You can stream Once It Started It Could Not End over at Vimeo. My advice – don’t watch it at work unless you want your coworkers to see your terrified face.

Previously supported by Rooftop’s Filmmakers’ Fund, Sears’ short was chosen by a panel of judges including filmmaker David Gordon Green, reRun Gastropub curator Aaron Hillis, and Hammer to Nail editor Michael Tully. As part of her prize, Sears will receive fee waivers to several major US film festivals, as well as a full review on Hammer to Nail (which you can read here.)

Submissions are open through March 1st for the contest’s second edition. This month’s judges include Compliance director Craig Zobel, critic Alison Willmore, and producer Mike S. Ryan (Think of Me, The Comedy.) Submit now here.… Read the rest

The Cannes Producer’s Network, a week-long immersion program, runs concurrently with the Cannes International Film Festival in May. The program is specifically designed for experienced producers looking to build their international networks and share expertise on the international production, financing, and packaging marketplace. Recent participants have included Howard Gertler (Shortbus), Anita Onadine & Lance Weiler (Head Trauma, Pandemic), Mike Ryan (Choke), Susan Stover (Laurel Canyon), and Ron Simons (Gun Hill Road, Night Catches Us).

To apply, please send a resume and one-page letter of interest to John Sylva (jsylva@ifp.org), by Tuesday, March 6th. Five producers
will be selected to attend the Producers Network and two emerging producers will attend the Producer’s Lab. All applicants must be
IFP members at any level to be considered for the program.

Applications are also open for the 2012 Trans Atlantic Partners Fellowship, an intensive three-week film training program for U.S., Canadian, and European producers seeking co-production/co-venture professional development. The three modules happen throughout the year, first with a week-long session in Berlin this June, then in Halifax this September (with a session that leads directly into Strategic Partners, Canada’s international co-production market) and finally, at Independent Film Week in New York. Previous participants have included Cora Olson and Jennifer Dubin (Good Dick), and Nekisa Cooper (Pariah).

The TAP application is available online here. The deadline to apply is March 21, 2012.… Read the rest

Second #3854, 64:14

“I saw The Yellow Man come out and meet up with a well-dressed man carrying an alligator briefcase,” Jeffrey tells Sandy, as we see him snapping a picture with his rigged-up camera-in-a-shoebox, a strange, analog echo of the Lumière brothers’ early motion picture camera. The sequence is reminiscent of a similar one (also involving doubles) in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, when Kate’s (Angie Dickinson’s) son Peter (Keith Gordon) has suspicions about Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine) and concocts a camera set-up to photograph the entry to his office. The whole operation is so dead-on: the detective’s determination in Jeffrey’s face, the elaborate string contraption he uses to snap the pictures, the hushed seriousness of his voice as the narrates to Sandy what he’s seen.

What’s easy to forget during this sequence is that what we’re being shown in this frame isn’t what Jeffrey saw, but what the camera filming Blue Velvet saw, as opposed to the shot from the previous post, which actually depicts Jeffrey’s flashback from his point of view. This shot at second #3854 is what we might call implied memory information; it reflects how Jeffrey—as he retells the story to Sandy at Arlene’s later that day—might have imagined himself as he took the photos. It’s interesting: Sandy can’t see these flashbacks. She simply hears what Jeffrey says. But is it implied that Jeffrey can see them? Are we to understand that, as he’s talking to Sandy about what happened, he’s picturing what we, as the audience, are seeing? Or is this visual information outside of both Jeffrey and Sandy, existing for our sake alone, to help give a settled shape and form to the narrative?

In a sense, what does it matter? We are woven so tightly into the narrative fabric of the film that that whether this is an image of Jeffrey remembering and picturing himself or simply a shot originating outside his psychological world (or some combination of both) seems to be a meaningless distinction. And yet, in a film about what lies beneath the surface of things and … Read the rest

While working at a New York multimedia design firm, Curry decided to pursue a latent desire to make documentary films. With no prior experience in filmmaking, he bought a Sony PD150 and started filming Newark’s 2002 mayoral race between Corey Booker and then-four-time incumbent Sharpe James. That film became Street Fight, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. Fast forward to today, where Curry has received his second Oscar nomination for his latest film, If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, and you could do a lot worse for a self-taught filmmaker with just three films under his belt.

