As Sanctuary, Zachary Wigon’s twisted tale of a dominatrix and her wealthy client, opens in NY and LA, David Lancaster of producer Rumble Films recalls a speedy 18-day shoot on a custom-made set in Brownsville, Brooklyn in late summer of 2021. It was Covid, so not the easiest time for indie financing.
It world premiered in Toronto, Neon picked it up. Rumble is pretty prolific with projects including Whiplash, Night Crawler, Eye In The Sky, Drive and Donnybrook. It lost one project to a lack of pandemic insurance and more recently saw another fall away since it wouldn’t have been finished shooting by the end of June – when actor and director contracts expires and they could potentially be on strike alongside writers. “It’s a tricky world,” he said.
He’s in Cannes with eOne horror thriller Visitation by Nicolas Pesce starring Olivie Cooke and Isla Johnston that finished...
It world premiered in Toronto, Neon picked it up. Rumble is pretty prolific with projects including Whiplash, Night Crawler, Eye In The Sky, Drive and Donnybrook. It lost one project to a lack of pandemic insurance and more recently saw another fall away since it wouldn’t have been finished shooting by the end of June – when actor and director contracts expires and they could potentially be on strike alongside writers. “It’s a tricky world,” he said.
He’s in Cannes with eOne horror thriller Visitation by Nicolas Pesce starring Olivie Cooke and Isla Johnston that finished...
- 5/19/2023
- by Jill Goldsmith
- Deadline Film + TV
Exclusive: Kat Taylor & Tom Steyer’s TomKat MeDiA has unveiled its slate of social justice-themed projects for 2022. The multi-platform media company has secured rights to Duff Wilson’s eco-thriller Fateful Harvest and Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s award-winning work of narrative non-fiction, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez, with plans to develop both as feature films.
Based on a Seattle Times investigative series reported by Wilson that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Fateful Harvest is the riveting account of an alarming environmental scandal. Published in 2001, the book tells the story of Patty Martin — the mayor of a small Washington town called Quincy — who discovers American industries are dumping toxic waste into farmers’ fields and home gardens by labeling it “fertilizer.” She becomes outraged at the contaminated soil, failed crops, dead horses, and fatal, rare diseases in her town, as well as the direct threat to her own children’s health.
Based on a Seattle Times investigative series reported by Wilson that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Fateful Harvest is the riveting account of an alarming environmental scandal. Published in 2001, the book tells the story of Patty Martin — the mayor of a small Washington town called Quincy — who discovers American industries are dumping toxic waste into farmers’ fields and home gardens by labeling it “fertilizer.” She becomes outraged at the contaminated soil, failed crops, dead horses, and fatal, rare diseases in her town, as well as the direct threat to her own children’s health.
- 8/3/2022
- by Matt Grobar
- Deadline Film + TV
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: David Dalaithngu in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout.Renowned Aboriginal film actor David Gulpilil Ridjimiraril Dalaithngu has died. David Dalaithngu was seen as a trailblazer for his early roles in Walkabout (1971) and Storm Boy (1976), and later performances in films like the semi-autobiographical Charlie's Country (2013). He rose to prominence as an actor and traditional dancer during a time in which Indigenous roles were frequently played by non-Indigenous actors, often in blackface. In his own words, he described acting as a "piece of cake." Steven Soderbergh, Channing Tatum, and writer Reid Carolin have joined forces for the next installment in the Magic Mike franchise, entitled Magic Mike's Last Dance. "The stripperverse will never be the same," Channing Tatum said. First Cow takes the number one in Cahiers du cinéma's top ten list for 2021! The list...
- 12/1/2021
- MUBI
Undocumented immigrants are detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a regular basis, and their experiences could provide the foundation of a potent documentary, or a riveting social thriller. “The Infiltrators” endeavors to be both: Husband-and-wife co-directors Alex Rivera (“Sleep Dealer”) and Cristina Ibarra (“Las Marthas”) oscillates from real-life accounts of Dreamer activists going undercover in detention facilities to help reunite immigrants with their families, and fictional reenactments of the drama that unfolded inside.
The experimental approach takes some time to settle in and doesn’t always click, but at its best, “The Infiltrators” manages to personalize the undocumented struggle by transforming it into an unlikely blend of activism and suspense that makes a compelling case for the abolishment of Ice.
The two-pronged approach reflects its creators’ many modes: Rivera’s 2008 “Sleep Dealer” was a sci-fi allegory for contemporary immigration concerns, while Ibarra directed several documentaries on the same subject.
The experimental approach takes some time to settle in and doesn’t always click, but at its best, “The Infiltrators” manages to personalize the undocumented struggle by transforming it into an unlikely blend of activism and suspense that makes a compelling case for the abolishment of Ice.
The two-pronged approach reflects its creators’ many modes: Rivera’s 2008 “Sleep Dealer” was a sci-fi allegory for contemporary immigration concerns, while Ibarra directed several documentaries on the same subject.
- 2/1/2019
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Chronicling the audacious acts of a group of organized undocumented youth prior to the Obama-implemented, temporary relief known as Daca (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), “The Infiltrators,” from Latinx directors Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, is a vital piece of hybrid cinema that shines light into the obscure realm of privately-operated immigration detention facilities. The timely film world-premiered Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival.
Interweaving firsthand accounts in talking-head format and scripted reenactments, Rivera and Ibarra construct a high-stakes, real-life drama centered on the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (Niya), comprised of resourceful and deeply committed DREAMers who’ve dared to defy the system, not only for their own benefit but also for the greater good.
“Everyone needs a plan,” says Niya activist Marco Saavedra (played by Maynor Alvarado in the docufiction sections) when detailing their strategy behind the 2012 infiltration of the Broward Transitional Center, an immigration jail in Florida,...
Interweaving firsthand accounts in talking-head format and scripted reenactments, Rivera and Ibarra construct a high-stakes, real-life drama centered on the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (Niya), comprised of resourceful and deeply committed DREAMers who’ve dared to defy the system, not only for their own benefit but also for the greater good.
“Everyone needs a plan,” says Niya activist Marco Saavedra (played by Maynor Alvarado in the docufiction sections) when detailing their strategy behind the 2012 infiltration of the Broward Transitional Center, an immigration jail in Florida,...
- 1/26/2019
- by Carlos Aguilar
- The Wrap
“Where is the hope?”
That was the question was posed last week at one of the world’s most prominent launch pads for nonfiction films in development — Hot Docs Pitch Forum — and it reflected the general mood in the room.
As 20 filmmaking teams pitched their projects to dozens of top decision-makers, funders, and broadcasters sitting around the long wooden table in the Gothic-designed Hart House at the University of Toronto, there was a particular excitement for new documentaries that were “fresh,” “optimistic” and “fun”—to use some of the words spoken publically over the two-day pitch-a-thon.
See MoreHow Hot Docs, North America’s Smartest Festival, Could Anoint an Oscar Winner
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could see those same powerbrokers struggling over what to do with still essential, but tough issue-driven films having to do with post-revolutionary countries in the Middle East or the global refugee crisis.
That was the question was posed last week at one of the world’s most prominent launch pads for nonfiction films in development — Hot Docs Pitch Forum — and it reflected the general mood in the room.
As 20 filmmaking teams pitched their projects to dozens of top decision-makers, funders, and broadcasters sitting around the long wooden table in the Gothic-designed Hart House at the University of Toronto, there was a particular excitement for new documentaries that were “fresh,” “optimistic” and “fun”—to use some of the words spoken publically over the two-day pitch-a-thon.
See MoreHow Hot Docs, North America’s Smartest Festival, Could Anoint an Oscar Winner
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could see those same powerbrokers struggling over what to do with still essential, but tough issue-driven films having to do with post-revolutionary countries in the Middle East or the global refugee crisis.
- 5/10/2017
- by Anthony Kaufman
- Indiewire
There’s no question that hordes of people will swarm to theaters to see “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” on opening weekend, and most of them will get their money’s worth — it’s yet another visually dazzling comic space opera about intergalactic heroes trading banter in their meandering quest to save the universe. Writer-director James Gunn was already onboard to direct a third entry before this one hit theaters, a signal that this vibrant formula works really well for a lot of people. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for a big, flashy blockbuster like “Guardians” has the power to overwhelm everything else out there, and drown out memories of other first-rate science fiction storytelling from recent years that still deserves a larger audience. Here are a few of them worth checking out this weekend. Trust us — “Guardians” will be there next weekend, too.
“Beyond the Black Rainbow” (2010)
The first (and...
“Beyond the Black Rainbow” (2010)
The first (and...
- 5/5/2017
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
No film buff wants to see a promising, or prominent filmmaker pull a disappearing act a la Terrence Malick, (though it seems he isn’t keen to repeat another lapse like the one between Days of Heaven to The Thin Red Line), but whether they’re dealing with unforeseeable professional (endless pre-production woes, writer’s block) or personal issues, sometimes there is a considerable time between projects.
With John Cameron Mitchell, Charlie Kaufman, Rebecca Miller, Patty Jenkins, Kenneth Lonergan and more recently, Barry Jenkins recently moving out of the so called “inactive” period, we decided to compile a list of the top ten American filmmakers who, for the most part, we’ve lost sight of and would like to see get back in the director’s chair again. Most of the filmmakers listed below have gone well over half a decade without a substantial movement in this category. Here is...
With John Cameron Mitchell, Charlie Kaufman, Rebecca Miller, Patty Jenkins, Kenneth Lonergan and more recently, Barry Jenkins recently moving out of the so called “inactive” period, we decided to compile a list of the top ten American filmmakers who, for the most part, we’ve lost sight of and would like to see get back in the director’s chair again. Most of the filmmakers listed below have gone well over half a decade without a substantial movement in this category. Here is...
- 10/26/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Two up-and-coming Native talents, Razelle Benally (Navajo/Oglala Lakota) and Randi LeClair (Pawnee) have been selected for the Sundance Institute Native Filmmakers Lab, where the two writers will receive grants for production and targeted support during a residential Lab to prepare for production of their short films.
The Lab takes place in Santa Fe, New Mexico July 10-14. The Lab is a highlight of the Institute’s year-round work with Native American and Indigenous filmmakers and is one of the 24 residential labs the Institute hosts each year to discover and foster the talent of emerging independent artists in film, theater, new media and more recently episodic content.
The Native Filmmakers Lab builds on the Institute’s former NativeLab to include grants to support production of the Fellows’ short films – a first for the Institute’s renowned independent artist Labs. The writers and directors serving as Creative Advisors for this year’s Lab include: Janicza Bravo ("Gregory Go Boom" and "Pauline Alone"), Beck Cole ( "Plains Empty" and "Here I Am" ), Sydney Freeland ("Drunktown's Finest" and "HoverBoard" ), Aurora Guerrero ( "Pura Lengua" and "Mosquita y Mari" ) and Lucas Leyva ( "#PostModem" and "Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke" ).
N. Bird Runningwater (Cheyenne/Mescalero Apache), director of the Sundance Institute Native American and Indigenous Program, said, “Our Native Filmmakers Lab responds to the unique need within our community to support Native American artists with grants and mentorship focusing on the crucial phase of producing their films. I am excited to embark on this creative journey with these two bright female directors as they begin the tactical phase of creating their films.”
The Native Filmmakers Lab will be followed by the inaugural Native Writers Workshop, jointly hosted by Sundance Institute and the Institute of American Indian Arts (Iaia). The Workshop will support six emerging Native storytellers who seek to share their voices in film and television: Gabe Abeyta (Taos Pueblo and Navajo from Santa Fe, Nm), Katie Avery (Iñupiaq from Los Angeles, CA), Kelly D'Angelo (Haudenosaunee from Los Angeles, CA), Felicia Nez (Navajo from Albuquerque, Nm), Blue Tarpalechee (Muscogee from Santa Fe, Nm) and Kaherawaks Thompson (St. Regis Mohawks of Akwesasne from Memphis, Tn).
They will be mentored by: Beck Cole (Writer, "Here I Am" and "Black Comedy" ), Jason Gavin (Writer, "Greek, "Friday Night Lights"), Derek Santos Olson (Writer, "Friday Night Lights" ), Sierra Ornelas (Writer, "Selfie" and "Happy Endings" ), Alex Rivera (Writer/Director, "Sleep Dealer" ) and Joan Tewkesbury (Writer, "Nashville" and "Thieves Like Us" ).
True to founder Robert Redford’s original vision, the Institute maintains a strong commitment to supporting Native and Indigenous filmmakers. The Native program has built and sustained a unique support cycle for Indigenous artists through grants, labs, mentorships, a fellowship program at the Sundance Film Festival, and screenings for Native communities to inspire new generations of storytellers. Currently operating programs in the United States, Canada, and formerly New Zealand and Australia, the Institute has established a rich legacy of work by supporting more than 300 Native and Indigenous filmmakers, including Taika Waititi, Chris Eyre, Sterlin Harjo, Billy Luther, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, Aurora Guerrero, Sydney Freeland and Yolanda Cruz.
There are the two artists/projects selected for the 2015 Native Filmmakers Lab:
"I Am Thy Weapon"
Razelle Benally (Navajo/Oglala Lakota)
A young artistic Navajo woman relives memories of her deceased sister, that in turn help her heal and battle against the modern-day adversities of reservation life.
Razelle Benally is of Oglala Lakota and Navajo blood. Benally’s firsthand experience while filming and traveling with renowned skateboard company Apache Skateboards has helped her hone a self-developed style of editing and directing. She most notably gained acclaim for her short documentary "The Humble," and six-minute experimental piece "Love is a Losing Game." Benally is one of five young women featured in the 2011 documentary, "Apache Chronicle."
She has shown in galleries in Long Beach, CA and in Phoenix, Az. Her films have been shown nationally and internationally at select screenings in Portland, Winnipeg Manitoba Canada, and Sweden. She earned a third place award in the 2007 Aihec Film Festival, and is the 2010 Santa Fe Indian Market jury-awarded winner for Best Documentary in Swaia’s Classification X. Benally is an alumna of the 2012 Sundance Institute Native Filmmakers Lab.
"The Other Side of the Bridge"
Randi LeClair (Pawnee)
After two high school football stars are found dead, decade’s long racial tensions sizzle in a small-town diner.
Randi LeClair is an enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. She graduated from Oklahoma State University with a BA in English (Creative Writing) and is currently a graduate student in the University of Oklahoma’s Master of Professional Writing program. Recently, Randi and her husband, Todd, signed an option agreement for the screen adaptation of Todd’s book, "60 Feet Six Inches and Other Distances from Home: The (Baseball) Life of Mose YellowHorse," which follows the story of Pittsburg Pirates pitcher Mose YellowHorse, the first full-blood American Indian in the major leagues.
In addition to screenwriting, Randi also engages her love of literary fiction and is currently working on a collection of short stories. As well, she also serves as co-editor for "Out of the Stars: An Anthology of Pawnee Writing, Stories, and Art." Her dream is to help bring Native Cinema to the mainstream. She is an alumna of the 2010 Sundance Institute Native Filmmakers Lab.
The Lab takes place in Santa Fe, New Mexico July 10-14. The Lab is a highlight of the Institute’s year-round work with Native American and Indigenous filmmakers and is one of the 24 residential labs the Institute hosts each year to discover and foster the talent of emerging independent artists in film, theater, new media and more recently episodic content.
The Native Filmmakers Lab builds on the Institute’s former NativeLab to include grants to support production of the Fellows’ short films – a first for the Institute’s renowned independent artist Labs. The writers and directors serving as Creative Advisors for this year’s Lab include: Janicza Bravo ("Gregory Go Boom" and "Pauline Alone"), Beck Cole ( "Plains Empty" and "Here I Am" ), Sydney Freeland ("Drunktown's Finest" and "HoverBoard" ), Aurora Guerrero ( "Pura Lengua" and "Mosquita y Mari" ) and Lucas Leyva ( "#PostModem" and "Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke" ).
N. Bird Runningwater (Cheyenne/Mescalero Apache), director of the Sundance Institute Native American and Indigenous Program, said, “Our Native Filmmakers Lab responds to the unique need within our community to support Native American artists with grants and mentorship focusing on the crucial phase of producing their films. I am excited to embark on this creative journey with these two bright female directors as they begin the tactical phase of creating their films.”
The Native Filmmakers Lab will be followed by the inaugural Native Writers Workshop, jointly hosted by Sundance Institute and the Institute of American Indian Arts (Iaia). The Workshop will support six emerging Native storytellers who seek to share their voices in film and television: Gabe Abeyta (Taos Pueblo and Navajo from Santa Fe, Nm), Katie Avery (Iñupiaq from Los Angeles, CA), Kelly D'Angelo (Haudenosaunee from Los Angeles, CA), Felicia Nez (Navajo from Albuquerque, Nm), Blue Tarpalechee (Muscogee from Santa Fe, Nm) and Kaherawaks Thompson (St. Regis Mohawks of Akwesasne from Memphis, Tn).
They will be mentored by: Beck Cole (Writer, "Here I Am" and "Black Comedy" ), Jason Gavin (Writer, "Greek, "Friday Night Lights"), Derek Santos Olson (Writer, "Friday Night Lights" ), Sierra Ornelas (Writer, "Selfie" and "Happy Endings" ), Alex Rivera (Writer/Director, "Sleep Dealer" ) and Joan Tewkesbury (Writer, "Nashville" and "Thieves Like Us" ).
True to founder Robert Redford’s original vision, the Institute maintains a strong commitment to supporting Native and Indigenous filmmakers. The Native program has built and sustained a unique support cycle for Indigenous artists through grants, labs, mentorships, a fellowship program at the Sundance Film Festival, and screenings for Native communities to inspire new generations of storytellers. Currently operating programs in the United States, Canada, and formerly New Zealand and Australia, the Institute has established a rich legacy of work by supporting more than 300 Native and Indigenous filmmakers, including Taika Waititi, Chris Eyre, Sterlin Harjo, Billy Luther, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, Aurora Guerrero, Sydney Freeland and Yolanda Cruz.
There are the two artists/projects selected for the 2015 Native Filmmakers Lab:
"I Am Thy Weapon"
Razelle Benally (Navajo/Oglala Lakota)
A young artistic Navajo woman relives memories of her deceased sister, that in turn help her heal and battle against the modern-day adversities of reservation life.
Razelle Benally is of Oglala Lakota and Navajo blood. Benally’s firsthand experience while filming and traveling with renowned skateboard company Apache Skateboards has helped her hone a self-developed style of editing and directing. She most notably gained acclaim for her short documentary "The Humble," and six-minute experimental piece "Love is a Losing Game." Benally is one of five young women featured in the 2011 documentary, "Apache Chronicle."
She has shown in galleries in Long Beach, CA and in Phoenix, Az. Her films have been shown nationally and internationally at select screenings in Portland, Winnipeg Manitoba Canada, and Sweden. She earned a third place award in the 2007 Aihec Film Festival, and is the 2010 Santa Fe Indian Market jury-awarded winner for Best Documentary in Swaia’s Classification X. Benally is an alumna of the 2012 Sundance Institute Native Filmmakers Lab.
"The Other Side of the Bridge"
Randi LeClair (Pawnee)
After two high school football stars are found dead, decade’s long racial tensions sizzle in a small-town diner.
Randi LeClair is an enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. She graduated from Oklahoma State University with a BA in English (Creative Writing) and is currently a graduate student in the University of Oklahoma’s Master of Professional Writing program. Recently, Randi and her husband, Todd, signed an option agreement for the screen adaptation of Todd’s book, "60 Feet Six Inches and Other Distances from Home: The (Baseball) Life of Mose YellowHorse," which follows the story of Pittsburg Pirates pitcher Mose YellowHorse, the first full-blood American Indian in the major leagues.
In addition to screenwriting, Randi also engages her love of literary fiction and is currently working on a collection of short stories. As well, she also serves as co-editor for "Out of the Stars: An Anthology of Pawnee Writing, Stories, and Art." Her dream is to help bring Native Cinema to the mainstream. She is an alumna of the 2010 Sundance Institute Native Filmmakers Lab.
- 7/13/2015
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
A few years ago back in 2008, filmmaker Alex Rivera made a cool sci-fi movie called Sleep Dealer that premiered at Sundance and went on to win both the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.
A small distribution company (and former backer of Latino Review) picked up the film for distribution but failed to give it a proper release. Then the home video market imploded when Blockbuster went bankrupt and the small distribution company went insolvent and disappeared off the map.
Undeserved misfortune for Alex Rivera and his producers but luckily for the filmmakers they had an opt-out clause in the distribution contract. In short, It took a while but Rivera got his film back.
Sundance Institute Artist Services got involved and selected Sleep Dealer to be one of the films it would support by facilitating digital distribution deals with iTunes, Amazon and, soon, Netflix.
A small distribution company (and former backer of Latino Review) picked up the film for distribution but failed to give it a proper release. Then the home video market imploded when Blockbuster went bankrupt and the small distribution company went insolvent and disappeared off the map.
Undeserved misfortune for Alex Rivera and his producers but luckily for the filmmakers they had an opt-out clause in the distribution contract. In short, It took a while but Rivera got his film back.
Sundance Institute Artist Services got involved and selected Sleep Dealer to be one of the films it would support by facilitating digital distribution deals with iTunes, Amazon and, soon, Netflix.
- 7/8/2014
- by El Mayimbe
- LRMonline.com
Back in 2008, Alex Rivera's "Sleep Dealer" had the kind of premiere at the Sundance Film Festival that most filmmakers only dream of. Critics gushed about the Rivera's debut feature, the story of Memo Cruz who struggles against a brave new border. Indiewire called the sci-fi thriller, set in Mexico in the near future, "a fantastic journey." Rivera won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and Alfred P. Sloan Award and "Sleep Dealer" was acquired by a small distributor called Maya Entertainment. Things seemed to be going swimmingly until the theatrical release disappointed and Maya Entertainment went out of business. Rivera hired a legal team and was able to buy the film back. But how do you go about distributing a film that's six years old and was previously distributed? Through social media and a grassroots efforts, Sundance Institute Artist Services signed on to distribute "Sleep Dealer" digitally via a variety of platforms and.
