If you sense an excited hum emanating out from our Pico Boulevard headquarters and spreading out across the Southland, it’s probably because we know that LA is about to get a whole lot more colorful, thanks to LA-based artist Carolyn Castaño. So keep an eye out. The official poster art for the 2016 LA Film Festival is coming soon to a lamppost, billboard or bus shelter near you! A native Angeleno, Castaño joins the ranks of acclaimed local artists who have lent their distinctive interpretation of Southern California iconography to the Festival’s visual identity in years past, including such illustrious names as Ed Ruscha and Noah Davis....

What do The Virgin Suicides, Jack Goes Boating, Welcome to the Dollhouse and The Story of a Three Day Pass have in common? They’re all debut features by acclaimed directors. All happened to also be part of the program at the inaugural First Time Fest in New York City this past spring. First Time Fest is exactly what it sounds like: a festival celebrating first-time feature films, which is aimed at discovering the next generation of great filmmakers and showcasing the debut work of acclaimed filmmakers....

TRUE DETECTIVE: NIGHT COUNTRY When You Can Watch: Now Where You Can Watch: HBO, Max Director: Issa López Cast: Jodie Foster, Kali Reis, Fiona Shaw Why We’re Excited: The fourth season of HBO’s anthology crime drama is the first one for which creator Nic Pizzolatto does not serve as the showrunner or writer; those responsibilities now fall to Mexican filmmaker Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid, Todo Mal), with the franchise returning from a five-year hiatus....

We all know Hollywood is a treacherous career path for anyone, but it’s especially brutal for female directors. Here’s a sobering stat: women directed only 6% of the top 250 U.S. grossing films in 2013, according to San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. That’s a 3% drop from between 1998 and 2012. Yes, it’s been getting worse, not better. If you’ve ever been dismayed, discouraged, outraged or all of the above by the “celluloid ceiling,” there’s an easy way to take a stand: buy a seat....

First and foremost: start thinking about PR when you’re building your budget. Sit down or stand there (really, that’s up to you) and ask yourself a few questions about the cost of things like hiring a unit photographer, hiring a publicist when you get accepted into a festival, paying travel expenses for talent to attend the festival and creating press materials. If it’s been decided, you’re hiring a publicist… time out!...

But despite temperatures dipping into the intimidating 50-degree range, this year’s Spirit Award nominees were undeterred, arriving eagerly to eat, drink, rub bespoke shoulders and celebrate a year that, despite whatever other horrors plagued the world IRL, was nevertheless a pretty damn good one for the movies—a fact that managed to spark optimism among Saturday’s attendees despite the gloomy forecast (weather and otherwise). But Saturday’s brunch wasn’t just about giving A-listers the chance to swap war stories over rectangular plates loaded up with exquisitely seasoned potato fritata....

Throughout the end of the year, we’ll be spotlighting some of our key accomplishments from the past year in the hope that you’ll consider making an end-of-year donation to help make all that we do here to empower and promote the voices and visions shaping the future of our culture possible. Like President Josh Welsh said—2016 was a big year for us. The Film Independent Spirit Awards broke new ground in recognizing the achievements of underrepresented filmmakers, as did the LA Film Festival (which relocated to its new home in Culver City) and we continued our commitment to innovative and diverse programming through Film Independent at LACMA and the Film Independent Forum....

Each of these three short narrative films center female protagonists, unmoored in the midst of an existential crisis brought on by a male counterpart. In two of the films, the male in question is a romantic foil—or at least perceived to be. The third explores the dynamic between student and educator, placing its dynamic in the context of artistic potential and the pursuit of superhuman perfection. A greater perspective on each of our protagonists’ situations is eventually presented, in a graveyard, at a party, and on stage....

From Mildred Pierce to Grey Gardens to Terms of Endearment, the complicated bond between mothers and daughters has provided cinema with a seemingly inexhaustible source of drama and rich narrative incident. Sometimes this drama is caused by the stinging absence of a mother; other times, by the smothering omnipresence of one. Often it’s even both—as a mother’s influence continues to haunt their children’s psyches in absentia and inspiring the sort of actions that make for riveting, if not always heartwarming, filmmaking....

These Tribeca-bound bangers include one fiction feature, one nonfiction feature and a fiction short. So whatever programming track you find yourself on below Canal Street in July, there’s a good chance you’ll stumble upon something with our #FiSpo impreminator. You’ll also discover three distinct tales–of contentious teen romance, manslaughter as family bonding, and the 1980s New Wave music scene. And in case you forgot, here’s a quick explanation of Film Independent Fiscal Sponsorship:...

