Los Angeles Film Festival
Monday, August 6th, 2007
Currently in its fifth year, Fast Track, a joint program of the Los Angeles Film Festival and Filmmaker magazine, was created to promote the careers of talented filmmakers over the course of a year, while spreading the word about their newest projects. The filmmakers chosen are alumni of the LAFF as well as alumni of Film Independent’s Talent Development Programs: the Filmmaker Labs, Project: Involve, and the grants awarded at the Spirit Awards. Here are the Fast Track filmmakers of 2007 and their upcoming projects.
Robbie Pickering
You know you’re in for some trouble when your dutiful Christian wife discovers that you’ve been secretly donating to a local sperm bank. That’s the premise of Robbie Pickering’s feature film Natural Selection, which follows housewife Linda White as she breaks off from her idyllic yet reserved life in search of the “mulleted, foul-mouthed child” that her husband laid the seed for behind her back. In addition to directing, he also wrote the screenplay which was selected to take part in Film Independent’s 2006 Screenwriter’s Lab.
Pickering, one of only four students to graduate with thesis honors from USC’s Graduate Screenwriting Program in 2006, was prompted to write the story “about a year ago, [when] my stepfather became terminally ill and my mom, a Texan housewife, was suddenly faced with the prospect of being alone for the first time in her life. I had been wanting to write a story about the women I knew growing up in Houston for a long time, and my mom’s fragile emotional state became the starting point for the movie,” he says, “…did I mention it’s a comedy?”
Before going to USC, Pickering graduated from the Film Production Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Art in 2003, where he was awarded a Lew Wasserman Screenwriting Award and a Warner Brothers Production Grant for what would become his critically acclaimed short film, Prom Night, “a raucous comedy about an awkward boy’s chaotic senior prom.”
Now in the midst of directing his first feature, which is being produced by Charlie Mason and Justin Moore-Lewy, whose company … Read the rest
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
Blithely defying industry norms, Film Independent’s Los Angeles Film Festival (June 21-July 1) managed the unlikely achievement of figuratively conferring independent filmmaker status on blockbuster director Michael Bay by presenting the L.A. premiere of DreamWorks’ Transformers to an audience of 4,000 in four theaters simultaneously during the height of the festival.
By now Film Independent’s affinity for mini-major product and studio specialty fare featuring high-profile talent, as evidenced by both the annual Independent Spirit Awards and Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) programming, is so well established that even the Transformers premiere drew little more than shrugs from filmmakers and festivalgoers.
Elsewhere in the fest lineup, those same inclinations were reflected by the gala programming, which put Focus Features’ Talk to Me up front as the opening night film. Kasi Lemmons’s period biopic of 60s radio icon and ex-con Ralph Waldo “Petey” Green Jr. features an awards-worthy performance by Don Cheadle in the DJ’s role, stirringly abetted by Chiwetel Ejiofor as his manager Dewey Hughes and Taraji Henson as Green’s girlfriend. Following his release from prison on an armed-robbery conviction, Petey storms Washington, D.C.’s WOL radio, where station manager Hughes gives him a slot on the morning show and runs interference with upper management to keep Green’s irreverent broadcasts on the air. Talk to Me has charisma to burn during the first half, but gradually loses some allure as Cheadle’s role diminishes with the decline of Petey’s career.
Fox Searchlight Pictures filled the closing night slot with the North American premiere of Danny Boyle’s highly anticipated sci-fi adventure Sunshine. Continuing his habitual genre hopping, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland construct a classic near-future premise about a spaceship crew on a mission to revive earth’s dying sun with the jolt of an onboard nuclear device. Miscalculations soon lead to mishaps that take on disastrous proportions, but midway through, the film shifts from a metaphysical mediation on man’s place in the universe to a space thriller, with ultimately uneven results.
Between the two specialty releases, LAFF thrived in its second year at a newly expanded Westwood Village location, a compact, accessible neighborhood … Read the rest
Monday, June 27th, 2005
Film Independent (formerly the IFP/Los Angeles) announced the winners of its 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival. Mark Banning won the Target Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature for his Jellysmoke, and the Target Best Doc Award went to Beth Bird for Everyone Their Grain of Sand. The Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature went to Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know. David Zeiger’s Sir! No Sir! won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature. Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins won the Audience Award for Best International Feature.