- 6/24/2014
- by Paula Bernstein
- Indiewire
It's already well beyond cliche to say that American independent film is in crisis. The alarms have been sounding for nearly a decade as new technologies, changes in viewing habits and shifts in the global financial structure have rendered the old theatrical release/home video model paleolithic. In its place? Who knows. Little by little, new platforms a la Netflix and Amazon Prime have been popping up presenting filmmakers, producers, and distribution companies with new outlets for experimentation but no one has quite figured out how to make independent filmmaking viable for the 21st century.
Latino film is no exception. In fact, the whole idea of a 'Latino market' only started to matter to the big money movers-and-shakers when the old model was sinking like the Titanic into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Over the years, many a brave company has tried to take on the challenge of articulating a Latino film audience in the U.S. only to be crushed by the invisible hand of the global marketplace, leaving many a worthy film orphaned in the process.
Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer was one of those films. A haunting vision of a dystopian near-future on the Us-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer was the toast of Sundance back in 2008, picking up two important awards, a glowing review by the New York Times' A.O. Scott, and a coveted distribution deal with upstart Latino distribution company Maya Entertainment. All seemed to be going well until 2011 when, virtually without warning, Maya went under. Concerned for the future of their film, Rivera and producer Anthony Bregman found themselves faced with a difficult decision: let their film be absorbed by the unknown distribution company that was picking up Maya's catalogue, or set forth on their own into the uncharted waters of 21st century film distribution.
Helped along by a very prudently negotiated opt-out clause in his distribution contract, Rivera chose to make lemons out of lemonade. He explains, "When Maya went under it provided us an opportunity to say, 'the landscape's shifted, years have gone by, there are new companies and new technologies.' At that moment we were thinking: what's the best new partnership?"
While ostensibly more risky, it seems this adventurous attitude inadvertently helped Rivera and Bregman dodge a bullet. Max 360 Entertainment - the company that absorbed Maya's catalogue - was sued a couple of years later for failing distribute and promote several Maya films as promised, along with some allegedly shady accounting practices.
Be that as it may, Sleep Dealer was an orphaned film adrift in an unforgiving marketplace - that is, until a fortuitous post on Rivera's Facebook wall led to the folks from Sundance contacting Rivera with a new proposal. The initiative, called Sundance Artist Services, proposed a new, artist-friendly model that takes advantage of the numerous new digital platforms available to guarantee a baseline of visibility for films that have passed through the festival.
According to Rivera, the initiative "presents an interesting path for filmmakers because it lets you get the revenue and the contact with your audience almost as if you were self-distributing, but you're getting the institutional support and the brand name of a film society that already has an audience... and can negotiate a deal collectively."
After a year of negotiations, Sleep Dealer's re-release is a go, and for Rivera this second chance is less about profit than reconnecting with fans, discovering new ones and giving the film the long life it deserves. A fundraising campaign recently launched at Rally.org seeks help with ancillary costs related to the re-release, including new poster design, subtitling, and more boring expenses such as insurance. "In short," Rivera summed up, "we're trying to work with the existing family of fans to build a 'force field' or a Matrix of support and love around this film to help it live it's life in peace, on-line, and continue reaching new audiences."
In the end, the story of Sleep Dealer is both a cautionary tale for filmmakers trying to crack the code of a persistently fickle U.S. Latino audience in the midst of an institutional crisis and an inspirational narrative about second chances in which trailblazers like the Sundance Artist Services continue to fight for the future of independent film.
Show your support for the Sleep Dealer re-release by donating: rally.org/sleep-dealer...
Latino film is no exception. In fact, the whole idea of a 'Latino market' only started to matter to the big money movers-and-shakers when the old model was sinking like the Titanic into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Over the years, many a brave company has tried to take on the challenge of articulating a Latino film audience in the U.S. only to be crushed by the invisible hand of the global marketplace, leaving many a worthy film orphaned in the process.
Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer was one of those films. A haunting vision of a dystopian near-future on the Us-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer was the toast of Sundance back in 2008, picking up two important awards, a glowing review by the New York Times' A.O. Scott, and a coveted distribution deal with upstart Latino distribution company Maya Entertainment. All seemed to be going well until 2011 when, virtually without warning, Maya went under. Concerned for the future of their film, Rivera and producer Anthony Bregman found themselves faced with a difficult decision: let their film be absorbed by the unknown distribution company that was picking up Maya's catalogue, or set forth on their own into the uncharted waters of 21st century film distribution.
Helped along by a very prudently negotiated opt-out clause in his distribution contract, Rivera chose to make lemons out of lemonade. He explains, "When Maya went under it provided us an opportunity to say, 'the landscape's shifted, years have gone by, there are new companies and new technologies.' At that moment we were thinking: what's the best new partnership?"
While ostensibly more risky, it seems this adventurous attitude inadvertently helped Rivera and Bregman dodge a bullet. Max 360 Entertainment - the company that absorbed Maya's catalogue - was sued a couple of years later for failing distribute and promote several Maya films as promised, along with some allegedly shady accounting practices.
Be that as it may, Sleep Dealer was an orphaned film adrift in an unforgiving marketplace - that is, until a fortuitous post on Rivera's Facebook wall led to the folks from Sundance contacting Rivera with a new proposal. The initiative, called Sundance Artist Services, proposed a new, artist-friendly model that takes advantage of the numerous new digital platforms available to guarantee a baseline of visibility for films that have passed through the festival.
According to Rivera, the initiative "presents an interesting path for filmmakers because it lets you get the revenue and the contact with your audience almost as if you were self-distributing, but you're getting the institutional support and the brand name of a film society that already has an audience... and can negotiate a deal collectively."
After a year of negotiations, Sleep Dealer's re-release is a go, and for Rivera this second chance is less about profit than reconnecting with fans, discovering new ones and giving the film the long life it deserves. A fundraising campaign recently launched at Rally.org seeks help with ancillary costs related to the re-release, including new poster design, subtitling, and more boring expenses such as insurance. "In short," Rivera summed up, "we're trying to work with the existing family of fans to build a 'force field' or a Matrix of support and love around this film to help it live it's life in peace, on-line, and continue reaching new audiences."
In the end, the story of Sleep Dealer is both a cautionary tale for filmmakers trying to crack the code of a persistently fickle U.S. Latino audience in the midst of an institutional crisis and an inspirational narrative about second chances in which trailblazers like the Sundance Artist Services continue to fight for the future of independent film.
Show your support for the Sleep Dealer re-release by donating: rally.org/sleep-dealer...
- 5/12/2014
- by Andrew S. Vargas
- Sydney's Buzz
Odd List Ryan Lambie Simon Brew 13 Feb 2014 - 06:39
Our voyage through history's underappreciated films arrives at the year 2008 - another great year for lesser-seen gems...
For some, 2008 will be memorable as the year of The Dark Knight, with its astonishingly unhinged turn from the late Heath Ledger. Alternatively, it could be remembered as the year a legion Indiana Jones fans left cinemas glum-faced, having sat through Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.
Elsewhere, Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan sang and danced on a Greek island in Mamma Mia!, while Will Smith played an alcoholic superhero in Hancock. But as usual, 2008 offered plenty of watchable movies outside the top 10, which is where we swoop in - like Hancock after a bottle of gin.
So as usual, here's our selection of 25 underappreciated films from the year 2008 - starting with a British horror film starring Michael Fassbender...
25. Eden Lake
James Watkins had written...
Our voyage through history's underappreciated films arrives at the year 2008 - another great year for lesser-seen gems...
For some, 2008 will be memorable as the year of The Dark Knight, with its astonishingly unhinged turn from the late Heath Ledger. Alternatively, it could be remembered as the year a legion Indiana Jones fans left cinemas glum-faced, having sat through Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.
Elsewhere, Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan sang and danced on a Greek island in Mamma Mia!, while Will Smith played an alcoholic superhero in Hancock. But as usual, 2008 offered plenty of watchable movies outside the top 10, which is where we swoop in - like Hancock after a bottle of gin.
So as usual, here's our selection of 25 underappreciated films from the year 2008 - starting with a British horror film starring Michael Fassbender...
25. Eden Lake
James Watkins had written...
- 2/12/2014
- by ryanlambie
- Den of Geek
The Sundance Institute announced I Origins as the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, as well as the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Lab Fellowship, which is presented through the Institute’s Feature Film Program.
These activities, as well as a panel at the Festival and the Alfred P. Sloan Commissioning Grant, are part of the Sundance Institute Science-in-Film Initiative, which is made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The initiative supports the development and exhibition of new independent film projects that explore science and technology themes or that depict scientists, engineers and mathematicians in engaging and innovative ways.
“We are delighted to collaborate with Sundance Institute for the 11th year in a row and to recognize Mike Cahill’s original and compelling I Origins as the winner of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize,” said Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “With Academy Award-nominated films like this year’s Gravity and Her, I Origins—as well as new scripts we are developing with Sundance Institute Labs such as The Buried Life and Prodigal Summer—demonstrates that not only are science and technology central to understanding, engaging with and dramatizing modern life, but they also make for cracking good films that draw large audiences.”
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Independent filmmakers offer unique perspectives on the role math, science and technology play in our world and culture. The Sundance Institute Science-in-Film Initiative, with critical support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes and encourages these projects as they make their way to audiences.”
Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize
I Origins, directed and written by Mike Cahill, has been awarded the 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and will receive a $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The Prize is selected by a jury of film and science professionals and presented to outstanding feature films focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character.
In I Origins, a molecular biologist and his lab partner uncover startling evidence that could fundamentally change society as we know it and cause them to question their once-certain beliefs in science and spirituality. The cast includes Michael Pitt, Brit Marling, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Steven Yeun, Archie Panjabi. The jury presented the award to the film for its “intelligent and nuanced portrayal of molecular biologists as central characters, and for dramatizing the power of the scientific process to explore fundamental questions about the human condition.”
Previous Alfred P. Sloan Prize Winners include: Andrew Bujalski, Computer Chess (2013); Jake Schreier, Christopher Ford, Robot & Frank (2012); Musa Syeed, Valley of Saints (2012); Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, Another Earth (2011); Diane Bell, Obselidia (2010); Max Mayer, Adam (2009); Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (2008); Shi-Zheng Chen, Dark Matter (2007); Andrucha Waddington, The House of Sand (2006); Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005), Shane Carruth, Primer (2004) and Marc Decena, Dopamine (2003). Several past winners have also been awarded Jury Awards at the Festival, including the Grand Jury Prize for Primer, the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Sleep Dealer and the Excellence in Cinematography Award for Obselidia.
This year’s Alfred P. Sloan jury members are:
Dr. Kevin Hand Dr. Kevin Hand is deputy chief scientist for Solar System Exploration at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research focuses on the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the solar system. His fieldwork involves exploring some of Earth’s most extreme environments from the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, to the depths of the Earth’s oceans, to the glaciers of Kilimanjaro.
Flora Lichtman Flora Lichtman is a science journalist living in New York. She has worked as a video journalist for the New York Times and National Public Radio’s Science Friday and writes regularly for Popular Science magazine. She is the coauthor of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us.
Max Mayer Max Mayer is a founder and producing director of New York Stage and Film and has directed over 50 new plays by writers such as John Patrick Shanley, Lee Blessing, and Eric Overmyer. In addition to writing and directing Better Living and Adam, which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and won the Sloan Prize, Mayer has directed As Cool as I Am and episodes of The West Wing, Alias, and Family Law and written three produced plays.
Jon Spaihts Jon Spaihts is the screenwriter of The Darkest Hour, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, and the upcoming Passengers and The Mummy. The one-time physics student and science writer continues to specialize in science fiction.
Jill Tarter Astronomer Jill Tarter, the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for the Seti Institute, has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere. The lead for Project Phoenix, a decade-long Seti scrutiny of about 750 nearby star systems, she now leads Seti’s efforts to build and operate the Allen Telescope Array. A 2009 Ted prize recipient, she is also the real-life researcher upon whom the Jodie Foster character in Contact is largely based.
Sundance Institute / Alfred P. Sloan Lab Fellowship
The Buried Life (U.S.A.) Joan Stein Schimke and Averie Storck (co-writers/co-directors) An archaeologist risks her reputation for the dig of her career, but when her rock 'n' roll sister and overbearing father follow her to the excavation, she discovers her biggest challenge is facing what's above ground.
Joan Stein Schimke and Averie Storck have just attended the Institute’s January Screenwriters Lab with The Buried Life.
Joan Stein Schimke was nominated for an Academy Award® for her short film One Day Crossing, which won several other awards including the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Best Woman Student Filmmaker, Best Director, National Board of Review and the Student Academy Award® Gold Medal. Other directing credits include Law and Order and the short film Solidarity, which screened at over a dozen festivals including the New York Film Festival. Stein Schimke is an Mfa graduate of Columbia University’s Film Program and is currently an Associate Professor at Adelphi University in New York.
Averie Storck is an Mfa graduate of Columbia University’s Film Program. Her award-winning short films include Live at Five , which won the New Line Cinema Development Award and screened at more than 30 international film festivals. Prior to filmmaking, Storck worked for People and Vogue magazines, was a writer for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and studied improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in NYC. She currently teaches and directs at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Founded in 1934, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a non-profit philanthropy that makes grants in science, technology and economic performance. This Sloan-Sundance partnership forms part of a broader national program by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to stimulate leading artists in film, television, and theater; to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology; and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the popular imagination. Over the past decade, the Foundation has partnered with some of the top film schools in the country – including AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Nyu, UCLA, and USC – and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production and an annual first-feature award for alumni. The Foundation has also started an annual Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival and initiated new screenwriting and film production workshops at the Hamptons and Tribeca Film Festival and with Film Independent. As more finished films emerge from this developmental pipeline—four features were completed in 2013, with half a dozen more on deck—the foundation has also partnered with the Coolidge Corner Theater and the Arthouse Convergence to screen science films in up to 40 theaters nationwide. The Foundation also has an active theater program and commissions over a dozen science plays each year from the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and Playwright Horizons.
These activities, as well as a panel at the Festival and the Alfred P. Sloan Commissioning Grant, are part of the Sundance Institute Science-in-Film Initiative, which is made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The initiative supports the development and exhibition of new independent film projects that explore science and technology themes or that depict scientists, engineers and mathematicians in engaging and innovative ways.
“We are delighted to collaborate with Sundance Institute for the 11th year in a row and to recognize Mike Cahill’s original and compelling I Origins as the winner of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize,” said Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “With Academy Award-nominated films like this year’s Gravity and Her, I Origins—as well as new scripts we are developing with Sundance Institute Labs such as The Buried Life and Prodigal Summer—demonstrates that not only are science and technology central to understanding, engaging with and dramatizing modern life, but they also make for cracking good films that draw large audiences.”
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Independent filmmakers offer unique perspectives on the role math, science and technology play in our world and culture. The Sundance Institute Science-in-Film Initiative, with critical support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes and encourages these projects as they make their way to audiences.”
Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize
I Origins, directed and written by Mike Cahill, has been awarded the 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and will receive a $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The Prize is selected by a jury of film and science professionals and presented to outstanding feature films focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character.
In I Origins, a molecular biologist and his lab partner uncover startling evidence that could fundamentally change society as we know it and cause them to question their once-certain beliefs in science and spirituality. The cast includes Michael Pitt, Brit Marling, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Steven Yeun, Archie Panjabi. The jury presented the award to the film for its “intelligent and nuanced portrayal of molecular biologists as central characters, and for dramatizing the power of the scientific process to explore fundamental questions about the human condition.”
Previous Alfred P. Sloan Prize Winners include: Andrew Bujalski, Computer Chess (2013); Jake Schreier, Christopher Ford, Robot & Frank (2012); Musa Syeed, Valley of Saints (2012); Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, Another Earth (2011); Diane Bell, Obselidia (2010); Max Mayer, Adam (2009); Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (2008); Shi-Zheng Chen, Dark Matter (2007); Andrucha Waddington, The House of Sand (2006); Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005), Shane Carruth, Primer (2004) and Marc Decena, Dopamine (2003). Several past winners have also been awarded Jury Awards at the Festival, including the Grand Jury Prize for Primer, the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Sleep Dealer and the Excellence in Cinematography Award for Obselidia.
This year’s Alfred P. Sloan jury members are:
Dr. Kevin Hand Dr. Kevin Hand is deputy chief scientist for Solar System Exploration at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research focuses on the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the solar system. His fieldwork involves exploring some of Earth’s most extreme environments from the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, to the depths of the Earth’s oceans, to the glaciers of Kilimanjaro.
Flora Lichtman Flora Lichtman is a science journalist living in New York. She has worked as a video journalist for the New York Times and National Public Radio’s Science Friday and writes regularly for Popular Science magazine. She is the coauthor of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us.
Max Mayer Max Mayer is a founder and producing director of New York Stage and Film and has directed over 50 new plays by writers such as John Patrick Shanley, Lee Blessing, and Eric Overmyer. In addition to writing and directing Better Living and Adam, which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and won the Sloan Prize, Mayer has directed As Cool as I Am and episodes of The West Wing, Alias, and Family Law and written three produced plays.
Jon Spaihts Jon Spaihts is the screenwriter of The Darkest Hour, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, and the upcoming Passengers and The Mummy. The one-time physics student and science writer continues to specialize in science fiction.
Jill Tarter Astronomer Jill Tarter, the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for the Seti Institute, has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere. The lead for Project Phoenix, a decade-long Seti scrutiny of about 750 nearby star systems, she now leads Seti’s efforts to build and operate the Allen Telescope Array. A 2009 Ted prize recipient, she is also the real-life researcher upon whom the Jodie Foster character in Contact is largely based.
Sundance Institute / Alfred P. Sloan Lab Fellowship
The Buried Life (U.S.A.) Joan Stein Schimke and Averie Storck (co-writers/co-directors) An archaeologist risks her reputation for the dig of her career, but when her rock 'n' roll sister and overbearing father follow her to the excavation, she discovers her biggest challenge is facing what's above ground.
Joan Stein Schimke and Averie Storck have just attended the Institute’s January Screenwriters Lab with The Buried Life.
Joan Stein Schimke was nominated for an Academy Award® for her short film One Day Crossing, which won several other awards including the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Best Woman Student Filmmaker, Best Director, National Board of Review and the Student Academy Award® Gold Medal. Other directing credits include Law and Order and the short film Solidarity, which screened at over a dozen festivals including the New York Film Festival. Stein Schimke is an Mfa graduate of Columbia University’s Film Program and is currently an Associate Professor at Adelphi University in New York.
Averie Storck is an Mfa graduate of Columbia University’s Film Program. Her award-winning short films include Live at Five , which won the New Line Cinema Development Award and screened at more than 30 international film festivals. Prior to filmmaking, Storck worked for People and Vogue magazines, was a writer for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and studied improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in NYC. She currently teaches and directs at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Founded in 1934, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a non-profit philanthropy that makes grants in science, technology and economic performance. This Sloan-Sundance partnership forms part of a broader national program by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to stimulate leading artists in film, television, and theater; to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology; and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the popular imagination. Over the past decade, the Foundation has partnered with some of the top film schools in the country – including AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Nyu, UCLA, and USC – and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production and an annual first-feature award for alumni. The Foundation has also started an annual Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival and initiated new screenwriting and film production workshops at the Hamptons and Tribeca Film Festival and with Film Independent. As more finished films emerge from this developmental pipeline—four features were completed in 2013, with half a dozen more on deck—the foundation has also partnered with the Coolidge Corner Theater and the Arthouse Convergence to screen science films in up to 40 theaters nationwide. The Foundation also has an active theater program and commissions over a dozen science plays each year from the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and Playwright Horizons.
- 1/24/2014
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
The National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a broad coalition of immigration activists, has teamed up with indie film director Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) to use the power of culture, specifically film and music in the form of music videos, to highlight the dire need for immigration reform. Earlier this year LatinoBuzz spoke to Rivera about making political films and his interest in the border. We share his answers here.
LatinoBuzz: Alex, you are not Mexican. Can you talk about why the U.S.-Mexico border has been such an important part of your work?
Rivera: My father is Peruvian, my mom was born in Brooklyn, of Scottish descent. I grew up in something of a "borderland" with icons of Peru around the house in which I watched "Gilligan's Island." But that's not the real reason to be interested in the border, and interested in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Anyone who's seriously interested in the future of America - and therefore the future of the world - needs to consider the deep, deep connections between the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. These are histories that are as intertwined as those of Great Britain and India. Or Palestine and Israel. You can't understand one without the other.
LatinoBuzz: Which came first your interest in politics or becoming a filmmaker? Were your films always political or did you evolve as a filmmaker?
Rivera: For a long time I've worked from the belief that Every Film Is Political. It's impossible to make a non-political film. Every time you make a decision about theme, location, cast, etc., you're making a decision that puts certain people and certain points-of-view in the center of the frame. And inevitably, you're also pushing other people and themes to the margins. Always. So the question any thoughtful filmmaker must confront is: who do I want to put in the center? Whose point-of-view do I want to explore?
In his most recent project, through powerful stories, told in music videos and using impassioned songs, Rivera is able to convey what statistics cannot. The intense emotional toll that living life under the constant threat of deportation can take on undocumented immigrants, their families, and entire communities. As the director of both "El Hielo" by the eclectic L.A.-based band La Santa Cecilia and soul singer Aloe Blacc’s acoustic rendition of his hit single "Wake Me Up," Rivera chose real-life day laborers, activists, and family members of deported immigrants as subjects in the music videos. Check out both music videos and their featured cast below.