Between Curry’s first and his latest film falls Racing Dreams, which has its television premiere on PBS on February 23rd at 9PM. Just because it lacks an Oscar nomination doesn’t mean it’s a film to be slighted. Like its oft-cited comparison Hoop Dreams, Racing Dreams locates a multi-character, coming of age story within a sport where the players literally grow up before your eyes. The film was crafted from around 500 hours of footage, and, different from Hoop Dreams, unfolds over a brisk hour and a half.

Racing Dreams explores the so-called “Little League” of NASCAR racing, the World Karting Association, where pre-teens from around the country race go karts at speeds of up to 70 mph. Curry zeroes in on three young drivers — Annabeth (11 years old), Josh (12), and Brandon (13) — and watches them compete for the league’s National Championship. Bearing in mind an urban viewer’s possible ignorance to the sport, he sidesteps the generic, competition film approach and treats racing more as an entry … Read the rest

Next, Francine heads Austin, TX for South by Southwest (SXSW) where American audiences will have their first chance to see it.

If you want to know more about Francine, the film’s official website is: www.francinethefilm.com

Here is the synopsis:

Academy Award winner Melissa Leo gives a fierce and restrained performance as Francine, a woman struggling to find her place in a downtrodden lakeside town after leaving behind a life in prison. Taking a series of jobs working with animals, Francine turns away others and instead seeks intimacy in the most unlikely of places. Gritty, elliptical, and voyeuristic, Francine is a portrait of a near-silent misfit and her fragile first steps in an unfamiliar world.

And some snapshots from the Berlinale:

L-R: Melanie Shatzky, Melissa Leo & Brian M. Cassidy.

Finalizing the layout for the Francine poster.

Suit shopping for the premiere.

Melanie asleep at the airport, post-Rotterdam / pre-Berlin.

We were invited to a luncheon at the American Embassy in Berlin. In retrospect, I should have used a coaster for my champagne.

Francine is a Canada/US co-production. We were delighted to discover … Read the rest

Imagine you’re a new parent at 30 years old and you’ve just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.

But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the “public good”, simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written? After all, when you wrote your book, it sprung from your mind fully-formed, without requiring any inspiration from other creative works – you owe nothing at all to the public. And what would the public do with your book, even if they had it? Most likely, they’d just make it worse.

No, it’s clear that our current copyright law is inadequate and unfair. We must move to Eternal Copyright – a system where copyright never expires, and a world in which we no longer snatch food out of the mouths of our creators’ descendants. With eternal copyright, the knowledge that our great-great-great-grandchildren and beyond will benefit financially from our efforts will no doubt spur us on to achieve greater creative heights than ever seen before.

Read the entire piece for more of Hon’s proposal, including its implications on Hans Christian Anderson, Shakespeare and the Bible.… Read the rest

Second #3807, 63:27

1. “Today,” Jeffrey tells Sandy at Arlene’s, as we see a flashback of what he’s describing, “I staked out Frank’s place with a camera. Now, there’s another man involved in all this. I call him The Yellow Man.” These shots, in the bright of day, are some of the most quietly beautiful in the film with their burnt-orange 1940s-era Allied Vans, as if Walker Evans photographs had switched to color.

2. In Derek Raymond’s novel The Devil’s Home On Leave, the nameless Detective Sergeant recalls a terrible dream:

But in the night I dreamed that two figures appeared at the foot of my bed in Earlsfield. The one in front was a thickset, middle-aged man, heavy-featured and dressed in a cap and a thick grey coat. He made as if to chop at me with his hand. Black matter seeped out of his mouth and nose and he had been dead for years. The figure behind was so evil that one glance was all I could stomach. It was very small, a collection of what looked like old peeled sticks wrapped in a sack; it radiated hell’s own malice and groaned to get at me.

