Any filmmaker knows that the script is but the first brick in a winding pathway to production. The feature documentary Click Here: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Making Movies takes this fact to heart, training the lens on the action that transpires before the camera even rolls. For Pete Chatmon and Candice Sanchez McFarlane, the development process effectively began at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, where their screenplay $FREE.99 debuted in competition, netting Chatmon TFI’s Creative Promise Narrative Award. While they found their fair share of industry champions, raising production funds proved to be another story altogether. Five years […]

Made quickly and on the cheap, prolific South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, Pieta, is an often disturbing revenge tale, moody and morally challenging, where redemption for one of recent cinema’s most dark-hearted anti-heroes seems just out of grasp. Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a pitiless and anger-fueled debt collector for a equally brutal moneylender who specializes in forcing his often destitute debtors to commit insurance fraud in order to pay back what they owe him. Living a comfortless and filthy existence in the same slum as many of his victim, Kang-do has not a friend or a care in the […]

Sundance Institute announced the 13 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah from May 27 through June 27. Under the leadership of Michelle Satter, Founding Director of the Institute’s Feature Film Program, and the artistic direction of Gyula Gazdag, the Fellows selected for this year’s program include emerging filmmakers and projects from the United States, Europe, Mexico, Peru and Somalia. Projects supported through the Directors and Screenwriters Labs receive continued, customized, year-round support from the Feature Film Program, which can include the following resources: ongoing creative and strategic advice, […]

“The independent screenwriter” — is the term a tautology or oxymoron? While the word “independent” is often applied to directors and sometimes producers, it’s rarely seen appended to the job title of screenwriter. Is that because so many independent directors write their own scripts? Because screenwriters-for-hire are inevitably drawn to the world of Hollywood? Or, perhaps, because the term means little when applied to the craft of screenwriting? After all, while a director is reliant on others to provide financing and labor, a writer can always sit down with pen, paper or word processor. In this new, occasional column, we […]

Born in Mexico City, Carlos Reygadas was a lawyer specializing in armed-conflict resolution in Brussels when he decided to try his hand at making films at the age of 30. He quickly became a unique voice in cinema with his first feature, Japón (2001), which received a special mention for the Camera d’Or at Cannes that year. In his three films since, Reygadas has developed his cinematic language and abilities, as well as his reputation for making aesthetically uncompromising and provocative films. If his second film, Battle in Heaven (2005), cemented his reputation as a provocateur, his following Silent Light […]

Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and […]

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is such a fine, rare bird: Terence Nance’s Gotham Award-winning debut film is, regardless of its aesthetic pyrotechnics and self-reflexivity (it consists of a series of short experimental films that radically deconstruct Nance’s romantic foibles), wholly, fully, truly accessible to everyone. If Hollis Frampton and Nina Paley had somehow, through the force of magic realism, had a black love child, it would have grown up to direct something like this. It’s altogether unusual strategy for detailing Nance’s obsessive courtship of a young woman named Namik Minter — using reenactments, direct address, doc interviews, stop-motion and traditional animation to […]

Paul Schrader presented a screening of Taxi Driver in Toronto last weekend and spoke to the capacity audience of 450 at the Royal Cinema for an hour afterwards about his career and the changing state of filmmaking. As part of the Seventh Art Live Directors Series and presented by The Royal, he also showed a scene from his forthcoming The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan. Many in the audience watched Taxi Driver for the first time on the big screen, since many were not even born when the film shocked audiences in 1976. A major critical and box-office success, it launched […]