Aloe Blacc "Wake Me Up"
The Cast
Hareth Andrade Ayala is an immigrants' rights leader in the state of Virginia. She has spent her teen years traveling across the nation to share her family's story. And recently to fight to stop her own father's deportation.
Margarita Reyes is a Los Angeles actress and producer whose first guest star appearance on prime time was opposite Emmy-award winning actress Alfre Woodard on the television series The Practice. She is currently starring in the film "Combat Ready". Despite being born in the Us, Margarita was deported as a child alongside her mother. Much of her work focuses on the issues of Latino and immigrant youth.
Agustin Chiprez Alvarez has been in the Us for 18 years. He is a proud father of an infant son and, like in the video, seeks work on Los Angeles day laborer corners to provide for his family. He is a songwriter and first became involved in acting through fellow actor Jose Mangandi at Teatro Jornalero.
La Santa Cecilia "El Hielo (Ice)"
The Cast
At age 9, Katherine Figueroa, came home from school and turned on the television only to become witness to the arrest of her own parents by Sheriff Arpaio's deputies. She led children’s marches at the capitol, testified in Congress, and successfully organized their temporary release. Her efforts are featured in the full-length documentary, Two Americans.
Erika Andiola is a nationally recognized leader in the undocumented immigrant youth movement. A graduate of Arizona State University, she moved from Mexico to Arizona when she was 11 years old and later became a co-founder of DRM Capitol Group and the Arizona Dream Act Coalition (Adac). When Ice raided her home and took her mother and older brother, Erika’s case became nationally known when she mobilized hundreds of thousands to stop their deportations.
Maria Arreola (Erika's mom) came to the United States to provide a better life for her children. Saying that they were following-up on a previous traffic stop, Ice agents arrested Maria and her son this past winter. After being detained, she was placed on a bus to be deported to Mexico only to have it turned around as a result of the national outcry organized by her daughter. She was given one year of deferred action but may face deportation orders again in 2014.
Juan Romero is a day laborer who looks for work outside a Los Angeles Home Depot where he meets contractors for temporary home construction jobs. He has been an actor in the community drama troupe, Teatro Jornalero, since 2010. He hasn't seen his wife since he came to the Us.
Isaac Barrera is an undocumented immigrant and organizer with the Immigrant Youth Coalition in Los Angeles. Isaac spent two and a half weeks in detention after being purposefully arrested by border patrol in Alabama in order to expose the inhumane treatment of immigrants in detention. His case is still pending.
Written by Vanessa Erazo. LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.
LatinoBuzz: Alex, you are not Mexican. Can you talk about why the U.S.-Mexico border has been such an important part of your work?
Rivera: My father is Peruvian, my mom was born in Brooklyn, of Scottish descent. I grew up in something of a "borderland" with icons of Peru around the house in which I watched "Gilligan's Island." But that's not the real reason to be interested in the border, and interested in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Anyone who's seriously interested in the future of America - and therefore the future of the world - needs to consider the deep, deep connections between the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. These are histories that are as intertwined as those of Great Britain and India. Or Palestine and Israel. You can't understand one without the other.
LatinoBuzz: Which came first your interest in politics or becoming a filmmaker? Were your films always political or did you evolve as a filmmaker?
Rivera: For a long time I've worked from the belief that Every Film Is Political. It's impossible to make a non-political film. Every time you make a decision about theme, location, cast, etc., you're making a decision that puts certain people and certain points-of-view in the center of the frame. And inevitably, you're also pushing other people and themes to the margins. Always. So the question any thoughtful filmmaker must confront is: who do I want to put in the center? Whose point-of-view do I want to explore?
In his most recent project, through powerful stories, told in music videos and using impassioned songs, Rivera is able to convey what statistics cannot. The intense emotional toll that living life under the constant threat of deportation can take on undocumented immigrants, their families, and entire communities. As the director of both "El Hielo" by the eclectic L.A.-based band La Santa Cecilia and soul singer Aloe Blacc’s acoustic rendition of his hit single "Wake Me Up," Rivera chose real-life day laborers, activists, and family members of deported immigrants as subjects in the music videos. Check out both music videos and their featured cast below.
Aloe Blacc "Wake Me Up"
The Cast
Hareth Andrade Ayala is an immigrants' rights leader in the state of Virginia. She has spent her teen years traveling across the nation to share her family's story. And recently to fight to stop her own father's deportation.
Margarita Reyes is a Los Angeles actress and producer whose first guest star appearance on prime time was opposite Emmy-award winning actress Alfre Woodard on the television series The Practice. She is currently starring in the film "Combat Ready". Despite being born in the Us, Margarita was deported as a child alongside her mother. Much of her work focuses on the issues of Latino and immigrant youth.
Agustin Chiprez Alvarez has been in the Us for 18 years. He is a proud father of an infant son and, like in the video, seeks work on Los Angeles day laborer corners to provide for his family. He is a songwriter and first became involved in acting through fellow actor Jose Mangandi at Teatro Jornalero.
La Santa Cecilia "El Hielo (Ice)"
The Cast
At age 9, Katherine Figueroa, came home from school and turned on the television only to become witness to the arrest of her own parents by Sheriff Arpaio's deputies. She led children’s marches at the capitol, testified in Congress, and successfully organized their temporary release. Her efforts are featured in the full-length documentary, Two Americans.
Erika Andiola is a nationally recognized leader in the undocumented immigrant youth movement. A graduate of Arizona State University, she moved from Mexico to Arizona when she was 11 years old and later became a co-founder of DRM Capitol Group and the Arizona Dream Act Coalition (Adac). When Ice raided her home and took her mother and older brother, Erika’s case became nationally known when she mobilized hundreds of thousands to stop their deportations.
Maria Arreola (Erika's mom) came to the United States to provide a better life for her children. Saying that they were following-up on a previous traffic stop, Ice agents arrested Maria and her son this past winter. After being detained, she was placed on a bus to be deported to Mexico only to have it turned around as a result of the national outcry organized by her daughter. She was given one year of deferred action but may face deportation orders again in 2014.
Juan Romero is a day laborer who looks for work outside a Los Angeles Home Depot where he meets contractors for temporary home construction jobs. He has been an actor in the community drama troupe, Teatro Jornalero, since 2010. He hasn't seen his wife since he came to the Us.
Isaac Barrera is an undocumented immigrant and organizer with the Immigrant Youth Coalition in Los Angeles. Isaac spent two and a half weeks in detention after being purposefully arrested by border patrol in Alabama in order to expose the inhumane treatment of immigrants in detention. His case is still pending.
Written by Vanessa Erazo. LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.
- 11/20/2013
- by Vanessa Erazo
- Sydney's Buzz
LatinoBuzz: Alex Rivera & Greg Berger on Making Political Films & Joining a Cheese-Making Collective
Greg “Gringoyo” Berger is an American filmmaker living in Mexico who makes social justice films. He doesn’t take himself too seriously and understands his position as an outsider in the country, often calling himself a revolutionary tourist.
Recently, in light of the drastic and violent effects the drug war has inflicted upon Mexico, he has focused his camera on narcos and failed drug policies. But, unlike his prior more conventional documentaries, his style has evolved to include satire and humor to get his point across.
Berger will be screening several of his short films next week at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens together with Alex Rivera, director of the science fiction film Sleep Dealer. Set in Mexico, it is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi movie. It’s in Spanish, it’s political and it imagines the near future, a world of cyberbraceros, coyoteks, remotely-controlled drones, aqua-terrorists, and closed borders. Both filmmakers use an imaginative and original lens to look at political issues. And, it turns out they are old college friends.
LatinoBuzz talked to Berger and Rivera about their free screening named “Bordering on Absurd,” what inspired them to make political films, and their college days spent in a cheese-making collective. Yeah, read on. It gets hilarious.
LatinoBuzz: How did the two of you meet? Have you collaborated on films before?
Rivera: We met at Hampshire College in the early nineteen-nineties. Back then, you needed a hand crank to power up the internet, and moving images were recorded in flip books. Even so, we managed to discover a set of shared interests in media, performance, and politics. While we've never produced a film together, we've always been in creative dialogue. Greg is a maniac. In a good way.
Berger: Alex is a maniac too, but he tries to pawn it off on me. During our time at Hampshire College I noticed that Alex had a unique talent for creative community organizing and was a political thinker. We became friends and lived in a kind of co-op housing unit on campus, spending most of our time creating film and performance projects around political issues that we felt passionate about. It seemed like every week we were building a 50 foot version of something for an “urgent” radical media project. For some reason, whatever we were building was always big. And we set up lots of front groups to try and siphon funds from the student activities budget for our projects. We had a cheese-making collective that never made any cheese. We learned to be resourceful. We each had sections of our final-year film projects that needed to be filmed in Florida. Alex needed to interview Jorge Ramos at Univision and I needed to film workers in the Florida citrus industry. We financed our trip by “volunteering” for an interstate car transportation service. We had to smile and convince a Massachusetts State Trooper to let us drive his elderly mom's 1980s Lincoln Town Car to Miami. I remember him looking us over suspiciously as we smiled and explained to him the urgent nature of our film projects. It was sort of like our first pitch to a grant-giving organization. He let us drive the car, which is a better outcome than lots of funding meetings I've had since.
LatinoBuzz: Can you explain the meaning of the title of the screening: “Bordering on Absurd”? And, how did the screening come about? Whose idea was it?
Rivera: I'll let Greg field this one.
Berger: Gonzalo Casals, the Deputy Executive Director at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan, thought it was kind of absurd that Alex and I have collaborated for so many years but never screened our work together! He has been supportive of both of us for many years. Gonzalo is a big fan of The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and worked with the team there to make this happen.
Actually, the title “Bordering on Absurd” is a reference to what it sounds like: absurd and surreal politics around the border as a constant theme in Alex's work. And also to my political comedies. The multiple meanings of the U.S.-Mexico border, as a symbol of economic inequality, and as a barrier that unjustly separates families, is a common theme in Alex's work. I use political satire to cover Mexican social movements and the push to end the farcical “War on Drugs.”
A few years ago I decided to give up long-format political documentary filmmaking and focus on political satire. I used to think that if you pointed out how awful something was, people would be moved to change it. I don't think that's true anymore. I've watched the city where I live, Cuernavaca, fall to pieces during the War on Drugs. My friends, family, and neighbors there don't want to hear more stories about how horrible things are. They want hope. Movements to end intolerable situations have to provide hope and even be fun, and so I only use comedy to cover social movements these days.
But what's really absurd is how many “far-fetched” elements of Alex's science fiction work have actually become reality. The remote labor systems, outsourced military contractors, and drone warfare in Sleep Dealer have all turned out to be features of our contemporary historical moment. That's not just bordering on absurd. That's beyond absurd.
LatinoBuzz: Can you talk a little bit about the films you will be showing? What do they have in common? Why did you choose them?
Rivera: Well, as I mentioned, we've always been in creative dialogue, both of us seeking ways to use humor, satire, and genre to directly address contentious political issues. And we've both, for various reasons, ended up in something of a “mental borderland” - working on images and stories and themes that connect the U.S. and Mexico.
Berger: Over the last decade I have been involved with a project in Mexico called The School for Authentic Journalism that is a affiliated with the online newspaper Narco News. I will be screening several short parodies that cover the movements to end the War on Drugs in Mexico, all of which grew out of my work with those projects. Those films include Spring Breakers Without Borders, Narco-Mania, and Foreigner Watch. I will also be screening Now! (¡Ahora!) which I will talk more about in a bit.
LatinoBuzz: When you do a screening like this (which is free) what is your objective?
Rivera: To learn from the audience. To come away a little more fired up to make new work.
Berger: The short term objective is to not get booed offstage. Over the last few years I have been concentrating on internet distribution and distribution via “self-piracy” in Mexico City's bootleg DVD markets. (By that I mean working with networks of bootleg DVD stands to make sure my films are outside every subway station in Mexico City.) Finding mass audiences is important if you want to use film as a political organizing tool, but there's no substitute for screening work in front of a live audience. I steal most of my best ideas from live audiences.
I am also looking forward to speaking with Alex in front of an audience about what we can do to use film as a tool for political movements. I just hope that Gonzalo doesn't have any Jerry Springer type surprises lined up for the event.
LatinoBuzz: Which came first your interest in politics or becoming a filmmaker? Were your films always political or did you evolve as a filmmaker?
Rivera: For a long time I've worked from the belief that Every Film Is Political. It's impossible to make a non-political film. Every time you make a decision about theme, location, cast, etc., you're making a decision that puts certain people and certain points-of-view in the center of the frame. And inevitably, you're also pushing other people and themes to the margins. Always. So the question any thoughtful filmmaker must confront is: who do I want to put in the center? Whose point-of-view do I want to explore?
Berger: I agree with Alex completely. Every film promotes a political worldview. I have been interested in grassroots politics since attending the massive anti-nuclear, anti-Reagan march in New York when I was nine years old. And filmmaking since before I was born. My mother grew up just a few blocks from the Museum of the Moving Image, in a poor, single-parent household, and the movie palace in Astoria was her lifeline to an imaginary world. The local movie theatre in Astoria saved her life, in many ways. She passed her love of film to me.
But for me, learning to become a strategic political filmmaker has been a much more arduous task. Every film is political, but it is much more difficult to produce films alongside social movements that have an impact on the real world, on the work and trajectory of movements.
For me, this became a matter of life or death when the Drug War started to accelerate in Cuernavaca, where I live, about five years ago. Several people I know have been murdered and kidnapped, and at one point I had to pass through two military checkpoints every morning to take my son to school. All because of a ridiculous and failed War on Drugs. That's when I decided that simply “reporting” through film was no longer enough. If I was going to bother to make films, I wanted them to have strategic value and to form part of a broader movement for change. That's what we do at the School for Authentic Journalism, where I co-direct the video program... it's kind of a laboratory for strategic filmmaking.
I put myself in my films, creating characters that satirize misguided U.S. attitudes or policy in Mexico and Latin America. My goal is to use myself as a kind of punching bag to attract attention to movements whose stories need to be told to audiences less interested in “serious” documentaries.
LatinoBuzz: Do you consider yourself an activist who makes films or simply a filmmaker?
Rivera: An aspiring thoughtful filmmaker.
Berger: A comedian and aspiring organizer!
LatinoBuzz: Alex, you are not Mexican. Can you talk about why the U.S.-Mexico border has been such an important part of your work?
Rivera: My father is Peruvian, my mom was born in Brooklyn, of Scottish descent. I grew up in something of a “borderland” with icons of Peru around the house in which I watched “Gilligan's Island.” But that's not the real reason to be interested in the border, and interested in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Anyone who's seriously interested in the future of America - and therefore the future of the world - needs to consider the deep, deep connections between the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. These are histories that are as intertwined as those of Great Britain and India. Or Palestine and Israel. You can't understand one without the other.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, can you explain your nickname Gringoyo and where that came from?
Berger: Well, in Mexico “Goyo” is short for “Gregorio,” and I happen to be one of those gringos who can't hide my gringo-ness no matter what I do, so soon after moving to Mexico in 1998 I said “fuck it” and turned the words Gringo and Goyo into a compound word and my nickname. It also has become a plausible way to separate myself from the dimwitted characters I create in my films. In 2003, I made my first political comedy short, Gringotón, which is about a good-natured but clueless gringo in Mexico City during the Iraq War. Soon after, two people who later became good friends and collaborators, worked hard to convince me to stop making “serious” documentaries and to use these characters like the one in Gringotón to cover the stories of social movements. Those two people were Al Giordano, the founder of the School of Authentic Journalism, and Oscar Olivera, the Bolivian union leader known for his role in the mass movement against water privatization in Cochabamba in the year 2000. Oscar is also a professor of the School of Authentic Journalism. In 2009, as the Drug War heated up in Mexico and comedy seemed a better vocation in the midst of so much pain and suffering, I finally took their advice. So now, I blame all my stupid mistakes on “Gringoyo,” my alter-ego.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, can you talk about how you became interested in Mexico and how you ended up living there?
Berger: It's basically Alex's fault. Alex should actually apologize to the 150 million residents of Mexico for bringing me there and subjecting them to my unpleasant presence.
In 1998, Alex was in the very beginning of his work on what was to become his film Sleep Dealer, and he was learning more about Mexico and brushing up his Spanish, and he invited me to come down to study Spanish with him. I was trying to produce my own films in the U.S. but was barely able to scrape by as a production assistant on horrible commercials and films. So I went to Mexico and loved it. It was the late 90s, and just a few years earlier the Zapatistas in Chiapas had set in motion a series of events that kind of filled social movements throughout Mexico with an infectious feeling of hope, that change from the bottom up was possible. Lots of local struggles felt emboldened by what was going on. So I stayed and began to film these movements, like the famous uprising in the town of Atenco in 2001. These movements became my political teachers and my film school at the same time. Eventually, I met Estela Kempis, a doctor and advocate for reproductive rights, and we started a family together in Morelos.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, your film Now! (¡Ahora!) compares the dreamers to the civil rights movement. What are the similarities of those struggles? Do you think the dreamers should be using similar or different tactics to the civil rights movement?
Let me just start off by saying that the dreamers have become teachers to all of us who strive to become more effective organizers. They are the most inspiring and effective grassroots political movement in North America right now. I love what they are doing. There is nothing about strategy and tactics that I could teach them... quite the opposite, so I won't presume to say what they should or shouldn't do.
And I'd love to explain the context of this film, which is basically a shot by shot recreation of the famous 1965 documentary Now! by Santiago Álvarez.
For those that don't know the story, after the Cuban Revolution, Santiago Álvarez became the unlikely director of newsreel production at the Icaic, the Cuban Film Institute. He was 40 years old and had never made a film in his life. With limited resources and a U.S. blockade to contend with, Álvarez made use of the materials available to him, which often consisted of a few scratched LP records, cutouts from Life magazine, and newsreel footage brought into Cuba by friends and allies. He once said, “give me two photos, a song, and a moviola (film editing device,) and I'll give you a film.” And that's literally what he did!
In 1965, he took images of the U.S. civil rights movement and cut it to a track recorded by pioneering African-American singer Lena Horne called “Now!” The song is something in itself...the melody is actually from the Hebrew song “Hava Nagilah.” Lena Horne had to contend with the apartheid-like conditions of the U.S. entertainment industry and was blacklisted for years, but the content of what she sang was generally never overtly political. But “Now!” was like a bomb. And Santiago Álvarez took that musical bomb and managed to discover the essence of it and turn it into a film montage of the civil rights movement that became an effective and gut-punching document of that struggle. It's an amazing film, and some film scholars call it the first true music video ever made in the sense that it wasn't just a filmed performance but a film that was actually cut to the rhythm of the music to bring out the essence of the song.
Álvarez took the newsreel format and made it both effective political propaganda for the masses and high art at the same time. By some accounts, lots of people would show up to a film in Havana just to see his newsreels, and then leave before the feature.
I teach film at the State University of Morelos in Mexico, and two years ago in a political filmmaking class my students and I began to study the actions of the dreamers in the U.S. Many of my students feel a strong affinity for the dreamers. Almost all of my students, regardless of social class or background, have family in the U.S. and have seen or felt firsthand the suffering that the border and accelerated deportations have created. The parallels between what the dreamers are doing and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s is clear. It's something that lots of people see. It's obviously different in its objective conditions and long term goals and in lots of other ways, but like the civil rights movement 50 years ago, they are winning and inspiring millions as they forge ahead. They are inspiring my students in Mexico. I assigned to them a project to try and find stills and videos of the immigrants' movements in the U.S. that matched in content and composition the film Now! which we were studying. We managed to recreate about 10% of the film.
Then, a few months ago, as the fame of the dreamers grew and the Senate began to debate immigration reform, I dusted off that old class assignment and finished the film.
As a political film this is really a celebration of the dreamers and of all movements of undocumented people in the U.S., and a reminder that they walk in the footsteps of the U.S. civil rights movement. And notwithstanding setbacks and the continued struggle against white supremacy in the U.S., the civil rights movement of 50 years ago was basically victorious, and so will the immigrants' movements of today.
But also, when I watch this new film we've created, an homage to the dreamers and to Álvarez's masterwork, I think about all the layers of history and the way movements and organizers and media makers can speak to each other across time and space. A Cuban filmmaker in Cuba takes a song written by an African-American and makes it into a film about the U.S. civil rights movement, and then a group of Mexican students work on an updated version of the film 50 years later featuring images of a movement of immigrants with roots from around the world in the U.S. It's very cool to watch.
Join Alex Rivera and Greg Berger for “Bordering on Absurd” a free film screening and conversation at The Museum of the Moving Image on Friday, August 9, 2013. For more information check out the Facebook invite.
Written by Juan Caceres and Vanessa Erazo, LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.
Recently, in light of the drastic and violent effects the drug war has inflicted upon Mexico, he has focused his camera on narcos and failed drug policies. But, unlike his prior more conventional documentaries, his style has evolved to include satire and humor to get his point across.
Berger will be screening several of his short films next week at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens together with Alex Rivera, director of the science fiction film Sleep Dealer. Set in Mexico, it is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi movie. It’s in Spanish, it’s political and it imagines the near future, a world of cyberbraceros, coyoteks, remotely-controlled drones, aqua-terrorists, and closed borders. Both filmmakers use an imaginative and original lens to look at political issues. And, it turns out they are old college friends.
LatinoBuzz talked to Berger and Rivera about their free screening named “Bordering on Absurd,” what inspired them to make political films, and their college days spent in a cheese-making collective. Yeah, read on. It gets hilarious.
LatinoBuzz: How did the two of you meet? Have you collaborated on films before?