3. The frame at second #3807, too, has its own malice, in the form of the black window to the right of the gas pump, its upper pane boarded over, the irrational sense (in the way that nightmares are) that there may be someone inside watching Jeffrey, who is himself watching Frank. The window recalls, as imperfectly as memory, the Man in the Planet at the window in Eraserhead.

4. A few moments after this frame, once Jeffrey has described more of what he saw, he asks, “Now the trouble is, what does that prove?” Sandy’s response is “Nothing, really, but it’s interesting.” Just like a dream, or a nightmare.

Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 in August 2012. … Read the rest

We are filmmakers. We are artisans.

Or so we forget.

With filmmaking so often abstracted from the actual work of making a film, so enmeshed in conversations about new models and plans and strategies, we sometimes lose touch with what should be the main reason we make movies in the first place: to take pride in works of art made beautifully and with love.

It is precisely the love of artisanal creation that is celebrated in Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story, a verite doc chronicling the making of a 50-foot gaff rigged schooner, “Charlotte,” by a team of craftsmen working in a Martha’s Vineyard Boatyard. Focusing particularly on boat builder Nat Benjamin, Kusama-Hinte observes the painstaking and quiet work involved in building such an elegant craft over the several years required. In doing so, he eschews many of today’s accepted documentary strategies — pinning narrative on conflict, or allowing a character-based story to assume center stage. Instead, Kusama-Hinte focuses on the work, and he pushes us, the audience, to concentrate on its pleasures as well as its vexations, on the focus required to sustain it and the quiet satisfaction achieved by its final completion. With a lovely, Satie-like score by Paul Brill, Charlotte has a gentle, meditative power.

Charlotte is the second feature by Kusama-Hinte, whose Soul Power documentary was half glorious concert film and half exhilarating behind-the-scenes chronicle of the famed concert accompanying the “Rumble in the Jumble” boxing match. The two films are quite different, but they share a respect for their subject matters and a resolve to find the cinematic styles most suited to them. Kusama-Hinte is also a well known producer, whose credits include The Kids are All Right, Thirteen and Mysterious Skin, as well as — full disclosure — the Board Chair of IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker.

I spoke to Kusama-Hinte about making Charlotte, the work required to place it before audiences, and the DIY techniques he’s using to promote and distribute it.

Filmmaker: So, tell me about how you began this documentary, Charlotte.

Kusama-Hinte: I … Read the rest

It’s opening night of the 62^nd Berlinale, and we’re tottering down the gleaming red carpet, tipsy with exhaustion after a marathon three-week final push to finish our documentary Call Me Kuchu for its world premiere at the festival.  The black tie affair has women dripping in mink and jewels, and men tightly bound in waistcoats and cummerbunds. Just 48 hours prior, we were dripping in sweat and bound by a serious time crunch as we raced to the airport, gripping two newly-minted HDCAMs, still toasty-warm from the tape deck.

Our run at the Berlinale marks the culmination of two years documenting the work of Uganda’s first openly gay man and activist, David Kato, who was brutally murdered midway through our shoot and just weeks after winning a landmark lawsuit in Uganda’s High Court. The film closely follows Kampala’s LGBT activist community, so we felt it was crucial to have someone present at the screenings to speak for the kuchus. After weeks of nerve-wracking uncertainty trying to wrangle visas and travel permission, we were able to do just that – Naome Ruzindana, an LGBT activist, a key player in the film and a good friend, joined us in Berlin just in the nick of time before the premiere.

Walking into the theater, Naome’s eyes widened with ours as we passed a line of Berliners hoping for eleventh hour entry to the sold-out screening. We settled into our seats, and gave each other a quick hand-squeeze as the lights went down.

When the lights came back up, we were invited down to the front of the theater with our composer Jon Mandabach and Naome, who followed a few steps behind. As she stepped in front of the audience the applause swelled significantly and she gave an outstretched wave with a sheepish grin.

