SFFILM, the presenter of the San Francisco International Film Festival, has announced two new artist development programs as well other grants and partnerships. Supporting producers will be the New American Producer Fellowship, a program for a producer who has recently immigrated to the United States. Supported by the Flora Family Foundation and intended to “provide a stage for the perspectives of underrepresented filmmakers and to enrich the understanding, empathy, and curiosity of the general public,” the Fellowship will provide a $25,000 cash grant as well as an artist residency at SFFILM’s FilmHouse. The new Women, Peace and Security Fellowship, supported […]

There’s already enough documentation on the Trump presidency to fill a university library (and we’re just getting started), but a few aspects have, I think, been underdocumented. One is Our 45th President’s almost endearing habit of asking, during his ex tempore rambles (politely, euphemistically and implausibly labeled “Remarks” on the White House website, as if they were full of stand-alone aphorisms that should be recorded for future circulation a la Oscar Wilde), where someone is: “Where is Reince?” “A couple of my friends are out in the audience today—Ike Perlmutter, Laura Perlmutter. Where are they? Where are they? Where are […]

Yance Ford, a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face, premiered his feature documentary debut Strong Island at Sundance this year, and the film’s new trailer has just dropped from Netflix. One of this year’s essential docs, Strong Island is a formally assured, highly thoughtful examination of racial injustice, family tragedy and the complexities of memory and grief. Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris wrote about the film earlier this year at The New Yorker: In the annals of cinematic memoir, there are very few films like Yance Ford’s Strong Island, a stylish and wrenching rumination on familial grief that had its première […]

The Camden International Film Festival, which takes place September 14 – 17 throughout Camden, Rockport and Portland, Maine, announced its 2017 lineup today. Opening the festival is a world premiere, Dustin Nakao Haider’s basketball doc, Shot in the Dark, and the lineup also contains eight films, including The Reagan Show, All That Passes By Through A Window That Doesn’t Open and Whose Streets?, that received support from parent organization Points North Institute’s Artist Programs. “Screening at CIFF this year feels like a homecoming,” said Sabaah Folayan, Director of Whose Streets?, in a press release. “This community believed in our project […]

The best new television series of the 2016-2017 season arrived on DVD last week in the form of CBS/Paramount’s Bull: Season One package. A smart, stylish and very funny drama with a killer pedigree – Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show writer Paul Attanasio is one of the show’s creators, Steven Spielberg is an executive producer, and indie auteur Rodrigo Garcia directed the pilot – Bull reinvents and reinvigorates both the procedural and the courtroom drama with consistent verbal wit, visual elegance and one of the most compelling protagonists in the history of television. The show focuses on Jason Bull (Michael […]

“Microbudget filmmaking” is a bit of a misnomer considering the broad spectrum “microbudget” entails — one producer’s $5,000 line item is another’s entire operating budget. In a perfect world, we’d all have sufficient funds to hire the best and brightest among us and no project would be too scrappy. Unfortunately, when it comes to independent productions, sometimes that old chestnut still applies: if you want something done, you have to do it yourself. I learned this lesson the (somewhat hard) way when I directed my first feature, A Feast of Man. With an operating budget of $15,000 – a combination of […]

I took a break from writing about Twin Peaks: The Return to let things shake down a bit, but now seems like a good time to make a few more notes before the end. The first 2.25 of 18 parts were almost total abstraction, and it seemed a matter of necessity to largely abandon that mode for extended stretches before increasingly reintegrating it. We seemed, for a long time, very far from where we started, but The Return has allowed for increasing interventions of the abstract and fantastical alongside its rising dramatic arcs, which have finally run long enough to allow nearly […]

Amongst the many tributes pouring out today to the late, great Jerry Lewis, slot this interview clip of Jean-Luc Godard from The Dick Cavett Show in 1980. Seeing him as continuing the great physical comedy tradition of Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton, Godard goes on to extoll Lewis’s precise framing and sense of geometry. “But do you find him funny,” Cavett asks, and the answer is worth rolling this clip.