Rivera: We met at Hampshire College in the early nineteen-nineties. Back then, you needed a hand crank to power up the internet, and moving images were recorded in flip books. Even so, we managed to discover a set of shared interests in media, performance, and politics. While we've never produced a film together, we've always been in creative dialogue. Greg is a maniac. In a good way.
Berger: Alex is a maniac too, but he tries to pawn it off on me. During our time at Hampshire College I noticed that Alex had a unique talent for creative community organizing and was a political thinker. We became friends and lived in a kind of co-op housing unit on campus, spending most of our time creating film and performance projects around political issues that we felt passionate about. It seemed like every week we were building a 50 foot version of something for an “urgent” radical media project. For some reason, whatever we were building was always big. And we set up lots of front groups to try and siphon funds from the student activities budget for our projects. We had a cheese-making collective that never made any cheese. We learned to be resourceful. We each had sections of our final-year film projects that needed to be filmed in Florida. Alex needed to interview Jorge Ramos at Univision and I needed to film workers in the Florida citrus industry. We financed our trip by “volunteering” for an interstate car transportation service. We had to smile and convince a Massachusetts State Trooper to let us drive his elderly mom's 1980s Lincoln Town Car to Miami. I remember him looking us over suspiciously as we smiled and explained to him the urgent nature of our film projects. It was sort of like our first pitch to a grant-giving organization. He let us drive the car, which is a better outcome than lots of funding meetings I've had since.
LatinoBuzz: Can you explain the meaning of the title of the screening: “Bordering on Absurd”? And, how did the screening come about? Whose idea was it?
Rivera: I'll let Greg field this one.
Berger: Gonzalo Casals, the Deputy Executive Director at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan, thought it was kind of absurd that Alex and I have collaborated for so many years but never screened our work together! He has been supportive of both of us for many years. Gonzalo is a big fan of The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and worked with the team there to make this happen.
Actually, the title “Bordering on Absurd” is a reference to what it sounds like: absurd and surreal politics around the border as a constant theme in Alex's work. And also to my political comedies. The multiple meanings of the U.S.-Mexico border, as a symbol of economic inequality, and as a barrier that unjustly separates families, is a common theme in Alex's work. I use political satire to cover Mexican social movements and the push to end the farcical “War on Drugs.”
A few years ago I decided to give up long-format political documentary filmmaking and focus on political satire. I used to think that if you pointed out how awful something was, people would be moved to change it. I don't think that's true anymore. I've watched the city where I live, Cuernavaca, fall to pieces during the War on Drugs. My friends, family, and neighbors there don't want to hear more stories about how horrible things are. They want hope. Movements to end intolerable situations have to provide hope and even be fun, and so I only use comedy to cover social movements these days.
But what's really absurd is how many “far-fetched” elements of Alex's science fiction work have actually become reality. The remote labor systems, outsourced military contractors, and drone warfare in Sleep Dealer have all turned out to be features of our contemporary historical moment. That's not just bordering on absurd. That's beyond absurd.
LatinoBuzz: Can you talk a little bit about the films you will be showing? What do they have in common? Why did you choose them?
Rivera: Well, as I mentioned, we've always been in creative dialogue, both of us seeking ways to use humor, satire, and genre to directly address contentious political issues. And we've both, for various reasons, ended up in something of a “mental borderland” - working on images and stories and themes that connect the U.S. and Mexico.
Berger: Over the last decade I have been involved with a project in Mexico called The School for Authentic Journalism that is a affiliated with the online newspaper Narco News. I will be screening several short parodies that cover the movements to end the War on Drugs in Mexico, all of which grew out of my work with those projects. Those films include Spring Breakers Without Borders, Narco-Mania, and Foreigner Watch. I will also be screening Now! (¡Ahora!) which I will talk more about in a bit.
LatinoBuzz: When you do a screening like this (which is free) what is your objective?
Rivera: To learn from the audience. To come away a little more fired up to make new work.
Berger: The short term objective is to not get booed offstage. Over the last few years I have been concentrating on internet distribution and distribution via “self-piracy” in Mexico City's bootleg DVD markets. (By that I mean working with networks of bootleg DVD stands to make sure my films are outside every subway station in Mexico City.) Finding mass audiences is important if you want to use film as a political organizing tool, but there's no substitute for screening work in front of a live audience. I steal most of my best ideas from live audiences.
I am also looking forward to speaking with Alex in front of an audience about what we can do to use film as a tool for political movements. I just hope that Gonzalo doesn't have any Jerry Springer type surprises lined up for the event.
LatinoBuzz: Which came first your interest in politics or becoming a filmmaker? Were your films always political or did you evolve as a filmmaker?
Rivera: For a long time I've worked from the belief that Every Film Is Political. It's impossible to make a non-political film. Every time you make a decision about theme, location, cast, etc., you're making a decision that puts certain people and certain points-of-view in the center of the frame. And inevitably, you're also pushing other people and themes to the margins. Always. So the question any thoughtful filmmaker must confront is: who do I want to put in the center? Whose point-of-view do I want to explore?
Berger: I agree with Alex completely. Every film promotes a political worldview. I have been interested in grassroots politics since attending the massive anti-nuclear, anti-Reagan march in New York when I was nine years old. And filmmaking since before I was born. My mother grew up just a few blocks from the Museum of the Moving Image, in a poor, single-parent household, and the movie palace in Astoria was her lifeline to an imaginary world. The local movie theatre in Astoria saved her life, in many ways. She passed her love of film to me.
But for me, learning to become a strategic political filmmaker has been a much more arduous task. Every film is political, but it is much more difficult to produce films alongside social movements that have an impact on the real world, on the work and trajectory of movements.
For me, this became a matter of life or death when the Drug War started to accelerate in Cuernavaca, where I live, about five years ago. Several people I know have been murdered and kidnapped, and at one point I had to pass through two military checkpoints every morning to take my son to school. All because of a ridiculous and failed War on Drugs. That's when I decided that simply “reporting” through film was no longer enough. If I was going to bother to make films, I wanted them to have strategic value and to form part of a broader movement for change. That's what we do at the School for Authentic Journalism, where I co-direct the video program... it's kind of a laboratory for strategic filmmaking.
I put myself in my films, creating characters that satirize misguided U.S. attitudes or policy in Mexico and Latin America. My goal is to use myself as a kind of punching bag to attract attention to movements whose stories need to be told to audiences less interested in “serious” documentaries.
LatinoBuzz: Do you consider yourself an activist who makes films or simply a filmmaker?
Rivera: An aspiring thoughtful filmmaker.
Berger: A comedian and aspiring organizer!
LatinoBuzz: Alex, you are not Mexican. Can you talk about why the U.S.-Mexico border has been such an important part of your work?
Rivera: My father is Peruvian, my mom was born in Brooklyn, of Scottish descent. I grew up in something of a “borderland” with icons of Peru around the house in which I watched “Gilligan's Island.” But that's not the real reason to be interested in the border, and interested in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Anyone who's seriously interested in the future of America - and therefore the future of the world - needs to consider the deep, deep connections between the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. These are histories that are as intertwined as those of Great Britain and India. Or Palestine and Israel. You can't understand one without the other.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, can you explain your nickname Gringoyo and where that came from?
Berger: Well, in Mexico “Goyo” is short for “Gregorio,” and I happen to be one of those gringos who can't hide my gringo-ness no matter what I do, so soon after moving to Mexico in 1998 I said “fuck it” and turned the words Gringo and Goyo into a compound word and my nickname. It also has become a plausible way to separate myself from the dimwitted characters I create in my films. In 2003, I made my first political comedy short, Gringotón, which is about a good-natured but clueless gringo in Mexico City during the Iraq War. Soon after, two people who later became good friends and collaborators, worked hard to convince me to stop making “serious” documentaries and to use these characters like the one in Gringotón to cover the stories of social movements. Those two people were Al Giordano, the founder of the School of Authentic Journalism, and Oscar Olivera, the Bolivian union leader known for his role in the mass movement against water privatization in Cochabamba in the year 2000. Oscar is also a professor of the School of Authentic Journalism. In 2009, as the Drug War heated up in Mexico and comedy seemed a better vocation in the midst of so much pain and suffering, I finally took their advice. So now, I blame all my stupid mistakes on “Gringoyo,” my alter-ego.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, can you talk about how you became interested in Mexico and how you ended up living there?
Berger: It's basically Alex's fault. Alex should actually apologize to the 150 million residents of Mexico for bringing me there and subjecting them to my unpleasant presence.
In 1998, Alex was in the very beginning of his work on what was to become his film Sleep Dealer, and he was learning more about Mexico and brushing up his Spanish, and he invited me to come down to study Spanish with him. I was trying to produce my own films in the U.S. but was barely able to scrape by as a production assistant on horrible commercials and films. So I went to Mexico and loved it. It was the late 90s, and just a few years earlier the Zapatistas in Chiapas had set in motion a series of events that kind of filled social movements throughout Mexico with an infectious feeling of hope, that change from the bottom up was possible. Lots of local struggles felt emboldened by what was going on. So I stayed and began to film these movements, like the famous uprising in the town of Atenco in 2001. These movements became my political teachers and my film school at the same time. Eventually, I met Estela Kempis, a doctor and advocate for reproductive rights, and we started a family together in Morelos.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, your film Now! (¡Ahora!) compares the dreamers to the civil rights movement. What are the similarities of those struggles? Do you think the dreamers should be using similar or different tactics to the civil rights movement?
Let me just start off by saying that the dreamers have become teachers to all of us who strive to become more effective organizers. They are the most inspiring and effective grassroots political movement in North America right now. I love what they are doing. There is nothing about strategy and tactics that I could teach them... quite the opposite, so I won't presume to say what they should or shouldn't do.
And I'd love to explain the context of this film, which is basically a shot by shot recreation of the famous 1965 documentary Now! by Santiago Álvarez.
For those that don't know the story, after the Cuban Revolution, Santiago Álvarez became the unlikely director of newsreel production at the Icaic, the Cuban Film Institute. He was 40 years old and had never made a film in his life. With limited resources and a U.S. blockade to contend with, Álvarez made use of the materials available to him, which often consisted of a few scratched LP records, cutouts from Life magazine, and newsreel footage brought into Cuba by friends and allies. He once said, “give me two photos, a song, and a moviola (film editing device,) and I'll give you a film.” And that's literally what he did!
In 1965, he took images of the U.S. civil rights movement and cut it to a track recorded by pioneering African-American singer Lena Horne called “Now!” The song is something in itself...the melody is actually from the Hebrew song “Hava Nagilah.” Lena Horne had to contend with the apartheid-like conditions of the U.S. entertainment industry and was blacklisted for years, but the content of what she sang was generally never overtly political. But “Now!” was like a bomb. And Santiago Álvarez took that musical bomb and managed to discover the essence of it and turn it into a film montage of the civil rights movement that became an effective and gut-punching document of that struggle. It's an amazing film, and some film scholars call it the first true music video ever made in the sense that it wasn't just a filmed performance but a film that was actually cut to the rhythm of the music to bring out the essence of the song.
Álvarez took the newsreel format and made it both effective political propaganda for the masses and high art at the same time. By some accounts, lots of people would show up to a film in Havana just to see his newsreels, and then leave before the feature.
I teach film at the State University of Morelos in Mexico, and two years ago in a political filmmaking class my students and I began to study the actions of the dreamers in the U.S. Many of my students feel a strong affinity for the dreamers. Almost all of my students, regardless of social class or background, have family in the U.S. and have seen or felt firsthand the suffering that the border and accelerated deportations have created. The parallels between what the dreamers are doing and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s is clear. It's something that lots of people see. It's obviously different in its objective conditions and long term goals and in lots of other ways, but like the civil rights movement 50 years ago, they are winning and inspiring millions as they forge ahead. They are inspiring my students in Mexico. I assigned to them a project to try and find stills and videos of the immigrants' movements in the U.S. that matched in content and composition the film Now! which we were studying. We managed to recreate about 10% of the film.
Then, a few months ago, as the fame of the dreamers grew and the Senate began to debate immigration reform, I dusted off that old class assignment and finished the film.
As a political film this is really a celebration of the dreamers and of all movements of undocumented people in the U.S., and a reminder that they walk in the footsteps of the U.S. civil rights movement. And notwithstanding setbacks and the continued struggle against white supremacy in the U.S., the civil rights movement of 50 years ago was basically victorious, and so will the immigrants' movements of today.
But also, when I watch this new film we've created, an homage to the dreamers and to Álvarez's masterwork, I think about all the layers of history and the way movements and organizers and media makers can speak to each other across time and space. A Cuban filmmaker in Cuba takes a song written by an African-American and makes it into a film about the U.S. civil rights movement, and then a group of Mexican students work on an updated version of the film 50 years later featuring images of a movement of immigrants with roots from around the world in the U.S. It's very cool to watch.
Join Alex Rivera and Greg Berger for “Bordering on Absurd” a free film screening and conversation at The Museum of the Moving Image on Friday, August 9, 2013. For more information check out the Facebook invite.
Written by Juan Caceres and Vanessa Erazo, LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.
- 7/31/2013
- by Vanessa Erazo
- Sydney's Buzz
Close to 100 New York-based Latino film & media arts professionals attended the New York Latino Film Summit on Friday evening, June 21, evening and all day Saturday June 22, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to engage in an open dialogue concerning the current and future state of U.S. Latinos in multimedia. By reevaluating and adopting comprehensive strategies that address critical issues, their professional insight and dedication proved to be an invaluable response to build a community to serve us all.
The purported trillion dollar purchasing power of Latinos in the United States bestowing a tremendous power as consumers of media has not yet increased the number of Latino cultural producers in this country. There are not yet enough Latino film directors, screenwriters, critical writers, programmers, and funders to create a consistent flow of product to a developed audience looking for a “Latino” film experience.
Simultaneously, independent filmmaking in Latin America is reaching new heights. The amount of projects coming out of the region continues to increase and the films are receiving international acclaim at top tier film festivals. So, what is going on?
The Summit culminated with a number of concrete initiatives, action points that to be implemented to advocate for a greater understanding of Latino cultural and geographical diversity, the richesse of stories, and a determination not to be defined and limited by labels.
Multimedia makers
The word Multimedia is used to include advertising, television, feature films, webisodes, and even literature, comic books, cartoons, animation and any other sort of media, new or old.
Beginning with Friday evening’s introduction and kick-off, a freely associated discussion of the meaning of “Latino” began a stimulating give-and-take amongst the participants aimed at pinpointing the solutions to the obstacles that stand in the way of creating meaningful and innovative Latino media content and a vibrant U.S.-based Latino film community.
The roundtables on the following day attempted to tackle such questions as:
Who has access to a film career? How can we democratize access to filmmaking? What stories are we telling? Are we limiting the stories Latinos can tell? Who is documenting our cinema? How are film festivals programming our films? How can we create more critical content on Latino films and filmmakers?
The spirit of the meeting reminded me of that of the Art House Convergence (now in its 6th year) or even of the founding of Ifp East and West so many years ago. The enthusiasm and intelligence shared among all the participants energized all of us.
What follows are my notes and sometimes my own thoughts as a well organized process took place to cull out the five major issues needed in order to develop further a strong, vibrant Latino multimedia community.
New York Latino Film Summit: Changing Our Paradigms
Day 1: Friday, June 21, 6pm – 8pm
Summer Solstice today marks a new beginning.
Today, what defines Latinidad exceeds the traditional categories imposed on the Latino identity. The opening session asked participants to question how we define ourselves, how we are defined by others, who validates our authenticity, and what it means to appropriate the label.
The Amphitheater at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center was filled to capacity. The audience of writers, actors, directors, producers, festival programmers, executives, and interested individuals bandied about the words heritage, language, community, diversity, the need to identify while still being “American”, the need not to identify to maintain one’s own unique individuality, the understanding among selves, the diversity among selves, even the Jewish part of Latino spoke up. Junot Diaz, (Omg! My idol! If you have not yet read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, then run to your nearest bookstore or go to Amazon now and order it! Its depiction of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo and the hero’s journey well deserves its Pulitzer and Booker Prizes!) standing in the back of the amphitheater, spoke of the need to identify in Latino solidarity, in spite of all the differences, in order to be heard by the rest of the world. Latino is a general strategic identity. The outside world recognizes it. It in no way negates all the other identities each one of us carries within us.
Other ideas coming out of the discussion:
• Latino serves as a bridge to filmmaking. It does not follow the Hollywood model at all.
• There is a duality of Latino: one’s own self-perception and others’ view of Latino.
• How can we rethink the Latino identity to rebuild the old into a new system?
• How to increase the Latino without appearing un-American?
• How do we move forward?
• There is a lack of community, even in the community.
Day 2: Saturday, June 22, 10:30am - 8pm
On rising this morning—at 4am, -- I am excited, anticipating today, and thinking about last night, I came up with my own thoughts and feelings on the issue. I bring the Pov of an outsider, and a “Latino manquee”, so to speak, as a once Spanish Jew who, when expelled from Spain in 1492, did not go to the New World, but instead went over the Pyrenees, “with nothing but the clothes on our back”, to France whence we were invited to the Duchy of Lithuania, and where we spent the next 400 years becoming “Ashkenazic” Jews. Speaking as an outsider I would define Latino as “everyone originating some generations ago (more or less with Hispanic last names) in the New World in areas not first colonized by the Anglos, French, or Germans, but by the Spanish and Portuguese, and not totally indigenous”
Access and Accessibility 10:30am - 12pm
Who has access to a film career?
By teaching reading and writing via filmmaking as storytelling to the young, both in school and out of school, we will raise the next generation of filmmakers and multimedia makers. Literacy began and still begins with pictures. Every child knows about moving pictures and wants to make him/her self part of them. Our form of alienation today is that we see ourselves as actors in stories not our own or we retreat into realities we create for ourselves, thinking that they are our private domain. We need to share the stories to become “real” to ourselves and to the rest of the world. Silence is not golden; it’s suicide.
Today access comes with the simplest digital toy: a mobile phone, iPad or simple point and shoot camera. Anyone can make a film.
How can the audience get access to the work of Latino media makers?
By creating a Latino circuit of festivals, distributors and exhibitors who share information, marketing ideas, existing materials, prints and advertising, dubbed and subtitled soundtracks, press coverage and tools for community outreach.Creating a sustainable circuit of branding festivals with films or for films, distribution, exhibition, press.Placing product in movies, at events, in advertising...Corona beer, Chilean and Argentinian wine, Dominos Pizza, Contadina, Coca Cola, Univision, Televisa, Panama hats, Galapagos conservation, Easter Islands tourism, Earthquakes preparedness, quinoa...
Funding and Training: Is needed not only for filmmaking, but for also distribution and international licensing and sales. The discussion created a list of options, under the headings of challenges.
Public Funding
What are the strengths: PBS, Itvs, Ford Foundation, Nea, Latino Public Broadcasting grant money one does not have to pay back and they bestow a seal of approval upon the project.
What are the challenges: They are restricted by the fiscal year, by who has access, and by their lack of lack of outreach into the communities.
Private Funding
· Global film initiative
· Wealthy individuals
· Equity funds
Training and networks of solidarity training
Class and access, formal schooling vs. other forms of training.
Professional networking
Distribution
Strengths:
· Can raise monies
· Access
· Money
· The deal
· Legitimizes
Challenges:
· Expensive
· Lack of screens
· Only 3% of films get into theaters
· 1% of programming in theaters is split among U.S. indies, docs and features and foreign language films.
· Lack of organizational cohesiveness
· Highly trend given.
. I think the model of Affrm (for African American theatrical film distribution via the African American film festivals) plus using Emerging Pictures to reach non-theatrical venues in museums, libraries and other 4walled spaces, plus art house theaters would be viable especially if there were a “body of work” rather than just a single film.
· Non-theatrical circuit needs an organizational strategy of the Latino film community.
· Additional revenue streams, audience development, greater visibility are needed.
· Shorts have great interest at universities.
· Parity of funding, exposure on tv, etc, If Latino is 13% , then funding, distribution, and training should be 13%.
And not parenthetically, 50% of that should go to Latinas (gender parity).
Storytelling and Narratives
What stories are we telling? Are we pushing the envelope? Are we limited by our own narratives? Are we limiting the stories Latinos versus Latin Americans can tell?
• Latin American films have greater interest in Europe than Latino stories. And they are very different from each other.
• What about this oft cited “universality of stories? Question the formulas which labs and classes provide. Learn the rules and then bend them, like learning the dance steps, beats and rhythms in order to create new variations of the themes which are, nevertheless, universal.
• Alex Rivera, filmmaker who did Sleep Dealer noted that he changed genre to tell a typical border-crossing story and made it science fiction.
• Film is a collaborative art, there is a need for people to read scripts, Proofing your scripts! Have someone else proof them!
• There seems to be a lack of creativity in scripts. Self doubt creates a lack of creativity.
• There is a need for mentoring, for a salon and for workshops for scriptwriting particularly for Latino screenwriting labs and social networking, a workshop where each person gets 10 minutes to try out his\her project.
There is a lack of critical writing about Latino films. The only consistent writing is LatinoBuzz, Chicana from Chicago, about.com, NBC Latino, Huffington Post.
There is a lack of government funding of films except for the ever dwindling Nea. However, discussions are now underway with the government regarding using Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding platforms to accept investments as well as gifts.
Validation and Audience Development
Who is validating our cinema? Who is documenting our cinema? How are we programming our films and directors? How can we create more critical content on the films and filmmakers? How do we engage audiences in a more effective way?
There is a lack of knowledge of U.S.-Latino films.
The closest thing to a catalog of U.S.-Latino films was created by Lava.
Latin American Video Archives (Lava) opened in the late 80s and closed in 2006 for lack of funding. It contained 3,000 tapes. It created a database, and was set to go online as a searchable database of Latin American and Latino cinema. Listing over 9,000 titles produced by and about Latin Americans and Latinos, it became a distributor for the educational and consumer markets and for film festivals. The physical archive still exists as does the database on a hard disk drive.