Catherine Kellner and Ebon Moss-Bachrach of Leslie McCleave’s Road won for Outstanding Performance in the Narrative Competition.
Describing Jellysmoke, the fest writers, “In his feature debut, Jellysmoke, Mark Banning paints the portrait of a young man searching for love and a way to maintain his sanity. Though sweet, handsome, and well-liked, Jacob suffers deeply from bipolar depression. After a stint in the psych ward, he resolves to find normalcy and sees the key to securing it in the love of a beautiful stranger and her young son. Quietly nuanced, Michael Ealy’s performance is a beautiful and apt reminder of how heartbreakingly fragile, yet ultimately hopeful life can be.”
And re the doc winner: “Beth Bird shows a small town’s struggle for survival in the face of corporate greed and how it powerfully demonstrates the downside of globalization and U.S.-Mexico border economics. Since 1988, Mexican community Maclovio Rojas has been fighting for education, electricity, and water owed them by their government, which would rather force thousands of residents off land that developers are drooling over. Community leaders are arrested, lingering in prison without due process, while their families and friends make every effort to obtain justice. Beth Bird’s heartbreaking and intimate feature debut balances these hardships with glimpses of goodness — an elementary school graduation, holiday celebrations — to remind us what they’re fighting for.”
.… Read the rest
Thursday, May 12th, 2005
The 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival (June 16 – June 25) will open with the North American premiere of David Jacobson’s Down in the Valley, festival organizers announced yesterday.
“We are thrilled to be opening the festival with this homegrown film in which the city itself is a major character,” said FIND (formerly IFP/Los Angeles) and the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Director of Programming Rachel Rosen in a prepared statement. “David Jacobson is a director with a truly independent vision and Down in the Valley exemplifies the kind of films we’re proud to present at the festival.”
A Los Angeles native, Jacobson was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards for his previous feature, Dahmer, which was based on events from the life of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Down in the Valley stars Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin, and Bruce Dern. The festival’s press release describe it as a “suspenseful crime story set at the edge of the San Fernando Valley, a seedy place of horse ranches and immigrant gangs, where ten-lane freeways converge to create a cultural no man’s land.”
The festival also announced that George Clooney will receive the inaugural Spirit of Independence Award and that the cash prize of the Target Documentary Award has been increased to $50,000. The full program will be announced later this month.
.… Read the rest
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005
Knowing that the IFP/Los Angeles was to announce its split from the Independent Feature Project and rebranding as Film Independent (FIND) today, I hit the search engines for the official press release and was startled to come across this news piece about the arrest of an IFP leader. Fortunately, the piece refers to the detaining of a South African Inkatha Freedom Party MP for “dagga possession” and has nothing to do with the independent film organization.
For the official release via Movie City News detailing the IFP Los Angeles’s rechristening as FIND, click here.
An excerpt:
“‘Film Independent [FIND] will be a continuation of our current goals, with a name that better reflects our mission and a structure that will serve our members more effectively,’ said Dawn Hudson, Executive Director of Film Independent [FIND]. ‘The independent film community in Southern California has grown exponentially in the last several years, and it is crucial that we evolve to better fit this new landscape.’
FIND will continue to work with IFP and other independent film organizations, including partnering on advocacy issues and encouraging diversity in the film industry.
All staff will remain the same. Richard Raddon will continue as Festival Director of the Los Angeles Film Festival; Diana Zahn-Storey will continue as Event Producer for both the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Independent Sprit Awards. Rachel Rosen will continue as the organization’s Director of Programming; Doug Jones will continue as the organization’s Senior Programmer.
FIND members will continue to receive the same benefits currently offered as part of their memberships, such as year-round educational programs, free screenings, a diversity/mentoring program, equipment and studio rentals, discounts to the Los Angeles Film Festival, and voting privileges for the Independent Spirit Awards.
The organization plans to launch a new website that will further build its online community and serve as an effective resource for its members. The new website will enable members to communicate with one another more easily.”
The Hollywood Reporter has more, including this official statement from IFP Board Chairman Ira Deutchman regarding the split: “IFP and its chapters around … Read the rest
