March 09, 2006

New Director, Familiar Film: Ryan Fleck Turns Short Into Feature

You may know him from such blog entries about Sundance-winning short films as Gowanus, Brooklyn. Now director Ryan Fleck has made Half Nelson, a feature-length adaptation of Gowanus, which debuted at Sundance 06, where ThinkFilm picked it up. Half Nelson will also be the opening night feature of this year's New Directors/New Films program, which rocks. Both leads, Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps, got huge acting props from critics in IndieWIRE's Sundance poll. See the full ND/NF 2006 lineup at...
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Posted by greg at 04:18 PM

January 25, 2006

Please Credit My Baloney's Name Properly, It's O-S-C-A-R

From the Observer report on how publicists are the "real Sundancers": As crowds exited a packed screening of Wrestling with Angels—a staid, unthrilling film about Tony Kushner which emblemizes the idea that to be truly successful these days, not only must you be a widely admired playwright, write a musical and work with Steven Spielberg, but you must also be the subject of a documentary—a small gathering of people were sitting on the tented ground outside the theater, eating cold...
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Posted by greg at 09:01 AM

January 18, 2006

The Black Manohla

Wow, it sucks to be Manohla Dargis. Or to be at Sundance. The festival is apparently the same every year, but different. And since that means that mediocre films and deals often hog the spotlight, and actual, honest-to-goodness finds are often left without distribution, it's really starting to bug. Sundance, for Indies, Soft Kiss Before Dying [nyt]...
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Posted by greg at 10:15 PM

September 29, 2005

Cinema Paramilitaristo

Despite the ravages of war and the censorship imposed by local religious authorities, a lovable young scamp in a rubble-strewn town finds solace, even hope, in the movies. If only there was a kindly old projectionist to take the place of the boy's father, who'd been disappeared at Abu Ghraib... Defying Terror, Filmgoers Attend a Festival in Baghdad [nyt] While half of me says, "Congratulations, Karen Hughes," the other half wonders what the story is in the two movie...
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Posted by greg at 11:34 AM

May 22, 2005

What Cannes I Do

Fear and self-loathing in Cannes [guardian] A step up from when they the Guardian crew would just complain about the shortage of open bars, Mark Lawson looks for the big themes in Cannes. The result: 1) guilt, 2) loser fathers. And the Palme d'Or goes to: Loser Fathers. The Dardennes' doc-style filmmaking wins again. I [heart] Manohla Dargis, whose Cannes Journal with Tony Scott was very funny. Plus, she namechecked daily.greencine.com. I'd say more, but I can't; it's off the...
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Posted by greg at 09:18 PM

February 02, 2005

We're Going To The Pan Pacifics, Fran!

"'We've been given the mandate to compete on a more aggressive level,' says [Paramount Classics co-pres David] Dinerstein, who also helped orchestrate the reported $2 million purchase of Mad Hot Ballroom, a Slamdance documentary widely described as Spellbound meets Strictly Ballroom." 1) One of the odd, still-annoys-me things was that Strictly Ballroom was vaguely a documentary, too. The early scenes were all "talking-head-and-captions," and then it just disappeared. Weird, edgy, or sloppy, whatever, it got him to Romeo+Juliet. 2) Every...
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Posted by greg at 07:57 AM | TrackBack

January 24, 2005

What Sharon Waxman Heard At Sundance

As people were rushing away from her or avoiding her while they were caught up in a bidding war at Sundance for the Craig Brewer-directed, John Singleton-produced Hustle and Flow:"The adrenalin is flowing," David Dinerstein, co-chairman of Paramount Classics, tossed over his shoulder as he hurried out of the screening... Specialty movie executives went barreling from the hall to their cell phones, then back into the hall to make initial offers to the United Talent Agency agents... "This is torture,"...
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Posted by greg at 09:11 AM | TrackBack

December 16, 2004

IP Documentary Contest Finalists

In a bit of tail-eating snake-ism, The Arts Project at The Center for The Study of The Public Domain at Duke sponsored a contest as part of this year's Full Frame Documentary Festival [got all that?] for the best 2-minute or shorter film about intellectual property's impact on art, specifically music or documentary film. Well, the finalists are in, and you can view and vote for them online. The Arts Project Moving Image Contest [Duke Law]...
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Posted by greg at 03:38 PM | TrackBack

December 03, 2004

US Film Festival Goes International, Changes Name

Apologies for the scarce posts lately; I've been busy with offline writing and real work. Still, I don't know how I missed this: The US Film Festival is now called the Sundance Film Festival?? I guess since they added two world cinema competitions for docs and narrative films, the USFF name just didn't make sense anymore. Here's this year's list of films [minus the shorts, set for release Monday] which all sorts of folks are unpacking. Meanwhile, David Hudson unpacks...
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Posted by greg at 11:26 AM | TrackBack