IFP announced today that former Vice President Al Gore, whose work on the issue of climate change has been featured in two feature documentaries, will receive a newly created Humanitarian Tribute at this year’s IFP Gotham Awards. Blumhouse topper Jason Blum, the producer behind low-cost, high-profit, zeitgeist-zinging horror hits like this year’s Get Out, will receive the Industry Tribute. “We are thrilled to be presenting Vice President Al Gore with the Humanitarian Tribute and Jason Blum with the Industry Tribute” said Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP and the Made in NY Media Center, in a press release. “Mr. Gore’s […]

Reed Morano was told she wouldn’t get to pitch on The Handmaid’s Tale: “Don’t get too excited about it.” Someone showed her the pilot just so she had an idea of what Hulu was up to, but there was already a “very big male director” they were out to, as Morano discussed at an IFP Q&A earlier this year. When Morano heard that her long time collaborator and friend Elisabeth Moss was attached as the lead of the show, she reached out — not taking no for an answer. “A week and a half later, I got a call: ‘The producers […]

In this video essay, :: kogonada returns to the films of Robert Bresson (which he previously explored in this video essay on the director’s use of hands), this time looking at his use of doors.

Markets and festivals are not the same. Some filmmakers may find the difference confusing because the Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals operate concurrently with an adjoining film market. Sundance is a festival but an informal market of sorts has grown up around the festival with distributors bidding to acquire rights to some films.

Markets are generally only open to the trade, and the fee to attend limits attendance to industry professionals. A member of the public usually cannot buy a ticket to see a film at a market or participate in it. At markets, films are screened for buyers. Actually, it would be more accurate to call these buyers “licensees” since they usually do not buy ownership of a film, but license distribution rights for a term of years in their country. A buyer might be a German broadcaster interested in acquiring films to distribute on his cable television service. Another buyer might be a theatre-chain owner who wants to exhibit films in Turkey. Some buyers want all media rights (including theatrical, television, digital, and home video) in a territory, and may sub-license some of those rights to other distributors.

Markets are an opportunity for buyers worldwide to interact with those who license film rights. These licensors are usually sales agents acting on behalf of producers. In the course of a market, a buyer can talk to many sales agents and view multiple films. Deals may be signed during the market or afterwards. The market is also an opportunity for sellers and buyers to socialize, and to build relationships with people with whom they often transact business by email or phone.

Festivals, on the other hand, are open to the public. Anyone can buy a ticket to a screening, although at the most popular festivals, there may not be enough tickets to go around. Festivals can provide a test of a film’s audience appeal. A festival screening may be the first opportunity for the filmmaker to see how typical moviegoers react to the film.  Of course, festivalgoers tend to be better educated and wealthier than the average moviegoer. Nevertheless, a festival screening does provide some good feedback.

Festivals serve several important functions. First, they expose films to distributors. Acceptance at a top festival will induce many acquisition executives to take a look at a film, either at the festival or by asking to screen the film outside the festival. Winning a top festival may make a film highly desirable in the eyes of distributors and may lead to a bidding war.

Festivals can also generate publicity for a film and draw the public’s attention to it. Thus, once distribution has been secured, the distributor may want to screen the film in festivals to build awareness and perhaps generate good reviews. If the timing of the festival is near the release date of the film, participation in the festival may help publicize the picture. Alternatively, if the film is not going to be released for another six months, publicity now may not be helpful; it can even be harmful. When the film is released, the prior coverage will have been forgotten by the public, and the news media will consider the film old news. The media may not review the film again or write articles about it.

 

Filmmaker Claire Carré participated in the 2014 IFP Independent Filmmaker Labs with Embers, her first feature film.

Tomorrow I’ll be flying to Park City to screen my first feature Embers as the Closing Night Film of the 2016 Slamdance Film Festival. For many American filmmakers, getting a rejection letter (or for the lucky less than 1%, an invitation) from Sundance or Slamdance is the start of their film’s festival story. For me, it came as a surprising turn in the middle! I’ve had an incredible variety of experiences at festivals thus far, each bringing its own unique benefits. Along the way I have been able to form friendships with talented fellow filmmakers, speak with scientists, sign to an agency for features and TV, visited universities, and receive a bunch of reviews from film critics. Best of all, I got to share my first film with hundreds of film lovers and then ask them what they thought afterwards.

