This month Filmmaker is publishing diaries from writers and directors who attended the 2023 Sundance Directors Lab. First up is Kasey Elise Walker, who traveled to the Lab with The Dispute, co-written with Andrea Ellsworth. Here’s the description: “Down on their luck and desperate for more, two best friends from South Central take a chance encounter as an invitation to trade their dead-end lives in Los Angeles for something new. When chaos ensues during their seemingly lucrative adventure, they realize the true cost of their actions..” A complete list of Sundance Labs participants can be found here. — Editor I’m freaking out. […]

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In the first two films in their trilogy of environmental-themed documentaries, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle married — literally — their loving spirit of “ecosexuality” with urgent debates around the preservation of our natural resources. In 2014’s Goodbye, Gauley Mountain, Stephens returned to her West Virginia home with Sprinkle only to find the eponymous ridges she remembered from her youth undergoing the environmentally-destructive coal-mining process of mountaintop removal. In the film, as Wren Awry wrote for Filmmaker, Stephens says, “Sometimes I feel like fighting [mountaintop removal] is a losing battle. Then I imagine that some good old queer ACT UP-style […]

The post “Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Not Bad But What You Bring To It”: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Winter kept us warm,” reads an early line in T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land, “covering Earth in forgetful snow.” This season, often associated with loneliness and despair, heralds quite the opposite both in Eliot’s masterwork and in Canadian filmmaker David Secter’s. The latter’s 1965 feature debut, Winter Kept Us Warm, centers on the blossoming relationship between Doug (John Labow) and Peter (Henry Tarvainen), two University of Toronto college students. An upperclassman, the popular Doug spends more time socializing with his fraternity brothers than studying; conversely, freshman Peter feels awkward in his new surroundings, and as such greatly prefers […]

The post “The Movie Stays the Same, Yet the Interpretation Is Often Very Different”: David Secter on the 60 Year Legacy of Winter Kept Us Warm first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

At Full Sail University, the filmmakers of tomorrow can pursue hands-on bachelor’s and master’s degrees that prepare them for the demands of the industry. With a real-world educational approach and a campus filled with tech-forward facilities, Full Sail is designed so students can take their first steps toward their industry dreams today. Full Sail’s Film Degree Programs Film bachelor’s degree: Students experience every step of the filmmaking process in this campus program. They write scripts, collaborate to build sets, learn about on-set crew positions, work together to shoot footage on dedicated film days, and tackle editing in post-production. Film Production […]

The post Full Sail University: A Campus for Future Filmmakers (Sponsored Post) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

8 Above’s June webinar, co-sponsored by Filmmaker Magazine, profiles four new adventurous and innovative distributors that have emerged on the US independent film scene. Join Scott Macaulay (Filmmaker) and Jon Reiss for a conversation with Elizabeth Woodward (Willa), Munir Atalla (Watermelon Pictures), Elizabeth Purchell (Muscle Distribution), and Theodore Schaefer & James Belfer (Cartuna x Dweck). 🎤 What The Webinar Will Cover How each company approaches curation, audience building, and community engagement What makes these new distribution models unique—and replicable How filmmakers can find the right fit for their work in a shifting ecosystem Whether you’re prepping for a release, scouting […]

The post Free Webinar: CRISIS/OPPORTUNITY: Four New Innovative Distributors Rethinking the Indie Model first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Every Friday I write a free newsletter that’s a riff on various topics — filmmaker sustainability, the health of our ecosystem, new players and ideas, the plight of the producer, the rise of AI and more are frequent subjects. This week, I used the newsletter to announce two upcoming events, our new issue, and my news that after the next issue in September I’ll be stepping down as Editor-in-Chief after 33 years. Read all of this below, and if you’d like to sign up to the newsletter, which I’ll be writing for almost three more months, you can do so […]

The post Filmmaker ‘s New Issue and News from Our Editor-in-Chief first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

For much of her life, Karla Murthy listened as her father regaled her with tales of his troubled upbringing and eventual journey to America. Raised in poverty in India, Shantha Murthy spent years of his childhood destitute and working for meager wages at a restaurant, his only respite arriving in the form of an American couple who eventually brought him to the U.S. as their adoptee. The rest follows a fairly simple pattern: he met a girl in his new home state of Texas, got hitched and started a family of his own. This, he claimed, was his true life’s […]

The post “Crying and Editing at the Same Time”: Karla Murthy on Her Sheffield World Premiere The Gas Station Attendant first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In 1986, ia Kamandalu showed up at the EZTV space in West Hollywood for a screening of video art by Doris Chase. People recognized her even though it had been a few years since she danced in music videos like “Super Freak” by Rick James and on variety shows like Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, performing at the time under the name Kim McKillip. Michael Masucci, an artist and longtime participant in the community of video-makers known as EZTV, started talking to her. They kept up over the phone and made plans to work together. Based in Phoenix, Kamandalu flew in […]

The post Hollywood Underground: Joanne McNeil on EZTV’s Inventive Body of Work first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Sorry, Baby opens with a wide shot of a lone house on a quiet New England country night—an image that could be the height of snoozy serenity or scary isolation. Writer-director Eva Victor remembers this being a genuine issue in the edit of her first feature. “It ended up feeling like the beginning of a horror movie. I was like, ‘I don’t really care that it does.’ And everyone else was like, ‘Is that what we’re doing?’” The same thoughts might occur to viewers at the beginning of any movie dealing with the trauma at Sorry, Baby’s core while also […]

The post Chapter Break: Eva Victor on Sorry, Baby first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

I’m a bit of a hypocrite: I hated school but now advocate for the experience. I force my kid to do her nightly homework when I failed to do mine. I failed art class in high school (and later dropped out of high school) but ended up with a BFA. This is because (I’ve been told) I possess a Protestant work ethic. I believe deeply in the power of education, but I’m unsure anything can truly be taught beyond what one is willing to teach oneself. Despite abhorring being told what to do, I teach full-time in an undergraduate media […]

The post The Hypocrite: James N. Kienitz Wilkins on Cine-phobia and Film School first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.