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With business partner Monika Skerbelis, Edwards also co-wrote the books The Complete Filmmaker’s Guide to Festivals: Your All Access Pass to Launching Your Film on the Festival Circuit and I Liked It, Didn’t Love It: Screenplay Development from the Inside Out, currently in its 3rd edition. (Check out our interview earlier this year with Monika Skerbelis here.) We asked Edwards to take us through the in’s and out’s of bringing stories—particularly those based on real life—to the screen, including what pitfalls newbies should be looking out for....

Room When: March 1 Where: DVD/VOD Director: Lenny Abrahamson Starring: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, William H. Macy Why We’re Excited: Now that Brie Larson has officially swept award season and won pretty much every Best Actress award out there (including the Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead), here’s your chance to watch her emotionally charged performance yet again—or for the very first time. Lenny Abrahamson’s adaptation of Film Independent Member Emma Donoghue’s heartfelt and thrilling novel will have you on the edge of your seat, all while reaching for a box of tissues....

“10 Questions with LA Film Fest Filmmaker Spotlights” is a series of posts to help you get to know our Festival filmmakers and their films just a little bit better. In this installment, Simon Barrett discusses his much-anticipated horror film You’re Next. Simon Barret FILM: You’re Next / The Beyond With their best fake smiles plastered on their faces, the Davison family has gathered together at their country estate to celebrate Mom and Dad’s anniversary, although there won’t be much celebrating tonight....

Produced by Film Independent Documentary Lab Fellow Jared Parsons, Aram, Aram, which made its world premiere last month at the Los Angeles Film Festival, tells the story of a 12-year-old Armenian boy (John Roohinian) sent to live with his grandfather (Levon Sharafyan) in Los Angeles where he must navigate the conflict between the culture he left behind and his new-world identity. Chambers, who also wrote the screenplay and shot the film, said that despite their initial misgivings, the Los Angeles Armenian community was crucial, not only in the making of the film, but also in ensuring its authenticity....

Silence—an abstract, feature-length meditation on humans’ too-often neglected need for auditory stillness—is Vedder’s latest collaboration with director Patrick Shen, whose previous film La Source documented Haitian-born humanitarian Josue Ljeunesse’s attempts to erect clean-water wells in his native country following the devastating earthquakes of 2010. As director, Vedder also created the 2015 nonfiction short A Certain Kind of Light, which chronicled the therapeutic practice of “whole person” healthcare via the radically empathetic career of maverick physician Dr....

What inspired you to become a filmmaker? For Simien, it’s about being challenged. Watching Disney classics like Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid as a kid, he recalled drawing his own comics versions of the characters, trying to figure out how to tell stories visually. Years later he’s still trying to quench that thirst for visual storytelling. “I want to have the images and performances challenge me, [to] expand me in some kind of way that I wasn’t expecting before,” he said....

Film Independent President Josh Welsh saw the program’s mission as a natural extension of the organization’s goals. “Filmmakers have the rare gift of humanizing the marginalized and disenfranchised for mainstream audiences,” said Welsh, “And with that the ability to change attitudes and improve lives.” The five films selected for the series will be available free of charge to UN offices in countries across the world for public screenings. The aim of these screenings will be to stimulate discussion and raise awareness of homophobic and transphobic discrimination and violence....

That’s right: no matter how many booster shots we may need to get or air quality indexes we need to cross-reference before stepping outside, we remain fiercely (fiercely!) committed to our work, which is only made possible by the generous support of our community. And at the moment, when we say “community” we mean two people, specifically—Arts Circle Member Susan Murdy and YOU. During the course of our new Matching Campaign running through September 23, all (tax-deductible!...

As its name suggests, Black History Month is a yearly appeal to all Americans to study, celebrate and reflect back on the essential role that Black communities and individual innovators have played in shaping the modern world—and that these critical achievements should continue to be recognized long after February has closed its weirdly abbreviated storefront for business. Of course, when your purview is the direct support of emerging creative voices (as is ours!...

Look: no seasonal Halloween activity will ever compare to the pure, primal, bone-shatteringly visceral brutality of Shaquille O’Neal’s Shaqtoberfest, coming soon to a dry-docked Queen Mary near you. But absent the wherewithal to immerse yourself in a family-friendly Shaq Diesel-themed carnival outing, there are always plenty of horror movies to watch—or in this case, to support. Like cilantro, some people are predisposed to reject horror cinema outright. Others (like us) can’t get enough of the stuff, liberally sprinkling it on every taco and streaming queue in sight, particularly as fall descends and the witching season draws neigh....