After eons of friends-and-family-only screenings (the only dedicated souls willing to sit through a three-hour cut) the eager responses from the crowd of strangers was a welcome kick-off to the dialogue we hope this film will launch. As we discussed how the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which David fought tooth and nail, was … Read the rest

On the basis of the episodes he had done so far, I selected Ferguson for Filmmaker‘s 2011 “25 New Faces” list. Here’s how I began his profile:

It’s hard to create something original about the remix. Okay, that would seem to go without saying, but I’m not referring to the subject of the remix — I’m talking about the discourse surrounding it. From Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix to Brett Gaylor’s feature doc, RIP: A Remix Manifesto, the creative, social and political issues surrounding the rise of remix culture have been debated with brio. Paradoxically, then, the familiarity we have with the issue of remixing is precisely what makes Kirby Ferguson’s four-part Web series, Everything is a Remix, so compelling. Rather than push a copy-left agenda or hype the latest mash-up artist, Ferguson uses the subject of the remix to discuss the history and nature of creativity. Everything is a Remix deconstructs the idea of originality, exploring the creative but also technological and business memes that recombine from one generation to the next, making us feel that we are encountering something “new” along the way. And it does so in bite-size, six-minute segments that have become a self-sustaining enterprise for its New York-based director.

“The idea for the series started a few years ago, when there were [plagiarism] lawsuits against Coldplay, J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown,” says Ferguson. “I thought they were kind of far-fetched. Why does someone

… Read the rest

Trailers have the ability to psyche us up, freak us out, turn us off, and lead us very, very astray, but the heightened anticipation (they don’t call them teasers for nothing) is part of the fun, regardless of how accurate a representation of the film that cleverly constructed little bugger ends up being in the end. Here’s a little commentary on a selection of recent genre trailers; let’s both judge a book by its cover and appraise the cover itself.

THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS (Justin Kurzel, in theaters March 2nd)

I always feel wary of trailers that start off with “true story” or facts and figures and location information, as if these are the film’s strongest selling point and said framing is required to appreciate it, but this trailer definitely evokes a grittily menacing Australian suburbs vibe pretty quickly. The tension between what initially appears to be a family drama and something far more sinister is established by setting carefree scenes of play against ominous music and beautifully overcast skies, and the choice to only show the eerie aftermath of violence, like a body wrapped in plastic, is chillingly effective.

PLAYBACK (Michael A. Nickles, in theaters March 9th)

Films about serial killers who tape their handiwork? Hardly a new concept. Movies in which technology is haunted by evil? The Japanese are on top of it, with everything from One Last Call to Ringu, baby. The confluence of those two classic ideas? Well that could be interesting, but only if appropriately executed. I wish this trailer made the crossover seem fresh but their cliche handling, with the jerky J-horror movements and quick cuts interspersed with TV blizzard imagery, doesn’t inspire confidence that some exciting hybrid is going to emerge. Plus, this trailer makes me feel sad for Christian Slater.

SILENT HOUSE (Chris Kentis & Laura Lau, in theaters March 9th)

Elizabeth Olsen is exploding faster than Jessica Chastain in 2011, so casting her in a film in which, like Martha Marcy May Marlene, she is the focus of nearly every frame seems equally prescient. While the … Read the rest

He co-wrote the script with the source novel’s Croatian author, Ivica Djikic. Tanovic examines kinship up front, with the impending war between Croats and Serbs (in Croatia and in Herzegovina, a gorgeous region of mixed ethnic population that is part of Bosnia) coloring the intimate links between family members.

Set in 1991, when the various regions of Yugoslavia were seceding, and with trouble brewing in places like Bosnia and Croatia where Serbs constituted a substantial minority, the film surveys the pre-war mood. You will not find the irony and black comedy that made No Man’s Land such a unique treatment of battle. Instead, here Tanovic goes for a more straightforward narrative, with only incidental humor, that well serves the film’s strong emotional resonance. His gift with affect was already manifest in his short documentary, Dawn (1998), in which he cross cuts between a vulnerable Bosnian war veteran who has lost his arms and the wife and children driving to see him for the first time since his injury. This is the one film that makes me cry every time I watch it.

