Today, Metrograph announces Inge de Leeuw as their newly appointed Director of Programming, who joins the New York-based company after working as a programmer of English-language titles at International Film Festival Rotterdam for over a decade, where she introduced European audiences to filmmakers like Kogonada, Terence Nance and Eliza Hitman. (Notably, the aforementioned filmmakers each previously appeared on our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list). “Metrograph is a family built around film curation—daring, inspiring, personal programs that have driven our growth since we opened in 2016,” said Alexander Olch, Metrograph’s Founder, via a press release. “These countless detailed choices […]

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Following his 2016 feature Operation Avalanche and re-launching Nirvana the Band the Show in 2016, director Matt Johnson returns with BlackBerry. The film, co-written by Johnson and longtime producing partner Matthew Miller, was adapted from the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. The film’s short synopsis reads: BlackBerry tells the story of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the two men that charted the course of the spectacular rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone. Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton star as Lazaridis and […]

The post Trailer Watch: Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In its second post-pandemic, in-person year, True/False was still trying to convince audiences to come back (there were fewer venues this year than pre-pandemic) to watch artful documentary, but the in-person joy was contagious.  For one long March weekend, the True/False Film Fest turns the college town of Columbia, Missouri into an arts extravaganza. The films range from the mainstream (Going Varsity in Mariachi, a high-school competition film from the Texas border) to surprising (Milisuthando Bongela’s Milisuthando, about identity challenges in post-apartheid South Africa), to the strange (Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré’s Xaraasi Xanne/Crossing Voices, which uncompromisingly mixes past, present […]

The post Precarity, Therapy Films and Ethics: True/False Film Fest 2023 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Sophie von Haselberg stars as Sissy St. Claire in Amanda Kramer’s psychedelic fever dream musical Give Me Pity! It’s part mock 70’s television special, part monologue film, and requires the creation of a bigger-than-life persona on screen, and von Haselberg carries it all and delivers a virtuoso performance. On this episode, she takes us from Kramer “pulling me from the ether,” through extensive preparation, getting the character “into my body,” a frustrating COVID pause, on to the live theater-like 5 day shoot, and how she doesn’t think she would have “ever allowed myself to dream that something like this would […]

The post “I Know This Woman. I Have Her in My Body”: Sophie von Haselberg (Back To One, Episode 244) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A reliable way for filmmakers to generate audience sympathy is flattering attendees by stoking their regional pride, as at my first screening of True/False Film Fest 2023: Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s short Moune Ô, followed by the world premiere (one of eight at this year’s fest) of Sebastián Pinzón Silva and Canela Reyes’ La Bonga. Attending in-person, the latter pair spoke of the sense of community they felt in Columbia, Missouri and how that related to their film, an observation that raised some cheers. In his subsequent webcam-taped intro, Jean-Baptiste said how happy he was to have his film showing even if he […]

The post True/False Film Fest 2023: Constructed Communities first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

There’s the concept of art as therapy, and then there’s the concept of a specific artist as a therapist, which is how debuting filmmaker Ken August Meyer introduces the Swiss-German painter Paul Klee at the start of his Angel Applicant, premiering today in the SXSW Documentary Feature Competition. At the beginning of the 21st century, Meyer, an art director at Wieden+Kennedy, is struck by systemic scleroderma, a life-threatening autoimmune disease that causes scarring and tightening of the skin and which can damage internal organs. As he embarks on a treatment path, Meyer finds solace as well as a kind of […]

The post “Klee Wanted to Destroy the Convention of Angels in Their Historic Tradition”: Ken August Meyer on His SXSW Doc about Art and Illness, Angel Applicant first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Winners of the Best Screenplay and Best Picture awards at last night’s Oscars for their Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Daniels — Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — have appeared in our pages many times over the years, with the various articles and interviews offering a historical timeline of the iconoclastic creators’ move from music video stars to celebrated feature directors. The two showed up first in 2015, in our 25 New Faces list, while they were in production on their first feature, Swiss Army Man. But we had already been knocked out by their music videos for the […]

The post The Filmmaker Guide to the Oscar-Winning Daniels first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Here’s a Good example of what AI created from writing script, V.O., Actor-to-finished Video
This beginning to end Production by, Thabiso Molatlhwa, was inspired by Idan Benishu @ Dataloop in Israel
who’s Head of Marketing at Dataloop AI

It took me less than 10 minutes to create an animated video with a character telling a story – all AI.
How did I do it?
Step 1:
I went to midjourney and asked it to create the guy you see in the video.

This is the prompt:
Intense Black guy, sits on a stool, cinematic lightning, holding a microphone, looking into the camera, detailed face, by artstation, unreal engine –q 2
Note the q2– at the end, this is a parameter that creates a higher-quality image
Step 2:
Once I had the picture, I went to Chat GPT and asked it to tell me a story about a guy walking in the woods who had a mysterious experience that would change his life forever.
It took about a minute and a half.
Step 3:
After I had text and an image, I went to D-ID, uploaded the image, chose a voice and tone, and created the video you see here – it took 3 minutes

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All with AI-based tools

One of the most surprising revelations about the painter (and multimillion-dollar mass marketer) Thomas Kinkade, “the most successful artist of his time” according to the synopsis for Miranda Yousef’s SXSW-premiering doc Art for Everybody, is not that he was, well, “the most successful artist of his time.” Nor that after his death a decade ago from a drug and alcohol overdose his family discovered a secret trove of rather dark and sometimes disturbing work, images at complete odds with the sugary sweet depictions of small-town life that once graced the walls of the Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery franchises, a ubiquitous presence […]

The post “…The Costs of Turning Yourself from a Three-Dimensional Person into a Two-Dimensional Brand”: Miranda Yousef on Her SXSW-Premiering doc Art for Everybody first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In the nine years since Serial, the “true crime podcaster” has become, variously, a career goal, sociological type and, in TV shows like Only Murders in the Building, object of satire. In Citizen Sleuth, world premiering in SXSW’s Documentary Spotlight section, debuting director Chris Kasick considers his voluble, no-filter subject—Emily Nestor of the Mile Marker 181 podcast—from all of these angles while also producing a work that is something of a moral reckoning for the popular audio genre. In 2011, Jaleayah Davis, a 20-year old Ohio woman, died in a horrible drunk-driving accident, her head severed from her body. Or […]

The post “How Do You Talk About It as a Murder When You Think It’s an Accident?” Citizen Sleuth Director Chris Kasick on His SXSW-Premiering Mile Marker 181 Doc first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.