Independent Films

Filmmaker Magazine

• Sundance 2023 Documentary Sales and Beyond: Stark Realities, Golden Opportunities June 2, 2023
  Distribution strategist Peter Broderick, whose articles on microbudget filmmaking were foundational in the early days of this magazine, publishes a weekly newsletter that is a must-read for anyone tracking the independent film industry. A recent edition, his report on Sundance 2023 documentary sales, has prompted discussion and clarified important current trends in non-fiction acquisitions. This […]
  Peter Broderick
• “Directing Is Being a Professionally Passionate Person”: Celine Song on Past Lives June 2, 2023
  A lived-in, swooning memory piece on the intersection of roads taken and missed, Celine Song’s Past Lives is as confident as filmmaking debuts come. “I needed to invent the way that this movie should be made. I wanted it to be the first movie of its kind to be made,” Song tells me recently during […]
  Tomris Laffly
• “Music Will be a Prism That You Can See the Whole Movie Through”: Director Zachary Wigon on Story Beats, Miles Davis and His BDSM-Themed Thriller Sanctuary May 31, 2023
  The poster for Sanctuary features a blonde Margaret Qualley whispering to a mysterious Christopher Abbott. Its imagery — a seeming femme fatale, an unknowing male prey and all the imagined chaos in between — evokes the height of the cinematic erotic thriller era. But the strength, elegance and wit of Micah Bloomberg’s (TV series Homecoming) […]
  Meredith Alloway
• “Annoying, Finicky Placement Stuff”: DP Jody Lee Lipes on Shooting Two Rachel Weiszs for Dead Ringers May 31, 2023
  Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes says that shooting an actor playing twins is like learning a new filmmaking language. By now, he’s fluent. Lipes lensed all six episodes of the 2020 HBO miniseries I Know This Much Is True, with Mark Ruffalo playing identical twins. As an added complication, the coverage of each brother was shot […]
  Matt Mulcahey
• “It Really Does Take a Village”: Ted Schaefer on Giving Birth to a Butterfly May 30, 2023
  Our projected identities—and the constant performance inherent in presenting ourselves—fuel the surrealist philosophy of Ted Schaefer’s Giving Birth to a Butterfly. The filmmaker’s directorial debut, from a script he co-wrote with author Patrick Lawler, delves into a psychedelic psychology of what truly constitutes “the self” (very fitting for a collaborative duo who met through a […]
  Natalia Keogan
• “I Had Three Art Directors and Two Cinematographers”: Rodrigo Moreno on The Delinquents at Cannes 2023 May 30, 2023
  It’s the rare three-hour film that has as light a touch as The Delinquents while keeping a deft hold on the audience. That’s partly down to its surefire bank heist plot, borrowed somewhat from Hugo Fregonese’s 1949 Argentine noir Hardly a Criminal: a longtime clerk steals enough money to retire on, stashes it, then goes […]
  Nicolas Rapold
• “The Sweat of Desperation Does Not Translate to a Series Regular”: Jeff Hiller (Back To One, Episode 255) May 30, 2023
  It is extremely hard not to love Jeff Hiller’s character Joel, opposite Bridget Everett’s Sam, on the hit HBO series Somebody Somewhere. Their friendship is sweet, revelatory, and concerningly codependent, all at the same time. On this episode, he talks about how he got good at auditioning while wondering if he’d ever play someone with […]
  Peter Rinaldi
• Cannes 2023: The Pot-au-Feu, Portraits of Ghosts May 29, 2023
  To celebrate Cannes is to celebrate film history itself—or at least so the fest would have it. But while there’s certainly meaningful and genuine overlap, any self-venerating mythology is going to breed unwelcome byproducts, as at the premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s “final” film, Trailer of a Movie That Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars.” (Its actual finality […]
  Vadim Rizov
• Cannes 2023: Awards, A Prince, Directors’ Fortnight, Close Your Eyes May 29, 2023
  Cannes wrapped another edition last weekend, and a new batch of prize winners have been announced. I’ve typically used this final wrap-up to offer brief comments on many of said winners, namely those Vadim and I didn’t already address in prior dispatches. Ruben Östlund and co. did well, though, because the only victor currently unremarked […]
  Blake Williams
• Cannes 2023: Club Zero, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell May 27, 2023
  Faith, divinity, transcendence and/or what one might otherwise call “magical” interventions remain thematic staples of arthouse filmmaking, not least in Cannes films that carve out a space for poetic languors and modest effects work which elevate non-commercial films’ often make-do or naturalistic mises-en-scène. Austere Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner is not necessarily in need of stylistic […]
  Blake Williams