I’ve been a fan of Tyler Measom’s work ever since I wandered into a screening of his and Jennilyn Merten’s nail-biting portrait of teen exiles from the FLDS Church, Sons of Perdition, at Tribeca five years back. (The doc ultimately went on to be picked up by the Oprah Winfrey Network for broadcast the following year.) Now Measom has teamed up with producer Justin Weinstein (a scientist turned filmmaker and both executive producer of Ryan Murdoch’s Bronx Obama and writer/editor of Constance Marks’s Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey) to craft another festival success story. An Honest Liar is an up […]

With only three features under his belt, Matthew Porterfield has proven himself one of the most original voices in low-budget independent cinema, winning deserved praise from critics and audiences in both the US and Europe. Last year Porterfield made his first short film, the 30-minute Take What You Can Carry, which had its world premiere at the 2015 Berlinale. Inspired by a quote from French author Georges Perec, this self-described meditation on “communication, creativity and physical space” finds the Baltimore native working once more (in a somewhat more abstract mode than his features) with girlfriend Hannah Gross as Lilly, an American in […]

My German teacher in Berlin has been hacked. In class, she violates her “no speaking English” rule to explain that for nearly a year, a hacker has tracked her digital life in order to stalk her in real life. I’ve never been personally hacked — or so I think — but, the inconvenience of it seems rather minor compared to the sense of intimate violation. The Sony leak, the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence, and my teacher’s less gossip-worthy admission all underscore this pervasive reality of digital fragility. This is a topical conversation, but it’s also a really abstract one. […]

Ted Hope — producer, Good Machine co-founder, and now CEO of Fandor — is no tongue-tied wallflower in the independent film community. Indeed, his passionate commentary, counsel and editorializing on topics ranging from net neutrality to making better films to a “systems reboot” of the independent film economy seem to be everywhere these days. But while his website, Twitter account and frequent speeches at industry events may make it seem that his opinions have been enabled — or at least turbo-charged — by this current social media age, he has, in fact, been lobbing list-driven rhetorical broadsides for years. (Don’t […]

Combining taste, business savvy, and enduring idealism for the role cinema can play within the broader culture, legendary producer, distributor, director and exhibitor Marin Karmitz has helped shape the course of world cinema since launching his MK2 Films in the early 1970s. Beginning his career as an assistant director to, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, Karmitz went on to become one of the most distinguished producers of his generation, with such classics as Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself and Claude Chabrol’s Ceremonie to his name. But his list of producing credits only tells […]

When I went to meet Land Ho! co-director Martha Stephens and producers Mynette Louie and Sara Murphy in their color correction suite in Midtown NYC, they were in fuzzy sweaters with zigzag lines, and were laughing often – which makes sense as their film is a road trip comedy set in Iceland (about two older men who must contend with life after retirement).  Just months earlier these sweaters had shielded their crew against the vibrant and freezingly unpredictable Icelandic elements during the production of their film (and kept them warm after getting out of dips in the hot springs – […]

“I’ve been around so long that I’ve seen the ‘death’ of independent film at least three times” – Christine Vachon, Producing Masterclass Widely regarded as one of the key figures in American independent cinema, Christine Vachon is now well into her fourth decade of film production. Her first feature film as a producer was Todd Haynes’ corrosive, Jean Genet-inspired Poison (1991), which set the tone for the host of fearlessly confrontational films that followed, including Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) and Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). In 1996, alongside Pamela Koffler, Vachon co-founded the NYC-based production company Killer Films, which has been […]

One of the great things about Independent Film Week is getting to meet so many other filmmakers who are sharing in the same experience working in independent film. On any given day of the conference you could be sitting next to a producer, director or distributor who might end up helping you on your next project (or maybe you’ll end up helping them!) You also end up hearing about a lot of great projects and films, which is exactly what happened one session this week when I found myself sitting next to Milo Daemgen, independent producer of various short & […]

In 1965, a rough-and-tumble band of rock ‘n’ roll upstarts called The Rolling Stones were just beginning to build their legend, when wily manager Andrew Loog Oldham engaged English documentarian Peter Whitehead to follow the band around for a couple of days during a short stint in Ireland. The result was Charlie Is My Darling, a cinéma vérité snapshot of an era when the cultural revolution was only just beginning to crack the façade of the Old World. We see the young Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts (who gives the film its title) brainstorming […]

When Mike Birbiglia asked This American Life‘s Ira Glass to produce his first feature, Sleepwalk with Me, premiering here at Sundance, Glass thought it sounded like it might be fun. “I’d read a couple of scripts, look at a couple of rough cuts,” he remembers thinking. Glass’s presumption was far from the truth… very far. In this short interview, shot before Sundance while Glass was in the sound studio with Birbiglia, he ponders — hilariously — the job of the producer.