FilmFinders (the company I founded in 1988) also tracked U.S.-Latino, Latino and every other film in the international film market from 1988 to 2009, totaling 60,000 titles with details including rights sold.
Latino film festivals also have databases of films and of participants from the public as well as publicists for Latino films. Those festival databases and those festivals’ skills in outreach could be used throughout the year if they would see the value in this for their own festivals.
Out of this comes the idea to create a central database with critical information.
The educational and non-theatrical market is an unknown market. Finding the academic department where the film belongs is somewhat complicated. A film could show on campus and bring in $3,000. A school or university could also buy the film on dvd for $300. The trick is in finding the proper professor to pitch, preferably one who would bring in the filmmaker as well to speak of the experience. Moreover, professors will write about the film too and so the life of the film can continue to be a vital part of the study program or the body of literature cited in the course of study. The professors might be in Latin American studies, anthropology, political science, or any other departments at a university or college.
An example in academia of interest in Latino film which might be useful in going forward in educational distribution is the Film Festival Research Network (Ffrn). Kansas based member Tamara L. Falicov, Associate Professor/Department Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the
University of Kansas was quoted in a LatinoBuzz blog dealing with Latino production from the Spanish point of view. She can be reached at tfalicov [at] Ku.edu, 785-864-1353
Plenary Session Wrap Up
1st session:
Felipe Tewes, HBO Latino, reiterated Junot Diaz's advice to embrace general identity for strategic purposes without diluting individual identities.
Action
Create community and spaces for cross-pollination.Create a monthly salon for sharing...Create a resource directory/database.Create a film collaborative.Create a cinema club.
2nd Session: Storytelling
Lack of mentorship and developmentCreate an umbrella encompassing a salon, with biweekly or monthly script reading.Create a Latino fund.Create Facebook Page...or Linked InCreate co-production event.
3rd Session: Distribution and funding bodies are broken.
Look at models of Emerging Pictures, Affrm, and create a festival-distribution-exhibitor circuit
Look at educational distribution and other forms of non-theatrical distribution to universities, colleges, libraries, special interest groups.
4th Session: Validation
Lack of knowledge of U.S. -Latino films
Lack of critical writing
LobbyingArchivingMicro cinemaNetworkingWriting networking...cinema tropical and Latino buzzLatino film history/information
In one year this group meeting will reconvene to see what has developed. Meanwhile, here are the points of action with volunteers committing to work on them. I am on the database committee.
Call to Action
For those of you who were not able to attend, the participants of the last session signed up for the action groups, If you would like to sign up, please email and name which group(s) you choose to join. Send your email to: newyorklatinofilmsummit [At] gmail.com.
The committees are:
- Organizing Committee. The group in charge of general coordination and communication, as well as planning future Summit events.
- Information Committee. The group that will coordinate databases and communication in social media, as well as creating fluid networks of information inside and outside the group.
- Salons. This group will organize Professional events (please choose one from below)
a) Screenwriters
b) Producers
c) Work-in-progress screenings
d) Non-Theatrical/ Educational Distribution
- Workshops. Organizing specific workshops for the professional advancement of the group.
- Mentorships. Creating mentorship programs both for the members of the group, as well as for younger generations.
- Lobby/Advocacy/Activism. Creating strategies for the advancement and visibility of the professional and social causes of the group.
- Microcinema/Cine-Club. Creating a on-going cine-club with the hopes of documenting and presenting the history of Latino Cinema in the U.S., and serving as a curatorial platform for the exhibition of Latino works.
The summit organizing committee consists of: Andrea Betanzos (Assistant Director, Cinema Tropical), Carlos A. Gutiérrez (Co-founder and Director, Cinema Tropical), Paula Heredia (director/editor, Heredia Pictures), and Lucila Moctezuma (Production Assistance Program Manager, Women Make Movies.
The purported trillion dollar purchasing power of Latinos in the United States bestowing a tremendous power as consumers of media has not yet increased the number of Latino cultural producers in this country. There are not yet enough Latino film directors, screenwriters, critical writers, programmers, and funders to create a consistent flow of product to a developed audience looking for a “Latino” film experience.
Simultaneously, independent filmmaking in Latin America is reaching new heights. The amount of projects coming out of the region continues to increase and the films are receiving international acclaim at top tier film festivals. So, what is going on?
The Summit culminated with a number of concrete initiatives, action points that to be implemented to advocate for a greater understanding of Latino cultural and geographical diversity, the richesse of stories, and a determination not to be defined and limited by labels.
Multimedia makers
The word Multimedia is used to include advertising, television, feature films, webisodes, and even literature, comic books, cartoons, animation and any other sort of media, new or old.
Beginning with Friday evening’s introduction and kick-off, a freely associated discussion of the meaning of “Latino” began a stimulating give-and-take amongst the participants aimed at pinpointing the solutions to the obstacles that stand in the way of creating meaningful and innovative Latino media content and a vibrant U.S.-based Latino film community.
The roundtables on the following day attempted to tackle such questions as:
Who has access to a film career? How can we democratize access to filmmaking? What stories are we telling? Are we limiting the stories Latinos can tell? Who is documenting our cinema? How are film festivals programming our films? How can we create more critical content on Latino films and filmmakers?
The spirit of the meeting reminded me of that of the Art House Convergence (now in its 6th year) or even of the founding of Ifp East and West so many years ago. The enthusiasm and intelligence shared among all the participants energized all of us.
What follows are my notes and sometimes my own thoughts as a well organized process took place to cull out the five major issues needed in order to develop further a strong, vibrant Latino multimedia community.
New York Latino Film Summit: Changing Our Paradigms
Day 1: Friday, June 21, 6pm – 8pm
Summer Solstice today marks a new beginning.
Today, what defines Latinidad exceeds the traditional categories imposed on the Latino identity. The opening session asked participants to question how we define ourselves, how we are defined by others, who validates our authenticity, and what it means to appropriate the label.
The Amphitheater at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center was filled to capacity. The audience of writers, actors, directors, producers, festival programmers, executives, and interested individuals bandied about the words heritage, language, community, diversity, the need to identify while still being “American”, the need not to identify to maintain one’s own unique individuality, the understanding among selves, the diversity among selves, even the Jewish part of Latino spoke up. Junot Diaz, (Omg! My idol! If you have not yet read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, then run to your nearest bookstore or go to Amazon now and order it! Its depiction of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo and the hero’s journey well deserves its Pulitzer and Booker Prizes!) standing in the back of the amphitheater, spoke of the need to identify in Latino solidarity, in spite of all the differences, in order to be heard by the rest of the world. Latino is a general strategic identity. The outside world recognizes it. It in no way negates all the other identities each one of us carries within us.
Other ideas coming out of the discussion:
• Latino serves as a bridge to filmmaking. It does not follow the Hollywood model at all.
• There is a duality of Latino: one’s own self-perception and others’ view of Latino.
• How can we rethink the Latino identity to rebuild the old into a new system?
• How to increase the Latino without appearing un-American?
• How do we move forward?
• There is a lack of community, even in the community.
Day 2: Saturday, June 22, 10:30am - 8pm
On rising this morning—at 4am, -- I am excited, anticipating today, and thinking about last night, I came up with my own thoughts and feelings on the issue. I bring the Pov of an outsider, and a “Latino manquee”, so to speak, as a once Spanish Jew who, when expelled from Spain in 1492, did not go to the New World, but instead went over the Pyrenees, “with nothing but the clothes on our back”, to France whence we were invited to the Duchy of Lithuania, and where we spent the next 400 years becoming “Ashkenazic” Jews. Speaking as an outsider I would define Latino as “everyone originating some generations ago (more or less with Hispanic last names) in the New World in areas not first colonized by the Anglos, French, or Germans, but by the Spanish and Portuguese, and not totally indigenous”
Access and Accessibility 10:30am - 12pm
Who has access to a film career?
By teaching reading and writing via filmmaking as storytelling to the young, both in school and out of school, we will raise the next generation of filmmakers and multimedia makers. Literacy began and still begins with pictures. Every child knows about moving pictures and wants to make him/her self part of them. Our form of alienation today is that we see ourselves as actors in stories not our own or we retreat into realities we create for ourselves, thinking that they are our private domain. We need to share the stories to become “real” to ourselves and to the rest of the world. Silence is not golden; it’s suicide.
Today access comes with the simplest digital toy: a mobile phone, iPad or simple point and shoot camera. Anyone can make a film.
How can the audience get access to the work of Latino media makers?
By creating a Latino circuit of festivals, distributors and exhibitors who share information, marketing ideas, existing materials, prints and advertising, dubbed and subtitled soundtracks, press coverage and tools for community outreach.Creating a sustainable circuit of branding festivals with films or for films, distribution, exhibition, press.Placing product in movies, at events, in advertising...Corona beer, Chilean and Argentinian wine, Dominos Pizza, Contadina, Coca Cola, Univision, Televisa, Panama hats, Galapagos conservation, Easter Islands tourism, Earthquakes preparedness, quinoa...
Funding and Training: Is needed not only for filmmaking, but for also distribution and international licensing and sales. The discussion created a list of options, under the headings of challenges.
Public Funding
What are the strengths: PBS, Itvs, Ford Foundation, Nea, Latino Public Broadcasting grant money one does not have to pay back and they bestow a seal of approval upon the project.
What are the challenges: They are restricted by the fiscal year, by who has access, and by their lack of lack of outreach into the communities.
Private Funding
· Global film initiative
· Wealthy individuals
· Equity funds
Training and networks of solidarity training
Class and access, formal schooling vs. other forms of training.
Professional networking
Distribution
Strengths:
· Can raise monies
· Access
· Money
· The deal
· Legitimizes
Challenges:
· Expensive
· Lack of screens
· Only 3% of films get into theaters
· 1% of programming in theaters is split among U.S. indies, docs and features and foreign language films.
· Lack of organizational cohesiveness
· Highly trend given.
. I think the model of Affrm (for African American theatrical film distribution via the African American film festivals) plus using Emerging Pictures to reach non-theatrical venues in museums, libraries and other 4walled spaces, plus art house theaters would be viable especially if there were a “body of work” rather than just a single film.
· Non-theatrical circuit needs an organizational strategy of the Latino film community.
· Additional revenue streams, audience development, greater visibility are needed.
· Shorts have great interest at universities.
· Parity of funding, exposure on tv, etc, If Latino is 13% , then funding, distribution, and training should be 13%.
And not parenthetically, 50% of that should go to Latinas (gender parity).
Storytelling and Narratives
What stories are we telling? Are we pushing the envelope? Are we limited by our own narratives? Are we limiting the stories Latinos versus Latin Americans can tell?
• Latin American films have greater interest in Europe than Latino stories. And they are very different from each other.
• What about this oft cited “universality of stories? Question the formulas which labs and classes provide. Learn the rules and then bend them, like learning the dance steps, beats and rhythms in order to create new variations of the themes which are, nevertheless, universal.
• Alex Rivera, filmmaker who did Sleep Dealer noted that he changed genre to tell a typical border-crossing story and made it science fiction.
• Film is a collaborative art, there is a need for people to read scripts, Proofing your scripts! Have someone else proof them!
• There seems to be a lack of creativity in scripts. Self doubt creates a lack of creativity.
• There is a need for mentoring, for a salon and for workshops for scriptwriting particularly for Latino screenwriting labs and social networking, a workshop where each person gets 10 minutes to try out his\her project.
There is a lack of critical writing about Latino films. The only consistent writing is LatinoBuzz, Chicana from Chicago, about.com, NBC Latino, Huffington Post.
There is a lack of government funding of films except for the ever dwindling Nea. However, discussions are now underway with the government regarding using Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding platforms to accept investments as well as gifts.
Validation and Audience Development
Who is validating our cinema? Who is documenting our cinema? How are we programming our films and directors? How can we create more critical content on the films and filmmakers? How do we engage audiences in a more effective way?
There is a lack of knowledge of U.S.-Latino films.
The closest thing to a catalog of U.S.-Latino films was created by Lava.
Latin American Video Archives (Lava) opened in the late 80s and closed in 2006 for lack of funding. It contained 3,000 tapes. It created a database, and was set to go online as a searchable database of Latin American and Latino cinema. Listing over 9,000 titles produced by and about Latin Americans and Latinos, it became a distributor for the educational and consumer markets and for film festivals. The physical archive still exists as does the database on a hard disk drive.
FilmFinders (the company I founded in 1988) also tracked U.S.-Latino, Latino and every other film in the international film market from 1988 to 2009, totaling 60,000 titles with details including rights sold.
Latino film festivals also have databases of films and of participants from the public as well as publicists for Latino films. Those festival databases and those festivals’ skills in outreach could be used throughout the year if they would see the value in this for their own festivals.
Out of this comes the idea to create a central database with critical information.
The educational and non-theatrical market is an unknown market. Finding the academic department where the film belongs is somewhat complicated. A film could show on campus and bring in $3,000. A school or university could also buy the film on dvd for $300. The trick is in finding the proper professor to pitch, preferably one who would bring in the filmmaker as well to speak of the experience. Moreover, professors will write about the film too and so the life of the film can continue to be a vital part of the study program or the body of literature cited in the course of study. The professors might be in Latin American studies, anthropology, political science, or any other departments at a university or college.
An example in academia of interest in Latino film which might be useful in going forward in educational distribution is the Film Festival Research Network (Ffrn). Kansas based member Tamara L. Falicov, Associate Professor/Department Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the
University of Kansas was quoted in a LatinoBuzz blog dealing with Latino production from the Spanish point of view. She can be reached at tfalicov [at] Ku.edu, 785-864-1353
Plenary Session Wrap Up
1st session:
Felipe Tewes, HBO Latino, reiterated Junot Diaz's advice to embrace general identity for strategic purposes without diluting individual identities.
Action
Create community and spaces for cross-pollination.Create a monthly salon for sharing...Create a resource directory/database.Create a film collaborative.Create a cinema club.
2nd Session: Storytelling
Lack of mentorship and developmentCreate an umbrella encompassing a salon, with biweekly or monthly script reading.Create a Latino fund.Create Facebook Page...or Linked InCreate co-production event.
3rd Session: Distribution and funding bodies are broken.
Look at models of Emerging Pictures, Affrm, and create a festival-distribution-exhibitor circuit
Look at educational distribution and other forms of non-theatrical distribution to universities, colleges, libraries, special interest groups.
4th Session: Validation
Lack of knowledge of U.S. -Latino films
Lack of critical writing
LobbyingArchivingMicro cinemaNetworkingWriting networking...cinema tropical and Latino buzzLatino film history/information
In one year this group meeting will reconvene to see what has developed. Meanwhile, here are the points of action with volunteers committing to work on them. I am on the database committee.
Call to Action
For those of you who were not able to attend, the participants of the last session signed up for the action groups, If you would like to sign up, please email and name which group(s) you choose to join. Send your email to: newyorklatinofilmsummit [At] gmail.com.
The committees are:
- Organizing Committee. The group in charge of general coordination and communication, as well as planning future Summit events.
- Information Committee. The group that will coordinate databases and communication in social media, as well as creating fluid networks of information inside and outside the group.
- Salons. This group will organize Professional events (please choose one from below)
a) Screenwriters
b) Producers
c) Work-in-progress screenings
d) Non-Theatrical/ Educational Distribution
- Workshops. Organizing specific workshops for the professional advancement of the group.
- Mentorships. Creating mentorship programs both for the members of the group, as well as for younger generations.
- Lobby/Advocacy/Activism. Creating strategies for the advancement and visibility of the professional and social causes of the group.
- Microcinema/Cine-Club. Creating a on-going cine-club with the hopes of documenting and presenting the history of Latino Cinema in the U.S., and serving as a curatorial platform for the exhibition of Latino works.
The summit organizing committee consists of: Andrea Betanzos (Assistant Director, Cinema Tropical), Carlos A. Gutiérrez (Co-founder and Director, Cinema Tropical), Paula Heredia (director/editor, Heredia Pictures), and Lucila Moctezuma (Production Assistance Program Manager, Women Make Movies.
- 7/5/2013
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Inquiring minds want to know, what has the Peruvian-American multi-media artist and filmmaker of the radical film Sleep Dealer been up to since he broke through at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. I had a chance to catch up with Alex and find out what’s shaking.
Sleep Dealer had been percolating through development for a few years when it participated in the 2001 Sundance Institute Screenwriters lab. It premiered in the festival’s Us Dramatic Competition in 2008 where it was bestowed with the Waldo Screenwriting Award for Alex and his co-writer David Riker. The ambitious and thoughtful genre bender (eco/romance/sci-fi/adventure/socio-political thriller), was a uniquely original feature debut which earned him lots of buzz including a spot on Variety’s Ten Directors to Watch. On the heels of all the Sundance momentum, Alex was courted around town for various projects, mostly speculative script work (aka free labor). One of the projects he became attached to write and direct was a film based on the Wired article “La Vida Robot,” then being produced by Salma Hayek and John Wells. Meanwhile, Sleep Dealer was released by Maya Entertainment in April 2009. Unfortunately, Maya’s theatrical releases struggled to make much profit (the company quietly shuttered last year to dissolve its debt). Sleep Dealer averaged 2k in its 18 booked theaters NY/La Opening Weekend engagement. My opinion? Lack of a strong and savvy marketing campaign along with Maya’s model of booking the film at its out of the way fringe theater markets hurt the film’s shot at targeting the audience it eventually found elsewhere. And where it did find a cultish nerd-like audience was in the educational space. Alex has traveled to over 50 campuses and continues to do so in order to discuss and engage with the complex layers and themes the film generates - a testament to the heavily research based scientific, sociological and immigration alchemy of the film.
So let’s hear what else Alex has been up to. {redacted transcription of our recorded conversation}.
What are some of the exciting things you’ve worked on immediately after Sleep Dealer?
David Riker and I developed a TV series. It’s called “Blink!” It’s about a woman who suffers a strange accident, loses her eyesight, and is given digital retinas, a technology that is currently being developed. Shortly after she starts to see again, she realizes something is terribly wrong – her head is transmitting. You can see what she sees through a live video feed. She doesn’t know if her eyes are malfunctioning, if she’s been ‘hacked,’ etc. The show follows Blink as she tries to unravel what’s inside her head and the possibility that she is part of a conspiracy that might even be altering her reality. We still have the material and are looking for a partner for it, we’ve had different partners along the way.
One of the more surprising developments for me was an ongoing collaboration with the community of activists working around the cause of immigration. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network became aware of my work through Sleep Dealer. They are really active working with day laborers in this grassroots way, but they also have a unique cultural strategy. They happened to be in touch with Manu Chao, the legendary and popular World music artist, who in his work sings about the experience of migration. They put me in touch with him and we produced a video in Arizona. We did the same thing with Ana Tijoux, a Latin Hip Hop artist, and we are dialoging with other artists like Zack de Rocha and La Santa Cecilia, a local La group Latino music mashup group. It’s been deeply fulfilling not going through agencies but rather activists that are committed to the same values that I am committed to. So that kind of has been my reality; partly working with these activist groups on these cultural projects, partly shopping around ideas in this system like the Sci-Fi TV series, and partly supporting Sleep Dealers’s after life.
You also work with other filmmakers on an ongoing basis, talk about your collective:
I’ve been working with other filmmakers for the past 14 years through a small distribution company called SubCine, like subliminal, subliminated. The idea behind the name is that experimental films, documentaries and risky fiction films are already shut out of the mainstream film culture, so then if you are making that kind of work from the Latino perspective its yet another level of marginalization. Its like we are the outsiders of the outsiders. It’s an exciting place to be, to think, imagine and attack from. We are a small collective of filmmakers like myself, Jim Mendiola Gregorio Rocha, Jesse Lerner, Cristina Ibarra, Natalia Almada, Dolissa Medina. A lot of us were making our films in the 90s and selling our films individually. We decided that instead of selling them individually, to compile a catalog together. From one day to the next, a distributor was born. We have a warehouse that keeps the films, does all the fulfillment and billing so we don’t have to lick the stamps anymore. Most traditional distributors pay filmmakers 40% minus expenses. We pay 70% with no expenses taken out of that. We are a very slender operation but set up to make the sales and get the money to the filmmakers. Right now we have almost 50 films in the catalog and over 20 filmmakers that we work with. I manage that on a month to month basis as one of my many other side projects. It’s been super fulfilling because its getting the films seen. They are sold to only a little segment; the libraries, universities and colleges to be used in classroom. Those institutions will pay $300 more or less for a DVD because they are using it in the institutional context. Then that work is seen by young people hungry to learn, whose ideas about the world and ideas about film are being shaped, so its a win-win-win.
That’s an interesting model, you think there is room for more of these kind of distribution platforms for Latino filmmakers?
We were inspired by New Day Films, a social issue documentary distribution collective. It’s a lot of the same thought; Lets not work alone, lets work together. If you sell your film maybe the person who bought it would want to buy my film. It’s like this collective spirit of a distributor that’s owned by the filmmakers. The educational market doesn’t sound glamorous, but it’s absolutely essential for students to see the wide variety of films and it gets to them when their brains are soft and squishy and malleable. It’s an influential moment to reach that audience. And they still pay - librarians still care about getting a licensed copy of a film for their collection and are willing to pay for it. In a day and age when nobody seems to get paid, this market is a unique space to be.
With all these side projects and day to day busy-ness and constant fellow filmmaker collaboration and stimulation how do you concentrate on developing your own projects and tell us what personal project are you focusing on now?
