In Cannes, Sandra Schulberg, producer, co-founder of IFP (now The Gotham) and head of IndieCollect, participated today in a CNC Discussion on Film Restoration, sponsored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. In her prepared remarks, which she gave to Filmmaker, she is calling for a new Indie Filmmaker Bill of Rights in an attempt to save a generation of independent cinema. Read her remarks below. Forty-four years ago, in 1978, international critics here in Cannes gave the first Camera d’Or Award to an American indie film. The next year they did the same. I am here today to gratefully acknowledge […]

Cancer is taking a toll on our postwar generation of filmmaker activists, and now we mourn Richard Brick. Richard was a coiled spring whose febrile energy made him a one-man power station, radiating waves that enveloped you and insisted that you pay attention. Whether he was running the Mayor’s Office of Film & Television, chairing the Board of Directors of the IFP, helping to run Columbia University’s graduate film school, teaching his famous pre-production class, or trying to bring a director into line (most famously Emir Kusturica), his verve, passion and discipline were a wonder to behold. The various obituaries […]

The indie film world, including the IFP, has lost another pillar: Ray Silver.  Raphael “Ray” Silver became a producer in order to bring to the screen one of the most beautiful and influential films of the fledgling independent film movement. The film was Hester Street, directed by Joan Micklin Silver, Ray’s wife and now, sadly, his widow. When I was first thinking about starting a self-help organization for indie filmmakers in the 1970s, Ray and Joan’s 1975 release of Hester Street was a touchstone and an inspiration for those of us who were contemplating a do-it-yourself approach. Following in the footsteps […]

The indie film world is mourning the loss of George Gund, and so am I. This modest, magnificent man often pretended to not hear or not see, yet he absorbed and adopted the interests and needs of thousands whose worlds he crossed. George Gund’s support for the Sundance Institute, San Francisco Film Society, Pacific Film Society, and Cleveland Film Society is well known and documented, and it was heart-warming to see Robert Redford show up to honor his friend at Gund’s recent memorial. But what is less known, remembered by only a few of us, is that George played a […]