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What’s on your 2019 to-do list? Sure, there are the smaller things that we all resolve to do each year, like lose 20 pounds or learn to speak Italian. But then there are bigger things, like making a film or even changing the world. Or, if you really want to be really ambitious about it, changing the world through film. That lofty, laudable ambition is certainly the case with the three films taking center stage—sometimes literally—in this month’s Fiscal Spotlight series....

Effective cinematic storytelling begins and ends with tone. Sitting through a TV show or film with an inconsistent grasp on its narrative can feel a little like making a rapid deep-sea ascent, your unsteady brain struggling to equalize air pressure as is vacillates from fathom to fathom. And no tonality is quite so difficult for filmmakers to nail than the dark comedy—stories of mayhem and occasional trauma rendered with a comic’s eye for the incisive and the absurd....

The 2017 Film Independent Forum was held at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles from October 20-22. Appropriately, the first panel on Saturday covered a topic all filmmakers must be savvy about: film financing. The panel—“Getting Creative about Getting Money”—featured veteran producers speaking to a diverse range of industry experiences as they broke down the so-called “three-legged stool” of film financing: pre-sales, equity and soft money. Producer Stu Pollard (Bass Ackwards, And Then I Go) moderated the panel, which included Superlative Films Founder Danielle Behrens; Jordana Mollick, partner/producer/manager of Haven Entertainment; Brian O’Shea, CEO of The Exchange; and Illse Ronteltap, head of The Netherlands Film Production Incentive at The Netherlands Film Fund....

“I want to go back to my notebooks and look at the notes I took during the last five weeks,” she says. “It was a very fast-paced program. More like an M.A. program!”–an idea echoed over and over again by the 16 filmmakers who came together from seven different countries as part of this year’s Global Media Makers Residency. The program, now in its second year, is an innovative mentoring program that fosters creative connections between visual storytellers from around the world and leading U....

We asked 2020 Episodic Lab Fellow Katherine Ruppe to share her experience in the Lab developing her Sloan-supported series project Liftoff, about the lives and careers of NASA’s first class of female astronauts. Follow Katherine online at @RuppeVerse on Instagram and X. It’s the grand finale of our 2020 Film Independent Episodic Lab. I’m facing a zoom screen of half a dozen Netflix executives, about to pitch Liftoff, my TV project centered around America’s first six female astronauts as they break through the brotherhood of spaceflight....

This was July, 1996. Twenty-one years ago “the web” was right in the middle of the dot-com boom and Virtual Reality was about to break open, big-time. VR Headsets were available for Nintendo consoles, there were stand-alone VR game systems in arcades and half a dozen different ways to create and share your own QuickTime VR (QTVR) images. In the late ‘90s, building a 360-degree panorama meant: developing and printing the photos, scanning images into a computer, processing and stitching the images and then authoring the interactive elements in a specialized application....

Muahahahaha! We’re back with the second installment of our Halloween scary movie questionnaire—(click for part one)—this time with writer/producer Ramon Isao, co-writer of ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction. Isao is currently in post-production on his latest project, Dead Body, the trailer of which can be found here and the Kickstarter funding its completion here. What was the first horror film that scared the pants off you? Psycho, no question. I was eight, with no idea I was watching a horror flick....

Community creator Dan Harmon’s first notion about filming his live podcast-turned-national-tour Harmontown was to make a funny road trip movie. “Jeff and I both have an improv background,” Harmon said, referring to his podcast sidekick, Jeff Bryan Davis. “We would do funny stuff on the road. Let’s just make a funny movie and I thought that’s what we would do,” he said after a screening of Harmontown during the 2014 Los Angeles Film Festival....

They call it the content revolution for a reason. There’s an upheaval happening for media makers, and yes, chaos sometimes ensues. Filmmakers are no longer placing imaginary barriers between working on television and theatrical films, or shooting film vs. digital – these distinctions are now irrelevant. While so many lines are being blurred, there’s one thing that’s clear: it’s all about the power of story, and what it means to be a storyteller in this new age....

The subtitle of George Lucas’s Star Wars is (of course) Episode IV: A New Hope. And in 1977 it was a new hope—for Hollywood and for the return of the kind of grand, classic score associated with the Golden Age studio films of the 1930s-‘40s. In the decade before Star Wars’ release, Hollywood had trended toward using pre-existing songs as soundtrack rather than original orchestral arrangements. Paul Simon’s songs in The Graduate (1967) and the Burt Bacharach/Hal David songs in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969) are just two examples....

