“I Just Need More Money To Make the Longer Version of It”: On the Proof-of-Concept PROOF Film Festival
From Half Nelson to Whiplash, Bottle Rocket to Short Term 12, making a short film as a feature proof-of-concept has been a time-tested independent film strategy to generate screenplay interest and secure feature financing. But, in the past, the “proof-of-concept” part of a short’s identity is usually hidden to audiences, revealed only by the filmmakers as they then circulate their screenplays and pitch decks. More recently, though, the proof-of-concept short has come into its own as a sub-genre worthy of its own consideration and showcase. Currently in the middle of its three-day third edition is the American Cinematheque’s PROOF Film […]
On the cusp of every autumn for the last 21 years, the Camden International Film Festival becomes the center of the nonfiction world, offering a kind of community campfire in the midst of the seasonal showcase sprawl (Telluride, Toronto, New York), its focus on a more intimate, artist-led level of engagement in the crisp air of coastal Maine, far from the madding crowds (and industry noise). This year’s festival, situated in Camden and Rockland, felt securely grounded after several years shadowed by various uncertainties: COVID, a hurricane, and the departure of founder and former executive and artistic director Ben Fowlie […]
“If there is a giant who sits astride the history of Uzbek cinema, it’s Ali Khamraev, one of those rare talents like Welles or Godard or Scorsese whose love for the medium is so intense that his best films burst with criss-crossing energies and insights, like a fireworks display.” –Kent Jones Ali Khamraev (b. 1937, Tashkent) is one of the great living filmmakers whose work has been too-little-seen in the western world. Throughout his career Khamraev has exhibited extraordinary artistic range, transitioning from realist social dramas to the “Ostern” (“Eastern”) genre of films— which transpose American Western tropes onto the regional history, […]
Alex Winter and Tom Stern’s 1993 cult classic Freaked is less an example of “high” and “low” art commingling than of pop- and-sub-cultures colliding. At the precipice of marquee fame after headlining the first two Bill & Ted movies alongside Keanu Reeves, Winter—along with his former NYU classmate Stern and TV writer Tim Burns—pitched 20th Century Fox on an anarchic comedy called Hideous Mutant Freekz, in which Ricky Coogan (played by Winter), a shallow TV idol, becomes spokesman for a patently evil chemical corporation. Ricky, his best friend and a handful of others board a plane to the fictitious South […]
Corey Fogelmanis’s first big break came as the fan-favorite Farkle on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World. He later appeared alongside Octavia Spencer in the psychological thriller Ma, and in Netflix’s hit series My Life with the Walter Boys. Now his first lead performance as Ben, a teen who comes out as non-binary, in the refreshingly modern coming-of-age movie I Wish You All the Best, has already garnered glowing early reviews. On this episode, he talks about the “very aligned process” of working with director Tommy Dorfman, how music helps him prepare, learning the difference between naturalism and truthfulness, […]
One of our most prolific independent American filmmakers, Richard Linklater, now has two new movies in release. Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon are both evocations of transformative moments in, respectively, narrative cinema and Broadway musical theater. Both are period films, ingenious in form and generous in spirit — in other words they are two of the best films of the year. Nouvelle Vague is set in Paris in 1959, when many of the critics who had formed a community around the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had already directed at least one feature. Desperate to catch-up was Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague […]
Sky Hopinka is one of those rare filmmakers who seems to possess an instinctual artistic eye. And his latest Powwow People is a “vérité-style documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering” according to its spot-on synopsis. It’s also a beautifully-crafted art film refreshingly not specifically made for the cinephile (i.e., East Coast liberal/Euro) gaze. Indeed, in order to avoid the extractive lens Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, purposely did not parachute in to capture a powwow “National Geographic” style (as the […]
Filmmaker‘s Awards Season coverage launches for the Fall with the return of Tyler Coates’s Considerations newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday or find it online here every Friday. — Editor I spend the bulk of my time in September and October driving across Los Angeles to watch movies. It’s not something I feel like I can complain about—I love the movies!!!—but it is a lot of work, particularly for someone who lives on the east side of the city. I’ve spent so many hours in the Wilshire Screening Room in Beverly Hills, and thus just […]
Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk’s The White House Effect is an intriguing all-archival trip back in time to the precise moment in US politics when we arguably could have turned the page on climate change. From 1988-1992, Yale grad and oil company founder George H.W. Bush was commander-in-chief; not only did Bush. Sr. improbably make vocal his belief that global warming (“The Greenhouse Effect”) was real, but promised to employ “the White House effect” to counter it. Which included appointing as EPA chief Bill Reilly, an avid conservationist and veteran of Nixon’s Presidential Council on Environmental Quality and […]
Nina Hoss is one of our most respected stage, film, and television actors working internationally. She is known for her collaborations with director Christian Petzold in films such as Barbara and Phoenix, as well as Tar opposite Cate Blanchett, the celebrated series Homeland, and her latest Hedda, opposite Tessa Thompson. On this episode, she talks about what drew her to Nia DaCosta’s bold new reimagining of the Ibsen’s classic. She gives us a peek into her process, talks about the “journey of filmmaking” she and Petzold embarked on together, environment as communication, how The Cherry Orchard in Brooklyn “landed at […]