Back when I was in the IFP Narrative Filmmaker Lab and had only shot the first half of my film, there was a workshop session centered around festival strategy. IFP’s Deputy Director and Head of Programming Amy Dotson broke the news to us that, from a probability standpoint, only a few of the films in the room would premiere at an “A-list” festival,and that we needed to come up with a festival strategy that best suited our personal goals for our film. In response to several nervous questions about the possibility of not getting into such-and-such festival, Dotson would calmly respond that each film finds its own unique path. At the time, I think we were all thinking “okay, that’s great advice, but really my unique path is going to be about deciding which awesome festival to accept because they are all going to want this first film I’ve put so much sweat and tears into.” Yeah….that’s not how it went down for me. 

We ended up not finishing shooting the last section of Embers until mid-November, and missed the deadlines for festivals like Sundance and SXSW. Over the next few months I watched as my friends from the IFP Lab premiered their films at a diverse array of great festivals like Sundance, Berlin, Tribeca, and Seattle, and there I was, still buried in the edit. Despite the pressure I put on myself to finish post as quickly as possible, the whole process took a long time. It was worth it. The difference between the first rough cut I had in December and the picture-locked version after the sound mix in April was massive. Before the mix, the film felt like an edit. After the mix, it started to feel like watching a real movie. 

I figured it was good enough to send out, and since the summer and fall are full of top festivals in Europe, I thought maybe Locarno or Karlovy Vary or San Sebastian would be my premiere. Maybe even Venice? As I worked through finishing the vfx and the nitty gritty of post over the summer, the rejection letters from Europe rolled in. And the time difference made it even worse, as it felt like all too often I’d wake up and check my email first thing to discover a new email informing me that so many great films were submitted this year etc. etc., and mine was not one of the ones chosen. Most of the time, the American films selected had already premiered at Sundance. A couple festivals didn’t even bother to watch my film before they rejected it. I got depressed. 

In August, with the completion of the color grade taking it up to the next level, the film was finally fully finished, and sitting on a DCP drive ready to go out into the world. Through strange synchronicity, that’s when our first festival invitation came in the form of a phone call from Germany. 

Embers  had its World Premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival in Germany in September. The festival experience was amazing. The festival is personally run by founder Torsten Neumann who makes a point of programming what he likes, hand-picking quirky discoveries that haven’t been making the festival rounds. The festival is mostly run by volunteers from all across Europe, who come to work the festival in Oldenburg for free because it’s really that fun. It isn’t an industry festival, so we didn’t need to worry about the business side; we were allowed to enjoy it. Oldenburg was five days of watching films all day and talking about films all night. Going to sleep at around 3am, I was maybe the earliest to leave the parties. In addition to meeting other talented filmmakers for a brief chat, we got to watch each other’s films, have long talks about our influences and our challenges, and discuss how we might be able to collaborate and support each other in the future. We ate breakfast together. We ate dinner together. I even got to see the Final Cut of my favorite film, Blade Runner, presented in person by actress Joanna Cassidy. It was awesome.

The acceptance emails started to come in. In October we screened Embers at six festivals within two weeks (Chicago, New Orleans, Heartland, Flyway, Savannah and Molodist). We tried to go to as many as we could. Charles (my co-writer/co-producer/husband) and I personally traveled to four of them, with actress Iva Gocheva traveling to the fifth. 

Our US Premiere was at the Chicago International Film Festival in their New Directors category. Unlike the contained city of Oldenburg where the film festival was the big thing for everyone in town, the film festival in Chicago is sprawling in length and number of films, and just one event among many in a major city. The experience felt more like a series of individual events. These are my favorite moments: Standing in the giant theater at the AMC 25 Cineplex doing the sound check and seeing my film with great sound on a screen so big that it curved, talking on a panel about science and film with the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience program at Northwestern University, and sharing the film on the big screen with my family and our local cast and crew from Chicago.