Cirkus Columbia takes place in a Herzegovinian village where people are too wrapped up in their own personal problems to take seriously telling signs of the conflict to come. The protagonist is Divko (the great Serbian actor Miki Manojlovic), a Croatian who has just returned to his unsophisticated but quaint home town after 20 years of fortune-making in Germany. Instead of war clouds, he channels his energy into obsessively searching for his lost black cat and waxing nostalgic over the backwater town as it used to be.

(The title refers to the … Read the rest

While there are many pressing existential questions, to my mind, this is one of the most significant: can one make a truly effective film about aimlessness and boredom without that film becoming excruciatingly aimless and boring in its own right? At first glance, Clay Jeter’s Jess + Moss might seem to confront that issue head on, and if you aren’t in the right frame of mood, your opinion might be a less than favorable one. But if you go into it understanding that this is sensory-based—as opposed to plot-driven—cinema, you’ll immediately recognize that Jess + Moss is about something completely different. It’s about the memory of aimlessness and boredom. In a larger way, it concerns the ineffable, mysterious power of memory itself, how it can cause us to feel so deeply when we aren’t even able to pinpoint what it is that’s making us feel so lonely and sad.

Jess + Moss is most certainly not from the Super 8 school of nostalgia cinema (if anything, we’re in George Washington country here, though even that feels like an unnecessary stretch of a comparison). Shot in and around Murray, Kentucky, where Jeter himself was raised—most of the film takes place on his family’s actual land—this is actually an experimental tone poem of a feature, which moves to the dreamy, meandering rhythm of summertime itself. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a compelling or dramatic incident that propels the story forward. Jess (Sarah Hagan) and Moss (Austin Vickers), seemingly the only inhabitants on this old, forgotten land, no longer have parents. As the 18-year-old Jess tells Moss repeatedly, her story soothing his 12-year-old soul, their parents were best friends who used to play pitch together, until one night a … Read the rest

That’s a question I asked on Facebook after a late night holiday bender and noticing the ridiculous amount of press Ed got for making a film that certainly didn’t cost him 9K. Then I thought, who really does make a film for 9K? If you add up all the favors and salaries that are not getting paid you’re in the hundreds of thousands. Then I thought, oh man is there any such thing as micro-budget at all? Or is it like the myth of cover girl beauty. (Isn’t he married to a model, by the way?) Then before I could kill myself, Lucas McNelly commented in defense of Ed. Lucas and I have been communicating on and off, and recently, FCF has started development on a documentary of his A Year Without REnt and this experiment we call indie filmmaking.

Now don’t get me wrong, Ed Burns is a good filmmaker, and I think it’s great that he is jumping into micro-budget filmmaking with both feet. Lucas made a good point that he is also making low-budget filmmaking acceptable to a wider audience. All good things.

I think my biggest problem with Ed being the mouthpiece is the expectation it sets. By having a large arsenal of personal favors and resources far beyond the scope of any micro-budget filmmaker he sets a false expectation to the filmgoing audience. The industry often does the same thing by taking a film that cost hundreds of thousands to make and finish, fudging the numbers to put it in the four-digit range, and then using that as it’s selling point. This is the same as taking someone who is a size 12, photographing them, and then using Photoshop to make them look a size 4. We cultivate an audience that has disjointed expectations between budget and product. They demand a certain quality of product, yet no one can truly make that product with the tools (or body) they are given. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not surprised this has happened in … Read the rest

… Read the rest

From the review:

A minimalist, image-based character study that is almost impossibly fragile and yet emotionally robust, Francine is a legitimate discovery. It’s propelled by Melissa Leo’s remarkable title-role performance, rigorous in its honesty and unimpeded by even a scrap of vanity. Made on a shoestring, this first narrative feature from husband-and-wife filmmaking team Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky is raw, intimate and observed with penetrating acuity.

