish 70s rock band of the same name, and in 2008 followed it up with Så kort og mærkeligt livet er, about Danish poet Dan Turéll.
Østergaard’s latest film, Burma VJ, once again grapples with how and why we capture the world on film. It was initially meant to be a small-scale film about “Joshua,” a junior video reporter living in Rangoon, the largest city in Burma, who is part of the Democratic Voice of Burma (or DVB). Though any journalistic activity is banned under the current Burmese junta, the DVB risk their lives and freedom to secretly document government suppression in the country so that its own citizens, as well as the … Read the rest
Sunday, February 21st, 2010
Congrats to Kathryn Bigelow and the whole team behind The Hurt Locker for winning Best Director and Best Film at this year’s BAFTA Awards.
… Read the rest
DIRECTOR KIMBERLY REED. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.
