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

By Filmmaker Staff

The 25 new faces of independent film.

“BILAL’S STAND” | writer-director, Sultan Sharrief

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 25, 9:00 pm -- Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City]

The hardest decision I had to make while shooting my film Bilal’s Stand was to do reshoots in a different format. The film was originally shot on 16mm film. I love the process of film from loading the camera to seeing dailies for the first time. I love the stubborn, sometimes unforgiving nature of the medium and the care required to get the beauty you want. I often joke and say that film and I have a “Ross and Rachel” type relationship. You know you have strong feelings but it’s so damn difficult sometimes to make it work. I even started a youth program called Student EFEX — Encouraging the Filmmaking Experience — that teaches life skills through the art of filmmaking. Coming from metro-Detroit, I gained an appreciation for the way in which the process of efficient filmmaking is representative of living a successful life.

After our initial shoot, reshoots and editing I was still unsatisfied with the film. We had never been able to raise the money to shoot the material the way I wanted. After trying for more than a year to raise more funds, I came to a realization: I could reshoot the material I wanted on HD-DV or settle for the film as it was. Shooting this film — my first film — was literally a dream come true. And at this juncture I felt I knew the answer to Langston Hughes’s question of what happens to a dream deferred. Also shooting a film in inner-city Detroit with an all-student crew I was concerned about the nonprofessional (and, dare I say it, ghetto) stigma that could easily be attached to the project. I didn’t want to give anyone another reason to write the film off as something uninteresting or not competitive. After thinking long and hard, I decided that the story was bigger than my selfish desires of how I thought I should tell it and insecurities about how people would judge it. So we shot on video.

We did another round … Read the rest