The austere approach and stark naturalism invite comparison with the work of Kelly Reichardt, and the subject specifically recalls Wendy and Lucy. (Producers Joshua Blum and Kate Stern have both worked with Reichardt.) The earliest films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne also come to mind while watching. But Cassidy and Shatzky, whose backgrounds are jointly in photography and documentary, have their own voice and their own nonjudgmental gaze.

As a window into a life of seemingly irreversible dissociation, the film performs the uncommon trick of being wide open and pellucid while simultaneously shut tight and opaque. One of the interesting aspects of Francine is that despite the unsettling intimacy of the portrait, only sparing use is made of facial closeups – the usual short-cut to accessing an introspective character. Dialogue figures just as frugally, and psychological background is entirely withheld. But still we come to know the woman onscreen, speculating about her history and contemplating her future after the film has ended.

In Francine, Leo plays a paroled convict, first seen showering and then turning to the camera where she is caught naked, full body, in a wide shot. The nudity foreshadows the emotional nakedness of the film to follow, as Leo’s withdrawn, emotionally damaged character drifts through a series of dead-end jobs before finally working in a veterinary clinic and developing an … Read the rest

The full list of additions:

NARRATIVE SPOTLIGHT

Blue Like Jazz
Director: Steve Taylor, Screenwriters: Donald Miller, Steve Taylor, Ben Pearson
A Texas college student flees the hypocrisy of his religious upbringing for life in the Pacific Northwest at ‘the most godless campus in America.’ Based on the New York Times bestseller by Donald Miller.
Cast: Marshall Allman, Claire Holt, Tania Raymonde, Justin Welborn, Eric Lange (World Premiere)

Nature Calls
Director/Screenwriter: Todd Rohal
Polar-opposite brothers Randy (Oswalt) and Kirk (Knoxville) never saw eye-to-eye, but their rivalry is taken to a new level when Randy hijacks Kirk’s son’s sleepover, taking the boys on a Scout Trip to remember. Cast: Patton Oswalt, Johnny Knoxville, Rob Riggle, Maura Tierney, Patrice O’Neal, Darrell Hammond (World Premiere)

EMERGING VISIONS

King Kelly
Director: Andrew Neel, Screenwriter: Mike Roberts
Made entirely from camera-phone footage, King Kelly is a sensational journey into hedonistic American youth culture and the YouTube generation.
Cast: Louisa Krause, Libby Woodbridge, Roderick Hill, Will Brill, Patrick Murney (World Premiere)

LOW & CLEAR
Directors: Kahlil Hudson, Tyler Hughen
Two formerly close friends reunite for a fly-fishing trip and struggle to understand how much they’ve each changed – and how these changes now threaten the friendship. (World Premiere)

24 BEATS PER SECOND

Lost and Sound (UK)
Director: Lindsey Dryden
Music may be an essential part of being human – but what if you lost the ability to hear it? A dancer, a pianist and a music critic attempt to re-discover music after deafness, with astonishing results.
(World Premiere)

Searching for Sugar Man (Sweden/UK)
Director: Malik Bendjelloul
The true story of the greatest ‘70s US rock … Read the rest

Each year Cinekink co-founder and director Lisa Vandever previews her festival here on the blog, pointing Filmmaker readers to films of particular interest to our readers. This year, the festival ran earlier, so below Vandever presents a wrap-up in which she lists the winners and discusses some of her programming choices. — Editor.

Earlier-than-usual dates this year for CineKink NYC (February 7-12) and a ramped-up pre-production schedule hampered my ability to put together some coherent thoughts on the festival going into it. I’m happy, then, for the opportunity to remark on some of the highlights coming out of it — and things to look for in the year ahead, either via other festivals or as part of the CineKink 2012 tour.

