No matter who you are, as a filmmaker it’s imperative to approach any scenes of sex and nudity in your film proactively and professionally. It’s simple: establish boundaries and be both rigorous and consistent in your application of on-set rules. This will be your most important safeguard against sexual harassment and assault. Keeping your cast and crew safe means addressing concerns and thus pushing positive—and urgent—social change within the film industry....

The experiences of servicemen and servicewomen have served as the basis of countless movies and TV shows over the years, in all sorts of different forms. But the most powerful of these are the ones based upon actual journalistic accounts from real-life soldiers. So in advance of Memorial Day on Monday, here are five military-themed indies we love… GENERATION KILL Year: 2008 Directors: Susanna White, Simon Cellan Jones Starring: Alexander Skarsgård, James Ransone, Lee Tergesen, Jon Juertas Producer: Andrea Calderwood Why We Love It: Nominated for 11 awards—and winning three!...

THE ART OF SAYING “NO” “No.” It’s a word we all have to say and don’t like to hear. After all, in an industry built on relationships, who can afford to distance anyone? Is it possible to protect your time and maintain a healthy professional network? As a creative professional, your time is valuable. Chances are you have a project you are committed to completing. But it’s easy to get roped into other roles that won’t help your career or even give you much satisfaction....

Jill Soloway Writer/Director Jill Soloway is the real deal. This is her feature directorial debut, but Jill is an established TV show runner, producer and writer. She just may have written your favorite episodes of Six Feet Under; her work on the acclaimed series earned her three Emmy noms. It’s one of those films that’s way more fun to see in a theater. “I call my brand ‘funcomfortable,’ ” Jill told The Times — and it’s the perfect way to sum up why Afternoon Delight is best seen in a theater filled with laughter—and communal cringing....

Director: Javier Fuentes-Léon Producers: Javier Fuentes-Léon, Rodrigo Guerrero Budget: Under $1 million Financing: Foreign co-production funds; Grants; Small private equity Production: Six weeks/Perú/November–December 2008 Shooting Format: Super 16mm Screening Format: 35mm, DigiBeta World Premiere: 2009 San Sebastián International Film Festival Awards: Miami Film Festival – Audience Award, Ibero-American Competition; San Sebastian International Film Festival 2009 – Sebastion Award; Sundance Film Festival 2010 – Audience Award, World Cinema Dramatic. Perú’s official submission to the Academy Awards; nominated for the Goya Award for Best Latin American Film....

4:38 pm Film Independent’s new tag line: Our show ends on time! 4:35 pm Bye, Kristen! 4:30 pm Birdman cast and crew come into the press room. Keaton jokes that when Iñárritu and Lubezki were speaking Spanish to eachother, he understood everything! 4:24 pm 4:20 pm Iñárritu gets choked up: “I think all these films were an act of love.” (Perhaps he didn’t hear Lubezki call him “a pain in the ass....

In honor of this weekend’s release of the highly anticipated adaptation of Lois Lowry’s beloved YA novel The Giver, we’ve rounded up some of the best quotes about filmmaking to come from its producer and star, Spirit Award winner (for Crazy Heart), Film Independent Member (!), and portrayer of one of the most iconic indie film characters of all time, Jeff Bridges. The Dude abides. Bridges often says that his father, actor Lloyd Bridges, has had an enormous influence on his life and work....

Fellow actress Bryce Dallas Howard moderated the talk and started off by asking about their origins as performers. Alfre Woodard gave a beautiful analogy of the difficulties of breaking into the industry as a woman. “Some people walk through the front door. For a lot of female actors they have to take the back door, some of us come through a window. I had to walk through a wall.” Mae Whitman had a smoother introduction to Hollywood—she basically starting acting the second she got out of the womb....

By Jim Lichacz / LA Film Fest Guest Blogger The art of cinema is alive and well at the Los Angeles Film Festival; I’ve seen it with my own eyes. House with a Turret speaks through image and sound, creating a stirring cinematic experience. Together, the director and cinematographer effortlessly weave a suffused palette of human dignity and determination across the screen. The second feature film from Ukrainian director Eva Neymann, House was shot on 35mm black and white film that captures the very essence and soul of whatever comes across cinematographer Rimvydas Leipus’ camera lens....

