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The SxSW programmer blogs on his experience wading through screeners as the festival draws near.
I always say, and it's true, the films that pain me the most are not the really bad ones but the ones that were so close to being good and missed the mark.
One of the ways that TIFF seeks to distinguish itself from other major North American festivals is by dedicating a portion of its festival to focus on Canadian film. Of course there are now dozens of festivals in Canada that purport to do the same thing, but as a top tier fest Toronto naturally commands attention that the others do not. This week TIFF announced its top ten list of Canadian films made this year.
A quick scan through the titles reveals new work from Ellen Page (Juno, Hard Candy) in The Tracey Fragments and what sounds like some amazing short work in Terminus and Farmer's Requiem. Of course some attention will be paid to David Cronenberg's new thriller Eastern Promises with Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts.
Canada's Top Ten will exhibit in Toronto for a series of nights beginning January 25th.
Over at Indiewire you can get a taste of Sundance's roster of feature films for the 2008 event in January. There really isn't enough there to get a real feel for each film, but hopefully some trailers and whatnot will surface soon on the actual Sundance site. I'm not gung-ho enough to try and hunt down the trailers and individual film web sites myself (especially since many of the filmmakers don't seem to have built sites for their films!) but there are a few docs and narrative features that have piqued my interest. I can do without the Roman Polanski documentary and the film about Palestinian rappers (it seems like everywhere you turn someone's making a documentary about hip hop), but Trouble the Water and Secrecy both look fascinating.
Of course there's still the shorts left to hear about, and of course Slamdance will announce before too long.
Who doesn't love a good list of rules for success? Doug Block, the director of one of the most fascinating personal documentaries I've seen in years, 51 Birch Street, provides his personal Ten Rules of Personal Documentary Filmmaking as a series of entries on his blog. Doug knows of whence he speaks; 51 Birch Street is both compelling and (at times) uncomfortably personal. You could do a lot worse than to take his rules to heart.
That's a pretty decent cash stake for a short film. Visit www.kcjubilee.org for full details on entering. Early deadline is November 15.
This year Apple is again running a film festival for high school and college filmmakers -- the idea is to make a film basically from scratch in 24 hours.
Thinking of participating? Check out John August's top ten tips for making a short film in a limited amount of time. My favorite: "Protein, not carbs. Because you’ll likely be working all night, sugar will send you into a crash."
Of course, the most practical is to "Go funny." This applies to documentaries as well as narrative films; if you can display a sense of humor towards your subject -- however dire -- your film is much more likely to be remembered and rewarded.
Best of luck to the participants.
New York Times article highlights the upcoming ACE Film Festival and the highly competitive NYC festival market.
Fledgling festivals must lure filmgoers with the prospect of important premieres and director appearances while promising filmmakers a sophisticated New York audience. The balance became too much for Josh Koury, who this year dissolved his own five-year old Brooklyn Underground Film Festival to concentrate on documentary making and programming at the Hamptons Film Festival.
“If I knew then what I know now, maybe I would have done things differently of course,” Mr. Koury said, noting the competitive conflict in mid-spring with the larger Brooklyn International Film Festival. “But I think that’s the beauty of film festivals like that. Real, underground, experimental cinema is an idea of do-it-yourself culture and having enough energy and gumption to just jump into something.”
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Chris Holland has been writing about movies since 1991. In 1996 he co-founded Stomp Tokyo, a film review web site described by the New York Times as "a place to indulge one's questionable cinematic taste." In 2003 Stomp Tokyo published a compendium of reviews in a book called Reel Shame: Bad Movies and the Hollywood Stars Who Made Them.
Chris now puts his expertise in movies and film festivals to use at B-Side Entertainment as the Manager of Festival Operations. He writes this blog as well as Blue Glow and contributes to Slackerwood.
Collected articles from the blog as well as original essays about preparing your film for the festival circuit are published in the book Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers, now available at Amazon.com.
E-mail Chris at chris at filmfestivalsecrets dot com.