The New Orleans Film Festival changed everything. Embers screened Friday and Saturday in Chicago and screened Sunday in New Orleans in an intense but exciting weekend. I arrived just in time for the filmmaker awards brunch. I was totally surprised to be called up on stage to accept the Jury award for Best Narrative Feature! A whole bunch of the core team from Embers had flown to New Orleans, and we got to celebrate together. But it only got better. The morning of our second screening in New Orleans I got an email with a link to Indiewire. It was an article titled “The Best Science Fiction Discovery of the Year” and it was all about my little film! The article was written by Eric Kohn, senior editor and film critic of Indiewire, who had been a member of the New Orleans Film Festival Jury and was literally the first critic in the United States to watch my film. 

My inbox exploded. All of a sudden, important people wanted to watch my film. I got emails from talent agents, managers, distributors and production companies. I even got a request to rush a BluRay to Disney. It was nuts. Thanks to the New Orleans Film Festival and Kohn’s Indiewire article, our film received representation with a sales agent. Charles and I were signed by UTA for features, television and games and are already developing our next projects. And (fingers crossed) it looks like our film will soon get distribution.

It’s hard to know what would have happened in an alternate universe, if we had waited and maybe premiered at a big industry festival. We would have had more people interested in our film from the start, but would we have been lost in the crowd, a microbudget sci-fi film in a sea saturated with indie all stars. I’ll never know for sure.

In the midst of that whirlwind, Charles and I flew to Ukraine to screen Embers as the only American film in the International Competition at Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival, my first FIAPF and FIPRESCI festival. It felt like we were there not just as filmmakers but as cultural ambassadors (the US Embassy even covered our flights). In interviews (including one on live TV), I was asked big questions as a representative of the United States film industry that were a bit beyond my expertise – things like “How can more Ukrainian films get distribution in the US?” The most interesting aspect of the festival to me were the political overtones. Given their current situation with Russia, the festival was proudly nationalistic. Anthems were sung, political spoken word poetry was performed, and national festival award winners (all women!) each accepted their awards with fists in the air declaring “Ukraine Forever!”

I next brought the film to our first genre festival, Other Worlds Austin. Only in its second year, the festival was small in scale but big in heart and festival team spirit. Only at Other Worlds would I end up taking photos with someone else also wearing a Star Trek uniform. It was great to show our science fiction film to a crowd made up entirely of sci-fi fans, who really got it. Embers was the Closing Night Film and had the honor to win the Inaugural Mary Shelley Award. Our actress Greta Fernández won Best Actress in a Feature Film. The most touching moment of my festival experiences so far came from an audience member at Other Worlds Austin who had previously experienced amnesia after coming out of a coma. He told me that my film captured the confusion of what it felt like to not remember and to feel glimmers of meaning without being able to hold onto something specific. He insisted that I needed to keep making movies because he wanted to see them.

That brings us to today. Tomorrow I head to Park City to continue my festival journey with excitement and curiosity for where this winding road will take me next!

A multiple time IFP alum, filmmaker Andrew Droz Palermo (Rich Hill) recently attended SXSW to present the American premiere of his latest feature, One & Two. The film made its world premiere in Berlin this past February. Below, Palermo reflects on his experience in Austin, Texas, working on other filmmakers’ material, how to handle yourself during press Q&As, and how to separate the work from the artist. One & Two can currently be seen at festivals throughout the United States.

 

This year marked my 6th year attending SXSW – Austin’s annual bacchanalia of music, movies, and tech. Having already premiered our new film One & Two in Berlin, the pressure was off, and so I was able to sit back and enjoy the festivities a bit more than previous years. I saw some great films, spent quality time with old friends, and ate a few too many breakfast tacos.

