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If you only know Milwaukee as the setting of Laverne & Shirley or the place where your favorite mass-market beer comes from, you’re missing out. Wisconsin’s largest city (two hours north of Chicago) has much to recommend it: world-class museums, a thriving bar and restaurant scene, beautiful river walk… plus a bronze statue of Henry Winkler. What’s more, “Cream City” also boasts a surprisingly robust film scene, anchored by the 10-year-old nonprofit arts organization Milwaukee Film—aka MKE Film....

It’s exciting to see all the buzz building about tonight’s theatrical release of Fruitvale Station. Now the whole country gets to see what won us over when we selected it for a Gala Screening at the 2013 LA Film Fest last month. The award-winning film from the Weinstein Company, by first-time feature filmmaker Ryan Coogler, brings cinematic grace and maturity to the tragic true story of Oscar Grant, a young African-American man, on the fateful day he was killed by Oakland’s BART transit police....

1985’s The Breakfast Club is a quintessential coming-of-age story about a five students who believe they have nothing in common, defined in the film as a “Princess, Athlete, Criminal, Brain and Basket Case.” Or, in more modern terms: Prep, Jock, Stoner, Nerd and Misfit. They do, however, share the fact that they’re all stuck in Saturday detention together. Trapped over the course of one long day, the fivesome eventually comes to discover that they have much more in common than initially suggested by their superficially disparate cliques....

Biffa joined renowned music services company Air-Edel as a receptionist in 1996, where his impressive knowledge of music was quickly recognized. He cut his creative teeth sourcing music for commercials, such as Jonathan Glazer’s “Swimblack” campaign for Guinness. As Biffa began cultivating relationships with key members of the music industry, he moved into feature films, where he has garnered a reputation for being a canny negotiator and a veritable walking encyclopedia of the history of popular music....

One of the many Miami-based filmmakers whose careers were kicked into high gear by the pollinating effect of Spirit Award Best Feature winner Moonlight’s 2015 shoot in the area, Cuban-American producer Robert Colom co-wrote the Mountains screenplay alongside Sorelle and brought the film to life finding strength in community–as well as a newfound ability to better pitch his material!–through the Fi Artist Development Labs. We spoke to Colom about coming to the producer’s chair without the benefit of a film school education, community building (film-oriented and otherwise) in Miami and why you should consider applying to Film Independent Producing Lab....

Produced by Daniel Poneman, Daniel Dewes and Derek Doneen (Haider, Dewes and Doneen are 2015 Fast Track and 2016 Documentary Lab Fellows), Shot tells the story not just of a single team, coach or school, but of an entire neighborhood. The film (yet to be released) was last year’s recipient of Film Independent’s yearly EFilm | Company 3 Feature Film Grant, which awards $50,000 in color correction and digital intermediate services to a qualified Film Independent Fellow....

Regardless of means or method, it’s inarguable that episodic content is central to the lives of most modern culture-vultures. It’s also no secret that, as the global entertainment marketplace continues to shift and innovate, the line between independent film and creator-driven episodic TV is blurrier than ever. For easily a decade now, young indie filmmakers like Lena Dunham (HBO’s Girls), Sarah Violet-Bliss and Charles Rogers (TBS’s Search Party), Joe Swanberg (Netflix’s Easy), Justin Simien (Dear White People, coming to Netflix) and many more have been steadily reinventing themselves as television creators and showrunners, often finding opportunities on the small screen that are increasingly absent in feature films....

Magnet, the genre division of Magnolia Pictures, is releasing Bad Milo! on itunes/VOD on August 29 and in select theaters October 4. Check out the hilarious red band trailer: Ingenious promotional material for Bad Milo!, as seen on Indiewire Magnet is leading the charge with genre VOD distribution, having released envelope-pushing titles such as V/H/S/2, Europa Report, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Goon, Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, The Innkeepers, Tucker & Dale vs....

Film festivals are filmmaker-centric and they honor and recognize the creative. The implication is that producers are not part of that creative magic. Yet I would argue that we are the ones who hold the wands. When asked by Film Independent to write about my experience at Cannes, I thought about describing how amazing it was to be part of such a prestigious festival filled with A-list celebrities and red carpets, or about dancing my stress out to Robin Thicke live at the Gothe nightclub, or about how I got goosebumps while watching Mommy at the Palais and was moved to tears during its standing ovation....

