25 NEW FACES – PART 2

By Filmmaker Staff

Jason Byrne

When we caught up with filmmaker Jason Byrne to include him in this year’s “25,” it was via e-mail from Tanzania. At the sa me time Byrne’s hypnotic experimental documentary Scrap Vessel winds its way along the festival circuit, he is working as an audio/visual archivist for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. “Living in East Africa for the last two years has been a deeply rich experience, and this job has been fascinating but psychologically difficult at times, especially when listening to the many graphically explained testimonies from witnesses to the genocide,” he writes.

Byrne has worked previously as an archivist in Los Angeles, and he also graduated from the Film/Video Masters program at CalArts, where he “received a lot of help in understanding space and time from filmmakers Betzy Bromberg and James Benning.” His understanding of the relationship between film practice and historical memory informed Scrap Vessel, which was his thesis project at CalArts. The film takes place on the final voyage of a former Chinese-owned freighter ship on its way to the breaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. As he explains, “I shot this film in the frame of mind of being alienated from the rest of the crew and of trying to capture my initial understanding of the new environment. Maybe the film is the reverse of an anthropological study. Once I began editing, I realized I also wanted the film to reflect the memories I had aboard the ship, which I created by manipulating shots to give them a dreamlike image. By manipulation, I was able to capture a stronger state of sublime (technically by building heavy contrast by rephotographing the print over and over again), along with sound of Albert Ortega’s haunted-like score, to capture the traces of memory that leave me continuously with the surreal vision of being aboard the vessel. Also, I was interested in creating a similar haunted feeling with the use of the dusty archival material left over from the former mainland Chinese crew, which is interspersed throughout the film, that includes 16mm motion pictures of 1970s/’80s … Read the rest

25 NEW FACES – PART 4

By Filmmaker Staff

Brent Stewart

When you live next to Harmony Korine some unconventional ideas can creep into your head. So when Brent Stewart was thinking about making a chamber-piece drama on 35mm and shooting the whole thing with little to no camera movement he went to his famous filmmaking neighbor for some advice.

“I knew it would be a challenge to pull off because even Harmony said to me, ‘Man, that’s risky.’”

But, The Colonel’s Bride, Stewart’s debut feature, is an intimate look at loneliness, old age and death with striking photography, a haunting score and a stirring lead performance that shouldn’t be missed. In the film, we follow Bill (character actor James DeForest Parker), a Vietnam vet who awaits the arrival of his mail-order bride (Alicia Truong). With a regular diet of booze and cigarettes, Bill is a grizzled guy from a different era. Though Stewart doesn’t delve into the pain in Bill’s eyes, it’s obvious he’s seen a lot in his life and is still digesting it all; and by the time he’s content the end is suddenly upon him.

For Stewart, 35, the creation of Colonel’s Bride is a culmination of years struggling in the avenues of fine art and photography. Searching to find “comfort in narrative stories,” he attended Rotterdam’s CineMart when he was selected in 2007 in hopes to get his footing in the film world. “I was meeting with production companies from all over the world, but they were like, ‘Let’s make a film in Belgium.’” Frustrated, he went back to Nashville and began making shorts, including the ’09 Sundance entry The Dirty Ones. Then last year he scrounged enough money through a mixture of sporadic jobs, selling his still photography and working as a second-unit director for one of Korine’s Liberty Mutual commercials (where he met Parker) to make Colonel’s Bride. He also obtained his 35mm film through short ends his AC got from shows like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy and the movie Gran Torino. “Economy of means,” is how Stewart describes the making of the film. But soon after filming … Read the rest

25 NEW FACES – PART 3

By Filmmaker Staff

Zac Stuart-Pontier

If you go to the website of Zac Stuart-Pontier (zac-edits.com), your browser heading will display the following: “Zac edits really, really, really well.” This cheeky claim was earned in early 2010 when the three feature documentaries that Zac had been working on since he graduated NYU in 2006 premiered within a month of each other: Jody Lee Lipes and Henry Joost’s NY Export: Opus Jazz, which premiered on PBS and took to the festival circuit with gusto in March, via SXSW; James Rasin’s biographical doc Beautiful Darling,about the Warhol superstar Candy Darling and the loves she left behind, which premiered at Berlin and ND/NF; and the Sundance sensation Catfish, which chronicles the twists and turns of a Facebook romance.

“The reception of Catfish was a trip,” says Stuart-Pontier. “Working on it for years, you become desensitized to the story, so when people have a reaction like that, it’s just amazing.” As his edits have progressed, Stuart-Pontier has consistently taken on a bigger role in his productions, earning himself co-producer credits on both Catfish and Beautiful Darling. He has also been an assistant director, chiefly on Cannes selections Afterschool (directed by Antonio Campos) and Two Gates of Sleep (directed by Alistair Banks Griffin), but also on some of the same commercials and music videos that he edits. “That’s perfect, because I can be on set and say, ‘Guys, I’m never gonna use this shot. Let’s cut it.’” Stuart-Pontier says he has a difficult time sitting back when there’s work to be done. “It’s hard for me to stop working on something; it feels like admitting defeat. It feels like, ‘I wasn’t able to solve this problem.’”

Growing up in Narrowsburg, N.Y., his parents ran the local newspaper together, which is where he was first bit with the story bug “learning to write news, what information you give first, how you introduce the characters.” He writes a weekly column for the River Reporter about his life, begun during college at the behest of his mother, and credits it with keeping … Read the rest

STREET STYLE

By Jamie Stuart

By Jamie Stuart

25 NEW FACES

By Filmmaker Staff

The 25 new faces of independent film.