Thankfully three out of four of our main cast were able to attend the festival: Timothee Chalamet, Grant Bowler and Elizabeth Reaser (Kiernan Shipka was shooting in Canada, but sent us emojis from afar). Even after shooting a movie together in 100 degree North Carolina heat we all still love each other, so that made for an enjoyable premiere and press-day. Something interesting happened on my end in that department. On occasion, while doing the press rounds you get unlucky and get some super-hyper TV interviewer. You know the type: all surface and pep like they just finished a great workout. That’s totally fine, and I understand it makes sense to be up and energetic for TV, but I have a really hard time smiling and laughing my way through those type of interviews.

I watched our host bouncing up and down during the countdown to airtime, and knew we were in for it, so I wondered to myself — am I in control of the energy of an interview? Can I pull them into the moment with me? As an experiment, I tried to get them to at least meet me half way. So I gave very long, very languid answers, and when I felt like they replied with a form question, I’d turn it into something I was more interested in.

Honestly, I have no idea if it worked. I suspect I come off a little bit like a corpse, or even combative, but it made the experience a lot more fulfilling for me, and I feel like it encouraged deeper and more heartfelt answers from our cast. On set, I really tried to my hardest to not be precious about the material, because I wanted the cast to also have a sense of ownership. That sparked interesting dialogue between us about the motivations of characters and their backstories, some of which was reignited after seeing it as a group in Austin and we had a lot of fun unpacking our opinions of the film at our interviewer’s expense.

 

This year, in addition to directing a film, I also shot one for Hannah Fidell called 6 Years. Watching a film you shot is very different from watching something you directed, mainly because you’ve had a lot more time to reflect on the process. But even so, in the past I’ve found myself critiquing my work (or the construction of the film) and never really allowing myself to be absorbed in the narrative. It was much different for me this go-round — I really liked watching it. I think two things are at play here:

1. I think I’m starting to allow my work to be part of a bigger learning process in ways I previously unable to, and that has allowed me to enjoy my perceived successes and failures.

2. More simply, I think the movie is great. Hannah and her editors, Sofi Marshall and Carlos Marques-Marcet, did an amazing job shaping the film. The electric and largely improvised performances by Taissa Farmiga and Ben Rosenfield that I witnessed on set were firing on all cylinders in the final edit. And bonus, it found a home!

 

Which brings me to my final topic: having your film out in the world. The festival release is often talked about as a business affair — there are tons of articles out there about how to sell your movie, how to put butts in seats, or how to get into fests, et cetera. Those items are very important to the life of a film (and you should read them) but what I’m interested in talking about lately is how does it feel to have a film out? How do you manage interacting with audiences and press about something so personal? How do you sleep at night when things don’t go as planned?

 

While I’m no zen master or therapist, I have spent a good deal of time talking about these things with people who are, or who are at least to me. The first short I made called A Face Fixed was a deeply personal film. I was happy with it when I finished it. I really thought the film had a great mood, felt nicely paced, and it looked and sounded great. But something happened when I showed it to the first audiences — I felt exposed. I had spent so much time on it that I really started to feel it was a reflection of my deepest self, and I grew to become unhappy with it and myself.

Did it not meet my expectations? Was I in need of some gratification I didn’t receive? Did airing out personal wounds make them worse? The answer is “yes” to all of the above. Afterward, I spent time soul-searching, and really trying to remember why I liked to make films. I tried to learn to separate who I am from the things I make, to truly let go of projects once they are finished, and that’s been extremely helpful for me creatively and emotionally. It took me a bit to find my way, but with One & Two and Rich Hill before it, I’ve grown to throughly enjoy post-screening Q&A’s. They’ve become some of the most interesting and gratifying experiences of festival life.

Jeremy Boxer (Creative Director of Vimeo), Ryan Koo (Director of Manchild), and Marc Schiller (CEO of BOND) discuss the success of your film can depend on how much you promote it, and promotion is a lot easier when you have things to promote. Learn about creating and circulating captivating content beyond just the trailer — behind-the-scenes footage, short films special features, and more — plus how you can use these amazing assets to drive audience awareness and engagement.

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