I have a curious mind and active imagination, which is a curse and a blessing. Definitely over the years I have had many ideas and I try to do everything I just mentioned plus develop my own material. About a year ago I got interested in the story of a legendary Chicano activist - somebody who should be as well known as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X or Cesar Chavez but who is not. His name is Reies López Tijerina. He led an armed movement in New Mexico to reclaim part of the land for the original Mexican families that had settled there before it was the United States - the land that was stolen after the war with Mexico. Tijerina is a fascinating character and there are parts of his story that are like a Quentin Tarantino film. Like he would wear a suit in the desert while armed, trying to arrest police officers….it has that kind of great genre and humor in it, but it also taps into extraordinary realities and histories about The Southwest which have, for the most part, been forgotten.
How much does the general public know about this man?
I think the general public knows close to nothing. People who study Chicano history would run into his story but not everybody even in that category…We live in a strange age where there are 53 million Latinos in this country and yet if you ask, ‘Who are some great Latino figures in U.S. history?’ most folks can’t name five. Whether it’s the result of a concerted effort or not, the history is missing. I mean, you look at Arizona and they are banning books about Chicano history, you start to think maybe it is concerted. Either way, you don’t get 50 million people here overnight. There’s a long history that has been erased and its part of the duty of artists who define themselves as Latino to rescue parts of that history because we deserve to know it. Tijerina is one of those incendiary, wild and fantastic stories and there should be many films about it and yet it is exactly the opposite. He’s nearly completely forgotten and he’s not the only one, there is a whole series of these kind of figures that have been swept under the rug. It’s a problem and also an opportunity because it is definitely time now to think of ways that are visually exciting to tell these stories. When I talk about history, it’s not to put someone to sleep, its not a Ken Burns treatment. This is life and death, sex, people fighting over billions of dollars that are at stake, the future of the country - these are high stakes, thrilling stories going back to days of the Conquest up until today.
How would you go about rescuing these histories and making it modern, relevant and accessible in order to capture people’s interest in unknown historical figures?
All the way through, if you look at any chapter in Latino history, and as I would define it, it starts with the conquest when the Spanish meet Native Americans and start to kill each other and enslave each other and make babies together and create a whole new race -is there anything more Shakespearean? More dramatic? No. Obviously Mel Gibson took a stab at that time period with Apocalpyto, which was wildly successful commercially. Why? Because he used a kind of genre approach. It’s not a historical film, it’s an action film. Now I didn’t love the film but I can respect that it’s a piece of pop culture that is also telling a part of history. Do I love its point of view? No. But I respect the craft. And so starting with that going up to, anywhere you drop the needle on Latino history there is something equally dramatic going on..…In the Us Mexico war countless moments and characters and stories could be told through the genre of a heightened western that would be incredible. Quentin Tarantino has just shown that films that are set in historical contexts but that us the energy and aesthetics of genre filmmaking can be wildly successful. So the approach needs to be creative, elevated, the approach needs to push the envelope. You can mine these histories for all kinds of fantastic narratives. And, of course, the future can be mined as well.
Thanks to Alex for sharing!
Sleep Dealer had been percolating through development for a few years when it participated in the 2001 Sundance Institute Screenwriters lab. It premiered in the festival’s Us Dramatic Competition in 2008 where it was bestowed with the Waldo Screenwriting Award for Alex and his co-writer David Riker. The ambitious and thoughtful genre bender (eco/romance/sci-fi/adventure/socio-political thriller), was a uniquely original feature debut which earned him lots of buzz including a spot on Variety’s Ten Directors to Watch. On the heels of all the Sundance momentum, Alex was courted around town for various projects, mostly speculative script work (aka free labor). One of the projects he became attached to write and direct was a film based on the Wired article “La Vida Robot,” then being produced by Salma Hayek and John Wells. Meanwhile, Sleep Dealer was released by Maya Entertainment in April 2009. Unfortunately, Maya’s theatrical releases struggled to make much profit (the company quietly shuttered last year to dissolve its debt). Sleep Dealer averaged 2k in its 18 booked theaters NY/La Opening Weekend engagement. My opinion? Lack of a strong and savvy marketing campaign along with Maya’s model of booking the film at its out of the way fringe theater markets hurt the film’s shot at targeting the audience it eventually found elsewhere. And where it did find a cultish nerd-like audience was in the educational space. Alex has traveled to over 50 campuses and continues to do so in order to discuss and engage with the complex layers and themes the film generates - a testament to the heavily research based scientific, sociological and immigration alchemy of the film.
So let’s hear what else Alex has been up to. {redacted transcription of our recorded conversation}.
What are some of the exciting things you’ve worked on immediately after Sleep Dealer?
David Riker and I developed a TV series. It’s called “Blink!” It’s about a woman who suffers a strange accident, loses her eyesight, and is given digital retinas, a technology that is currently being developed. Shortly after she starts to see again, she realizes something is terribly wrong – her head is transmitting. You can see what she sees through a live video feed. She doesn’t know if her eyes are malfunctioning, if she’s been ‘hacked,’ etc. The show follows Blink as she tries to unravel what’s inside her head and the possibility that she is part of a conspiracy that might even be altering her reality. We still have the material and are looking for a partner for it, we’ve had different partners along the way.
One of the more surprising developments for me was an ongoing collaboration with the community of activists working around the cause of immigration. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network became aware of my work through Sleep Dealer. They are really active working with day laborers in this grassroots way, but they also have a unique cultural strategy. They happened to be in touch with Manu Chao, the legendary and popular World music artist, who in his work sings about the experience of migration. They put me in touch with him and we produced a video in Arizona. We did the same thing with Ana Tijoux, a Latin Hip Hop artist, and we are dialoging with other artists like Zack de Rocha and La Santa Cecilia, a local La group Latino music mashup group. It’s been deeply fulfilling not going through agencies but rather activists that are committed to the same values that I am committed to. So that kind of has been my reality; partly working with these activist groups on these cultural projects, partly shopping around ideas in this system like the Sci-Fi TV series, and partly supporting Sleep Dealers’s after life.
You also work with other filmmakers on an ongoing basis, talk about your collective:
I’ve been working with other filmmakers for the past 14 years through a small distribution company called SubCine, like subliminal, subliminated. The idea behind the name is that experimental films, documentaries and risky fiction films are already shut out of the mainstream film culture, so then if you are making that kind of work from the Latino perspective its yet another level of marginalization. Its like we are the outsiders of the outsiders. It’s an exciting place to be, to think, imagine and attack from. We are a small collective of filmmakers like myself, Jim Mendiola Gregorio Rocha, Jesse Lerner, Cristina Ibarra, Natalia Almada, Dolissa Medina. A lot of us were making our films in the 90s and selling our films individually. We decided that instead of selling them individually, to compile a catalog together. From one day to the next, a distributor was born. We have a warehouse that keeps the films, does all the fulfillment and billing so we don’t have to lick the stamps anymore. Most traditional distributors pay filmmakers 40% minus expenses. We pay 70% with no expenses taken out of that. We are a very slender operation but set up to make the sales and get the money to the filmmakers. Right now we have almost 50 films in the catalog and over 20 filmmakers that we work with. I manage that on a month to month basis as one of my many other side projects. It’s been super fulfilling because its getting the films seen. They are sold to only a little segment; the libraries, universities and colleges to be used in classroom. Those institutions will pay $300 more or less for a DVD because they are using it in the institutional context. Then that work is seen by young people hungry to learn, whose ideas about the world and ideas about film are being shaped, so its a win-win-win.
That’s an interesting model, you think there is room for more of these kind of distribution platforms for Latino filmmakers?
We were inspired by New Day Films, a social issue documentary distribution collective. It’s a lot of the same thought; Lets not work alone, lets work together. If you sell your film maybe the person who bought it would want to buy my film. It’s like this collective spirit of a distributor that’s owned by the filmmakers. The educational market doesn’t sound glamorous, but it’s absolutely essential for students to see the wide variety of films and it gets to them when their brains are soft and squishy and malleable. It’s an influential moment to reach that audience. And they still pay - librarians still care about getting a licensed copy of a film for their collection and are willing to pay for it. In a day and age when nobody seems to get paid, this market is a unique space to be.
With all these side projects and day to day busy-ness and constant fellow filmmaker collaboration and stimulation how do you concentrate on developing your own projects and tell us what personal project are you focusing on now?
I have a curious mind and active imagination, which is a curse and a blessing. Definitely over the years I have had many ideas and I try to do everything I just mentioned plus develop my own material. About a year ago I got interested in the story of a legendary Chicano activist - somebody who should be as well known as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X or Cesar Chavez but who is not. His name is Reies López Tijerina. He led an armed movement in New Mexico to reclaim part of the land for the original Mexican families that had settled there before it was the United States - the land that was stolen after the war with Mexico. Tijerina is a fascinating character and there are parts of his story that are like a Quentin Tarantino film. Like he would wear a suit in the desert while armed, trying to arrest police officers….it has that kind of great genre and humor in it, but it also taps into extraordinary realities and histories about The Southwest which have, for the most part, been forgotten.
How much does the general public know about this man?
I think the general public knows close to nothing. People who study Chicano history would run into his story but not everybody even in that category…We live in a strange age where there are 53 million Latinos in this country and yet if you ask, ‘Who are some great Latino figures in U.S. history?’ most folks can’t name five. Whether it’s the result of a concerted effort or not, the history is missing. I mean, you look at Arizona and they are banning books about Chicano history, you start to think maybe it is concerted. Either way, you don’t get 50 million people here overnight. There’s a long history that has been erased and its part of the duty of artists who define themselves as Latino to rescue parts of that history because we deserve to know it. Tijerina is one of those incendiary, wild and fantastic stories and there should be many films about it and yet it is exactly the opposite. He’s nearly completely forgotten and he’s not the only one, there is a whole series of these kind of figures that have been swept under the rug. It’s a problem and also an opportunity because it is definitely time now to think of ways that are visually exciting to tell these stories. When I talk about history, it’s not to put someone to sleep, its not a Ken Burns treatment. This is life and death, sex, people fighting over billions of dollars that are at stake, the future of the country - these are high stakes, thrilling stories going back to days of the Conquest up until today.
How would you go about rescuing these histories and making it modern, relevant and accessible in order to capture people’s interest in unknown historical figures?
All the way through, if you look at any chapter in Latino history, and as I would define it, it starts with the conquest when the Spanish meet Native Americans and start to kill each other and enslave each other and make babies together and create a whole new race -is there anything more Shakespearean? More dramatic? No. Obviously Mel Gibson took a stab at that time period with Apocalpyto, which was wildly successful commercially. Why? Because he used a kind of genre approach. It’s not a historical film, it’s an action film. Now I didn’t love the film but I can respect that it’s a piece of pop culture that is also telling a part of history. Do I love its point of view? No. But I respect the craft. And so starting with that going up to, anywhere you drop the needle on Latino history there is something equally dramatic going on..…In the Us Mexico war countless moments and characters and stories could be told through the genre of a heightened western that would be incredible. Quentin Tarantino has just shown that films that are set in historical contexts but that us the energy and aesthetics of genre filmmaking can be wildly successful. So the approach needs to be creative, elevated, the approach needs to push the envelope. You can mine these histories for all kinds of fantastic narratives. And, of course, the future can be mined as well.
Thanks to Alex for sharing!
- 2/27/2013
- by Christine Davila
- Sydney's Buzz
Members of the Sloan Jury at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, chosen by the Sundance Institute and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, also participated in the Science in Film Forum Panel at the Festival. The members of the 2013 Sloan Jury were: Paula Apsell (Senior Executive Producer, Nova and Nova ScienceNow, Director, Wgbh Science Unit), Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Fountain, Pi), Scott Burns (writer, Contagion, Pu-239, The Informant and producer, An Inconvenient Truth), Dr. André Fenton (Professor of Neural Science at the Center for Neural Science at New York University), Dr. Lisa Randall (Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science, Harvard University, author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World).
2013 marks the 10th Anniversary of the Alfred P. Sloan Science in Film initiative, a collaboration between Sundance Institute and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the development and presentation of film projects that explore science and technology ideas, or depict scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in engaging new ways. Activities include the Science in Film Forum, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Sloan Commissioning Grant, and the Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Scientists, engineers, mathematicians are – like filmmakers - some of the most imaginative and adventurous thinkers of our time, and the Alfred P. Sloan Science in Film initiative has fostered awareness of and engagement with these fascinating themes in independent film for the last 10 years.”
"We are thrilled to celebrate our tenth anniversary with Sundance, which has been such a great partner in our nationwide effort to encourage filmmakers to engage with science and technology themes and characters,” said Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Anyone who looks at the incredible list of winning films, from Shane Carruth's Primer and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man to Jake Scheirer’sRobot and Frank and Musa Syeed's Valley of Saints—or at the amazing screenplays that have been developed through the Sloan Fellowship at Sundance Institute Labs and the Sloan Commissioning Grant—will see that science and technology can reveal the human condition in ways previously unseen and undreamt of."
For more information about the Science in Film initiative, along with updated content, a complete list of supported filmmakers, trailers for completed films, and an interview with Jake Schreier (director, Robot and Frank, 2012 Sloan Prize Winner), visit www.sundance.org/science-in-film.
Feature Film Prize Jury
The Sloan Jury determines the recipient of the Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival which is presented to an outstanding Festival feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. The Prize includes a $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Previous Alfred P. Sloan Prize Winners include: Jake Schreier and Christopher Ford, Robot & Frank, and Musa Syeed, Valley of Saints (2012); Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, Another Earth (2011); Diane Bell, Obselidia(2010); Max Mayer, Adam (2009); Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (2008); Shi-Zheng Chen, Dark Matter (2007); Andrucha Waddington, The House of Sand (2006); Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005), Shane Carruth, Primer(2004) and Marc Decena, Dopamine (2003). Several past winners have also been awarded Jury Awards at the Festival, including the Grand Jury Prize for Primer, the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Sleep Dealer and the Excellence in Cinematography Award for Obselidia.
Science in Film Forum Panel
The Science in Film Forum Panel takes place at Sundance Film Festival on January 22 at 2:30 p.m. Mt at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City. Sloan Jurors Aronofsky, Burns, Dr. Fenton and Dr. Randall will engage in conversation with moderator Paula Apsell.
Juror and Panelist Bios
Paula Apsell
As Director of the Wgbh Science Unit and Senior Executive Producer of the PBS science series Nova, Paula Apsell has overseen the production of hundreds of acclaimed science documentaries, including such distinguished miniseries as The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene, Origins with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Making Stuff with David Pogue and the magazine spin-off Nova scienceNOW. Nova is the nation’s most watched science series, a top site on pbs.org, and recipient of every major broadcasting honor, including the Emmy®, the Peabody®, and the duPont-Columbia Gold Baton. Paula has won numerous individual awards and has served on many boards including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. She was recently journalist in residence at Uc Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Darren Aronofsky
Academy Award® Nominated Director Darren Aronofsky was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His most recent film, Black Swan, won Natalie Portman the Academy Award® for Best Actress and received four other nominations, including Best Picture. The film received scores of other accolades, appeared on over 200 critical Top Ten lists, and swept the 2011 Independent Spirit Award with wins for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Cinematography. Prior to Black Swan, Darren directed The Wrestler. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the esteemed Golden Lion making it only the third American film in history to win this grand prize. He also directed The Fountain, starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, and Requiem for a Dream, which was named to over 150 Top Ten lists. Darren’s first feature, π, won the Director’s Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. He is currently at work on Noah, based on the biblical story of Noah’s ark. Among his honors, the American Film Institute gave Darren the prestigious Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal, the Stockholm Film Festival presented him the Golden Horse Visionary Award, and he has won three Independent Spirit Awards.
Scott Z. Burns
Scott Burns is screenwriter, director and producer. He wrote the original screenplay for Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Matt Damon, penned the screen adaptation of Soderbergh's The Informant! and co-wrote the Academy Award® winning Bourne Ultimatum, directed by Paul Greengrass. He was a producer on An Inconvenient Truth, the Academy Award® winning documentary, for which he received the Humanitas Prize and the Stanley Kramer Award from the Producers Guild of America. Scott recently completed production on Side Effects, a psychological thriller, slated for release in early 2013. It stars Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta Jones and Channing Tatum and is again directed by Steven Soderbergh with Scott writing and producing along with Greg Jacobs and Lorenzo Di Bonaventura. Currently, Scott is writing The Library, a stage play based on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School with Steven Soderbergh directing and Kennedy/Marshall producing. The play is under development at the Public Theater in New York City. Scott began his career in advertising and was part of the creative team responsible for the original "Got Milk?" campaign. His advertising work has been recognized by the Clio Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival.
Dr. André Fenton
Dr. André Fenton, is a neuroscientist, biomedical engineer and entrepreneur working on three related problems: how brains store information in memory; how brains coordinate knowledge to selectively activate relevant information and suppress irrelevant information; and how to record electrical activity from brain cells in freely-moving subjects. André and colleagues identified PKMzeta as the first memory storage molecule, a discovery identified by Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal, as one of the ten most important breakthroughs in all the science reported in 2006. Recordings of electrical brain activity in André’s lab are elucidating the physiology of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. It was recently discovered that preemptive cognitive training during adolescence changes the brain sufficiently to prevent the adult brain dysfunction and cognitive impairments that arises from brain damage during early life in a schizophrenia-related animal model. André is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University’s Center for Neural Science. He founded Bio-Signal Group Corp., which is developing an inexpensive, miniature wireless Eeg system for functional brain monitoring of patients in emergency medicine applications and other clinical scenarios.
Dr. Lisa Randall
Dr. Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University where she is Frank J. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. Her research connects theoretical insights addressing puzzles in our current understanding of the properties of matter, the universe, and space. Dr. Randall is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. Professor Randall was included in Time Magazine's “100 Most Influential People” of 2007, was among Esquire Magazine's “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century," and was one of 40 people featured in “The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary issue" in 2008. Dr. Randall's two books, Warped Passages (2005) and Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2011) were featured on the lists of New York Times 100 Most Influential Books. Her ebook, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space, was published last summer.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Founded in 1934, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a non-profit philanthropy that makes grants in science, technology and economic performance. This Sloan-Sundance partnership forms part of a broader national program by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to stimulate leading artists in film, television, and theater; to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology; and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the popular imagination. Over the past decade, the Foundation has partnered with some of the top film schools in the country – including AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Nyu, UCLA, and USC – and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production and an annual first-feature award for alumni. The Foundation has also started an annual Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival and initiated new screenwriting and film production workshops at the Hamptons and Tribeca Film Festival and with Film Independent. As more finished films emerge from this developmental pipeline—four features were completed this year, with half a dozen more on deck—the foundation has also partnered with the Coolidge Corner Theater and the Arthouse Convergence to screen science films in up to 40 theaters nationwide. The Foundation also has an active theater program and commissions over a dozen science plays each year from the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and Playwright Horizons.
The Sundance Film Festival®
A program of the non-profit Sundance Institute®, the Festival has introduced global audiences to some of the most ground-breaking films of the past two decades, including sex, lies, and videotape, Maria Full of Grace, The Cove, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, An Inconvenient Truth, Precious, Trouble the Water, and Napoleon Dynamite, and through its New Frontier initiative, has showcased the cinematic works of media artists including Isaac Julien, Doug Aitken, Pierre Huyghe, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Matthew Barney. The 2013 Sundance Film Festival® sponsors include: Presenting Sponsors – Hp, Acura, Sundance Channel and Chase Sapphire PreferredSM; Leadership Sponsors – Directv, Entertainment Weekly, Focus Forward, a partnership between Ge and Cinelan, Southwest Airlines, Sprint and YouTube; Sustaining Sponsors – Adobe, Canada Goose, Canon U.S.A., Inc., CÎRoc Ultra Premium Vodka, FilterForGood®, a partnership between Brita® and Nalgene®, Hilton HHonors and Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, Intel Corporation, L'Oréal Paris, Recycled Paper Greetings, Stella Artois® and Time Warner Inc. Sundance Institute recognizes critical support from the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development, and the State of Utah as Festival Host State. The support of these organizations will defray costs associated with the 10-day Festival and the nonprofit Sundance Institute's year-round programs for independent film and theatre artists. www.sundance.org/festival.
Sundance Institute
Founded by Robert Redford in 1981, Sundance Institute is a global, nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to nurturing artistic expression in film and theater, and to supporting intercultural dialogue between artists and audiences. The Institute promotes independent storytelling to unite, inform and inspire, regardless of geo-political, social, religious or cultural differences. Internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival and its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, film composers, playwrights and theatre artists, Sundance Institute has nurtured such projects as Born into Brothels, Trouble the Water, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amreeka, An Inconvenient Truth, Spring Awakening, Light in the Piazza and Angels in America. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
2013 marks the 10th Anniversary of the Alfred P. Sloan Science in Film initiative, a collaboration between Sundance Institute and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the development and presentation of film projects that explore science and technology ideas, or depict scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in engaging new ways. Activities include the Science in Film Forum, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Sloan Commissioning Grant, and the Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Scientists, engineers, mathematicians are – like filmmakers - some of the most imaginative and adventurous thinkers of our time, and the Alfred P. Sloan Science in Film initiative has fostered awareness of and engagement with these fascinating themes in independent film for the last 10 years.”
"We are thrilled to celebrate our tenth anniversary with Sundance, which has been such a great partner in our nationwide effort to encourage filmmakers to engage with science and technology themes and characters,” said Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “Anyone who looks at the incredible list of winning films, from Shane Carruth's Primer and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man to Jake Scheirer’sRobot and Frank and Musa Syeed's Valley of Saints—or at the amazing screenplays that have been developed through the Sloan Fellowship at Sundance Institute Labs and the Sloan Commissioning Grant—will see that science and technology can reveal the human condition in ways previously unseen and undreamt of."
For more information about the Science in Film initiative, along with updated content, a complete list of supported filmmakers, trailers for completed films, and an interview with Jake Schreier (director, Robot and Frank, 2012 Sloan Prize Winner), visit www.sundance.org/science-in-film.