Certainly by now you already have this Saturday, February 27 circled and re-circled on your calendar, until the force of your Sharpie pen have practically carved a porthole in your day planner. After all, we’ve been doing our level best to keep you in the loop about everything happening in Spirit Awards land—from Instagram cosplay, to recaps of our five Best Feature nominees, to excited testimonials from some of the lucky folks who have actually been nominated....

Says Francisco Velasquez, Senior Manager of Project Involve: “Our immense gratitude goes out to all of our sponsors, mentors, advisors and friends who, with their constant support, have made Project Involve the premier diversity program it is today—and will continue to be.” Alums of the program—a free, nine-month filmmaker workshop open to writers, directors, producers, editors, cinematographers and entertainment execs from diverse backgrounds—including Effie T. Brown (producer, Dear White People), Andrew Ahn (writer/director, Spa Night), Cherien Dabis (director, Amreeka), Rhys Ernst (director, Transparent) and many more....

Project Involve needs no introduction. But if it did, we’d probably say something like: “For over 28 years, Film Independent’s signature diversity and mentoring program has incubated the careers of dozens of your favorite filmmakers.” But of course you already know that. You’ve seen The Farewell (Lulu Wang, PI 2014), Dear White People (Justin Simien, PI 2010) and Netflix’s Gentefied (Linda Yvette Chávez PI 2010, Marvin Lemus PI 2015 and Aaliyah Williams, PI 2010) You’ve seen Selah and the Spades (Jomo Fray, PI 2017), Bottle Rocket (Effie T....

But just as every individual family unit inevitably develops their own unique set of holiday traditions over time, so too do our regular late-December viewing habits differ from person to person. The media each of us chooses to spend time with during these cozy winter days is specific to us, whether it be a longstanding seasonal classic, a TV show we’ve been meaning to catch up with, or just something weird that for whatever reason we always return to this time of year....

In the film Stanfield plays Cassius “Cass” Green, an unemployed denizen of a cracked-vision, semi-futuristic Oakland. Out of options, Cassius takes a cold-calling gig at a local telemarketing firm and soon discovers that in order to make sales, he must use his “white voice” (provided by David Cross, courtesy of some intentionally surreal ADR), to great success. Soon, Cassius ascends the ranks of the Byzantine telemarketing hierarchy—and cedes his soul, bit by bit....

After months of anticipation, Sundance has announced their 2014 lineup, and Film Independent couldn’t be prouder! 25 Fellows from our Artist Development and grant programs are screening 17 films at Park City. (See the full list below.) From Effie T. Brown, who was a Fellow in the very first year of Project Involve—21 years ago!—to Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo, who were just in the 2013 Documentary Lab with their film Rich Hill, these filmmakers have participated in virtually all of Film Independent’s Artist Development programs....

In short, greater inclusion is needed just as badly needed below the line as it is above. The issue was the focus of the September 22 We The People Inclusion Summit panel “Can You See Me Now: Below-the-Line and Buried,” which occurred as part of the 2018 LA Film Festival. Moderated by Jennifer Westin (production executive, Mar Vista Entertainment), the panel featured Congyu E (producer, Searching), Carlos Rosario (costume designer, The Girl in the Spider’s Web), Joi McMillon (editor, If Beale Street Could Talk), Kris Bowers (composer, Of Monsters and Men) and Eddie Perez (stunt coordinator, Shameless....

Using her childhood as inspiration, Martinez has now written and produced Death of Nintendo, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age dramedy set in 1990s Manila. Directed by Raya Martin, the film premiered at this year’s (pre-COVID) Berlinale Film Festival and is currently making the rounds at festivals worldwide, continuing this weekend with the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, running September 25-October 30. Centered around teenage friendship and burgeoning self-exploration—the beginnings of romantic relationships, family drama, videogame obsessions, etc....

Regardless of who you are, this is a huge problem. The disparity in the number of female directors vs. their male counterparts is the subject of Amy Adrion’s new documentary Half the Picture. The film, which premiered at this year’s Sundance, features interviews with a who’s-who of today’s top female filmmakers—Miranda July, Lena Dunham, Ava DuVernay, Catherine Hardwicke and more—discussing the difficulties of establishing and sustaining a career as a woman director in today’s Hollywood ecosystem....

One of the defining characteristics of Film Independent’s mission is to champion diversity in film. You couldn’t find a better example of that aim than the Best Feature category for the 2016 Film Independent Spirit Awards, announced this morning. Among the nominees in that category are a stop-motion animated film, an Oscar frontrunner and a film about transgender sex workers shot on an iPhone. Either Anomalisa, Beasts of No Nation, Carol, Spotlight, or Tangerine will go home with the Spirit Award for Best Feature after the Awards Show on the beach in Santa Monica on February 27....