In the Sundance 2024 Midnight premiere It’s What’s Inside, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Jardin, an uninvited guest with a mysterious suitcase derails a pre-wedding party. Below, Jardin discusses what led him to edit his own film, the balance between long shots and flutter cuts, and more. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Jardin: I started out directing low-budget music videos, which I more or less […]

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Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively?  Ninety percent of our film takes place in one location, which makes that the default answer – a giant house in the middle of nowhere. The whole impetus behind the film’s premise was coming up with something that could unfold in a single […]

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Starting with a packed house on the night of October 13 and concluding right after Thanksgiving, MoMA showcased “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979,” the largest retrospective of Iranian cinema ever held inside or outside of Iran. With close to 70 films covering the pre-revolutionary period, there were works from Iran’s most famous filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami; the most famous film of this era, the late Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow; and repertory favorites like Ebrahim Golestan’s Brick and Mirror, Bahram Beyzaie’s Downpour and Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black. But, significantly, there were also films by lesser-known but just as vital […]

The post “The Grandest Orphan Cinema”: Ehsan Khoshbakht on MoMA’s “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979” Series first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The nonprofit Chicken & Egg Pictures has announced the eight recipients of its Chicken & Egg Awards for 2024. From the press release: Chicken & Egg Pictures, the organization dedicated to offering support and funding for women and gender-expansive documentary filmmakers, has announced more than $600,000 in new grants to eight recipients of its 2024 Chicken & Egg Award, with each receiving a $75,000 grant–a $50,000 unrestricted career grant and $25,000 to be applied to a project the filmmaker will work on during their award year. The recipients are Alisa Kovalenko, Beth Aala, Jumana Manna, Katy Lena Ndiaye, Nailah Jefferson, […]

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A working digital colorist or cinematographer in 2024 is likely all too familiar with one particular question: “Can we get the ‘film look’?” A decade into the age of digital sensors as the increasingly dominant and default shooting format, filmmakers at all budget levels are increasingly looking back at celluloid for inspiration. Phenomena once seen as drawbacks to be minimized—grain, chromatic aberration, anamorphic distortion, lens flares, halation—have not only become desired, but, if hordes of YouTube camera gurus are to be believed, “cinematic.” That is, these elements associated with this particular image formation workflow are essential to what constitutes “cinema,” […]

The post The “Film Look” and How The Holdovers Achieved It first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

How do you film something that’s only about 2.5 millimeters long? What about thousands of those little somethings—pavement ants, in this case—all working together to dismantle a hot dog, perched amidst on a New York City sidewalk?  That’s a question Bill Markham and his team had to figure out when putting together National Geographic’s A Real Bug’s Life, available now on Disney+. Ostensibly a sort of “real life” tribute to A Bug’s Life, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, A Real Bug’s Life follows different bugs in their natural habitats, all in service of teaching viewers how they live […]

The post Endoscopes and Racing Drones: How a NatGeo Team Filmed A Real Bug’s Life first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Sallieu Sesay is a Sierra Leonean-American actor who has had recurring roles on CBS’ Seal Team and HBO’s Barry, and, in his latest, delivers an incredible supporting performance in John Trengove’s nihilistic thriller Manodrome alongside Jesse Eisenberg. On this episode he talks about doing tons of research before taking on that part, having so little in common with the character and facing the pressure of being at the center of a movie’s most pivotal scene. He gives us a glimpse at his dedication to this craft, his continuous training with some of the best acting teachers around such as Ivana […]

The post “There’s a Lot in This Heart”: Sallieu Sesay, Back To One, Episode 276 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“It’s very much like having a kid out there in the world doing its own thing,” said writer/director Rose Troche last month as she was finishing the restoration of her debut feature Go Fish, which screened as part of Sundance’s 40th Edition programming this week, three decades after its original premiere at the festival. “It’s one of those films that has never gone out of the conversation, this funky movie made for $17,000 that launched these careers.” Troche is right —while many films from Sundance in the ’90s never made the leap to digital distribution, the lesbian drama Go Fish […]

The post In Full Frame: Director Rose Troche and Sundance Institute’s John Nein on Restoring the Lesbian Classic Go Fish first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The 2024 Slamdance Film Festival, which returned this year to its original home at the Doubletree Park City (i.e., the Yarrow), announced the winners of its Sparky Awards on Friday. Giuseppe Garau’s The Accident, a 16mm-shot film about a newly separated woman finding employment within the tow-truck industry, won the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize. The Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize went to Matt Moyer’s and Amy Toensing’s Inheritance, an Appalachia-set film dealing with the opioid epidemic. Kiarash Dadgar, whose short film The Steak played the festival, was awarded the AGBO Fellowship, which comes with $25,000 in prize money and […]

The post Slamdance 2024 Announces Winners, The Accident and Inheritance Take Top Prizes first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The Sundance Film Festival has announced the awards for this year’s edition. The list follows below, with links to our coverage of the films in question as available: GRAND JURY PRIZES The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to In The Summers / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Alessandra Lacorazza, Producers: Alexander Dinelaris, Rob Quadrino, Fernando Rodriguez-Vila, Lynette Coll, Sergio Lira, Cristóbal Güell) — On a journey that spans the formative years of their lives, two sisters navigate their loving but volatile father during their yearly summer visits to his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Cast: René Pérez Joglar, […]

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