Feature Film Prize Jury
The Sloan Jury determines the recipient of the Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival which is presented to an outstanding Festival feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. The Prize includes a $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Previous Alfred P. Sloan Prize Winners include: Jake Schreier and Christopher Ford, Robot & Frank, and Musa Syeed, Valley of Saints (2012); Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, Another Earth (2011); Diane Bell, Obselidia(2010); Max Mayer, Adam (2009); Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (2008); Shi-Zheng Chen, Dark Matter (2007); Andrucha Waddington, The House of Sand (2006); Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005), Shane Carruth, Primer(2004) and Marc Decena, Dopamine (2003). Several past winners have also been awarded Jury Awards at the Festival, including the Grand Jury Prize for Primer, the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Sleep Dealer and the Excellence in Cinematography Award for Obselidia.
Science in Film Forum Panel
The Science in Film Forum Panel takes place at Sundance Film Festival on January 22 at 2:30 p.m. Mt at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City. Sloan Jurors Aronofsky, Burns, Dr. Fenton and Dr. Randall will engage in conversation with moderator Paula Apsell.
Juror and Panelist Bios
Paula Apsell
As Director of the Wgbh Science Unit and Senior Executive Producer of the PBS science series Nova, Paula Apsell has overseen the production of hundreds of acclaimed science documentaries, including such distinguished miniseries as The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene, Origins with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Making Stuff with David Pogue and the magazine spin-off Nova scienceNOW. Nova is the nation’s most watched science series, a top site on pbs.org, and recipient of every major broadcasting honor, including the Emmy®, the Peabody®, and the duPont-Columbia Gold Baton. Paula has won numerous individual awards and has served on many boards including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. She was recently journalist in residence at Uc Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Darren Aronofsky
Academy Award® Nominated Director Darren Aronofsky was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His most recent film, Black Swan, won Natalie Portman the Academy Award® for Best Actress and received four other nominations, including Best Picture. The film received scores of other accolades, appeared on over 200 critical Top Ten lists, and swept the 2011 Independent Spirit Award with wins for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Cinematography. Prior to Black Swan, Darren directed The Wrestler. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the esteemed Golden Lion making it only the third American film in history to win this grand prize. He also directed The Fountain, starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, and Requiem for a Dream, which was named to over 150 Top Ten lists. Darren’s first feature, π, won the Director’s Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. He is currently at work on Noah, based on the biblical story of Noah’s ark. Among his honors, the American Film Institute gave Darren the prestigious Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal, the Stockholm Film Festival presented him the Golden Horse Visionary Award, and he has won three Independent Spirit Awards.
Scott Z. Burns
Scott Burns is screenwriter, director and producer. He wrote the original screenplay for Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Matt Damon, penned the screen adaptation of Soderbergh's The Informant! and co-wrote the Academy Award® winning Bourne Ultimatum, directed by Paul Greengrass. He was a producer on An Inconvenient Truth, the Academy Award® winning documentary, for which he received the Humanitas Prize and the Stanley Kramer Award from the Producers Guild of America. Scott recently completed production on Side Effects, a psychological thriller, slated for release in early 2013. It stars Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta Jones and Channing Tatum and is again directed by Steven Soderbergh with Scott writing and producing along with Greg Jacobs and Lorenzo Di Bonaventura. Currently, Scott is writing The Library, a stage play based on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School with Steven Soderbergh directing and Kennedy/Marshall producing. The play is under development at the Public Theater in New York City. Scott began his career in advertising and was part of the creative team responsible for the original "Got Milk?" campaign. His advertising work has been recognized by the Clio Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival.
Dr. André Fenton
Dr. André Fenton, is a neuroscientist, biomedical engineer and entrepreneur working on three related problems: how brains store information in memory; how brains coordinate knowledge to selectively activate relevant information and suppress irrelevant information; and how to record electrical activity from brain cells in freely-moving subjects. André and colleagues identified PKMzeta as the first memory storage molecule, a discovery identified by Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal, as one of the ten most important breakthroughs in all the science reported in 2006. Recordings of electrical brain activity in André’s lab are elucidating the physiology of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. It was recently discovered that preemptive cognitive training during adolescence changes the brain sufficiently to prevent the adult brain dysfunction and cognitive impairments that arises from brain damage during early life in a schizophrenia-related animal model. André is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University’s Center for Neural Science. He founded Bio-Signal Group Corp., which is developing an inexpensive, miniature wireless Eeg system for functional brain monitoring of patients in emergency medicine applications and other clinical scenarios.
Dr. Lisa Randall
Dr. Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University where she is Frank J. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science. Her research connects theoretical insights addressing puzzles in our current understanding of the properties of matter, the universe, and space. Dr. Randall is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees. Professor Randall was included in Time Magazine's “100 Most Influential People” of 2007, was among Esquire Magazine's “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century," and was one of 40 people featured in “The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary issue" in 2008. Dr. Randall's two books, Warped Passages (2005) and Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2011) were featured on the lists of New York Times 100 Most Influential Books. Her ebook, Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space, was published last summer.
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Founded in 1934, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a non-profit philanthropy that makes grants in science, technology and economic performance. This Sloan-Sundance partnership forms part of a broader national program by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to stimulate leading artists in film, television, and theater; to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology; and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the popular imagination. Over the past decade, the Foundation has partnered with some of the top film schools in the country – including AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Nyu, UCLA, and USC – and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production and an annual first-feature award for alumni. The Foundation has also started an annual Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival and initiated new screenwriting and film production workshops at the Hamptons and Tribeca Film Festival and with Film Independent. As more finished films emerge from this developmental pipeline—four features were completed this year, with half a dozen more on deck—the foundation has also partnered with the Coolidge Corner Theater and the Arthouse Convergence to screen science films in up to 40 theaters nationwide. The Foundation also has an active theater program and commissions over a dozen science plays each year from the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and Playwright Horizons.
The Sundance Film Festival®
A program of the non-profit Sundance Institute®, the Festival has introduced global audiences to some of the most ground-breaking films of the past two decades, including sex, lies, and videotape, Maria Full of Grace, The Cove, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, An Inconvenient Truth, Precious, Trouble the Water, and Napoleon Dynamite, and through its New Frontier initiative, has showcased the cinematic works of media artists including Isaac Julien, Doug Aitken, Pierre Huyghe, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Matthew Barney. The 2013 Sundance Film Festival® sponsors include: Presenting Sponsors – Hp, Acura, Sundance Channel and Chase Sapphire PreferredSM; Leadership Sponsors – Directv, Entertainment Weekly, Focus Forward, a partnership between Ge and Cinelan, Southwest Airlines, Sprint and YouTube; Sustaining Sponsors – Adobe, Canada Goose, Canon U.S.A., Inc., CÎRoc Ultra Premium Vodka, FilterForGood®, a partnership between Brita® and Nalgene®, Hilton HHonors and Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, Intel Corporation, L'Oréal Paris, Recycled Paper Greetings, Stella Artois® and Time Warner Inc. Sundance Institute recognizes critical support from the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development, and the State of Utah as Festival Host State. The support of these organizations will defray costs associated with the 10-day Festival and the nonprofit Sundance Institute's year-round programs for independent film and theatre artists. www.sundance.org/festival.
Sundance Institute
Founded by Robert Redford in 1981, Sundance Institute is a global, nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to nurturing artistic expression in film and theater, and to supporting intercultural dialogue between artists and audiences. The Institute promotes independent storytelling to unite, inform and inspire, regardless of geo-political, social, religious or cultural differences. Internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival and its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, film composers, playwrights and theatre artists, Sundance Institute has nurtured such projects as Born into Brothels, Trouble the Water, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amreeka, An Inconvenient Truth, Spring Awakening, Light in the Piazza and Angels in America. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
- 2/2/2013
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
A week long near-drought brings a condensed version Your Netflix Instant Weekend this week. There very few titles of note added, though there are still a few gems to be found. If you're looking for other options, don't forget you can always look at entries from previous weeks for other ideas of titles to add to your queue! This week we're going to travel South of the border for a thriller and some sci-fi from Mexico.
Read more on Your Netflix Instant Weekend: Bajo La Sal, Sleep Dealer, and more...
Other articles that you might like:
Your Netflix Instant Weekend: My Name Is Nobody, Cloud 9, and more Your Netflix Instant Weekend: BMX Bandits, The House Of Yes, and more Your Netflix Instant Weekend: Jar City, The Horseman, and more
Other articles that you might like: Your Netflix Instant Weekend: My Name Is Nobody, Cloud 9, and more Your Netflix Instant Weekend: BMX Bandits,...
Read more on Your Netflix Instant Weekend: Bajo La Sal, Sleep Dealer, and more...
Other articles that you might like:
Your Netflix Instant Weekend: My Name Is Nobody, Cloud 9, and more Your Netflix Instant Weekend: BMX Bandits, The House Of Yes, and more Your Netflix Instant Weekend: Jar City, The Horseman, and more
Other articles that you might like: Your Netflix Instant Weekend: My Name Is Nobody, Cloud 9, and more Your Netflix Instant Weekend: BMX Bandits,...
- 5/11/2012
- by Brian Kelley
- GordonandtheWhale
Known for his neo-realist film about the plight of Latin American immigrants living in New York City, "La Ciudad," indie writer/director David Riker has spent the better part of 14 years evolving story of his latest feature, "The Girl," which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week. In the minimalist drama, Abbie Cornish plays Ashley, a minimum wage earner working in a podunk South Texas chain store, who is determined to get her son back; taken by child services after a drunken mistake. She finds out her wandering, absentee father (Will Patton) is on a self-proclaimed "lucky streak," which turns out to mean he's using his truck driving job to sneak Mexican immigrants into the country. When she tries her hand at it out of desperation, it goes terribly wrong -- except she now has to deal with Rosa (Maritza Santiago Hernandez), a little girl that forces her to...
- 4/26/2012
- by John Lichman
- The Playlist
#22. The Girl - David Riker It has been a long time coming for David Riker's sophomore to arrive - like Derek Cianfrance we're talking more than a decade between 1998's La Ciudad and next year's The Girl. Riker did make a blip at the fest for co-writing the award winning Sleep Dealer and this border crossing drama was workshopped at Sundance in 2007 and was one of the 2009 Sundance Nhk Filmmaker Award winners. This should receive a U.S Dramatic Comp. showing. Gist: A young mother (Cornish) from South Texas is thrown into an unexpected and life-changing journey when her attempt to smuggle immigrants across the border goes terribly wrong. Producers: Paul Mezey (Ioncinema.com Preview Page // IMDb Link) ...
- 11/9/2011
- IONCINEMA.com
The Sundance Institute has announced fourteen projects for its 30th director and screenwriting labs. To be held at the Sundance Resort in Utah from May 30-June 30, 2011, the lucky lab participants are listed below, along with details of their selves and their feature projects. Here’s the official word from the Institute:
Sundance Institute today announced the 14 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah May 30 – June 30, 2011. Under the leadership of Michelle Satter, Director of the Sundance Feature Film Program, and the artistic direction of Gyula Gazdag, the projects selected for this year’s program include emerging filmmakers and projects from the United States, Israel, Romania, Mexico, the Philippines and Algeria. Sundance Institute is marking the 30thanniversary of its first Directors Lab, led by Robert Redford and Satter in 1981.
Over the course of the Directors Lab, Fellows work with an accomplished group of Creative Advisors,...
Sundance Institute today announced the 14 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah May 30 – June 30, 2011. Under the leadership of Michelle Satter, Director of the Sundance Feature Film Program, and the artistic direction of Gyula Gazdag, the projects selected for this year’s program include emerging filmmakers and projects from the United States, Israel, Romania, Mexico, the Philippines and Algeria. Sundance Institute is marking the 30thanniversary of its first Directors Lab, led by Robert Redford and Satter in 1981.
Over the course of the Directors Lab, Fellows work with an accomplished group of Creative Advisors,...
- 5/2/2011
- by admin
- Moving Pictures Magazine
The Sundance Institute has announced fourteen projects for its 30th director and screenwriting labs. To be held at the Sundance Resort in Utah from May 30-June 30, 2011, the lucky lab participants are listed below, along with details of their selves and their feature projects. Here’s the official word from the Institute:
Sundance Institute today announced the 14 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah May 30 – June 30, 2011. Under the leadership of Michelle Satter, Director of the Sundance Feature Film Program, and the artistic direction of Gyula Gazdag, the projects selected for this year’s program include emerging filmmakers and projects from the United States, Israel, Romania, Mexico, the Philippines and Algeria. Sundance Institute is marking the 30thanniversary of its first Directors Lab, led by Robert Redford and Satter in 1981.
Over the course of the Directors Lab, Fellows work with an accomplished group of Creative Advisors,...
Sundance Institute today announced the 14 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah May 30 – June 30, 2011. Under the leadership of Michelle Satter, Director of the Sundance Feature Film Program, and the artistic direction of Gyula Gazdag, the projects selected for this year’s program include emerging filmmakers and projects from the United States, Israel, Romania, Mexico, the Philippines and Algeria. Sundance Institute is marking the 30thanniversary of its first Directors Lab, led by Robert Redford and Satter in 1981.
Over the course of the Directors Lab, Fellows work with an accomplished group of Creative Advisors,...
- 5/2/2011
- by admin
- Moving Pictures Network
One of the ways the Spirit Awards has continued to celebrate what's new and next has been by honoring genre films that are typically overlooked when it comes to year-end ceremonies and top ten lists. After all, what other non-genre specific awards show would've had the gumption to put up "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" for Best Feature as the Spirits did in 1995? Yet that surprising nod shouldn't come as all that surprising to those who have followed the Spirit Awards through the years, where horror and sci-fi have long been an integral part of the proceedings, not only to highlight what's been the best for a particular year, but what new voices are on the horizon.
Naturally, the Best First Feature category has been a hotbed for filmmakers who quickly make their mark with genre films. Although audiences didn't immediately embrace Richard Kelly's time-travel drama "Donnie Darko" in 2002, the...
Naturally, the Best First Feature category has been a hotbed for filmmakers who quickly make their mark with genre films. Although audiences didn't immediately embrace Richard Kelly's time-travel drama "Donnie Darko" in 2002, the...
- 2/27/2011
- by IFC
- ifc.com
hollywoodnews.com: The Weinstein Company (TWC) announced today that it has acquired domestic rights to Jesse Peretz’s new film My Idiot Brother, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The company also acquired distribution rights for the U.K., Germany, France and Japan. TWC will partner on the acquisition with Ron Burkle, who previously backed TWC founders Harvey and Bob Weinsteins’ bid to acquire Miramax Films and its library. Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer, Steve Coogan, Hugh Dancy, Rashida Jones, Kathryn Hahn, Shirley Knight, Tj Miller, Janet Montgomery and Adam Scott star in the film, a comedy about family and the sacrifices it takes to deal with them.
Written by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall and based on a story by Evgenia Peretz and Jesse Peretz, My Idiot Brother is directed by Jesse Peretz, and produced by Anthony Bregman for Likely Story...
Written by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall and based on a story by Evgenia Peretz and Jesse Peretz, My Idiot Brother is directed by Jesse Peretz, and produced by Anthony Bregman for Likely Story...
- 1/24/2011
- by HollywoodNews.com
- Hollywoodnews.com
It appears that Abbie Cornish is grown up enough to take on mother roles. When David Riker's The Girl was being pre-sold in Cannes this May, producers were attaching Emily Blunt in the white-trashy type of role. Cross off Blunt and add Cornish say the Screen Daily folk. To be directed by David Riker (scribe for 2008's Sleep Dealer) and based on his 2009 Sundance/Nhk International Filmmakers Award winning screenplay, Cornish would play a young Texan mother who loses her child to foster care and begins smuggling Mexicans across the border. When her quick money scheme fails, she ends up travelling across Mexico with an orphaned eight year old girl from Oaxaca for company. Cornish who has Sucker Punch, The Dark Fields and W.E all in post production, is free as a bird right now and is apparently circling the Alien reboot/prequel. I'm not sure what shooting dates...
- 10/19/2010
- IONCINEMA.com
Getting a little less attention than glossier fare like "The Avengers" and "Cowboys & Aliens" in the four-day firestorm of Comic-Con unveilings the past weekend was the announcement that "A Contract With God" was headed to the big screen, indie-style.
Will Eisner's masterpiece, which consists of four semi-autobiographical short stories set in the Bronx and its environs in the 1930s, is considered a landmark of the form. It's one of the main texts, along with "Watchmen" and "Maus," that gets brought up by people making the case for the potential of comic books and graphic novels as art forms.
Each of the four parts of "A Contract With God" will be handled, anthology-style, by one of four up-and-coming indie filmmakers. The dream team and the segments they'll each handle:
Sean Baker: "Cookalien"
One of the creators of the "Greg the Bunny" franchise, formerly of IFC, then Fox, then IFC again,...
Will Eisner's masterpiece, which consists of four semi-autobiographical short stories set in the Bronx and its environs in the 1930s, is considered a landmark of the form. It's one of the main texts, along with "Watchmen" and "Maus," that gets brought up by people making the case for the potential of comic books and graphic novels as art forms.
Each of the four parts of "A Contract With God" will be handled, anthology-style, by one of four up-and-coming indie filmmakers. The dream team and the segments they'll each handle:
Sean Baker: "Cookalien"
One of the creators of the "Greg the Bunny" franchise, formerly of IFC, then Fox, then IFC again,...
- 7/30/2010
- by Alison Willmore
- ifc.com
We are becoming familiar with the idea that filming graphic novels rarely works out the way we might hope. Alan Moore disinherits most adaptations of his work, big-budget Watchmen drastically changed the story (managing only marginal artistic success, and mixed reactions), and Will Eisner‘s The Spirit quickly became a laughing stock.
There is something very different going on in graphic novels, a subject about which Will Eisner had much to say. Born in 1917, and considered by most the father, grandfather, or otherwise supreme chief of the graphic novel format (or sequential art), Eisner’s work not only led the way for the form to become what it is today, but like many forerunners, is better than anything that followed to boot.
We’re giving it another shot now, with his treasure, A Contract with God. Set to film as distinct(ish) segments directed by Tze Chun, Alex Rivera, Barry Jenkins and Sean Baker,...
There is something very different going on in graphic novels, a subject about which Will Eisner had much to say. Born in 1917, and considered by most the father, grandfather, or otherwise supreme chief of the graphic novel format (or sequential art), Eisner’s work not only led the way for the form to become what it is today, but like many forerunners, is better than anything that followed to boot.
We’re giving it another shot now, with his treasure, A Contract with God. Set to film as distinct(ish) segments directed by Tze Chun, Alex Rivera, Barry Jenkins and Sean Baker,...
- 7/29/2010
- by Marc Eastman
- AreYouScreening.com
The graphic novel, A Contract With God And Other Tenement Stories, published in 1978 by the late cartoonist, Will Eisner, is being adapted into a feature-length film with 4 directors attached to direct each of the four short stories the book tells – A Contract With God, The Super, The Street Singer, and Cookalein. All 4 stories, said to be semi-autobiographical, are mostly set in a Bronx tenement in the 1930s, and are centered on common themes of first-generation immigrant experiences, across different cultures.
I haven’t read it, but maybe some of you have. It’s said to be a critically acclaimed landmark work, containing “jarringly bleak” stories of “life, death, faith and failure.”
So, who are the 4 lucky directors attached to helm each of the 4 stories that’ll make up the feature film? Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer), Tze Chun (Children of Invention), Sean Baker (The Prince Of Broadway), and, of course, as...
I haven’t read it, but maybe some of you have. It’s said to be a critically acclaimed landmark work, containing “jarringly bleak” stories of “life, death, faith and failure.”
So, who are the 4 lucky directors attached to helm each of the 4 stories that’ll make up the feature film? Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer), Tze Chun (Children of Invention), Sean Baker (The Prince Of Broadway), and, of course, as...
- 7/29/2010
- by Tambay
- ShadowAndAct
Hollywood is powering through the existing comic-book proerties on shelves, working their way from the obvious Spideys and Batmans and onto more obscuro works of graphic storytelling like The Green Hornet and Ant Man. So it is only right that it's time to now revisit one of the most heralded comic creators, Will Eisner.
While the most recent Eisner adaptation, The Spirit, wasn't too much of a success, producers are hoping to make a better go of his short-story collection A Contract With God, often misconstrued as the first ever graphic novel.
A merry band of screenwriters will team up to adapt one story each, under the watchful eye of producer Darren Dean. Writer/ Directors include Alex Rivera, (Sleep Dealer); Tze Chun (Children of Invention); Barry Jenkins, (Medicine for Melancholy); and Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway).
It's unclear which scribe will take which story just yet, but Eisner's semi-autobiographical book...
While the most recent Eisner adaptation, The Spirit, wasn't too much of a success, producers are hoping to make a better go of his short-story collection A Contract With God, often misconstrued as the first ever graphic novel.
A merry band of screenwriters will team up to adapt one story each, under the watchful eye of producer Darren Dean. Writer/ Directors include Alex Rivera, (Sleep Dealer); Tze Chun (Children of Invention); Barry Jenkins, (Medicine for Melancholy); and Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway).
It's unclear which scribe will take which story just yet, but Eisner's semi-autobiographical book...
- 7/29/2010
- Screenrush
Will Eisner’s graphic novel A Contract With God is being adapted into a live-action feature, and producer Darren Dean will be in charge for the adaptation.
This definitely looks good, since four screenwriters will be behind the short stories that makes up the novel: Alex Rivera, Tze Chun, Barry Jenkins and Sean Baker. But, we guess that this kind of story deserves the best team…
Here’s a description: “The work consists of four short stories – A Contract With God, The Super, The Street Singer, and Cookalein – all set in a Bronx tenement in the 1930s, with the last story also taking place at a summer getaway for Jews. The stories are semi-autobiographical, with Eisner drawing heavily on his own childhood experiences as well as those of his contemporaries.
