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Ugh, sorry guys. I’m being told that one of the extras fainted into their bowl of prop ramen during that last take. Let’s bring it back to one. To reset: Film Independent’s Directing Lab is an intensive, eight-week program designed to support emerging filmmakers with the making of their feature films. And once again, the call sheet is star-studded with A-list advisors and guest speakers who have all been there themselves at one point, with major wisdom to dispense....

Every filmmaker is a storyteller with two stories to tell: the one he’s telling on film and the one about how the film got made. We’ve asked our Festival filmmakers to tell us a bit about the latter—inspirations and anecdotes that reveal what drives and inspires them. Here, we meet five directors who are screening as part of our LA Muse section, films inspired by Los Angeles, which is launching for the first time this year....

Film Independent is currently in the middle of a Matching Campaign to raise support for the next 30 years of filmmaker support. All donations make before or on September 15 will be doubled—dollar-for-dollar up to $100,000. Hailing from the mostly white suburban-exurban neighborhoods of central California, first-generation Filipino-American documentarian PJ Raval’s eclectic career has taken him places to places up (a 100-foot tall army barrack tower), down (post-Katrina New Orleans) and all around (Texas, New York, Colorado)....

First up on Saturday was the wonderfully written and produced series Gente-fied, directed by Film Independent Fellow Marvin Lemus (Project Involve 2015) and co-written by Lemus and Linda Yvette Chávez (Fellow, Project Involve 2010; Screenwriting Lab 2015.) The festival screened all seven episodes of the show, each focused on one of seven characters dealing with life and the effects of change in LA’s redeveloping Boyle Heights. From the moment Lemus stepped onto the stage to introduce the series, his humor and excitement came shining through—in hindsight, an indication of what was to come during the post-screening Q&A....

By Jim Lichacz / LA Film Fest Guest Blogger When I learned a documentary film about the Nixon presidency was showing at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival, I got excited. I lived through the Watergate era, and it formed a key part of my political psyche. I don’t think my kids really appreciate the effect Watergate had on the American political system. With Americans’ confidence in Congress as an institution down to just 10%, I hoped that Our Nixon would offer a chance to reopen the file and get fresh information on what went wrong with a great political system....

A full 13 years after its initial demise, Deadwood has returned, in the form of a feature-length reunion film, written by series creator David Milch, directed by frequent series episode-helmer Daniel Minahan, which premieres on HBO tonight, Friday, May 31. But don’t expect a simple retread. The film—which picks up with the outlaw mining camp Deadwood’s residents 12 years later—explores themes of encroaching modernity and Civilization as a brute force all its own....

As the film community continues to process the fallout of the #MeToo movement and keeps growing in its awareness of the trauma caused by the mishandling of actors on set, a critical new production role has emerged: the intimacy coordinator (IC). But while the role has been largely welcomed by the industry since it started appearing on call sheets in 2017 the job is still widely misunderstood. To teach our community more about the value a skilled IC can bring to a project, Film Independent Education’s Filmmaker Tuesdays invited intimacy coordinator Rebecca Johannsen–of Intimacy Professionals Association (IPA)–to hold a group workshop around the topic on April 23 at Film Independent’s Wilshire Boulevard HQ....

“This is a movie we’re still finishing,” he said, admitting that he’s already a year into the editing process. “There are some scenes we still want to do, a couple scenes we’re writing that we want to shoot.” Jonze wrote and directed Her, making it his first solo feature screenplay. In the first scene he screened, Theodore installs/meets Samantha, the OS1 personality custom-built for him. In the second, Theodore takes Samantha to the beach....

But having made his first film, Undertow, in Peru—where he had such great experiences—Fuentes-León decided he wanted to go there again for this project. Luckily, however, he brought the movie back to LA, the place of its inception, to screen in the Festival’s Buzz section. (It premiered at Toronto last fall.) Equal parts film noir and mind-bending, surrealist meta-fiction, The Vanished Elephant follows crime novelist Edo Celeste, who is still mourning the loss of this fiancée Celia, who disappeared seven years ago on the day of the 2007 Peru earthquake....

As a savvy industry-watcher, you’re well aware that these oh-so-coveted showbiz awards come in a variety of shapes and sizes—from wee acrylic monoliths to weaponish hunks of jagged pewter. Some are shaped like naked gold bald dudes or angels playing volleyball. Some are literal surfboards. And at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, our awards statuette—designed by artist Carol Bosselman in 1986—is a handsome-looking bird-thing poised atop a pedestal ribboned with a single shoelace, signifying the shoestring budgets all indie filmmakers inevitably transcend in order to make their art....

