“BLACK SWAN” WINS BIG AT SPIRIT AWARDS

By Jason Guerrasio

The Film Independent Spirit Awards just wrapped (see it on IFC tonight @ 10ET) and Darren Aronofsky‘s thriller Black Swan was the big winner taking home four awards, including Best Feature, Best Director for Aronofsky and Best Female Lead for Natalie Portman. Winter’s Bone won the supporting acting prizes with John Hawkes taking it for actor and Dale Dickey for actress while James Franco won Best Male Lead for 127 Hours, Banksy‘s Exit through the Gift Shop won Best Documentary and Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg won Best Screenplay for The Kids Are All Right.

Also, “25 New Face” alum Lena Dunham won the Best First Screenplay prize for Tiny Furniture and Mike Ott, who we awarded with our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” award at this year’s Gotham Awards for his latest Littlerock, won the Someone to Watch award.

Read the full list of winners below.

Best Feature

Black Swan

Best Director

Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan

Best Female Lead

Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Best Male Lead

James Franco, 127 Hours

Best Supporting Female

Dale Dickey, Winter’s Bone

Best Supporting Male

John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone

Best Screenplay

Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, The Kids Are All Right

Best First Feature

Get Low

John Cassavetes Award

Daddy Longlegs

Best First Screenplay

Lena Dunham, Tiny Furniture

Best Documentary

Exit Through The Gift Shop

Best Foreign Film

The King’s Speech

Best Cinematography

Matthew Libatique, Black Swan

Truer Than Fiction Award

Marwencol

Someone to Watch Award

Mike Ott, director of Littlerock

Producers Award

Anish Savjani, producer of Meek’s Cutoff

Robert Altman Award

Please Give — Nicole Holofcener (writer-director), Jeanne McCarthy (casting director) and actors Ann Gilbert, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Lois Smith and Sarah Steele… Read the rest

BANKSY WINS TOP PRIZE AT CINEMA EYE HONORS

By Scott Macaulay

At an awards ceremony at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, Cinema Eye handed out honors to the best of this year’s documentary films. The top award, the Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking, when to Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, produced by Jaime D’Cruz. Laura Poitras was named Outstanding Director for The Oath, and Jeff Malmberg Outstanding Debut for his Marwencol. Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill won the first Filmmaker-sponsored Heterodox Award. One of the most moving moments of the night was a tribute to editor Karen Schmeer, who was killed last year in a hit-and-run, and one of the most inspiring was the Legacy Award given to Albert Maysles and Muffie Meyer. Maysles, who is 84, quipped, “There must be someone in the audience with money for my next 25 films. (The highlight of my evening was taking their picture and having Maysles correct my frame.)

Last night’s was my first time attending the Cinema Eye Honors, and I loved the mixture of awards-show ceremony and warm-hearted community gathering. A.J. Schnack and Esther Robinson were surprisingly good as comedically bantering hosts, zinging punchlines that I’m sure will be somewhat obscure to those watching on the Doc Channel later in the month but which everyone in the room laughed at. Quite often, though, both they and the presenters spoke personally and warmly about the psychic rewards of the often punishing profession of documentary film. (Robinson at one point compared it to drug addiction in that you lose your money and your youth while pursuing it.) The most memorable of these comments was from the late George Hickenlooper, as remembered by Morgan Spurlock. The Super Size Me director recalled a dinner with Hickenlooper a couple of weeks before he died. “How lucky we are to do what we do with our lives,” Hickenlooper said to him. They were words that resonated deeply to all of those in the room.

The complete awards list is below. For more on the Heterodox Award, wait for our Spring issue, in which the five jurors will discuss their decision … Read the rest

OSCAR DOC FEATURE SHORTLIST: WHICH TITLES SHOULD HAVE MADE THE CUT?

By Jason Guerrasio

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed today the 15 films that have made their shortlist for the Best Feature Documentary category in the 83rd Academy Awards.

They include:

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Alex Gibney, director (ES Productions LLC)

Enemies of the People, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, directors (Old Street Films)

Exit through the Gift Shop, Banksy, director (Paranoid Pictures)

Gasland, Josh Fox, director (Gasland Productions, LLC)

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont, directors (White Pine Pictures)

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson, director (Representational Pictures)

The Lottery, Madeleine Sackler, director (Great Curve Films)

Precious Life, Shlomi Eldar, director (Origami Productions)

Quest for Honor, Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, director (Smothers Bruni Productions)

Restrepo, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, directors (Outpost Films)

This Way of Life, Thomas Burstyn, director (Cloud South Films)

The Tillman Story, Amir Bar-Lev, director (Passion Pictures/Axis Films)

Waiting for “Superman”, Davis Guggenheim, director (Electric Kinney Films)

Waste Land, Lucy Walker, director (Almega Projects)

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, directors (Disturbing the Universe LLC)

Though many deserving titles will be moving forward with the chance to be called when the Academy names its nominees the morning of Jan. 25, the doc shortlist announcement has in recent years become a time to focus on which docs were left out.

