“The film isn’t about you,” Joanna Arnow tells her parents at the beginning of 2013’s i hate myself :). “You’re secondary characters.” Her mother Barbara responds, “We know who the primary character is,” with a smile that’s half-loving, half-exasperated. Across… Read more
A woman, a car, a gas station and a factory — from this minimalist set of locations Shannon Triplett has crafted a surprising work of supernatural suspense in her writing and directing debut, Desert Road, which premiered this weekend at… Read more
World premiering at this year’s SXSW, writer-director-star Alice Lowe’s sophomore feature Timestalker certainly feels like it’s been a long time coming. Arriving eight years after Prevenge, her 2016 debut that she shot and starred in just weeks before giving birth… Read more
Chicken & Egg Pictures, the non-profit organization dedicated to supporting women and gender-expansive filmmakers with funding and mentorship, today announced its 2024 (Egg)celerator Lab grantees. The organization is granting $40,000 each to ten feature documentary film projects, directed or co-directed… Read more
Pitch People is a feature documentary that takes an energetic look at the pitch business, a dynamic world that started in Europe, made its way to the U.S. boardwalks, and exploded on worldwide television in the 1990s. The film was completed in 1999. It was well-received at various festivals and independent film venues but a year later, it was still incomplete. It was missing an audience, partially due to it never having a formal theatrical release. In 2020, production and postproduction stopped due to the pandemic. With advanced filmmaking tools available and new ways of making people aware of a […]
Robert M. “Bob” Young, often described in the film era of the 1980s as the godfather of American independent filmmaking, has died. His son Andy, himself an award-winning filmmaker, announced Young’s death on February 7th in a Facebook post: “He was a rebel in the industry, who made the films he dreamed of and lived the life he wanted, whether it was trekking through the Congo, swimming with sharks, or plumbing the depths of the human experience. He was 99 years old, and while the final years were sometimes tough for a guy who lived to do it all, he […]
You have to look hard to find a trailer for the recent release of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, Estonia’s entry for this year’s Best International Feature Film category, on Facebook and Instagram — and forget about clips. Even though the lyrical documentary about women in an Estonian sauna has won numerous top prizes around the world—Best Directing at Sundance 2023; Best Documentary at San Francisco International; Best Documentary at the 2023 European Film Awards; Best Cinematography at IDFA 2024—many of the film’s artful moving images of women’s bodies were banned by Meta’s algorithms, and the U.S. distributor Greenwich Entertainment had to […]
The nonprofit Chicken & Egg Pictures has announced the eight recipients of its Chicken & Egg Awards for 2024. From the press release: Chicken & Egg Pictures, the organization dedicated to offering support and funding for women and gender-expansive documentary filmmakers, has announced more than $600,000 in new grants to eight recipients of its 2024 Chicken & Egg Award, with each receiving a $75,000 grant–a $50,000 unrestricted career grant and $25,000 to be applied to a project the filmmaker will work on during their award year. The recipients are Alisa Kovalenko, Beth Aala, Jumana Manna, Katy Lena Ndiaye, Nailah Jefferson, […]
A working digital colorist or cinematographer in 2024 is likely all too familiar with one particular question: “Can we get the ‘film look’?” A decade into the age of digital sensors as the increasingly dominant and default shooting format, filmmakers at all budget levels are increasingly looking back at celluloid for inspiration. Phenomena once seen as drawbacks to be minimized—grain, chromatic aberration, anamorphic distortion, lens flares, halation—have not only become desired, but, if hordes of YouTube camera gurus are to be believed, “cinematic.” That is, these elements associated with this particular image formation workflow are essential to what constitutes “cinema,” […]
Exuberantly maximalist in approach, Jazmin Jones’s blast of a debut feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon, is a rapid-fire blend of neo-noir road movie, desktop essay film and meta critique of the “searching for” documentary subgenre. The picture follows Jones and cyber doula friend Olivia McKayla Ross — self-described “e-girl detectives” — on their years-long journey to locate Renee L’Espérance, the Haitian-born model whose face in 1987 adorned the software packaging for the typing instructional program “Mavis Beacon Learns to Type.” As the program sold in the millions, the character of Mavis Beacon, who many believed was a real person, became an […]