October 13, 2004

I Scoopa de World, Chico, 'n everthin's'innit

These are the first color photographs released of Les Arenes de Chaillot. They'll be running this weekend in Le Monde. Supposedly, the staff of La Mexicaine de Perforation are dressed like this for the screening of Mister Freedom and Sgt Kabukiman. That, or this whole underground cinema thing is really a publicity stunt for Fox's upcoming The Tick: The Musical. Muchas gracias por todo, Mexicaines! Previously on greg.org: Les Arenes de Chaillot: complete programme guide Exclusive: La Mexicaine Le Interview...
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Posted by greg at 08:53 AM | TrackBack

October 12, 2004

Les Arenes de Chaillot: The Complete Programme Guide

If greg.org were a magazine, this would be the big sidebar. But you can call it what it is: whoring for traffic. Here, for the first time in the indexable media, are the programmes--complete with my poor translations of their film descriptions--of La Sesion Comoda and Urbex Movie, the 2003 and 2004 series, respectively, organized by La Mexicaine de Perforation. Screenings began at midnight in Les Arenes de Chaillot, the group's underground cinema adjacent to la Cinematheque Francaise....
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Posted by greg at 08:30 AM | TrackBack

October 10, 2004

Exclusive: La Mexicaine Le Interview

While the discovery of an underground cinema in the center of Paris has been widely covered, little or no attention has been paid to what the films actually played there. Les Arenes de Chaillot (The Chaillot Arenas) was created by La Mexicaine de Perforation, a group of self-labeled urban explorers who, for the last five or so years, have used the invisible and forgotten infrastructure of Paris as their own curatorial venue, putting on exhibitions, concerts, and, beginning last...
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Posted by greg at 10:30 PM | TrackBack

October 04, 2004

Mexican Consolidated Drilling Authority

That's one suggested translation of "La Mexicaine de Perforation," the amorphous group of urban explorers who built and operated a subterranean cinema in the center of Paris until it was discovered last month. The group's spokesman, Lazar Kunsman, originally explained the name in a French radio interview, but early English language reports of the movie theater botched both the original and the translation, and I unwittingly perpetuated their mistakes. La Mexicaine de la Perforation [sic] became The Perforating Mexicans [sic...
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Posted by greg at 11:37 PM | TrackBack

September 22, 2004

Wong Kar Wai talks about 2046

2046 barely screened at Cannes, after the director hand-carried the not-quite-finished print to the rebooked theatre. Now it's being released in the UK, and it turns out Wong has actually re-edited it since May. Read Howard Feinstein's interview with WKW and his recounting of the tortured making of in the Guardian "It was like being in jail" [Guardian UK] Related: I, too, delivered an unfinished film to Cannes, a fact I mention because of the deep, meaningful resonance between Wong...
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Posted by greg at 12:25 PM | TrackBack

September 18, 2004

Correction: Explorateurs Urbains are NOT Cataphiles

My apologies for mistakenly calling the explorateurs urbains of La Mexicaine de Perforation cataphiles. In an interview on NPR, filmmaker Lazar Kunsman, the group's spokesMexicain, explained that cataphiles are "more like nerds," who just wander around underground without doing anything. Explorateurs, meanwhile, are seeking to produce new forms of creative expression, to create a viable, engaging alternative to the sterile, mainstream culture found aboveground. So next time you run into a guy in the catacombs, just ask, "Why the hell...
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Posted by greg at 10:50 AM | TrackBack

September 13, 2004

And That's How Grizzly Adams Got His G-Class

What's with all the film festivals this time of year (Venice, Telluride, Toronto, NY, American Film Renaissance)? If you haven't heard of that last one, [Their slogan: "Doing films the right way"] for heaven's sake don't tell anyone; they'll know you're not one of them. AFR is a conservative film festival full of true believers; Bryan Curtis, who must've drawn the short festival coverage straw over at Slate, does a bangup job of unpacking the messages of this obscure, oppressed,...
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Posted by greg at 08:15 PM | TrackBack

Bloghdad.com/Gunner_Palace

Tony Scott's first report from Toronto really gives you a feel for the festival's sprawl and cinematic frenzy, where you feel like you're missing movies more than watching them. Meanwhile, he only mentions one film, and he mentions the hell out of it: Gunner Palace, Mike Tucker and Petra Epperlein's documentary about US soldiers' lives in Baghad. Here's a taste:Gunner Palace is so startling because it suggests - it shows - just how complicated the reality of this war has...
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Posted by greg at 06:18 AM | TrackBack

