Sorry for the lack of updates. We are still hard at work at getting this movie finished. We are also applying to film festivals all over the world. Hopefully, we’ll get into a few. So if you know any festival programmers, send them a fruit basket for us.

Anyway, our full color press kit is now finished and online. You can download that HERE.

Also, we scanned the print article of Filmmaker Magazine. You can download that HERE. We actually had a full page article which makes us feel pretty cool. Thanks Filmmaker!

It’s been over two years since we began this project. Man, how time flies.

Independent Film Week, Sept. 19 – 23, 2009, New York City

“The model has got to change.   There are no instructions.   There are no kits.   Do it the way that works for you.”   This was just one of many memorable quotes from Palladin’s Mark Urman, who spoke on the panel “The State of Distribution: The Current and Future Indie Model.   Having seen the demise of his employers ThinkFilm and Senator, Mark is embracing the new world of distribution.  Palladin partners with filmmakers to distribute their films while allowing them to retain their rights.   The partnership looks different for each film due to expectations and the amount of money the filmmaker can bring to the table.    Some P & A budgets are in the 2 – 3 hundred range while others are in the 1 – 2 hundred range.  Laughing, Mark said “I don’t buy.  I enable.”

Panel Photo - The State of Distribution: The Current and Future Indie Model

While Mark believes the model has got to change, B-side’s Paola is not completely sold on the idea.   “The old model still works for certain types of films and distribution companies.” That said, she does agree that the old model is getting harder to do and filmmakers need to look at all the options.    One such option is IFC’s Film Festival Direct.   Born out of conversations with filmmaker Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs, Alexander the Great), IFC Film Festival Direct allows films to capitalize on their film festival screening by making it available on this VOD platform simultaneously. Mark encourages filmmakers to sell DVDs directly to the consumer at the film festivals.

Filmmaker and author Jon Reiss goes one step further by offering the following advice:  “Get help from MBA students to help distribute your film.   Create a hybrid strategy.  Use other media platforms to tell the film’s story (aka transmedia).   Redefine the theatrical experience by picking alternative places to screen films (e.g. churches).”   For more on this and other ideas, read Jon’s book Think Outside the Box (Office): The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing in the Digital Era).

Panelists:
Paola Freccero (President of Distribution, B-Side)
Jon Reiss (director and author of Think Outside The Box (Office): The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing in the Digital Era)
Jonathan Sehring (President, IFC Entertainment)
Mark Urman (Founder, Palladin)
Scott Macaulay (Filmmaker Magazine Editor-n-Chief, Moderator)

Thanks to IFP for another great panel!

]]> http://nwfilmforum.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/filmmaker-magazine-makes-you-a-deal/ Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:33:53 +0000 Ryan http://nwfilmforum.wordpress.com/2009/09/18/filmmaker-magazine-makes-you-a-deal/

Wondering what’s with all those free Filmmaker Magazines in our lobby? Here’s the deal:

The FILMMAKER Magazine Stimulus Plan
You can argue about the effect of government’s stimulus package, but here’s one thing that’s not debatable: FILMMAKER Magazine gives you the tools you need to stimulate your own creativity and filmmaking productivity. And if you act quickly, you can save over 60% on a subscription and receive our digital PDF edition free. Find out more at http://filmmakermagazine.com/stimulus/

Meanwhile, grab a free issue the next time you are in our lobby…while supplies last.

Ahhh… the digital life….

Without the slightest sense of irony, we’re tickled pink to report that our favorite independent film publication, Filmmaker Magazine, has given us a Twitter endorsement. Apparently we’re part of a small group of people ‘who know what’s next’, and that is rad.

Seriously, stop snickering: This makes us feel very good. Twitter is the new broadsheet, dontcha know.

