NEW BREED L.A. #5: “MAKING PEOPLE NOTICE”

Here’s part five of the New Breed Los Angeles series looking at the creative filmmaking process through the eyes of several filmmakers attending this year’s Los Angeles Film Fest. Today’s episode focuses on the time-honored question of how to get people to notice your work. Speaking are Marwencol director Jeff Malmberg and The New Year director Brett Haley.

NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 5 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.… Read the rest

BRETT HALEY, “THE NEW YEAR”

By Brandon Harris

A young woman works at the shoe counter at a Pensacola, Florida bowling alley. Having abandoned the ambitions of her youth, she takes care of her ailing father, who painfully struggles with cancer. With the return of a rival from high school into her long standing social circle, the stillness that has taken over her existence breaks, leaving her to consider the possibility of a new direction, one which seems tantalizingly close and yet ever illusive. This is subject matter than may be right within American Independent Cinema’s wheelhouse, but in thoughtful hands, even the most seemingly pedestrian yarns can contain multitudes. A mid season candidate for low budget wonderkind of the year, Brett Haley’s The New Year is a quietly riveting, old fashioned AmerIndie, a character driven slice of  Florida panhandle life made for four figures that marks the coming out party for Triste Kelly Dunn, who turns in a performance that harkens back to past breakthroughs by girl next door types mired with dead end circumstances amidst sunny, coastal locales: think Ashley Judd in Ruby in Paradise or Lauren Ambrose in Swimming.

Skipped over by Sundance and SXSW only to surface at respected regional fests such as Sarasota and Nashville, the film is a feature directorial debut for Haley, a Pensacola, FL native who financed, produced, directed, co-wrote and co-photographed. He even downloaded the P2 cards. Between takes no less. Despite cutting his teeth as an Assistant to the Director on studio subsidized, highly formal Indiewood projects like The Road and Reservation Road, Haley counts John Cassavetes as his primary aesthetic influence, which goes a long way toward explaining the low-fi immediacy of his film. The New Year opens at the brand new reRun Gastropub Theater in Dumbo, Brooklyn this coming Friday.

Filmmaker: What provided the initial concept and inspiration for the project? Did you always conceive of this film at such a low budget?

Haley: The inspiration came totally out of left field and yet somewhat naturally. I’ve told this story a few times, but its just what happened. I was on a Amtrak train … Read the rest

TWO PREMIERES: reRUN and “AUDREY THE TRAIN WRECK”

By Scott Macaulay

Any new New York independent movie theater, one showing not mini-major studio moveovers but recently premiered festival films that don’t have formal distribution, is cause for celebration. But we at Filmmaker are hailing the new reRun for one other reason: it’s in our building. That’s right, after a long day solving the crises of the current indie scene, we can head downstairs and enjoy not only movies but pretzels filled with garlic mashed potatoes, popcorn with duck fat, and microbrews. That’s right, you can eat and drink inside this theater, which is down the hall from reBar. (Menu preview courtesy of Gothamist.). Aaron Hillis, of the Village Voice and GreenCine, is doing the programming, and he’s launching with Frank V. Ross’s Audrey the Train Wreck, produced by Adam Donaghey and Mike Ryan, whose “Straight Talk” on the current state of things kicked up a lot of discussion in last issue’s Filmmaker.

Here, Hillis talks to the New York Times about his programming plans:

“I hope to be able to be an indie-film hero, to be able to give week runs to films that have no distribution or poor distribution,” Mr. Hillis said. For young filmmakers in the increasingly competitive indie market — in which a proliferation of films and a dearth of gung-ho buyers have made distribution harder to achieve — reRun offers some hope.

The New Year, the debut feature of Brett Haley, 26, will play later this month. “For a film like mine to get a week run in New York is crazy,” he said. “I get reviews I’d never get, I get exposure I’d never get.”

Mr. Haley said that his film, a slice-of-life character tale made for $8,000, had been well received at festivals — it won the audience award at the Sarasota Film Festival this year — but had had no bites from distributors. “You’re told your movie’s great, but it’s not marketable,” he said. Having a New York screening, he added, helps prove the doubters wrong.

Frank Ross will be attending the Friday screening. Please check it out and … Read the rest