September 11, 2004

Now Playing at Les Arenes de Chaillot

The Guardian's Jon Henley talks with members of La Mexicaine de Perforation, the urban explorers group who built and operated a cinema in a 4,000-sf uncharted quarry 60 feet under the Place de Chaillot in Paris. They called the cinema Les Arenes de Chaillot. During the seven-week season, the Mexicans screened films by "Chinese and Korean directors but also Alex Proyas' Dark City, Coppola's Rumble Fish, David Lynch's Eraserhead, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Clandestine group reveals how it built its...
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Posted by greg at 01:25 PM | TrackBack

September 08, 2004

Hyper Chouette: Pirate catacomb cinema discovered in Paris

Holy Moley, damn, wow, whoa, this is possibly the coolest thing I've ever heard: a full-scale modern movie theater was discovered in an uncharted underground amphitheater carved out of the catacombs of Paris. It's near Trocadero, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Cinematheque. After French police stumbled across it during a training exercise, they returned with officials from the electric company, only to find the power and phone lines had been cut. A note on the floor read, "Do not...
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Posted by greg at 12:44 PM | TrackBack

May 24, 2004

Love the Cin, Hate the Cinner

And Kiarostami said editing was irrelevant. The Observer's Andrew Anthony calls Michael Moore "arguably the most ideological and emotive editor since Sergei Eisenstein," about as high as praise can get for a maker of agitprop. He points to Farenheit 9/11's powerful juxtaposition of criticism and humor, raw and manufactured images and predicts it could make an unprecedented "historic difference." But Moore, it seems, not only exaggerates or sometimes ignores inconvenient facts, he's insufferably self-aggrandizing and unpopular with more refined movie...
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Posted by greg at 09:51 AM | TrackBack

May 23, 2004

Cannes, you believe it?

bwahahahaha. I feel the same way about Michael Moore's masterful PR march to the Palme d'Or as Patrick Lang, ex-Pentagon Middle East intelligence chief feels about how Cheney & co were utterly duped by the Iranian intelligence agency and their frontman, Ahmed Chalabi: "[It was] one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence [insert 'buzz-generating' here] operations in history... I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work."...
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Posted by greg at 07:51 AM | TrackBack

May 19, 2004

Cannes, do it yourself

From J. Hoberman's halftime report from Cannes comes this description of Abbas Kiarostami's latest film: "[the] remarkably austere Five (after the number of shots) is a DV landscape study that might have been produced by a talented epigone of American minimalist Ernie Gehr." In Five, the director says, "an entire world is revealed to us. It's a work that approaches poetry, painting. It let me escape from the obligation of narration and of the slavery of mise en scène." [Kiarostami...
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Posted by greg at 09:19 PM | TrackBack

March 30, 2004

An Evening with Sofia Coppola

I'm co-chairman of this gig tonight at MoMA, An Evening With Sofia Coppola. I was going to write my speech, but in the spirit of the director, I'm going totally improv. Then I'm going to kiss every ass I can. In the mean time, Sofia will show clips of and discuss her work with Elvis Mitchell. Look for pics and a making-of doc later. Related: More from An Evening With Sofia Coppola...
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Posted by greg at 04:01 PM

Souvenir Series, Sofia, and me

In the last couple of weeks, I've decided to shoot a fourth short film, which may be part of the Souvenir Series, or may not. We'll see. It was not in the original outline of the series, and it's out of the order I'd planned to shoot them, but the opportunity and idea presented themselves so clearly, I've decided to at least get it shot, then see where to take it. Long story short, it's a reconceiving of the baptism/massacre...
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Posted by greg at 12:09 PM

March 29, 2004

ND/NF: Captive by Gaston Biraben

I saw Captive, the debut feature from Gaston Biraben, at New Directors/New Films last night; it's a subtly powerful movie that gripped the sellout audience at MoMA Gramercy. Captive is a fictionalized telling of real events, a surreal, politically charged story of, "You're adopted...And then some." A 15-year old Buenos Aires girl's life is turned upsidedown when she learns her real parents were among The Disappeared, the tens of thousands of Argentines kidnapped, tortured and killed by the country's military...
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Posted by greg at 07:17 AM

March 10, 2004

Tremble's Guide to the NY Underground Film Festival

[via Gawker] Todd Levin gets all excited, then he gets all real about the program notes for this year's New York Underground Film Festival. He has provided funny-because-it's-true guide to interpreting the program and selecting your screenings wisely. "'...an ode to lights and color' 'Even my closest friends and family will have second thoughts about attending this film.'" and "'Vice Magazine presents:...' Be prepared to laugh the meanest, most self-righteous laughs possible for about six minutes, and then hate yourself...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2004

New York Film Festival(s)

[via Gawker] Manhattan User's Guide has compiled a list of film festivals in New York. At last count, there are 28, including six at Lincoln Center and four at Anthology. Start dubbing those screener tapes....
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Posted by greg allen at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2004

GreenCine to Film Festivals: Bring It On!