IFP is still a week away, but check out the buzz that’s already in full swing

Variety

ScreenDaily.com

http://www.indiewire.com/

IndieWire.com

Filmmaker Magazine

The Hollywood Reporter

I responded to a post about the challenges facing indie filmmakers. It was a list of the current industry defects. However I see it as a powershift in the industry as studios back-off from indie film releases and indie filmmakers empower themselves to distribute their films. The post painted a bleak picture. I didn’t quite see it that way. Alas, my comments were then quoted by Filmmaker Magazine the next day. Here is the story:

Filmmaker Angelo Bell commented on the thread about Ted Hope’s “38 American Film Problems/Concerns,” calling it an “overexaggeration of the challenges” and responding to several of Ted’s points by saying that what is really happening now is not that business models are failing but that there is a “power shift” from studios/producers to individual filmmakers committed to exploring DIY approaches. As I said in my blog post, what Ted did was write an amazingly comprehensive list on which every filmmaker will find several points to agree with. That said, many of the points will be ignorable by each individual filmmaker as well. Bell’s comment makes clear that for some filmmakers the mulling over of different business models is an academic exercise to be contemplated after all the work involved with releasing a film is done. I checked out Bell’s site and was led to his blog, 1001 Positively True Stories of an Independent Filmmaker, which discusses his new film, The Broken Hearts Club, premiering at the Hollywood Black Film Festival on June 5. On the blog he’s got a number of posts discussing his application of various social networking and community-building techniques to the grass roots marketing of his film, and he’s pretty honest about the results.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE:

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/blog/2009/05/diy-and-importance-of-list-building.php

Tze Chun’s CHILDREN OF INVENTION is a timely film. The story of a Chinese immigrant mother desperately trying to make enough money to support her two kids with little to no help and a wandering eye toward one dubious entrepreneurial opportunity after another is familiar. Too familiar. And that’s why it will last and still resonate long after our country rights itself toward the next period of prosperity. Because that elusive dream of instant wealth and relief from the struggle and embarrassment of not being able to pay rent or properly feed your kids will always be here – for someone. And the fear of that happening to all of us and the curiosity of how we would respond to that bleak situation – remains with everyone. But the magic of the film is that Chun illustrates the other hopeful side effect of that struggle in the persons of the mother’s young son and daughter – and that is the spirit of innovation to survive.

1          There is a strong autobiographical inspiration behind this film. Why was it so important for you to make this film?
It’s always hard to say why a certain script will inspire you while you’ll lose interest in another.  I will say that as we were making the film, the cast (Cindy, Michael, and Crystal) continued to inspire me and kept the material fresh.

When I wrote the film, I was writing a personal story about the world I grew up in – a subculture of Americans trying to get-rich-quick in order to get themselves out of a financial hole. I didn’t foresee the current crisis. But with the economy tanking now and foreclosures going through the roof, it seems like everyone’s living through some version of what the Chengs go through in the film.

I hope this film can be a reminder that we’ve had bad times before, individually and as a country, but we’ve always made it out fine.

2            At this point in your life, are you comfortable with people who exhibit that get-rich-quick mentality or does your experiences growing up make you recoil from that?
The only thing that disturbs me is the get-rich-quick mentality without regard for hurting or exploiting others. But there are tons of harmless and brilliant get-rich-quick schemes that I’m very envious that I didn’t come up with — the Million Dollar Homepage, for example.

3            What is the best thing about having your film at AFI DALLAS?
Being eligible for the 25k prize! Also, hanging out with (programmers) James Faust and Sarah Harris.

4            Be honest here – Did you invest any money with Bernie Madoff?
Independent filmmakers generally have little to no money to invest in anything other than their own films, so luckily, no.

5            What should a director do that they never think of until it’s too late?
Wear layers when you go on set.  Directing a movie is stressful, and your body temperature fluctuates a lot!

6            What’s the most underappreciated job on the set?
Hmm… The most underappreciated job on set has got to be the first Assistant Director, who keeps the crew on schedule. People always complain that the first AD isn’t giving their department enough time to get everything perfect before the shot is taken, but no one thanks them when they get to go home on time.

7             What kind of responsibility comes with being one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film last year?
The main responsibility that came with that article was having to buy a dozen copies of the magazine and mailing them to various aunts and uncles in Asia.