Following a specially-curated collection of work from this year’s Fellows, 2016 PI Fellow Ana Souza moderated a conversation between filmmakers Felipe H. Caro (director, La Cacheras), Mary Evangelista (director, La Gloria), Frances Kroon (cinematographer, Balloon), Andrew Yuyi Truong (cinematographer, First Generation), Andrew Vasquez (director, Ruby’s Quinceanera) and Zamarin Wahdat (director and cinematographer, Bambirak and Buck.) See the full post-screening Q&A below and keep reading to learn more about our 2020 Fellows’ exciting work!...

Film Independent Fellow Reed Harkness began to lay the groundwork for his acclaimed 2022 documentary Sam Now way back in 1997. His intent then, as an 18-year-old, was merely to document some adventures with his 11-year-old half-brother Sam on Super 8mm footage. Little did he know that 25 years later he’d have an entire nonfiction feature, starring Sam and other members of his family, let alone one racking up awards on the film festival circuit....

The news about diversity in the film business is almost never good. (Sample headlines: “Lights Camera Struggle? Hollywood Latinos Speak Out,” “Hollywood’s Irrational Allergy to ‘Black’ Films,” “GLADD Surveys Movie Studios; Is Disappointed” and “The Bamboo Ceiling: Hollywood Shuns Asians.”) So every year when we get to announce the 30 newest Fellows to join Film Independent’s Project Involve family, it’s a refreshing break from the status quo—echoing the point of the whole program....

Now totaling over 100-plus projects, the series has featured films from a deep bench of directorial talent—including Albert Maysles, Steve James, John Singleton, Alex Gibney and Ice Cube, just to name a few. And joining their ranks this Tuesday, August 8 is Film Independent Fellow Sheldon Candis (LUV). Candis, a 2009 Directing Lab Fellow, 2009 Fast Track participant and 2010 Project Involve Fellow, is the co-director of Baltimore Boys, which charts the triumphant 59-0 run by East Baltimore’s Dunbar Poets in the early 1980s, a team that featured future NBA star Muggsy Bogues....

Like a swallow returning to the spires of San Juan Capistrano, so too have independent filmmakers, distributors, publicists and journalists descended on Park City in search of fortune and fame. Or—at the very least—some cool festival swag. This year, Film Independent is proud to count a whopping 36 films on the Sundance Film Festival slate that boast involvement from our Fellows and Alumni in one shape or another—be they products of our Filmmaker Labs, Educational Programs, the LA Film Festival, Grant Winners or general Members of Film Independent itself....

FISCAL FRIDAYS Survival. Coping. Confrontation. Inherent to each of these three distinct things is an element of conflict. And conflict, you may recall, is at the heart of storytelling. When film critics, festival programmers or grant managers talk about a project being a “Narrative,” they’re doing much more than just trying to delineate something as a work of fiction. They’re also recognizing all the hard work the filmmaker has ostensibly done to present a credible series of invented, escalating events featuring characters and situations that don’t really exist....

The word “paranormal” tends to conjure a certain set of images. A creaky Victorian mansion with blood dripping through its slats. A spectral young girl ringed in photo luminescent ectoplasm creepily singing “Ring Around the Rosie” while plucking daisies. Zak Bagans and his giant fake eyeglasses shout-whispering Did you hear that?!? under cover of midnight inside a long-abandoned Blockbuster video. But according to the big homies at the Oxford English Dictionary “paranormal” refers not to ghosts, but to any “phenomena analogous to physical phenomena but with no known physical cause....

I kid! But there’s no denying that comic adaptations are big business is modern Hollywood or that #SDCC is ground zero for major studios looking to build hype around a wide variety of mega-franchise film releases featuring impractically costumed, high-concept do-gooders. But what the casual moviegoer may not realize is that comics (or more typically, graphic novels) are becoming nearly as commonplace as the basis for films in the independent world as well....

For many, the word “drone” often conjures images of an ominous future dystopia with skies darkened by the constant hum and buzz of tiny flying devices. Of course, new technologies are really just tools. To a hammer every problem looks like a nail. And to an independent filmmaker, every drone looks like an efficient means to instantaneously increase one’s production value, capturing a variety of astounding aerial shots previously unthinkable on an indie film budget....

For over ten years, Film Independent and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have worked in collaboration—through grants, program support and the Sloan Film Summit, returning next month, April 8-10—to help filmmakers create more realistic and accurate stories about science and technology that challenge existing stereotypes about scientists and engineers in the popular imagination. So! As we prep final details for the 2022 Sloan Film Summit kickoff in two weeks—the first in four years due the event’s normal production interval (initially) and COVID-19 (subsequently)—we thought it’d be fun to take a look back at some of our favorite Sloan-supported projects over the years....