LARS KNUDSEN AND JAY VAN HOY SIGN DEVELOPMENT DEAL WITH K5

By Dan Schoenbrun

Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy, the producing duo behind Gotham Award Best Picture winner and Oscar nominee Beginners, have signed an output and development deal with sales, finance, and production company K5 Media Group.

The deal marks an alliance between two rising indie powerhouses. Knudsen and Van Hoy have been building their reputation for the past ten years. In 2004, they founded production company Parts & Labor and steadily accumulated a body of festival circuit sleeper hits including Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Cam Archer’s Wild Tigers I Have Known, and Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still. More recently, the duo produced Bradley Rust Gray’s Exploding Girl, Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather, Braden King’s Here, and of course, Mike Mill’s Beginners.

K5, whose offices are located in London, Munich, and Los Angeles have recently put out Vehicle 19 starring Paul Walker and Night Train to Lisbon starring Jeremy Irons. On the sales front, the company handled international sales on recent indies such as Buck, The Visitor, and Get Low.

This news marks another leap forward for Knudsen and Van Hoy, who previously had a three-year first look deal with Scott Rudin. The first titles the duo will offer up as part of their new K5 deal will be Mysterious Skin director Gregg Araki’s The Womb and Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter, to be produced with Rudin and starring Kirsten Dunst and Mark Ruffalo.

“Jay and Lars have clearly learned from one of the best in being mentored by Scott Rudin and they are at the forefront of the new wave of important indie producers,” says K5’s Oliver Simon.  “They’re ambitious too, like us, and we see this deal as a great opportunity to grow together.”… Read the rest

THE MICROBUDGET CONVERSATION: THE SUCCESS OF FAILURE

By John Yost

Well after a great holiday, and another Sundance, we are back for a new season of the conversation. This year we’re going to try and expand the definition of micro and see it as more of a state of mind and community, as oppose to a budget. I’m looking to hear from more filmmakers, see how they are expanding the limitations of technology, and see how the new model is effecting the old. We are also working on a project you’ll be hearing more about as the months roll on. Our hopes is that it will be some of the first steps in sustaining a career in micro, and expanding a community of professionals…stay tuned.

Winter can  be a season of rejection and failure in the film community. Many of us didn’t get into Sundance, but watched from the sidelines, and even more of us just got rejection letters from SXSW. However, failure is an essential part of the creative process and this week Mike Newman urges us to embrace it. – JY

For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I wasn’t physically locked up behind bars, rather my mind was trapped behind the confines of institutionalized schooling. I swear this ties in to filmmaking, just bear with me. We’re told that we go to school to receive an education, but I beg to differ. Indoctrination is really the point. I can’t really remember much of what I was taught in all those years, except that we should play it safe, follow the rules, listen to authority, and fit in with the crowd. This is not a recipe for success and definitely not a blueprint to reach our fullest potential. It’s a road-map to mediocrity.

The irony of it all is that the best lecture I got wasn’t in any classroom; it was on my college graduation day in June of 2004. It was a simple lesson. I don’t remember much of what was said during the ceremony except one distinct part of it that has been imprinted on my brain for eternity. My commencement speaker told us … Read the rest

CREATIVE CAPITAL ANNOUNCES 2012 FILM AND VIDEO GRANTEES

By Scott Macaulay

At a reception last night at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, Creative Capital announced its 2012 Film & Video and Visual Arts grantees. Among the media artists are a number of names familiar to Filmmaker readers, including 25 New Face directors Cam Archer, Matt Porterfield and Yance Ford. Others who received grants include L.A.-based director Nina Menkes, veteran experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, and Rooftop Films head Mark Elijah Rosenberg, who, as a director, will tell “a multimedia, fictional story of an astronaut heading to Mars alone on a one-way mission.”

“Our grantees span artists from 27 years old to 77,” said Creative Capital Director Ruby Lerner at the event, before going on to explain the organization’s unique mission, which involves not only granting artists funds for their projects but also working with them to hone their professional skill sets. For Creative Capital, both making work and making a living while making work are prioritized, and the organization’s hopeful stance is that it’s not only possible to do both but fulfilling to do so. At the reception, in fact, Feldman cited a study that asked artists over 65 if their career in the arts had been worth it. “Their answer was a unanimous ‘yes,’” he said.

Among the projects supported this year are “a nontraditional documentary that uncovers the underground medical industry of ‘curing’ homosexuality in India (Sonali Gulati); a hand-drawn, animated feature about characters in two different worlds connected by unlikely threads (Christopher Sullivan); a film that investigates the relationships between factory workers and the objects they produce (Daniel Eisenberg); a documentary about people who make the decision to disappear and disconnect from their pasts (Robert Bahar & Almudena Carracedo); a coming-of-age story of a first-generation Somali immigrant high-school girl in Minneapolis (Jake Yuzna); and a film about the American auto industry as a manufacturer of personal identity (Jesse Sugarmann).”