8             Do you still have one of those spinning spaghetti fork inventions the kids make in the film? And if so have you ever used it?
Haha, they kept on breaking on set.  We went through a bunch of them. They work well for ramen, but spaghetti will break it in two.

9            What was the last film that made you cry? Laugh out loud?
Last film that made me cry was Spike Lee’s WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE. I hardly ever cry at narrative films, but I will cry at almost any documentary about any serious subject.  Also at E.T.  The last film that made me laugh out loud was H.P. Mendoza’s FRUIT FLY, which I just saw at the San Francisco Int’l Asian American Film Festival.

10    Popcorn or candy?
As I get older, I can’t bring myself to eat anything in the theater… I just don’t need those calories.

DVD EXTRA

You and Anna Boden seem to keep trading off on each other’s skills: She edited WINDOWBREAKER so you painted the poster for HALF NELSON. Now she has edited CHILDREN OF INVENTION. So, what do you owe her now?
God, I think I may be all out of skills to trade. We edited the movie at Anna’s apartment, so I also owe Ryan Fleck for kicking him out of his own place for an entire month. Maybe I’ll clean their bathroom or something.

I read the phrase “three screen experience” for the first time in an interview that Filmmaker magazine did with Scott Kirsner, writer of the very good blog CinemaTech, in its Fall 2008 issue.  The three screen experience is an example of  current viewer behavior and involves watching a film, surfing the web, and texting all at the same time – thus three screens (television, computer, cell phone).  I’ve seen my sister do this and while I may think it is a horrible, almost blasphemous thing to do, different people have different ways and reasons that they consume films.  My sister likes to buy DVDs by the truckload and then “watch” them while working on her design projects.  That’s almost like having the television on just to keep you company, except here the film content, because of its theoretically infinite materiality (the plastic DVD), can play forever, constantly looped – thus the film itself as a phenomenological entity is different, becomes less the ephemeral dance of light and shadows on the screen and more concrete, physical.  On the other end of the spectrum is Aravind, the DP for “The Bull” and soon for The Virgins, who doesn’t like missing a single frame of a film since he watches them to analyze their lighting and shooting style.

Understanding how the current viewer watches film has led to some thoughts in innovating the viewing experience.  Kirsner mentions something along the lines of a chat thread running in a column next to the film (I don’t know if he means this for theaters or simply when watching a film at home on your computer a mandated part of the experience would be to have the chat along with it).  This specific example sounds pretty bad as well, though admittedly I am a purist.  When watching a film I want to experience it, the film and not be caught up in a meta-experience that surrounds it.  This is because I watch a film to enjoy it as an art and to learn the intricacies of said art – other people could enjoy an experience where the film is only a catalyst for a larger discussion/game/interaction.

I think some of these attempts at film interaction come from a desire to dominate the film.  I think people get freaked out by the innate power schematic of watching a film – being held practically motionless in a theater while some visual forms you can’t control express ideas to you that you may not like or want to hear – this is the process behind propaganda films, but also behind horror films which elicit some of their emotional response from the viewers’ vulnerability in the dark.  Assuming that a film has to be some sort of microcosm of the larger political/cultural dialogue forgets that the film is only part of this larger, constant signification and your response should happen there, not in the confines of the theater (because that itself is a cultural construct).

Following on the heels of the Pusan International Film Festival, the Tokyo International Film Festival, ever wanting to position itself as the festival to go to for new Asian cinema, seems to get sloppy seconds.  Even newcomer, Bangkok International Film Festival programmed an edgier Asian section, scooping the new Naomi Kawase film, Nanayo, a few weeks before TIFF.  Long the rollout fest for fall product for the Japanese market, it still carries its weight doing its duty to Japanese distributors. This year’s opener was John Woo’s Red Cliff and closing was Wall-E – Red Cliff premiering at the festival a few days before settling into a theatrical run.