Even before stepping up to the dais in Theater One at the DGA building in Los Angeles on Day Two of the 2016 Film Independent Forum, speaker Effie T. Brown had promised a keynote address light on bullshit and heavy on “real talk”. After being introduced by Film Independent Senior Director of Education and International Initiatives María Bozzi, Brown thanked keynote sponsor, The Loyola Marymount School of Film and Television (Brown is an alum) as well as Film Independent itself, which she referred to as “the longest relationship I’ve ever had, except for my parents....

The gist: an inclusion rider is a clause built into the contracts of high-profile talent (actors, producers, directors, etc.) that stipulate greater rates of inclusion of underrepresented groups both in front of and behind the camera. Such groups include women, POCs, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities. The idea was first proposed by Stacy Smith—a professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications—in 2014 Hollywood Reporter op-ed. Since then, Smith has worked in collaboration with civil rights attorney Kalpana Kotagal and Annenberg Inclusion Initiative board member Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, herself an actor-producer, to create a formalized inclusion rider template for download....

I was extremely fortunate to launch my career by having Ridley Scott hire me to write a screenplay and fly me to London to work with him on developing the story. The first night we went to dinner, one of his producers leaned across the table and asked me, “You go to UCLA, right?” I nodded. I was still in my second year of film school. He shook his head, warning, “If you try to write this script to one of those bullshit film school formulas you’ve been taught, I’ll fire your ass and hire a real writer....

Writer-director Billy Ray busted out his bag of tricks at a recent workshop for Project Involve Fellows. Best known for writing the screenplays for the blockbuster Hunger Games and Captain Phillips, as well as his work as the writer-director on Film Independent Spirit Award nominated Shattered Glass, Ray revealed some of his strategies for success, like following a disciplined, nine hours/day, writing schedule and making sure to show gratitude to his crew: “I shake everyone’s hand and say ‘Thank you....

Elvis Mitchell, Film Independent at LACMA flm curator, prefaced this month’s Live Read at LACMA’s Bing Theater, guest directed by David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer), with a telling fact: Tootsie was the genius creation of about 14 different writers, he joked, who couldn’t stand each other. Wain agreed with the “genius” description, as do so many other impassioned comedy devotees. When Jason Reitman offered him the opportunity to guest direct the Live Read, Wain quickly responded: “Yes!...

Though her work and studies have taken her across the globe, Julie Anderson Friesen—this month’s featured Member Lens subject—has doubled-down on her commitment to nurturing and advocating for an active film community in her native Upper Midwest. As founder of the nomadic cinema exhibitor and film arts community organization Cinema Falls in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Friesen has weathered a fair number of challenges in getting her passion project established, ranging from a lack of local cinema resources to the industry’s seemingly chronic indifference in engaging her part of the country....

“In dust we trust.” A motto we would have tattooed across our necks in November 2022 when we ventured into the desert to begin production on our first feature film, The Buildout. When I say we, I mean myself (Zeshaan Younus, Writer, Producer, Director) and Trevor Dillon (Producer). In 2019, I attended the Borrego Springs Film Festival for my short, Prefigured. Part of the festival’s itinerary was a tour of the “Borrego Badlands” hosted by a local adventure company called California Overland....

And on Tuesday, March 19 the end to this particular hiatus had been promised in the form of BFF funnymen (and reapeat Film Independent Spirit Award hosts) Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, joining forces to channel the erudite supper conversation of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory’s My Dinner with Andre. But it didn’t exactly happen like that. Many (many) minutes after the scheduled curtain time, Film Independent Presents curator Elvis Mitchell stepped on to the stage to “regretfully” inform the crowd that stars Kroll and Mulaney were unable to make it....

Film Independent’s popular Live Reads series has boasted some LA’s most memorable cultural events; staged readings of classic screenplays read by unlikely casts of celebrity all-stars. Whether reuniting the star-crossed leads of a classic crime caper or inverting swapping the gender of a beloved boys’ adventure yarn, Live Reads has continued to find new ways to tell some of cinema’s most enduring stories—and it’s happening again this Sunday. That’s right—the next Live Read is less than a week away, and it’s 100% guaranteed to make you swoon, as current rom-com king Randall Park (Netflix’s Always Be My Maybe) pays homage to one of the genre’s key touchstones, bringing When Harry Met Sally… to life onstage at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills this weekend, June 23....

After his film Goodbye Julia was selected as Sudan’s submission to the Oscars, Amjad Abu Alala served on the jury of the program’s Generation section. His Executive Producer, Lupita N’yongo, was the jury president of the festival’s main slate. Lebanese Fellow Myriam Sassine produced Diaries from Lebanon by director Myriam El Hajj, which premiered in the Panorama section. One of the most memorable moments was on closing night in the main competition, which featured the premiere of Fellow Min Bahadur Bham’s film Shambala (A Year of Cold)....