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

SEVEN OVERLOOKED INDEPENDENT FILMS OF 2011

By Anthony Kaufman

The world doesn’t need another list of the best films of the year, but after considering my own recent lists, I realized there were a handful of movies‹excellent independent work that has largely flown under the radar‹that even I initially overlooked. Here are seven bold American
low-budget movies from 2011 that may have been forgotten in theatrical release, but should make for essential home viewing (if you haven’t seen them yet) in 2012. And I’ll be among the first in line to see where these young directors go next.

1. Silver Bullets. ­ All I can say is that I hope Joe Swanberg doesn’t burn himself out. Fourteen movies in six years is enough to kill most directors, but Swanberg not only perseveres, but he’s far smarter and skilled than most critics give him credit for, and with Silver Bullets, I think he’s proven them wrong. The movie that inspired this list, Swanberg got short shrift from the N.Y. Times, but the film deserves a second look: A sharp looking, harshly critical (self-referential) portrait of the insecurities of male directors and their female actresses, Swanberg seems to be working with the likes of Atom Egoyan and Jean-Luc Godard in mind. Don’t scoff at the comparisons. At 30-years-old, he could very well get there. The last shot may be pretentious, but it’s a beautiful and haunting wonder.

2. The Future. ­While many critics didn’t buy Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, and others bandied about the twee word to describe The Future, July’s latest delivers equal doses of charm and profundity, oddness and transcendence. I contend that one mysterious, enigmatic scene, in which July dances inside a big T-shirt, is one of the most enthralling movie moments of the year.

3. Putty Hill. ­ Matthew Porterfield’s contemplative, exquisitely lensed snapshot of working-class white America on the fringes of Baltimore has been hailed among certain indie circles, but it’s worth another shout-out. Innovatively mixing fiction and documentary techniques, the film offers an emotionally truthful portrait of its down-and-out characters with empathy and sensitivity.… Read the rest

KICKSTARTER: MATT PORTERFIELD’S “I USED TO BE DARKER”

By Scott Macaulay

What do you do when your first Kickstarter campaign, which included a heartfelt personal direct-address video, has been cited as one of the best, and most successful, indie film ventures on the crowdfunding site? Well, you mix it up a bit for the next one. Putty Hill director Matt Porterfield is raising money for the production of his new feature, I Used to be Darker, which is shooting in three weeks. It’s a drama about marriage and divorce, and it’s set within the Baltimore music industry. Here’s the synopsis:

When Taryn, a Northern Irish runaway, finds herself pregnant in Ocean City, MD, she seeks refuge with American relatives in Baltimore. But Aunt Kim and her husband, Bill, have problems of their own: they’re trying to handle the end of their marriage gracefully for the sake of their daughter Abby, just home from her first year of college. What follows is a story of family revelations, people finding each other and letting each other go, looking for love where they’ve found it before and, when that doesn’t work, figuring out where they might find it next.

As I understand it, the production is a bit under the gun, and to dramatize that, Porterfield’s new video demonstrates his irrevocable faith in his own project. Check it out and consider supporting the film.

… Read the rest

“PUTTY HILL,” “ZERO BRIDGE” OPEN IN NYC

By Scott Macaulay

Two of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces” have excellent movies opening today that are worthy of your first weekend patronage. From Tariq Tapa, who made our list in 2008, is Zero Bridge. Here’s what I wrote about him back then:

“Everything I used to make this movie, from soup to nuts, fit in one little backpack,” says Tariq Tapa, whose Zero Bridge, a neorealist tale of unexpected friendship and moral complication set in the Indian-occupied city of Srinagar, Kashmir, is set to explode on the festival circuit this year. Tapa, who not only directed this first feature but shot, edited and recorded sound for it, says he wish he‘d had one extra crew member, but “financial and logistically, it wasn‘t possible. Also, I didn‘t know what would come up in [Kashmir], and I didn‘t want anything to happen [to the crew member] and have it on my conscience.”

Tapa was born in New York City to a Kashmiri Muslim father and American Jewish mother. “I spent every summer and extended vacations [in Kashmir] with my father‘s side of the family,” he says. “But when the war began in ‘89, I didn‘t see them in a decade. When I went back in 2002, my cousins and I had grown apart. I thought it would be interesting to make a movie because no one knows about daily life in Kashmir, and it was also a way for me to reconnect with my family and heritage.”

The L.A.-based Tapa, who graduated from CalArts and whose short films have screened at the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art, received a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to Kashmir and make Zero Bridge. The film tells the story of a teenage pickpocket, Dilawar, who plans to escape from both Kashmir and his strict uncle but whose plans are complicated when he forms a bond with a woman whose passport he has stolen. Tapa says that his first job when arriving in Srinagar was to convince the community there that he “was on their side.” He says, “Tempers could flare very quickly because of

… Read the rest

25 NEW FACES – PART 5

By Filmmaker Staff

Susan Youssef

At the IFP Narrative Lab, a mentor said of Susan Youssef’s first feature, Habibi Rasak Kharban (literally, “Darling, Something’s Wrong with Your Head”): “It’s a classic story, like Romeo and Juliet.” True, but the roots of Youssef’s story go back far further. The film is an adaptation of the 12th-century Sufi parable Majnun Layla, which was itself based on a 7th-century Arabic story. Over the years, the tragic tale of undying love between a woman and the wandering poet her family forbids her to marry has formed the basis for countless works of art, from Shakespeare’s classic to several Indian films of the 1920s to even pop songs like Eric Clapton’s “Layla.”

Youssef is currently in post on her feature, and it’s been a long road. “I’ve been working on the film for eight years, continuously,” she says. “I’ve never fought for something so hard before — I’ve defined my whole existence around this film.” The feature began in 2002 when Youssef traveled to Gaza while in post on a short documentary, Forbidden to Wander. She noticed all the graffiti on the walls there, and decided to make Majnun Layla’s poet one who scrawled his works on walls for all to see. She received a Fulbright scholarship to work on the script and, later, brought on an Islamic specialist as a co-writer. In 2007 she traveled to Gaza with the intention of shooting the film there, but the violence was too heavy. Realizing she needed a backup plan, she visited the West Bank and figured out ways she could cheat it for her Gaza locations. She also cast Palestinians with Israeli passports so that she’d be able to shoot in the West Bank if she had to. “In 2009 I finally raised enough money to make the film, and I had an organization sponsoring my application [to shoot] in Gaza, but it was denied. We went ahead and finally shot in the West Bank, although the film is still the first film set in Gaza in 15 years.”

Youssef was born in Bay Ridge, … Read the rest

25 NEW FACES

By Filmmaker Staff

The 25 new faces of independent film.