Released in 2002 (long before 50 Shades of Grey), the film was an art house hit across the world, introducing audiences to a truly original screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, who earned a Film Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay in 2003. The film was also nominated for Best Feature and Best Female Lead for Gyllenhaal, who also received a Golden Globe nod for her breakout performance. Over the past decade Shainberg’s focus has mostly been on producing and bringing his latest directorial project to fruition....

This idea was the crux of Del Toro’s thesis at the 2023 Film Independent Directors Close-Up session “Directing Frame by Frame” on February 26. It was the first of the annual program’s three live events at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills leading up to the Film Independent Spirit Awards on March 4. Moderated by Del Toro’s friend and fellow filmmaker Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Elf, Swingers), the discussion also featured co-director Mark Gustafson, Animation Supervisor Brian Leif Hansen and Director of Character Fabrication Georgina Haynes....

Film Independent caught up with Dixon to talk about her career, her role in the infamous Reservoir Dogs “ear scene” and the changing landscape of television. Do you see TV as becoming more like film in that the creators now know where the story will end and are writing toward it? I guess that’s sort of true. This is just my opinion, and it’s a lot of me seeing how Breaking Bad went and just looking at the way things work, but I don’t think that writers in television necessarily know what that ending is going to be....

Films are usually sold individually to the world markets. This is because as a commodity, each film is different than any other (the exception to this is genre films, which buyers often view as all the same, and which can be sold as “packages of films”). There are about 60 international territories and these can be individual or multiple countries. For example, the North American territory includes the U.S. and English and French speaking Canada....

Two of the performers taking their turn in the director’s chair at the Festival this year are longtime comedic performers with big ideas to share. One is a venerable fixture of English stage and screen, and one is mostly known as a filmmaker (okay, fine) but will still be a familiar face to TV-and-movie viewers. And one is a supremely talented writer-actor-director making her feature debut. So the next time you see Rupert Everett, Ike Berinholtz, Paul Lieberstein, Peter Bogdanovich or Ann Raffaela Lupo doing their thing in their next starring roll, just know that hey can call “Action!...

In this month’s Fiscal Spotlight column, we’re taking a look at three short narrative films created by women, each examining issues of female protagonist’s physical and mental wellbeing in response to moments of stress and trauma. Here we’ll take uncomfortable trips back home to reunite with aging parents, the honeymoon suite for surprising discoveries and an intense doctors’ room conversation revealing an unsettling pattern of behavior. So if any of those sound too upsetting for you, here’s your trigger warning....

How did you prepare for your role, and what attracted you to this film in the first place? Pearce: For starters, I had to do a Dutch accent. I [also] had to try to see the Reverend as a three-dimensional human being and not just an obsessed, psychopathic, religious preacher. It’s mentally exhausting playing someone who’s that driven and that dangerous. I’m much better at joking around in-between takes [when not playing a character] with electrical wiring that’s not right, whether it’s violent behavior or antisocial, antagonistic behavior....

TARNATION At the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, Apple had a booth set up in the event’s digital media center. The reps in there had a white board, and would ask filmmakers for the name of their movie and if they had edited in Final Cut Pro. It was sort of like a badge of honor—your film (which was now playing at Sundance) had been cut on a G4 tower in your apartment, using this awesome new tool from Apple....

To help tout this incredible opportunity, we’re taking a look back at one of our favorite Directors Close-Up events of all time: our super-fun panel with LAIKA Studios about the production and release of their critically acclaimed 2016 film Kubo and the Two Strings, then currently nominated for an Oscar. A Versuib of this blog originally ran in 2017. On most film shoots, capturing an average of just five or six seconds of useable footage per day would be serious cause for alarm....

If growing up you dreamed of becoming a writer, chances are you probably imagined yourself as some kind of very rich, very-famous novelist-journalist-humorist-playwrite-poet-screenwriter-cartoonist hybrid (or maybe that was just us.) In any event, your dramatist urges likely pointed somewhere other than videogames—which, in retrospect, was probably a huge mistake. Games are, of course, a multi-billion dollar industry and a maturing creative medium capable now of telling hugely complex, emotional stories on par with any other art form....

Eye In The Sky (2015 dir. Gavin Hood) Featuring Alan Rickman’s final on-screen performance prior to his untimely passing, Eye In The Sky is South African director Gavin Hood’s rendition of the moral quandary surrounding drone warfare. Lethal drone strikes have garnered much attention over the past decade as their use has vastly expanded: since 2009, over 500 strikes have killed 3,040 militants and terrorists and almost 400 non-combatants. In the film, British Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) leads a multinational operation to capture two British-born Al-Shabaab militants from a safe house in Nairobi....