Walking into SohoWorks Brooklyn, it feels as though you’ve entered someone’s sleek yet warm living room. This cozy assortment of chairs, couches and tables looking out over the East River of New York was the home of the 2023 Variety Gotham Week Expo on October 4th and 5th. The second year of their Expo initiative, these two days were overflowing with timely and cutting-edge conversations between acclaimed and budding organizations in the field. The space reflected the intention and intimacy of this year’s organizing—not always something easy to come by in the city. With over 40 years under their belt, […]

The post Changing Tides: Brown Girls Doc Mafia at Variety Gotham Week 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The following guest post was submitted by Brittany Franklin, founder and president of Minorities in Film (MiFILM). Franklin and MiFilm participated in the recent The Gotham Week Expo, a program of Filmmaker‘s publisher, The Gotham. — Editor The energy was palpable at The Gotham Week Expo Sessions on October 4th and 5th, as filmmakers and industry visionaries converged to exchange ideas, share insights and forge connections. Among the many enlightening sessions, Minorities in Film (MiFILM) had the pleasure to present two panels: “Amplifying Your Independent Film: Effective Marketing Techniques for Targeted Audience Engagement” and “Advocacy for the Independent Filmmaker Through […]

The post Navigating the New Wave: Insights from Gotham Week Expo 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Heralded as perhaps the greatest espionage novelist of all time (though some find this label horribly reductive), David Cornwell, best known by his pen name John le Carré, wrote 26 novels over the course of his 60-year career. But filmmaker Errol Morris decided to chronicle the life and career of the English writer and former British Intelligence agent through the lens of his 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. This decision makes perfect sense on paper: why wouldn’t Morris utilize Cornwell’s own recollections and reflections as the backbone of his documentary profile, particularly with a subject who, […]

The post “Contrary to Jean-Luc Godard, This Film Isn’t Truth 24 Frames a Second”: Errol Morris on The Pigeon Tunnel first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. In the first episode of The Wilds, one of the main characters is introduced via a quick beat of her smoking a cigarette on her family’s back deck with a nicotine-stained, pink flamingo ashtray nestled on the rail nearby. Sara K White, the show’s production designer, recalls: “We were working to build out Dot’s character—a girl who doesn’t come from money and […]

The post “You Provide Everything That’s in Every Shot”: Production Designer Sara K White and Director Susanna Fogel first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Unfortunately, because aging is so common and natural, we tend to think of it as destiny or something we should accept,” says biologist and researcher David Sinclair. And while the scientist’s work on aging and epigenetics is tied to discoveries in biology from the mid-20th century onwards, within the arts the theme of immortality goes back centuries. Filmmaker Eddie Alcazar, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2011, is the latest to tackle man’s search for eternal life, doing so at a time when interest in longevity and even avoidance of death is contemplated by tech community thinkers […]

The post From 50 Crew Members to Five: Director Eddie Alcazar on Divinity first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is a scathing adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated Black novelist who sets out to write a book purposefully full of outrageous Black stereotypes. American Fiction enters limited theatrical release on December 15 before expanding on December 22.

The post Trailer Watch: Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Todd Solondz’s indelible Happiness was released 25 years ago today. Filmmaker is reposting here its interview with Solondz, the cover story of our Fall 1998 issue. — Editor Winner of the Critic’s Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Todd Solondz’s startling new Happiness is not only one of the most challenging and invigorating independent films of the year, it’s also, by virtue of the strange politics of its release, a talking point for prognosticators everywhere concerned with the co-option of indie-film attitude by corporate-controlled majors and mini-majors. Ambitiously weaving five separate tales of modern alienation, romantic woe, and shocking […]

The post “The Price of Making a Movie is That I Have to Direct It”: Todd Solondz on Happiness first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Ahead of the launch of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of meetings between directors and production designers in which they discuss the particularities about their working dynamics as well as how production design can elevate the vision of a filmmaker.  Derek Cianfrance and Inbal Weinberg first collaborated on Blue Valentine, which set the stage for exploration and discovery. They continued to experiment with environment and process on such projects as The Place Beyond The Pines and I Know This Much Is True. Here they discuss the delicate balance of artifice and authenticity […]

The post “We Had to Row a Kayak to the Camera Truck to Save the Film Cans”: Director Derek Cianfrance and Production Designer Inbal Weinberg first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Reality Winner was an US Air Force vet and NSA employee whose leaking of an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, which subsequently handed it over to the FBI in a bungled, source-disclosing attempt to verify it wasn’t a hoax, in turn leading to her arrest. The saga has been well-documented, to say the least: Just this year, Tina Satter premiered her Sydney Sweeney-starring HBO film Reality, adapted from the playwright’s IS THIS A ROOM: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription. Now we have Sonia Kennebeck’s Reality Winner, itself an extension of the 25 New Faces alum’s […]

The post “We Offered to Bear Witness”: Sonia Kennebeck on Reality Winner first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. Below, is the first of these conversations published at Filmmaker, a conversation between production designer Jade Healy and director David Lowery. Their first collaboration had them wearing different hats. Shot in Costa Rica, It Was Great, But I Was Ready to Come Home was written by four friends, among them Jade Healy, an actress, and David Lowery, sound designer and editor. Years later, as […]

The post “I Become a Better Designer Every Time I Work with David”: Production Designer Jade Healy and David Lowery first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.