Glaring omissions: The Oath, Last Train Home, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, to name a few.

Soon after the announcement many took to Twitter to show their displeasure, including Zeitgeist Films which tweeted about doing a write-in campaign for their snubbed films, The Oath and Last Train Home.

Whether it be the Academy’s out-of-touch voters, or its confusing requirements to be considered, this time of year always causes many doc lovers (and filmmakers) to scratch their heads. But if anything positive can come from this, hopefully the attention to the titles that didn’t make it leads to more ticket/DVD/VOD sales for them.… Read the rest

JOHN SLOSS: “I COULD BE BANKSY!”

By Ingrid Kopp

Cinetic Media powerhouse John Sloss took to the stage on Wednesday morning at the Independent Filmmaker Conference in a conversation moderated by indieWIRE’s Eugene Hernandez (who announced today that he is leaving indieWIRE to take a new role as Director of Digital Strategy at the Film Society of Lincoln Center). Sloss began the conversation by acknowledging that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, pointing to the influence of John Pierson on his career, “His heart wasn’t in the business side of things but mine was.” Everyone should read Pierson’s book Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes he declared. He then moved on to talk about the recent uptake in buying activity at Toronto. He acknowledged that films were selling for less than before but he didn’t necessarily see this as a bad thing, “The marketplace is becoming much more efficient. You can anticipate what the offers will be because these guys know what the revenue streams will be.”

Like many other industry pundits at the conference this year, Sloss remarked that a theatrical release does not always make sense for a film, “What is this irrational compunction filmmakers have to mortgage the value of their film doing a theatrical release?” He acknowledged the upsides of theatrical including of course the all important critic reviews but said that filmmakers must understand that distributors are basically doubling down on theatrical and then hoping to make their money back on ancillary streams. He added that film critics risk becoming irrelevant if they only focus on theatrical releases.

Sloss went on to talk about his first foray into theatrical distribution with Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary about Banksy. “I was always very critical of basketball referees until I had to be one myself,” he said, explaining why he wanted to try distribution. They experimented with different approaches with Exit, including free screenings. “There are films where by screening them you expand the audience and there are films where by screening them you use up a finite audience.” Exit was definitely the former. They rolled the film out with … Read the rest

ARTISTS ADD PORN TO THE iPAD

By Scott Macaulay

Looks like Banksy’s Exit to the Gift Shop is influencing folks out there. This viral campaign by a group of San Francisco artists, Freedom From Porn , who are protesting the ban on adult material within Apple’s walled garden, clearly cops a few licks from the British artist’s great new movie.

Freedom From Porn from Freedom From Porn on Vimeo.… Read the rest

SPARROW SONGS, GOD, KAROKE AND BANKSY

By Scott Macaulay

Sparrow Songs is a documentary project by filmmaker Alex Jablonski and d.p. Michael Totten, who are making and posting one short doc film per month on their site for a whole year. They are six episodes in, and the films are quite wonderful. Averaging about eight minutes, they are poetic essays that capture the essences of specific places, people, and moments, and that then, without pretension, build these observances into larger statements about love, truth, community, and the ways we are choosing to live our lives.

The films include Porn Star Karoke, about the crowd that gathers weekly at an L.A. club for an evening of karoke with adult movie stars. In Donut Shop, the filmmakers insert themselves into their film as they wonder why more people won’t talk to them during a night spent at a 24-hour donut joint. In the most recent, L’Arche, the filmmakers visit a home for the developmentally disabled in which the residents are cared for in a warm, non-institutional environment; they focus not only on the residents but also on the caregivers, who include a young woman who has just left a monastery. With their artful framings, precise editing, and sensitive use of sound and music, Jablonski and Totten capture the quest of everyone at L’Arche to find purer, less complicated ways of living.

Sparrow Songs is a beguiling project that gains its power by the commitment shown to it by its filmmakers. Their web page contains thumbnails of the six episodes finished so far and blank spots for the six that are yet to come. The knowledge that these are not just disparate short films but rather installments in time-based project give Sparrow Songs a quiet gravity. Watching these films, you find yourself drawing connections between them. You watch — and wait — for themes to develop, and you project onto the filmmakers an evolving recognition of their authorship. It is slow-motion filmmaking dispensed in short, elegantly realized segments.

After watching L’Arche, which I’ve embedded below, I visited the Sparow Songs site, signed up for the newsletter, and … Read the rest

BANKSY’S STREETS ARE OURS

By Scott Macaulay

This was was favorite film at Sundance this year — pretty much from the opening notes of the Richard Hawley song that adorns its opening credits. See it here. (Hat tip: Movie City Indie.)

… Read the rest