Trailering Lorna's Silence

Trailering You Wont Miss Me

[PR] Sundance Institute confirms Gilmore resignation

For Immediate Release
February 17, 2008
Sundance Institute Confirms Gilmore Resignation
LOS ANGELES, CA – Sundance Institute today confirmed that effective February 28, 2009, Geoffrey Gilmore is resigning his position as Director, Sundance Film Festival. Gilmore joined Sundance Institute in 1990. As Director of the Sundance Film Festival he has worked as part of a team of programmers who select films for the annual event, the preeminent showcase for independent film. From its early days Gilmore nurtured the Festival’s world cinema program, recognized the importance of independent producers and expanded the Sundance Industry Office. He was also an early force for innovation, growing the Festival’s use of state-of-the-art presentation technology.
“I have both a personal fondness for Geoff that comes from working together for two decades, as well as a deep respect for his encyclopedic knowledge of and total commitment to independent film,” said Robert Redford, President, Sundance Institute and Founder, Sundance Film Festival. ”

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Oscar09: Laurent Cantet, The Class

The original French title of Laurent Cantet’s richly observed, masterful The Class, Entre les murs,” or “Between The Walls,” is philosophically just right, but didn’t sound right in English. Still, what occurs each day in schools is seldom considered by outsiders beyond those walls, the oppressiveness felt by those within their confines, by adults who have escaped that confinement and moved on to thoughts caught between the walls of their own heads.

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Oscar09: Ari Folman, Waltz With Bashir

Images and moments from movies past sift through the mind all the time, and dozens from the past year would in spirited conversation tumble forth at daunting speed. Still, the one movie that wells up again and again as I go through the day is Ari Folman’s Oscar-nominated animated film about memories of young soldiers recollecting in middle age what the Israeli Army did in the 1982 Lebanon war. I’ve seen it three times and it’s a mystery in plain sight. I have my ideas about why children empathize better with cartoon characters than human ones and why melodrama can sometimes demonstrate emotional truths better than naturalism. But Waltz with Bashir‘s grace, ease and simple brilliance comes from the form he chose to work in, a sort of sui generis that breaks boundaries: it’s an animated documentary.
“If this film was shot by a DV camera and it was screened on a big screen, on a television, it doesn’t matter [because] the image in the end would be made out of pixels, out of dots and lines,” the bearded, elegantly dressed Folman tells me the morning after disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s arrest, but before his film’s Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Considering the question of how on earth such a thing as an “animated documentary” could exist, he continues, “It’s not the real me in your TV set, y’know. This image is made by beautiful drawings [by] very talented people. The voice is the same. The voice over would be the same. So what is more real? The pixelized image with the dots or the drawing? I mean, who decides what is more ‘real’? I dunno. I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t think it makes a big difference. It’s a matter of taste.”

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Chris Monger's looking for Picassos

Filmmaker Chris Monger drops a line to Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film, which “turned into a rant which morphed into my history of why Indie Film did not start, but died with sex lies and videotape and that’s even before I’d started on why Indie Film should also forget the form of the 90-minute theatrical feature. The future is here, we are free to try anything. And that’s the conclusion I was working towards: There’s nothing to save. We can’t hang on to what was (and what was often totally imperfect) anymore than we can hang on to newspapers. Regular Film / Studio Film / Indie Film as we know them may limp along for a while, or may even exist like Opera for a long time, but stories / moving images are not going away. Now’s the time to have fun with them. In the late 60’s early 70’s a lot of Indie Filmmakers (and I’m talking about people who processed their own film, ran their own printers – really Indie!) believed that film was at the same point that painting was at the turn of the 20th Century: Rather than being ruined by photography, painting was liberated into all the isms of the new way of seeing and looking and re-presenting. So I say, where are the Picassos and Matisses, the people who will throw away the rule book?”

"Wishes": The oddest epic ad of the week for the largest Greek phone company

Almodóvar's La Concejala antropófaga

Be, don't be M.I.A.

Ye-ye-yay: the faux Scopitones of Mareva Galanter

Trailering Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter

PiL sez "This is not a love song"

Making "The Sopranos Uncensored"

ChiTrib’s Steve Johnson interviews interviews Victor Solomon, director of “The Sopranos Uncensored”. The slightly facetious result is at the link. Bit: “I, as a devout Trinitarian, neither take part, or believe in cursing of any kind. I find it to be a filthy and disgusting act, and ultimately a way for people to punch their ticket for an eternity in hell. I created this piece as a collection of the filth that American television subjects us to, in an attempt to help shake people out of their casual response to such behavior.”

"15 Step," by Radiohead

Two brothers