When the 1,400 people packed into the Theater at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles last night cheered wildly for David Fincher following the closing credits of Gone Girl, the moment was a marked contrast to his experience just a few weeks before, when the film’s world premiere opened the New York Film Festival. It’s not that the NYC audience didn’t appreciate the film—the critics raved—but rather that Fincher himself couldn’t stomach sitting through it with an audience....

At the second session of the 2023 Film Independent Directors Close-Up, these five writers came together to discuss their films and journey to this point. Filmmaker Kyle Patrick Alvarez (Homecoming, Tales of the City) moderated the conversation; about distilling their ideas, rewriting and the relationship with the director, whether it be as a collaborator or as themselves. See highlights from the session below. Series passes are on sale now....

Beatriz and Ingrid are both currently nominated for multiple 2018 Film Independent Spirit Awards, including individual nominations for White and Smith for Best Screenplay and Best First Screenplay, respectively. White has already won twice, claiming the John Cassavetes award in 2001 for Chuck & Buck and Best Screenplay in 2001 for The Good Girl, both directed by Miguel Arteta, also the director of Beatriz. Talk about a fruitful collaboration! Ingrid Goes West was the Closing Night Film at the 2017 LA Film Festival and Michael Arteta was the Festival’s Guest Director, so it made perfect sense for Jennifer Cochis, Director of LA Film Festival to moderate the discussion....

“I thought [that] was a kind of outrageous request,” Hooper recalled at a recent screening of The Danish Girl at Film Independent at LACMA. “And then he said, ‘Well, there was this little matter of the Academy Awards on Sunday…’” Redmayne, of course, took home the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything—then he went straight back to work on The Danish Girl....

A film set is a remarkable place, with infinite possibilities: a societal microcosm full of creative craftspeople performing their individual roles. Everyone on set plays their part and works hard (making movies is hard work, after all) to create a smooth workflow and contribute to their project’s success. But too often, film sets are also incredibly wasteful places—from discarded plastic bottles to leftover food, inefficient energy use, idling vehicle emissions and more....

That’s it—just two questions. But they’re big ones. You can be forgiven for wanting more time to mull on each hypothetical before locking in your final response. Or, better yet, to do a little research. And as it happens, these four vexing situations are at the heart of the films announced today as the 2018 LA Film Festival’s Gala screenings—just one tidbit amid a veritable metric ton of Festival news coming fast and furious over the wire....

Perhaps you watched the awards yourself, or enjoyed it vicariously through our extensive coverage on the Film Independent blog and YouTube channel. If so, then you know that the watchword of the evening was diversity—diversity of nominees, diversity of winners and diversity of the types of stories being celebrated by our hardworking and fiercely independent filmmaker community. History was made at this year’s awards as actors of color took home not one, not two, but three of the top acting awards, including a Best Supporting Female win for Tangerine’s Mya Taylor—the first trans actor to win a major acting award....

You’ll probably still be writing the wrong year on rent checks until at least March, not to mention scrambling to catch up on the glut of end-of-year awards season movies before the February 16 Spirit Awards voting deadline. Here then are out ten most popular new blogs of 2017, collecting 12 exciting months of content aiming to both edify and entertain. We hope you’ve enjoyed spending time with us this year....

Far be it for us to endorse the product of one of the world’s largest and most creepily Scandinavian media companies, but aren’t these #spotifywrapped recaps—which have been popping up all over social media this week—kinda, well… fun? After all, it’s a great reminder that music is always there for us as aural nourishment in both good times and bad. For many of us, in fact, our lives can be recalled as a series of cinematic needle drops, certain memories and major events practically inextricable from their concurrently circulating pop music....

There are a lot of things that can get in your way when you’re the creative type. You’re just sitting there, staring at your project in whatever state of desultory completion it is, wondering just what the hell it’s gonna take to get this goddamn thing finished up. And then, if things weren’t bad enough, the forces of entropy start chipping away at you, attacking both internally (self-doubt, distraction, creative blocks) and externally (too many to name)....

Most impressively, filmmakers have the ability to take some abstract, internal element of the human experience and physicalize it into something photographable and dramatic. Sure: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But sometimes in movies, a cigar is actually the memory of your dead father, a metaphor for America’s self-immolation, or—occasionally—a penis. Of course, a reliable way to transmute emotions and anxieties into something tangible, visible and narratively propulsive is to lean on metaphysics and the supernatural....