“It is odd being here imparting wisdom, having produced this movie that is just crashing and burning at the box office,” said Blum, who still had nail polish on from being Jem at a Halloween party the night before. “Anything that any of us say should be taken with a grain of salt.” But thanks to their successes—primarily with modestly-budgeted horror franchises like Paranormal Activity, Insidious and Sinister but also with the Oscar-nominated Whiplash and the critically acclaimed HBO series The Jinx—Blumhouse Productions is still alive and well and making waves for their revolutionary model of mixing independent production with studio distribution....

Recommended by Enrique takes place in Del Rio, Texas, a tiny border town that, as the introductory voiceover admits, you’ve probably never heard of. It follows a very ambitious, very superstitious young actress, there from out of town to shoot her first film, a low-budget horror flick. The film’s crew consists entirely of overly excited teenagers, however, and the director never shows up. Staying in the same shabby motel is a lone cowboy, there to perform a mysterious job, waiting for his contact to come back to Del Rio....

Have you ever wanted to sit back back, grab a cup of coffee with your favorite filmmaker and pick their brain about the art/craft/business of visual storytelling—even if only virtually? Well, Film Independent Education’s ongoing Coffee Talks series has you covered, bringing indie film’s best writers, directors, producers, actors and more together online for engaging, freewheeling conversations delivered directly to the comfort of your own home. On the May 7 edition of the weekly Coffee Talks series, acclaimed filmmakers Lulu Wang, writer and director of The Farewell and an alum of Film Independent’s Project Involve, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood‘s Marielle Heller got together from opposite coasts for a Zoom catch-up, available live for Film Independent Members....

A huge percentage of human beings are fascinated by the fashion world, be it the art of design, the business intrigue of the fashion world or the outsized personalities behind it all. However, very few of us know the real economic and environmental cost of our current fast-fashion landscape–”fast fashion” defined here as inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in reaction to quickly-shifting style trends. Needless to say, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes, things that filmmakers from around the world have sought to portray in an honest way in documentaries and narrative films for several years....

In addition to taking home prizes at several top festivals, the film also scored a Film Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. Simien then quickly set about reimaging the project as a TV series, something the 33-year-old filmmaker says had always been his intention for the story, centered on firebrand college DJ Samantha White (played by Tessa Thompson in the film) and the various students and administrators in her orbit....

Every composer I know agrees: you have to know how to create work for yourself. When I asked Jim Dooley—who currently scores Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events—about it, he said: “When there’s no work I make work.” And even though every project (and every composer) is different, there seems to be three reoccurring methods of finding the next gig that consistently pop up as part of the story. For some, the most common method is referrals from previous collaborators and other face-to-face meetings....

Take note, emerging filmmakers: the first step to writing and directing your own feature often begins with studying an established artist with a strong body of work; an artist like Noah Baumbach—who across ten critically acclaimed features has been renowned for capturing authentic moments between characters. Week Two of this year’s Directors Close-Up featured a trio of collaborators, speaking to Baumbach’s casting and acting process: writer/director Baumbach, veteran casting director Francine Maisler and LA-based stand-up-turned-actress Martha Kelly, discussing their Film Independent Spirit Award nominated Marriage Story, currently streaming on Netflix....

Last week, we took you down memory lane, to revisit some of our favorite moments of Film Independent Forums past. But! The time for rank nostalgia has passed. Today we instead turn our eyes toward the future (four weeks into the future, to be exact) to see what’s currently on tap for Forum 2019—an event literally 18 months in the making, due to a scheduling quirk that kept the much-loved industry event off of Hollywood’s calendar for all of 2018....

If making a nonfiction film is like climbing Mt. Everest, then having an experienced documentary editor is a bit like hiring your own personal Sherpa: they possess all sorts of valuable knowledge, experience and skill for the journey ahead and are committed to helping you get to where you want to go—even if you aren’t sure where that is exactly. And the best ones will do everything in their power to make sure you don’t do something stupid....

The 2014 Sloan Film Summit, hosted by Film Independent and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, took place November 14–16 in downtown Los Angeles and celebrated the intersection of science and the art of storytelling. The Summit opened that Friday night with a public screening of The Theory of Everything, James Marsh’s Stephen Hawking biopic starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones (and Film Independent hosted another screening of the film last night, followed by a conversation with Marsh)....