Minneapolis filmmaker Jake Yuzna (pictured above) will make Werewolves in the Mall of America, described as “A coming-of-age story of a first-generation Somali immigrant high-school girl living in Minneapolis… a poetic, emotional portrait of the new face … Read the rest

CAM ARCHER LAUNCHES CRIME DOC ON KICKSTARTER

By Scott Macaulay

Boundary-busting filmmaker Cam Archer — one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces and director of, most recently, Shit Year — is making his first doc, Criminal Thoughts. He talks about it and his career in an unguarded video for Kickstarter.

In the video, Archer is up-front about the exploratory nature of his project, which appeals to me. As more and more Kickstarter campaigns seem like pre-buys for existing products/projects, Cam’s appeal to us to assist him during his creative process is striking. From the page:

CRIMINAL THOUGHTS, my first feature length documentary, will be an exciting, creative departure for me. in the past, my work has been almost exclusively narrative. though i still consider all of that work to be of me, the fictional element, as far as i am concerned, builds a wall, or a mask, which keeps us from getting to know one another. i’d like to remove the mask and be as direct as possible. does this sound okay?

FIVE REAL CRIMES call to me each night… they’re tangled in my mind, actually. with your help, through my lens, i can begin to explore, investigate and re-imagine each of these crimes, their horrors. each investigation will take me some place new, places like: WASHINGTON STATE, INDIANA, OHIO, VIRGINIA, FLORIDA, CALIFORNIA and VIETNAM. yes, crime is everywhere. why?

the film will have one principal narrator, an actor, who will speak in the first person (as me), presenting new facts and old truths, as they are collected and exposed. additional narrators, or characters, will be presented throughout the film, as each new story or incident is introduced. inevitably, with actors lending their voices to real people, some of which are dead, there will be an unavoidable narrative element in the final film.

though this film will be, at its core, about crime, it will, inadvertently, also be a film about me, touching on my own personal obsessions and dark thoughts. projects like this are often labeled ‘personal documentaries,’ but i’d like to think that this project, at this point in time, is too new and undeveloped to be

… Read the rest

AN INTERVIEW WITH “SHIT YEAR”‘S CAM ARCHER

By Scott Macaulay

This post was originally published when Shit Year premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. The film opens today at the IFC Center.

It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set of her last film. In an eerily composed performance, Barkin projects the steely emotional control of a woman determined not to descend into the full-blown sadness that seems just a beat away. It’s a performance that reminded me a bit of Tuesday Weld’s similarly dazed heroine in Frank Perry’s under-seen adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays. Both films — along with more recent work like David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive — view Hollywood more as a corrosive mental state than an actual place.

But the film is also about other things that exist beyond the outlines of its plot and its often dead-on dialogue. What those other things are, however, is up to you. Freeing himself of the melodramatic conventions of the midlife crisis movie, or the Hollywood cautionary tale, Archer, shooting in beautiful black-and-white with his usual cinematographer, Aaron Platt, has captured a state that we all pass through at some point in our lives, a time in which the outside world recedes and all we are left with is what’s inside of us — and, perhaps, the company of an exotic space alien (played here by Theresa Randle) who would like to know just what it is that makes us tick.

I spoke with Archer for a few minutes at the American Pavilion in Cannes.

Filmmaker: What … Read the rest

CANNES COVERAGE, CAM ARCHER INTERVIEW NEW ON THE SITE

By Scott Macaulay

With both our “25 New Faces” feature and the IFP’s Narrative Lab coming up, I’ve been kind of backlogged here on the blog. But, I just posted a couple of things: first, Livia Bloom’s recap of Cannes in our Festival Coverage section, and then my interview with Shit Year director Cam Archer, conducted in Cannes after the premiere of his film in the Director’s Fortnight section. And, in a separate post, Bloom wonders why there were not any female directors in Competition in Cannes this year. You can check them out at the links.… Read the rest

“SHIT YEAR” DIRECTOR CAM ARCHER AT CANNES |
By Scott Macaulay

It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set of her last film. In an eerily composed performance, Barkin projects the steely emotional control of a woman determined not to descend into the full-blown sadness that seems just a beat away. It’s a performance that reminded me a bit of Tuesday Weld’s similarly dazed heroine in Frank Perry’s under-seen adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays. Both films — along with more recent work like David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive — view Hollywood more as a corrosive mental state than an actual place.