After several weeks of being holed up with nothing but stacks of screeners, it’s very easy to fear I’ve lost perspective on what’s going to work well up on the big screen. Audience response is an anticipated and feared indicator of how well we’ve succeeded, most tangibly in the form of Audience Choice Award for Best Features balloting. Not to take away at all from the winners, it was especially gratifying to have the scores come in so high and so close together this year — it’s very nice to have the competition so fierce! Cabaret Desire‘s (pictured above) tie for Best Narrative Feature was an easy call; it’s a sumptuous, sexy film and director Erika Lust has won several CineKink awards with her shorts over the years. But tying for the win, I wasn’t quite sure whether I’d veered off course into crazy with Sweet Prudence & the Erotic Adventure of Bigfoot, so it felt great to have the audience eagerly embrace it as well by giving William Burke’s wacky, sex-positive comedy an enthusiastic nod. And it was also validating to have Richard Buonagurio’s awkwardly compelling Stage Brother taken up by the audience and given the prize for Best Documentary Feature.

Screening out of competition (and since given our annual CineKink Tribute award), Tom Twyker’s romantic feature 3, about a long-time couple who both become … Read the rest

Back in 2008, Alaskan director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean was awarded Best Short at the Sundance Film Festival for his period film Sikumi, about a murder and its aftermath in an Inuit community. MacLean, one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” that year, had set the buzzed-about tale in his frozen Arctic hometown of Barrow, the historical seat of the Iñupiaq people, casting locals and shooting out on the ice in subzero temperatures. (Sin Nombre writer-director Cary Fukunaga lensed the film.) Last year at Sundance, MacLean unveiled On the Ice, a feature-length movie loosely based on the short film; while the basic set-up remained the same, the story had a contemporary setting where hoodie-wearing Inupiat youth striving to emulate their hip-hop icons gambol about town on snowmobiles instead of dog sleds. MacLean shifted gears to jittery suspense as well in order to explore the moral complexities of guilt and responsibility within a traditional culture. The film, gorgeously shot by DP Lol Crawley (Ballast), went on to win the Best First Feature Award at the 2011 Berlinale.

Teenage pals Qalli (Josiah Patkotak) and Aivaaq (Frank Qutuq Irelan) come from a close-knit community in northern Alaska, balancing the expectations of their elders with the natural rebelliousness of youth. Qalli’s family is stable and supportive of his efforts to head off to college; Aivaaq, who has an edgier vibe, lives with his alcoholic mother and is contemplating finding a job so he can take care of his pregnant girlfriend. Though such circumstances differentiate them, they maintain a tight relationship. As an all-night house party gets underway one evening, they agree to meet mutual friend James (John Miller)—a rival of Aivaaq’s—for a seal-hunting trip the next morning. When Qalli arrives at the meeting point, the meth-high boys are already locked in a fistfight, and he intervenes, an incident that leads to James’ violent death. Everyone back in town grieves for the missing teen, buying Aivaaq and Qalli’s claim that James fell through the ice, leaving the friends to quietly agonize over their decision to abandon the body … Read the rest

Q: How did you come to work on the movie Concussion?
I was contacted out of the blue by the director, who’d seen my reel. She interviewed a whole bunch of DPs and I guess we just connected over the script and what she was trying to do.

Q: Can you tell us about the movie?
It’s about a woman named Abby who is a bored, wealthy, lesbian housewife from the suburbs. By day, as her kids sit in school, she becomes a prostitute for women, while she also flips lofts for a living. She’ll buy a studio space and turn it into a loft and sell it, and she ends up entertaining clients there.

I kind of describe it as similar to American Beauty, in that sort of vein of frustrated-suburban-life with a little bit of fantasy. It’s very low budget, but it’s a beautiful film. We had a whole slew of amazing actors. Our lead actress was Robin Weigert from Deadwood, and other actors included Maggie Siff of Mad Men and Janel Moloney of The West Wing.

As far as everyone else involved, we had a very young crew. Somewhat inexperienced, but experienced enough to make it happen.

Q: You own a RED Epic, but was that the only reason you used the camera for this project?
I think using the Epic on this was perfect because, to me, it’s a cinematic camera. It’s made for cinema, and I only see a movie like this being projected in a theater, I don’t intend watching it on Vimeo or something like that.

I fought to shoot it on the Epic. I think something like an Alexa might have actually slowed us down because there was a lot of handheld shots. The movie was … Read the rest