Utilizing his talents for expressive lettering and cartoonish figures, he links the narratives by the common setting and the common...
This definitely looks good, since four screenwriters will be behind the short stories that makes up the novel: Alex Rivera, Tze Chun, Barry Jenkins and Sean Baker. But, we guess that this kind of story deserves the best team…
Here’s a description: “The work consists of four short stories – A Contract With God, The Super, The Street Singer, and Cookalein – all set in a Bronx tenement in the 1930s, with the last story also taking place at a summer getaway for Jews. The stories are semi-autobiographical, with Eisner drawing heavily on his own childhood experiences as well as those of his contemporaries.
Utilizing his talents for expressive lettering and cartoonish figures, he links the narratives by the common setting and the common...
- 7/29/2010
- by Fiona
- Filmofilia
Though many will agree that The Spirit may indeed be one of the worst comic book movies of all-time, that doesn't take away any of writer Will Eisner's influence on graphic novels and their eventual acceptance as true form of literature. As a matter of fact, Eisner's graphic novel which brought credibility to the medium is now heading to the big screen. THR reports A Contract with God will be adapted into a live-action film with directors Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer), Tze Chun (Children of Invention), Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy) and Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway) each helming one chapter of the story on screen. A Contract with God is essentially the first illustrated story to break away from the comic book moniker to become the first graphic novel. The works within re-create the neighborhood of Will Eisner's youth through a quartet of four interwoven stories which...
- 7/29/2010
- by Ethan Anderton
- firstshowing.net
Last time a Will Eisner comic reached the screen, it was in the distinctly peculiar form of Frank Miller's The Spirit. It sounds as if a proposed adaptation of Eisner's graphic novel A Contract With God will be treated with more reverence however, with producer Bob Schreck announcing "we are well aware that the work ahead has a very high bar of excellence to aspire to, set by Mr Eisner's pioneering achievements".The book contains four segments - The Super, The Street Singer, Cookalein, and A Contract With God itself - each drawing on Eisner's childhood experiences in the tenements of New York's Bronx district. The sometimes jarringly bleak tales of "life, death, faith and failure" were Eisner's first attempt to break out of the funny pages.As befits a collection of four stories, the film version will be a portmanteau affair, with four directors tackling a chapter each.
- 7/29/2010
- EmpireOnline
Will Eisner's classic graphic novel A Contract With God is going to be adapted into a live-action feature film by writer/producer Darren Dean. Dean hasn't really done much, but this graphic novel he is about to adapt better be done right. The comic is a collection of short stories that shows you just how great of a storyteller Eisner was.
The screenplay for the film is being written by four different screenwriters. Each screenwriter will take one of the short stories from the novel and adapt it. These screenwriters include Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) Tze Chun, (Children of Invention) Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy) and Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway). Darren Dean will also take a crack at one of the stories, he also co-wrote Price of Broadway.
It should be really interesting to see how this graphic novel translates to the big screen.
Heres a little synopsis...
The screenplay for the film is being written by four different screenwriters. Each screenwriter will take one of the short stories from the novel and adapt it. These screenwriters include Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) Tze Chun, (Children of Invention) Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy) and Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway). Darren Dean will also take a crack at one of the stories, he also co-wrote Price of Broadway.
It should be really interesting to see how this graphic novel translates to the big screen.
Heres a little synopsis...
- 7/28/2010
- by Venkman
- GeekTyrant
One of the enduring examples of the graphic novel as a form is Will Eisner's A Contract With God, a collection of short stories that is often called the first graphic novel. It isn't that, but it is a wonderful book, and a great example of why Eisner is considered a master of comic book storytelling. Now, and this was probably inevitable, there is a film version in development. THR says that producer Darren Dean is behind the adaptation, which is being written by four screenwriters, each of whom will take resposibility for one of the short stories that makes up the novel. They are: Alex Rivera, who wrote and directed Sleep Dealer; Tze Chun, who wrote and directed Children of Invention; Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed Medicine for Melancholy; and Sean Baker, who directed and co-wrote (with Darren Dean) Prince of Broadway. That's an interesting lineup -- all are writer/directors,...
- 7/28/2010
- by Russ Fischer
- Slash Film
A live-action feature film adaptation of Will Eisner's graphic novel "A Contract With God" is in the works says The Hollywood Reporter.
Alex Rivera ("Sleep Dealer"), Tze Chun ("Children of Invention"), Barry Jenkins ("Medicine for Melancholy") and Sean Baker ("Prince of Broadway") will direct parts of the anthology feature which recounts Eisner's memories of growing up in a New York City tenement.
Darren Dean is slated to produce.
Alex Rivera ("Sleep Dealer"), Tze Chun ("Children of Invention"), Barry Jenkins ("Medicine for Melancholy") and Sean Baker ("Prince of Broadway") will direct parts of the anthology feature which recounts Eisner's memories of growing up in a New York City tenement.
Darren Dean is slated to produce.
- 7/27/2010
- by Garth Franklin
- Dark Horizons
Will Eisner left behind a lifetime of work that goes well beyond "The Spirit" when he died in 2005, and few creators can claim to have pushed the graphic novel into popular existence the way he did with his book "A Contract with God." Now, a group of directors and producers that includes former DC Comics editor Bob Schreck have announced that they plan on bringing Eisner's story collection to film.
"Getting to know Will Eisner was one of the great honors of both my personal and professional journeys," Schreck said in a press release. "We are all well aware that the work ahead has a very high bar of excellence to aspire to set by Mr. Eisner's pioneering achievements in storytelling."
Four directors, Alex Rivera ("Sleep Dealer"), Tze Chun ("Children of Invention"), Barry Jenkins ("Medicine for Melancholy") and Sean Baker ("Warren the Ape") will each tackle the book's individual chapters,...
"Getting to know Will Eisner was one of the great honors of both my personal and professional journeys," Schreck said in a press release. "We are all well aware that the work ahead has a very high bar of excellence to aspire to set by Mr. Eisner's pioneering achievements in storytelling."
Four directors, Alex Rivera ("Sleep Dealer"), Tze Chun ("Children of Invention"), Barry Jenkins ("Medicine for Melancholy") and Sean Baker ("Warren the Ape") will each tackle the book's individual chapters,...
- 7/26/2010
- by Brian Warmoth
- MTV Splash Page
Legendary comic book master Will Eisner’s groundbreaking graphic novel “A Contract with God” is being adapted into a live action feature film, it was announced on Saturday at Comic- Con International 2010 by the film’s producers. In what is considered by many to be one of the most influential graphic novels ever written, in “A Contract with God” Eisner utilizes the comic book format in an innovative and pioneering way to explore stories and memories from his childhood growing up in a New York City tenement. Each tale captures the brutality, fragility, and tenderness that exists among people living in close quarters in challenging economic times.
A quartet of acclaimed independent directors are attached to direct each of the graphic novel’s four adjoining chapters: Alex Rivera (“Sleep Dealer”); Tze Chun (“Children of Invention”); Barry Jenkins (“Medicine for Melancholy”); and Sean Baker (“Prince of Broadway,” MTV’s “Warren the...
A quartet of acclaimed independent directors are attached to direct each of the graphic novel’s four adjoining chapters: Alex Rivera (“Sleep Dealer”); Tze Chun (“Children of Invention”); Barry Jenkins (“Medicine for Melancholy”); and Sean Baker (“Prince of Broadway,” MTV’s “Warren the...
- 7/26/2010
- by Allan Ford
- Filmofilia
Will Eisner's graphic novel "A Contract With God" is being adapted into a live-action feature by writer-producer Darren Dean.
"God" recounts Eisner's memories of growing up in a New York City tenement, and four directors, who will each helm one chapter of the tale, have lined up to bring it to the screen.
The quartet consists of Alex Rivera ("Sleep Dealer"), Tze Chun ("Children of Invention"), Barry Jenkins ("Medicine for Melancholy") and Sean Baker ("Prince of Broadway").
Dean -- who also co-wrote and produced "Prince of Broadway," which will be released by Elephant Eye Films in the fall -- will produce the adaptation under the auspices of the Eisner estate. Bob Schreck and Michael Ruggiero will serve as co-executive producers, with Tommy Oliver as co-producer and Mark Rabinowitz as associate producer.
The project was announced at Comic-Con at the 22nd annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, honoring achievement in American comic books.
"God" recounts Eisner's memories of growing up in a New York City tenement, and four directors, who will each helm one chapter of the tale, have lined up to bring it to the screen.
The quartet consists of Alex Rivera ("Sleep Dealer"), Tze Chun ("Children of Invention"), Barry Jenkins ("Medicine for Melancholy") and Sean Baker ("Prince of Broadway").
Dean -- who also co-wrote and produced "Prince of Broadway," which will be released by Elephant Eye Films in the fall -- will produce the adaptation under the auspices of the Eisner estate. Bob Schreck and Michael Ruggiero will serve as co-executive producers, with Tommy Oliver as co-producer and Mark Rabinowitz as associate producer.
The project was announced at Comic-Con at the 22nd annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, honoring achievement in American comic books.
- 7/25/2010
- by By Gregg Kilday
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Based on Will Eisner's graphic novel
SuperHeroHype received the following press release about a movie adaptation of Will Eisner's "A Contract with God":
Legendary comic book master Will Eisner's groundbreaking graphic novel "A Contract with God" is being adapted into a live action feature film, it was announced this evening at Comic- Con International 2010 by the film's producers. In what is considered by many to be one of the most influential graphic novels ever written, in "A Contract with God" Eisner utilizes the comic book format in an innovative and pioneering way to explore stories and memories from his childhood growing up in a New York City tenement. Each tale captures the brutality, fragility, and tenderness that exists among people living in close quarters in challenging economic times.
A quartet of acclaimed independent directors are attached to direct each of the graphic novel's four adjoining chapters:...
SuperHeroHype received the following press release about a movie adaptation of Will Eisner's "A Contract with God":
Legendary comic book master Will Eisner's groundbreaking graphic novel "A Contract with God" is being adapted into a live action feature film, it was announced this evening at Comic- Con International 2010 by the film's producers. In what is considered by many to be one of the most influential graphic novels ever written, in "A Contract with God" Eisner utilizes the comic book format in an innovative and pioneering way to explore stories and memories from his childhood growing up in a New York City tenement. Each tale captures the brutality, fragility, and tenderness that exists among people living in close quarters in challenging economic times.
A quartet of acclaimed independent directors are attached to direct each of the graphic novel's four adjoining chapters:...
- 7/24/2010
- by editor@comingsoon.net (SuperHeroHype)
- Superherohype
By Sean O’Connell
Hollywoodnews.com: Comic book icon Will Eisner’s groundbreaking graphic novel, “A Contract with God,” is being adapted into a live-action feature film, it was announced last night at Comic- Con by the film’s producers.
One of the industry’s most influential graphic novels, “Contract” explores stories and memories from Eisner’s childhood spent growing up in a New York City tenement. Each tale captures the brutality, fragility, and tenderness that exists among people living in close quarters in challenging economic times.
A quartet of acclaimed independent directors are attached to direct each of the graphic novel’s four adjoining chapters: Alex Rivera (“Sleep Dealer”); Tze Chun (“Children of Invention”); Barry Jenkins (“Medicine for Melancholy”); and Sean Baker (“Prince of Broadway,” MTV’s “Warren the Ape”). The film will be produced and adapted for the screen by Darren Dean, whose first feature “Prince of Broadway,...
Hollywoodnews.com: Comic book icon Will Eisner’s groundbreaking graphic novel, “A Contract with God,” is being adapted into a live-action feature film, it was announced last night at Comic- Con by the film’s producers.
One of the industry’s most influential graphic novels, “Contract” explores stories and memories from Eisner’s childhood spent growing up in a New York City tenement. Each tale captures the brutality, fragility, and tenderness that exists among people living in close quarters in challenging economic times.
A quartet of acclaimed independent directors are attached to direct each of the graphic novel’s four adjoining chapters: Alex Rivera (“Sleep Dealer”); Tze Chun (“Children of Invention”); Barry Jenkins (“Medicine for Melancholy”); and Sean Baker (“Prince of Broadway,” MTV’s “Warren the Ape”). The film will be produced and adapted for the screen by Darren Dean, whose first feature “Prince of Broadway,...
- 7/24/2010
- by Sean O'Connell
- Hollywoodnews.com
It's not because Haneke, Lynch or Almodóvar aren't launching their next projects at Comic Con that I'm not keeping a semi watchful eye on the mountain of news spilling out from San Diego, but when I received the following press release in my inbox, my first reaction was: whoa. Up-and-coming indie filmmakers Tze Chun, Alex Rivera, Barry Jenkins and Sean Baker are embarking on a fairly special graphic novel adaptation from none other than, Will Eisner. A Contract with God will begin lensing next year. Here's the entire press release. San Diego, CA (July 23, 2010) - Legendary comic book master Will Eisner's groundbreaking graphic novel "A Contract with God" is being adapted into a live action feature film, it was announced this evening at Comic- Con International 2010 by the film's producers. In what is considered by many to be one of the most influential graphic novels ever written, in "A...
- 7/24/2010
- IONCINEMA.com
At Comic-Con's Eisner Awards Friday night, writer-producer Darren Dean announced that he is adapting Will Eisner's graphic novel A Contract with God into an omnibus movie to be directed by four rising indie directors: San Francisco's Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy), New Yorkers Tze Chun (Children of Invention) and Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer) and bi-coastal Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway, which he co-wrote with Dean). Eisner divided the socially-conscious novel about the immigrant experience into four related segments of different lengths: "A Contract with God: (Rivera), "The Street Singer" (Chun), "The Super" (Jenkins) and "Cookalien" (Baker). Nat Sanders, Jenkins' editor on Melancholy, will edit the project. Dean will weave some characters through the four stories. Baker was the first director Dean thought of for the last, ...
- 7/24/2010
- Thompson on Hollywood
With a total of 37 features from 21 different countries, this years premier genre fest in Porto Alegre, Brazil is looking mighty fine. What are they playing you ask? Among others:
Amer (review)
Monkey Boy (review)
Psalm 21 (review)
The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (review)
and lots more. You can check out a full list of the feature films playing starting July 2nd after the break and find out more on their official website (if you know Portuguese).
Features
8th Wonderland
Amer
Black
Cold Storage
Dirty Saints
Eraser Children
Glenn, The Flying Robot
I Am Other
I Sell the Dead
Ink
Kandisha
Macabre
Monkey Boy
Mum & Dad
Must Love Death
Psalm 21
Rampage
Recortadas
Samurai Princess
Sleep Dealer
Stingray Sam
Strigoi
T.M.A.
The Ante
The Death of Alice Blue
The Door
The Horseman
The House of the Devil
The Human Centipede
The Life and Death of a Porno Gang...
Amer (review)
Monkey Boy (review)
Psalm 21 (review)
The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (review)
and lots more. You can check out a full list of the feature films playing starting July 2nd after the break and find out more on their official website (if you know Portuguese).
Features
8th Wonderland
Amer
Black
Cold Storage
Dirty Saints
Eraser Children
Glenn, The Flying Robot
I Am Other
I Sell the Dead
Ink
Kandisha
Macabre
Monkey Boy
Mum & Dad
Must Love Death
Psalm 21
Rampage
Recortadas
Samurai Princess
Sleep Dealer
Stingray Sam
Strigoi
T.M.A.
The Ante
The Death of Alice Blue
The Door
The Horseman
The House of the Devil
The Human Centipede
The Life and Death of a Porno Gang...
- 6/14/2010
- QuietEarth.us
HollywoodNews.com: Anthony Bregman of Likely Story and Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub of Big Beach announced that Paul Rudd has signed on to star in “My Idiot Brother,” a comedy about family and the sacrifices it takes to deal with them. Based on a screenplay by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall, “My Idiot Brother” will be directed by Jesse Peretz. Production is slated to begin in July in New York. Bregman, Saraf and Turtletaub will produce for their respective companies. Caroline Jaczko, Stefanie Azpiazu and Aleen Keshishian will executive produce. Rudd and Peretz have worked together previously on “The Château.” Rudd will next be seen starring in Jay Roach’s “Dinner for Schmucks” opposite Steve Carell and James Brooks’ “How Do You Know” opposite Reese Witherspoon. He will also be producing (alongside Judd Apatow, Wain, and Ken Marino) and starring in David Wain’s “Wanderlust” opposite Jennifer Aniston.
Ned (Rudd) is an idealist.
Ned (Rudd) is an idealist.
- 6/3/2010
- by HollywoodNews.com
- Hollywoodnews.com
Happy Cinco de Mayo, fellow Americans! This holiday has nothing to do with us, and yet we love to celebrate it anyway. And that's cool; there's nothing wrong with using a holiday as an excuse to learn more about a particular culture. Just make sure you take the time to find out what the day means before you engage in any drunken revelry.
The holiday extends back to the Battle of Puebla, on May 5, 1862. Outnumber Mexican armed forces beat back French invaders who were trying to lay claim to the state of Puebla. You can learn more about the holiday and its significance on MTV.com in Josh Wigler's full report. This is MTV Movies Blog though, and I'd be remiss if I didn't take some time today to shout out some of the brilliant Mexican filmmakers and films that can be found out there.
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Alejandro González Iñárritu...
The holiday extends back to the Battle of Puebla, on May 5, 1862. Outnumber Mexican armed forces beat back French invaders who were trying to lay claim to the state of Puebla. You can learn more about the holiday and its significance on MTV.com in Josh Wigler's full report. This is MTV Movies Blog though, and I'd be remiss if I didn't take some time today to shout out some of the brilliant Mexican filmmakers and films that can be found out there.
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Alejandro González Iñárritu...
- 5/5/2010
- by Adam Rosenberg
- MTV Movies Blog
Quality science fiction is a difficult thing to find. In this age of computer-generated imagery, fancy 3-D technologies and IMAX theaters, the temptation among filmmakers runs high to deliver blockbuster spectacle. While films like "Avatar" and "Transformers" fall squarely within the genre fiction realm in terms of their stories, they tend to trade thought-provoking subtext for big effects and high-concept ideas. To be fair, "Avatar" did feature some noteworthy commentary on the environment and modern-day imperialism, but much of that was lost beneath the spectacle.
We've seen some strong examples of sci-fi over the past several years: "Moon" and "District 9" in 2009; "Sleep Dealer," "Wall-e," "Sunshine," "Children of Men," "Timecrimes" and others in the years before. One name has been noticeably absent from the genre roll-call however: Andrew Niccol. His resume isn't terribly extensive, but Niccol is responsible for two of the strongest sci-fi entries of the '90s: "The Truman Show...
We've seen some strong examples of sci-fi over the past several years: "Moon" and "District 9" in 2009; "Sleep Dealer," "Wall-e," "Sunshine," "Children of Men," "Timecrimes" and others in the years before. One name has been noticeably absent from the genre roll-call however: Andrew Niccol. His resume isn't terribly extensive, but Niccol is responsible for two of the strongest sci-fi entries of the '90s: "The Truman Show...
- 4/14/2010
- by Adam Rosenberg
- MTV Movies Blog
Year: 2009
Directors: Ivan Engler / Ralph Etter
Writers: Ivan Engler / Patrick Steinmann / Thilo röscheisen
IMDb: link
Trailer: link
Review by: agentorange
Rating: 8.2 out of 10
[Editor's note: Cargo is having its North American premier at Sxsx 2010 tomorrow night. Be there, or be square.]
Those of you worried that Cargo will turn out to be just another Alien clone are going to be happy by the end of this review. Because, despite what the marketing for the film may have us believe, Cargo is not the typical space-station horror you might be expecting. It is a much grander work than that, blending classic scifi ideas about the destiny of humanity with massive visual scope and confident direction from first-time feature directors Ivan Engler and Ralph Etter. In short, Switzerland has not only produced its first large scale science fiction film, but one that showcases enough smarts and skill that it ranks among scifi cinema's best.
In all honestly I was completely taken aback when the first act of Cargo started to play.
Directors: Ivan Engler / Ralph Etter
Writers: Ivan Engler / Patrick Steinmann / Thilo röscheisen
IMDb: link
Trailer: link
Review by: agentorange
Rating: 8.2 out of 10
[Editor's note: Cargo is having its North American premier at Sxsx 2010 tomorrow night. Be there, or be square.]
Those of you worried that Cargo will turn out to be just another Alien clone are going to be happy by the end of this review. Because, despite what the marketing for the film may have us believe, Cargo is not the typical space-station horror you might be expecting. It is a much grander work than that, blending classic scifi ideas about the destiny of humanity with massive visual scope and confident direction from first-time feature directors Ivan Engler and Ralph Etter. In short, Switzerland has not only produced its first large scale science fiction film, but one that showcases enough smarts and skill that it ranks among scifi cinema's best.
In all honestly I was completely taken aback when the first act of Cargo started to play.
- 3/16/2010
- QuietEarth.us
This blog, Latin America in Sundance, will continue to be updated at least up to the day of the World Cinema round tables January 28 which Caroline Libresco inaugurated several years ago. The focus of this blog obviously will be the selection of Latin American films from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. We shall see if any creates enough of a stir - or what I consider a stir - within my purview of buying and selling (the agents surely will discover the directors and other talent without my prompting) - for a longer span of my attention. The politics of the films also interest me as Latin America is such an integral part of the USA today.
Nalip has this to say about the current state of Latino programming: "... in Nalip's 11th year, this seems worse than slow: it appears that diversity is really on a backburner.
Nalip has this to say about the current state of Latino programming: "... in Nalip's 11th year, this seems worse than slow: it appears that diversity is really on a backburner.
- 1/26/2010
- by Sydney
- Sydney's Buzz
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