But the film is also about other things that exist beyond the outlines of its plot and its often dead-on dialogue. What those other things are, however, is up to you. Freeing himself of the melodramatic conventions of the midlife crisis movie, or the Hollywood cautionary tale, Archer, shooting in beautiful black-and-white with his usual cinematographer, Aaron Platt, has captured a state that we all pass through at some point in our lives, a time in which the outside world recedes and all we are left with is what’s inside of us — and, perhaps, the company of an exotic space alien (played here by Theresa Randle) who would like to know just what it is that makes us tick.

I spoke with Archer for a few minutes at the American Pavilion in Cannes.

Filmmaker: What were the origins of Shit Year?

Archer: After making Wild Tigers I Have Known, the first [movie], I started to feel disenchanted … Read the rest

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT SLATE ANNOUNCED

Earlier today Cannes unveiled the 24 films selected for its annual sidebar, Directors’ Fortnight. Opening this year with Renaud Barret & Florent de la Tullaye’s documentary Benda Bilili!, the line-up is dominated by first-time filmmakers, 11 in all. One American standout is Cam Archer (Wild Tigers I Have Known) who will be screening his latest, Shit Year, starring Ellen Barkin.

Fortnight will take place May 13-23.

Full list of titles below.

FEATURE FILMS
Alegria (Joy), directed by Marina Méliande et Felipe Braganca (Brazil)
All Good Children, directed by Alicia Duffy (UK)
Alting bliver godt igen (Everything Will Be Fine), directed by Christoffer Boe (Denmark-Sweden-France)
Año bisiesto, directed by Michael Rowe (Mexico)
Benda Bilili!, directed by Renaud Barret & Florent de la Tullaye (France) (documentary)
La Casa muda (The Silent House), directed by Gustavo Hernandez (Uruguay)
Cleveland vs. Wall Street, directed by Jean-Stéphane Bron (Switzerland – France) (documentary)
“Des Filles en noir,” directed by Jean-Paul Civeyrac (France)
Ha’Meshotet (The Wanderer), directed by Avishai Sivan (Israel)
Illégal, directed by Olivier Masset-Depasse (Belgium-Luxembourg-France)
The Light Thief, directed by Aktan Arym Kubat (Kyrgyzistan)
Little Baby Jesus of Flandr, directed by Gust Vandenberghe (Belgium)
La Mirada invisible (The Invisible Eye), directed by Diego Lerman (Argentina-France-Spain)
Picco, directed by Philip Koch (Germany)
Pieds nus sur les limaces (Lily Sometimes), directed by Fabienne Berthaud (France)
Le Quattro volte, directed by Michelangelo Frammartino (Italy-Germany-Switzerland)
Shit Year, directed by Cam Archer (U.S.)
Somos lo que hay (We Are What We Are), directed by Jorge Michel Grau (Mexico)
Tiger Factory, directed by Woo Ming jin (Malaysia)
Todos vós sodes capitáns, directed by Oliver Laxe (Spain)
Two Gates Of Sleep, directed by Alistair Banks Griffin (U.S.)
Un Poison violent, directed by Katell Quillevéré (France)

SPECIAL SCREENINGS
Stones In Exile, directed by Stephen Kijak (U.K.) (documentary)
Boxing Gym, directed by Frederik Wiseman (U.S.A.) (documentary)

SHORT FILMS
Cautare (Quest), directed by Ionut Piturescu (Romania)
Ett tyst barn (A Silent Child), directed by Jesper Klevenas (Sweden)
Licht, directed by Andre Schreuders (The Netherlands)
Mary Last Seen, directed by Sean Durkin (U.S.A.)
Petit tailleur, directed by Louis Garrel … Read the rest

TIGER BEAT

By Scott Macaulay

Cam Archer emailed to say that the website for his feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known is online. It premieres later this month at the Sundance Film Festival in the Frontier section.

If you don’t know Archer’s shorts, you can get a glimpse of his style by checking out the site, which has the same hand-etched, artisanal qualities as his very intimate films. His is a film I’m really looking forward to at the festival.… Read the rest

ALL YOU’VE LEFT

By Admin

Cam Archer, who was kind enough to interview Mysterious Skin co-stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbett for Filmmaker while he was at Sundance earlier this year to premiere his short Forgetting Jonathan Brandis, wrote via e-mail to let us know he has just completed a new music video for the band Six Organs of Admittance.

The gorgeous, lyrical video for the song “Eighth Cognition/All You’ve Left,” from Six Organ’s new album School of the Flower (Drag City), can be viewed on Cam’s Web site.
.… Read the rest