Mark Duplass is the living patron saint of the indie filmmaker. Honest, simple, modest, positive, affirming about the work, Duplass, first with his brother Jay and now on his own, has become a household name in the film world for producing projects in a DIY style foregrounding authenticity, improvisational humor, and human connection. As an actor, both in his own productions and also series like The Morning Show, he finds a way to keep that homegrown genuineness alive in front of the camera. His latest film, Biosphere, which he co-wrote with director Mel Eslyn, is a true two-hander (with the wonderful Sterling […]

The post “I’m the Little Boy Believing That There’s a Pony in a Pile of Shit”: Mark Duplass (Back To One, Episode 257) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Maria Fredriksson’s astonishing feature debut The Gullspång Miracle isn’t just stranger than fiction—it’s batshit insane. In the broadest of outlines, the doc stars two devoutly religious Norwegian sisters, Kari and May. May visits Kari in Gullspång, Sweden, where Kari now lives. They go to an amusement park where they take a ride inside a fake whale. May finds herself stuck in Sweden for many months, so the two decide to go shopping for an apartment, and end up buying one based on a divine sign they witness there. At the closing, they meet the seller Olaug (formerly known as Lita), […]

The post “Authenticity is More Important than Anything Else”: Maria Fredriksson on Tribeca 2023 Premiere The Gullspång Miracle first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

As the lone faculty member teaching Virtual Reality in UCLA’s film program, all week, people have been asking me what I think about Apple’s promotional video for the new Vision Pro system. I created this video in response, using clips from more than a dozen VR films dating back to 1983 and highlighting largely fictional but characteristically euphoric visions of the technological utopia purported to lie just over the horizon. Apple’s nine+ minute, superlative-filled video recycles dozens of tropes and cliches drawn from the last 40 years of cinematic and televisual imaginings of virtual reality, holographic projection, and gestural interface. […]

The post Trailer Remix: The Science Fiction Behind the Apple Vision Pro first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Premiering in international competition at last year’s IDFA, where it took top prize, Lea Glob’s (2015’s Olmo and The Seagull) Apolonia, Apolonia is an intense character study of French figurative painter Apolonia Sokol. The Danish director met the artist, who is of Danish and Polish descent, while searching for the protagonist of her first doc while attending the Danish Film School, and then trailed her for the next 13 years. And while the bohemian free spirit, who was raised in a Paris underground theater founded by her eccentric parents (an old VHS tape Apolonia discovers comes with the written warning not […]

The post “This Work is a Product of Survival”: Lea Glob on Tribeca 2023 Premiere  Apolonia, Apolonia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Each Friday I write an original Editors Letter as part of the free Filmmaker newsletter. Always original and not usually archived on the site, the letters consist of essays, thoughts, recommendations and sometimes even early versions of pieces that appear later here. This week I wrote about the Apple Vision Pro and am reposting that piece in updated form here. To subscribe for free to the Filmmaker newsletter, click here. If you watched any of Apple’s WWDC keynote on Monday, or saw any of its videos, and thought that its new AR headset, the Apple Vision Pro, looked like science […]

The post Some Thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Award-winning DP Jude Chehab’s cinematographic talents are on full display in her Tribeca-premiering feature debut Q, a haunting look at three generations of women whose lives were forever upended by a cult. In this case, the shadowy entity is the Qubaysiat—a matriarchal religious order founded in the Middle East, where the Lebanese-American filmmaker moved to from Florida at the tender age of 10—and eagerly joined upon arrival in Beirut, having fallen under the influence of a particularly devout member – her own mother. Filmmaker reached out to Chehab, a 25 New Faces 2021 alum, to learn more about her powerful cinematic […]

The post “I Cried a Lot During the Edit”: Jude Chehab on Tribeca ’23 Premiere Q first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In the new Netflix series Beef, a struggling contractor (Steven Yeun) and an affluent entrepreneur (Ali Wong) become embroiled in an escalating feud following a road rage incident.  The series fits snuggly into a very specific quadrant of cinematographer Larkin Seiple’s wheelhouse— hard-to-classify A24 projects. Though his filmography includes sports biopics (Bleed for This), thrillers (Cop Car) and prestige dramas (To Leslie and Emmy-nominated work on Gaslit), Seiple’s most distinct work has come in A24’s Swiss Army Man, Everything Everywhere All at Once and now the studio’s Beef. With the full series streaming on Netflix, Seiple spoke to Filmmaker about Incubus clinching […]

The post “TV Shows are Like Better Funded Independent Films”: DP Larkin Seiple on Beef first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The 2023 Tribeca Film Festival kicked off last night with Nenad Cicin-Sain’s Kiss the Future and now continues with its characteristically densely packed program of features, interactive and new media works, television and special events. It’s the third year for Tribeca’s move to June, following Cannes, and the festival runs until June 18th, when the closing night picture is a 30th anniversary screening of Tribeca co-founder Robert DeNiro’s A Bronx Tale. “I really hope that people are adventurous in what they choose to experience at the festival and come see a lot,” Tribeca Festival Director Cara Cusumano told Filmmaker. “I […]

The post 13 Films To Watch at the 2023 Tribeca Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins—CBE, ASC, BSC and recently knighted—and his collaborator and wife, James Ellis Deakins, recently visited New York to talk about his book of still photographs. Byways, published by Damiani Books, is the first book from the two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer. It includes previously unpublished black-and-white photos spanning five decades, from 1971 to the present. North Devon farms, British seaside towns, the deserts outside Albuquerque: Deakins’s singular vision is apparent no matter what the subject. Deakins is known for his collaborations with directors like Denis Villeneuve, Sam Mendes and the Coen brothers. With his wife James he also hosts the […]

The post “At the End of the Movie You Have Nine Different Deliverables to Time”: Roger and James Deakins on Still Photography, LUTs and Previs first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls, its title a reference to the best place to be between during bombing raids, is a unique take on an exhaustively mined (some would say extracted) story—that of the current war in Europe. Combining doc and fiction, the film follows Ukrainian artists who have chosen to stay and fight for their homeland by making art and preserving culture as a means of resistance. And that includes those involved in the crafting of this very film. To learn all about this meta look at creation in a time of destruction, Filmmaker reached out to the Ukrainian-American writer-director […]

The post “A Ukrainian National Awakening on Multiple Fronts”: David Gutnik on Tribeca 2023 Premiere Rule of Two Walls first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.