The festival is flush, centered in Roppongi Hills, the high class mega development in central Tokyo, boasting countless cafes, shopping galore, an art museum, apartments and offices and a toney new 6-plex cinema. An environmentally friendly green carpet opening night brought out the star power with the likes of John Woo, Fernando Meirelles, Jerzy Skolimowski, Julianne Moore on hand for their Tokyo premieres and John Voight as competition jury head. They even had a special fly-in on the last weekend of the fest with Chen Kaige and Nikita Mikhalkov for lifetime achievement kudo, the Akira Kurosawa Awards.

This is a festival that brazenly programs epic schlock along the lines of Kim Tae-kyun’s The Crossing, Feng Xiaoning’s SuperTyphoon and Journey to the Center of the Earth, quality pics like Hunger and Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky – that will make into theaters anyway, festival faves along the lines of Jose Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys and various rejects from Pusan and Bangkok.  But still there were a few diamonds in the rough and discoveries that made the festival worthwhile.

TIFF’s Japanese Eyes section started 4 years ago in reaction to the challenge mounted by Edo’s other big film festival. Tokyo Filmex, which early on took on the mantle of breaking new Japanese films and talent. TIFF’s always had a bit of a problem, from curatorial choices and from the fact that hot new Japanese films are going to other festivals or making their runs outside of the fest circuit. Nonetheless, out a rather dreary lineup, there were some genuine winners. Taking the Best Picture Award was buy a suit, the last film by woefully neglected auteur, Jun Ichikawa, who sadly passed away a month before the scheduled festival debut of his film.  It’s a wonderful no-budget chamber piece that’s part city symphony and part Ozu-channeling family drama – a moving denoument to an amazing career. Kaizo Hayashi’s The Code, a clever thriller spoof featured an remarkable Joe Shishido, Seijun Suzuki’s favorite star, showing that minus cheek implants and at 74, he still is a commanding presence.

The competition section was mixed bag of offering from the truly questionable, to several lackluster Japanese, American and French entries, to the new Skolimowski and some premieres by very talented unknowns. Among the best were Planet Carlos, the debut film by German filmmaker, Andreas Kannengießer, about a dirt poor Nicaraguan teenager trying to make a go of life in gigantona, a sort of street poetry/dance/performance art. The Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix winner was Tulpan, a first feature by Kazhakstani filmmaker, Sergey Dvortsevoy’s. It’s wry ethnographic social comedy that fits into a new genre of films defined by the likes of The Story of the Weeping Camel.  Winner of Un Certain Regard at Cannes this year, the film is making the rounds, winning prizes nearly everywhere it goes. Skolimowski walked away with the Special Jury Prize for 4 nights with Anna.  Though perhaps not his greatest film, it’s good to see him back after 17 years. The audience award went to a Japanese oddity, Tetsu Maeda’s School Days with a Pig, an awkward adaptation of a TV documentary about a class that spends a year raising a pig from birth to the dinner table.

A new section was added with the Toyota Earth Grand Prize, part of an eco-friendly promotion by one of the festival’s major donors.  The winner was the amusing, but clichéd Ashes from the Sky, a Spanish anti-nuke Local Hero.

Like Roppongi Hills itself, TIFF is big, sprawling and very commercial, but there are many nooks and crannies where one can find some great things.

Originally published in Filmmaker Magazine, November 6 2008

Real-world scoop on shooting two features with Red One Digital Cinema cameras from Offhollywood Studios, company of Mark Pederson (early Red adaptor and innovator).

This year’s Retrospective at the New York Film Festival will celebrate “50 Years of Janus Films,” a collaboration among the NYFF, Janus Films and Criterion. From Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave to Japanese samurai epics and films filled with existential inquiries, the festival will showcase more than 30 world cinema classics, all of them screening in pristine new prints at the Walter Reade Theater.

“Anybody who saw these movies years ago was used to seeing them in spliced and scratched 16mm prints,” says Film Society of Lincoln Center Associate Director of Programming and retrospective curator Kent Jones. “That’s just the way things were. Now, the standards have changed and we are proud to be able to show [the films] in new prints on the big screen. It’s going to look spectacular.”

