Jason Kohn gave a great speech when he won the Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking at the Cinema Eye Honors last week. He spoke about making Manda Bala “out of anger” after watching Marshall Curry’s Streetfight play to an empty theater at a festival in Sao Paulo. “I was so god damn mad. . . because when these movies don’t get seen you feel like you’re fucking losing, you feel like somebody else is winning and that person is no…
Some trailers from fun films I saw at SXSW: We Are Wizards (Brad Neely is definitely the best thing since sliced bread) Beautiful Losers Nerdcore Rising (“Like playing Halo while getting a blowjob from Hello Kitty”)
I had the pleasure of watching an early cut of How’s Your News? at the ICA in London a few years back and was immediately hooked by the joyful, adventurous spirit of the folk from Camp Jabberwocky. Camp Jabberwocky is a summer camp for people with mental and physical disabilities and the How’s Your News? project grew out of a video class that Arthur Bradford taught at the camp. In How’s Your News? a group of the campers travel across…
A few more photos from last week’s adventures in Austin: Andre Williams subject of Agile Mobile Hostile enjoying the beer and sunshine, flanked by Directors Tricia Todd and Eric Matthies At the Spout party: Danielle DiGiacomo from IndiePix, Agnes Varnum blogger extraordinaire, and HotDoc’s Sean Farnel (with blogger Joel Heller peeking in!) Alternative distribution whizkid Brian Chirls with Ashley Sabin who was in town with her film Intimidad, co-directed by David Redmon Dan Nuxoll and Genevieve DeLaurier from the wonderful…
I always love the posters that filmmakers put up around festivals to publicize their work. Here’s a little collage of the posters in the Austin Convention Center last week.
I just posted something about the How’s Your News? show I saw at SXSW on the Shooting People Festival Focus blog. I wanted to link to it here too because if you haven’t seen How’s Your News? yet you should, and you should definitely try to catch them playing a gig if you ever get the chance. These guys rock the mothereffing house!
One of the only bum notes at SXSW last week was hearing that filmmaker Benh Zeitlin’s car had been rear-ended while he was driving to Austin for his Glory at Sea screenings resulting in some really nasty injuries. I don’t know Benh personally but it’s awful to hear about stuff like this, especially when health insurance is an issue (which is often the case in our community). Rooftop Films are going to be posting more information about Benh’s insurance situation…
I missed Lou Reed’s keynote speech at SXSW but I did see this rather lovely thing.
I went to a roundtable discussion organized by the From Here to Awesome team at SXSW last week. Many topics were covered but one of the things I was pleased to discover is this 1,000 True Fans article by Kevin Kelly. What is really useful about this article is that Kelly is focusing on the possibilities for everyone working between “poverty and stardom” – rather than talking about the Radioheads of this world. This is the crux of it: A…
