“A cutting room is a place where you see things that haven’t been seen before and may never be seen again,” says non-fiction editor and filmmaker Maya Daisy Hawke in Proof of Self, one of two masterclass short films (alongside Notes on Notes) that she’s made available to watch on Vimeo. “It’s where a certain amount of magic happens and where the truth gets buried—because ultimately once it’s been captured, it’s no longer real.” Proof of Self is 24-minutes long and partially explores Hawke’s nagging suspicion that she was “living in a spy novel” while editing the 2022 doc Navalny, […]

The post Maya Daisy Hawke Shares Masterclass Films Proof of Self and Notes on Notes first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Over the past 15 years, British filmmaker Jeanie Finlay has earned a reputation for nuanced, sensitive and compelling documentary portraits. Her films have told many unlikely stories: the rise and fall of a reluctant Elvis lookalike in Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, two Scottish hip hop fraudsters in The Great Hip Hop Hoax, a pregnant transgender man in Seahorse. Her first feature film, Sound it Out, told the story of the last record shop in the Northeast of England and its owner, Tom Butchart, a school friend of Finlay’s. The morning after the world premiere of Finlay’s latest […]

The post “I’m Not a Fly on the Wall, I’m Not Invisible”: Jeanie Finlay on Your Fat Friend first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Currently boasting 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and heading into its second weekend in New York theaters is Brian Vincent‘s Make Me Famous, a self-distributed documentary about the 1980s New York art world centered around painter Edward Brezinski. A notable figure from the era that spawned Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz, he never attained their level of recognition and subsequently disappeared — a disappearance the filmmakers try to solve. From the press materials: A madcap romp through the 1980’s NYC art scene amid the colorful career of painter, Edward Brezinski, hell-bent on making it. What begins as an investigation […]

The post Trailer Watch: Brian Vincent’s ’80s NYC Art World Doc, Make Me Famous first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Dave Burd, known by his stage name Lil Dicky, is a multi-platinum rapper, comedian and actor. For three seasons now, he has been the co-creator, executive producer, writer and star of the critically acclaimed comedy series, Dave. In this hour, he takes us from the beginning, being the laugh machine for his friends, through the discovery of his musical talent and the viral comedy video years, and finding his happy place in pitch meetings, convincing the money people that he could not just make a good TV show, that’s easy, but maybe one of the great shows of all time. He talks about […]

The post “With the Acting, It’s the One Thing That I Just Don’t Have Time To Prepare For; And I Think It Serves Me Well”: Dave Burd (Back To One, Episode 259) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

After more than 30 years of collaborating as a writing-directing duo, the Coen brothers have decided to embark on solo projects for the foreseeable future. Joel Coen helmed The Tragedy of Macbeth back in 2021, and Ethan Coen debuted Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind last year at Cannes. While that documentary still awaits a release, Ethan’s lesbian road movie Drive-Away Dolls is set to hit theaters early this fall. Co-written by spouses Coen and Tricia Cooke (who also edited Drive-Away Dolls together), the film stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan in the lead roles with Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal, […]

The post Trailer Watch: Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“It’s so great that this festival is back again!” In one form or another, I kept hearing that phrase between June 15 to 18 at DC/DOX, a brand-new festival in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Sky Sitney, DC/DOX’s co-founder, was also a founder of the 1990s-born Silverdocs, a partnership between American Film Institute and Discovery Networks mourned by the entire doc community after it passed. Silverdocs morphed into AFI Docs when Discovery bailed, but AFI Docs was run out of AFI’s Los Angeles office and often seemed out of touch with DC. Meanwhile, Sitney co-founded a mini-festival, Double Exposure, with […]

The post Highlights from the Inaugural Edition of DC/DOX first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

PAM CUT // Center for an Untold Tomorrow, the film and new media arm of the Portland Art Museum, is currently accepting applications for their third annual Sustainability Labs. The six month program is specifically tailored for multidisciplinary media storytellers, providing mentorship, career-developing resources and stipends to further their artistic practices. Applications close on July 1. “Our organization is all about artists who aren’t content to be contained—by medium, what’s come before or a singular type of media that they’re working with,” Amy Dotson, director of PAM CUT and curator of Film & New Media at the Portland Art Museum, […]

The post Apply for PAM CUT’s 2023 Sustainability Labs first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s Sundance-premiering The Stroll is a beautifully and lovingly crafted time capsule of NYC’s Meatpacking District that mostly spans from Giuliani’s infamous “broken windows” reign of terror through Bloomberg’s post-9/11 “gentrification on steroids,” as one knowledgeable interviewee ruefully reflects (seconds after I coincidentally yelled those same words at my screener). Unsurprisingly, our billionaire mayor did indeed view unrestrained capitalism as the solution to every problem, including that of the “undesirable” communities—starving artists and sex workers—that called the neighborhood home. For me, the most revelatory aspect of this heartfelt walk down memory lane isn’t that it’s offered from […]

The post “A Call to Action for Everybody To Preserve Their History Before It’s Gone”: Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker on The Stroll first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Though Wes Anderson’s films can be seen as the product of the director’s sharp imagination, the finished work is nothing without those who turn his thoughts into spreadsheet-enabled reality. Most of the physical things on screen—the punctilious graphic design on signs and cards, the actual locations, the trimmed sets and the giant buildings in the distance that exist just to fill up white space—exist thanks to production designer Adam Stockhausen, who has been Anderson’s go-to since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. Stockhausen has noted his fondness for planning productions in an old-fashioned, tactile way which likely appeals not only to the very […]

The post “The Hard Way Every Single Time”: Production Designer Adam Stockhausen on Asteroid City first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“She plans to continue working with ‘first-time performers in live settings’ and is developing a feature she hopes will be in production in the next year,” is how the profile of writer/director Hannah Peterson concluded for our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2018. The Graduates, about a group of students returning to their high school one year after a mass shooting, is that feature, having just made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, winning Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature for director of photography Carolina Costa. Co-starring John Cho, Maria Dizzia and Mina Sundwall, The […]

The post “How Do You Evoke the History of Violence in a Space Without Showing It?”: Hannah Peterson on The Graduates first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.