On an unassuming downtown block, the Los Angeles Unified School District (L.A.U.S.D.)’s Musical Instrument Repair has excelled for many years. A big fuss is never made by tireless employees (former musicians or quick learners who grew on the job) working long hours while tending to the wear-and-tear of damaged instruments public school students have relied on. Arts programs are severely neglected and underfunded in the United States; this repair facility—essentially a warehouse with minimal lighting but hundreds of tools and thousands of spare parts—provides an essential if underappreciated essential service. Hoping to enhance the visibility of these dedicated craftsmen, Ben […]

The post “We Wanted the Film to be Available for Free”: Kris Bowers & Ben Proudfoot on The Last Repair Shop first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Plenty of — and perhaps too many — nonfiction films today borrow from dramatic storytelling, but that synthesis of documentary and drama is the productive premise of Katie Mathew’s feature documentary debut, Roleplay. A group of Tulane University students collaborated with Mathews to create an immersive play drawn directly from their own experiences of, according to the press release, “sexual violence on college campuses, from the codes of silence, the isolation of people of color, the homophobia, the way Greek Life rules the social order, and the lack of guidance regarding issues like rape, racism, addiction, and trauma.” It’s project […]

The post Exclusive Clip: Katie Mathews’s SXSW-Premiering Roleplay first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

World premiering at this year’s SXSW, writer-director-star Alice Lowe’s sophomore feature Timestalker certainly feels like it’s been a long time coming. Arriving eight years after Prevenge, her 2016 debut that she shot and starred in just weeks before giving birth to her eldest daughter, Lowe’s latest was stalled for a slew of reasons—motherhood, COVID, involvement in other projects—but Timestalker’s extended development served to sharpen Lowe’s filmic instinct while shooting, resulting in an ambitious, blood-spattered time loop rom-com more aesthetically and thematically assured than its 22-day shoot may have initially allowed for.  Lowe stars as Agnes, an ordinary woman who we […]

The post “Any Independent Film Is a Miracle These Days”: Alice Lowe on SXSW 2024 Premiere Timestalker first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The precarious and conflicted economics of non-profits — both material and libidinal — are the subject of artist and filmmaker Charles de Agustin‘s short narrative essay film Mission Drift, which, over the past year, has screened at festivals, art spaces and microcinemas in conjunction with panel discussions that are integral to the piece itself. (Writes D’Augustin on his website, “The medium of Mission Drift is described as ‘video and discussion:’ the work may only be publicly presented if it is followed by a robust audience discussion on the issues at hand, structured in consultation with the artist if he is […]

The post The Sadean Horror of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex: Artist and Filmmaker Charles de Agustin on Mission Drift first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Co-founded by Micah Gottlieb and Sarah Winshall, the inaugural edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies is slated to take place this April 4 through 7 in venues across east Los Angeles. Today, the festival announced its inaugural lineup, including selections from former 25 New Faces of Film Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn (recently interviewed by Jordan Cronk about their new film, Dream Team) and Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan. Below, find the full line-up with descriptions from the festival’s press release. Official Selection Dream Team, dir. Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn Gasoline Rainbow, dir. Bill Ross IV & […]

The post Los Angeles Festival of Movies (LAFM) Announces Inaugural Lineup for April 4-7, 2024 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

25 years ago, Pi—a $70,000 indie about an obsessive mathematician shot on 16mm black and white reversal stock—put cinematographer Matthew Libatique on the map. In the intervening quarter century, Libatique has earned three Academy Award nominations and shot multiple films for Spike Lee, Jon Favreau, Joel Schumacher and Darren Aronofsky. He helped inaugurate the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man and dipped into the D.C. sandbox with Birds of Prey. He’s shot horror movies, westerns, sci-fi flicks, war dramas, biopics and whatever genre mother! falls into. But what Matthew Libatique hasn’t done since Pi is shoot a film in black […]

The post “A Frankenstein Set of Lenses”: DP Matthew Libatique on Maestro first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The Glasgow-based “post rock” band Mogwai is no stranger to cinema, having scored numerous films and TV shows, from the original French version of Les Revenants to Douglas Gordon and Phillippe Pareno’s experimental doc, Zidane, to, most recently, the Apple TV+ show Black Bird. And now, after a 25 year career that has included 10 studio albums, the band is the subject of its own documentary, Antony Crook’s If the Stars Had a Sound,” which premieres March 12 at SXSW. Band member Stuart Braithwaite says in a press release: “We’re incredibly excited for people to see Antony’s film If the […]

The post Trailer Watch: Antony Crook’s SXSW-Premiering Mogwai Doc, If the Stars Had a Sound first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

When National Geographic’s Janet Han Vissering and Wildstar Films’s Vanessa Berlowitz got the idea to make Queens, a six-part natural history series about female animals made by an all-woman production crew, they knew it would be a challenge. Only something like five percent of wildlife filmmakers are women, a number far short of the 20 to 30 percent average across the entertainment industry overall. They didn’t know how hard it would be, though.  “On the camera side, before Queens there were probably about five women who’d had the opportunity to get to the ‘premium wildlife’ level of work,” Berlowitz explains. “There […]

The post Women in the Wilderness: How Nat Geo’s Queens Aims to Close the Gender Gap in Natural History Filmmaking first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In what is a refreshing — at least for us at Filmmaker — changeup from the usual sorts of films that get the iPhone demo treatment, Apple has released a new 19-minute short, Midnight, directed by Takashi Miike. It’s no Audition or Ichi the Killer, naturally, but his adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga is a lot of fun. There’s also an accompanying short behind-the-scenes video, below, that demonstrates the use of iPhone modes like Action and Cinematic — the former’s handheld stabilization and the latter’s rack focus — as well as, most impressively, the use of the phone’s LIDAR scanner […]

The post Watch: Apple-Produced Takashi Miike Film Shot on iPhone 15 Pro first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Chicken & Egg Pictures, the non-profit organization dedicated to supporting women and gender-expansive filmmakers with funding and mentorship, today announced its 2024 (Egg)celerator Lab grantees. The organization is granting $40,000 each to ten feature documentary film projects, directed or co-directed by first- or second-time directors. Funds are targeted for production, and each director will also receive year-long mentorship. From today’s press release: The 2024 (Egg)celerator Lab films find families reimagining their histories, legacies, generational grief, and intimate end of life journeys such as in Ashley O’Shay’s Southmont Drive (Working Title), Gabriela Díaz Arp’s Matitinó, and Emma Francis-Snyder’s Anatomy of a […]

The post Chicken & Egg Pictures Awards $400,000 Total to Ten 2024 (Egg)celerator Lab Grantees first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.