The retrospective will take place from September 30 to October 27, opening with Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterful portrait of the French bourgeoisie The Rules of the Game. Other screenings will include Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954), Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Eclipse (1962), Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962) and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), among others.

Janus Films was once synonymous with bringing the best foreign feature films to American theaters, but the prevalence of DVDs and home theater systems has in many ways diminished the art house circuit on which Janus based its reputation. “50 Years of Janus Films” hopes to reintroduce audiences to the distributor’s canon of films in the manner in which they were always meant to be experienced, in pristine 35mm.

The New York Film Festival celebrates its 44th anniversary in 2006. The 17-day noncompetitive festival, which runs from September 29 through October 15, takes place at Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

This article was published in the Summer 2006 issue of Filmmaker Magazine.

So you’ve always wanted to watch those old Superman cartoons of the 1940s, but you’ve just been waiting for the Serbian translation? Always complained about how not enough American documentaries can be seen in your native Dutch or Tibetan? Crossed your fingers hoping that your music video could be understood in Japanese, Portuguese and Romanian?

There may finally be a solution.

dotSUB is a new online web browser-based tool that renders text in real time onto moving images as subtitles in, conceivably, any language on Earth (even including Esperanto). Anyone who is bi-lingual can register and voluntarily begin translating available films using time captured transcriptions. dotSUB is currently in its second beta version and will officially launch this fall, when the software will be available to embed as an API on any site free of charge, so people all over the world can begin translating any available online video libraries.

At this stage, which clips are subtitled into which languages is up to the translators, not the filmmakers or dotSUB itself. Any film in any language can be hosted on the site free of charge and translated into multiple languages by obtaining permission from the film’s rights holders to create a derivative work.

“We’re focused on the 99.5 percent of filmmakers who don’t have the multi-million dollar budget to translate and subtitle their films,” says dotSUB founder and CEO Michael Smolens. “We want to allow people from any culture to watch the films of any other culture.”

The next goal for dotSUB is to facilitate distribution of the final subtitled films – which can be delivered in web-based streaming video, DVD, or VHS formats – in theaters, on public TV or cable TV channels in all countries, to cell phone carriers interested in local language content, and directly to end users, in the end hopefully reaching a much broader audience than was ever possible before.

Visit www.dotsub.com for more information and to watch subtitled films.

This article was published in the Summer 2006 issue of Filmmaker Magazine.

'The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela'

After the death of his stepfather, artist and filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris searches for a greater understanding of the life of the man he could never call “father” in the documentary The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela. Pule Benjamin Leinaeng, known as Lee to his friends and family, was one of the first wave of South African exiles who left his home country in 1960 to fight apartheid, eventually leading him to the Bronx and into Harris’ family.

The search for information about Lee’s past leads Harris to a photograph of the “Bloemfontein Twelve,” a group of South African students, including Lee, who joined together to keep the anti-apartheid movement alive from East Africa, Europe, America and Cuba. Harris seeks out the surviving members, who called them themselves the Disciples of Nelson Mandela, and mixes interviews with dramatic reenactments of their adventures to create a unique journey into the life of a mysterious man.

Harris’ film is thematically similar to the 2003 doc My Architect, director Nathaniel Kahn’s critically acclaimed effort to learn about the deceased father he barely knew. In both films, father and son reach a posthumous reconciliation after conversations with friends, family and colleagues reveal a man much more complex and conflicted than either son could have realized. But whereas Kahn’s film frames his father’s life within his career as an architect, Harris uses the surviving disciples to learn not only about his father, but also about his cultural history.

“The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela is a story about family and displacement,” Harris says. “A son’s relationship to a father, and a father’s relationship to a fatherland. I wanted to reconnect with Lee by way of the men who were bonded to him by a common political, historical and emotional journey. It was only in the process of making this film that I realized just how much I was his son.”

The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela had its broadcast premiere on the PBS documentary series P.O.V. on Tuesday, September 19. The film is a co-production of the Independent Television Service (ITVS), in association with American Documentary/P.O.V. and the National Black Programming Consortium.

This article was published in the Summer 2006 issue of Filmmaker Magazine.