Between Jonathan Marlow's voluminous Park City dispatches and David's Berlinale preview, you can basically sound like you've been to both all three festivals and figured out what was worth seeing and tracking. Can't wait for Rotterdam to get the GreenCine treatment....
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Posted by greg allen at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2004

Sundance Winners at IndieWIRE and beyond

Awards were handed out last night at Sundance. Check out the list of winners at IndieWIRE. Or, check out IndieWIRE's profiles of the first-timers in the competition, including New Yorkers Morgan Spurlock, who won the directing award for his masochistic documentary, Super Size Me! and Josh Marston, whose Maria Full of Grace won the audience award for dramatic feature. Gowanus, Brooklyn, co-winner of the short film competition, is also by a New Yorker and Sundance vet, Ryan Fleck, who lives...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2004

TMI, or Overblogging Sundance

With daily reports from the frontlines filling the Festival site, IndieWIRE, Movie City News, the Times, the trades, , Sundance needs weblogging about as much as Bush's march to war did. Naturally, that's not stopping anyone. If you still think you should've gone, check out reports from the standby lines, bathroom lines, and coke lines as well: Weblogs, Inc. [portally]; Eric Snider [Utah-funny]; Dan Webster [Pf'ingH?]; Alastik [lots of waiting]; Peter Vonder Haar [lots of pics so far]; I'll keep...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2003

Toronto Film Festival: the SportsCenter Version

The National Post has a nice highlights reel, with reports from the field (and locker rooms, apparently) at the Toronto Film Festival. Some of it's like listening to cricket scores on the BBC, though; you can recognize the language as English, but you can't understand WTF it means. One thing I do understand, though is the mention of met-on-the-set couple, Christina Ricci and Adam Goldberg, who are premiering their film I Love Your Work, which was co-produced by Josh &...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2003

IndieWIRE, who loves ya, baby

[via GreenCine] IndieWIRE surveys 20 acquisition executives from indie and mini-major studios to see what gets them out of bed in the morning (and to see what gets you into bed with them). Great stuff....
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Posted by greg allen at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2003

Film Festival Directors On Film Festivals and Directors

[via GreenCine] David points to a GreenCine article last year where a table of film festival directors review the history and future of the festival. Some started as propaganda (Venice, Cannes, Berlin), some as flukes founded by freaks, but festivals are constantly balancing the art and commercialism, pure love of cinema with selling out. How can festivals avoid falling into the trap of becoming just another stop along way for the Hollywood press junket? "Cultivate Internet critics," insisted [Toronto...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2003

The Guardian's Cannes-imatrix Freakout

1. Kudos to the Guardian for enlisting every film monkey who can type to produce their extensive Cannes coverage. (Granted, Brits::Cote d'Azur, fish::barrel, and it's not exactly a hardship post, either.) 2. Or maybe it is. The Guardian crew seems to be suffering from serious alcohol-free delusion. The evidence is in the writing: Trapped in the (presumably dry) media lounge, Matt Keating is forced to piece a story together using only quotes from his partying fellow journos. The two main...
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Posted by greg allen at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2003

Cannes' Cinema Quote of the Day, from Jenny Holzer

The beginning of the war will be secret, Jenny Holzer balsa postcard from Printed Matter Every evening at dusk during the Cannes Film Festival, the artist Jenny Holzer is projecting cinema-related quotes from actors and filmmakers onto the ugly wall of the Palais des Festivals. You can follow along on the Festival's pretty info-packed official site. Holzer's Please Change Beliefs was the first great piece of web-based art, produced in collaboration with my friends at äda'web. There's tons of...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2003

Cannes Not, Cannes II

For the diehard greg.org fan, who's not related to me and/or not chased away by my recent forays into my perspective on current events which keep relating back to the themes of my first movie, otherwise I'd have just started a 9/11 blog and turned it into a warblog and... ahem: I've been writing the press kit for Souvenir (January 2003), my second short, which has been holding in a sort of DV-to-film transfer limbo. Also, I started dubbing...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2003

So Then Who Blew (Whom) At Sundance?

From yesterday's NYTimes:Editors' Note, Sunday Styles The Age of Dissonance column last Sunday, about cozying up to celebrities, mentioned a report in The Daily News that guests at the Sundance film festival "had their shoes spattered" when the actor Tobey Maguire was taken ill. But the day the Times column appeared, The News quoted the actor's publicist as saying that although Mr. Maguire doubled over at one point, it was not he who vomited."...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2003

Strictly (Sundance) Business

First, rather than just say, "Called it!" (which I did, thank you), let me congratulate director Stewart Hendler and company (including DP John Ealer) for winning Sundance's Online Film Festival with their short, One. Second, third and fourth, check out the following roundups of Sundance deal-making and film performance. The takeaway (sorry, Holly Hunter): Wo unto those who maketh their films for buzz, for verily, they have their reward. Mary Glucksman takes a thorough and incisive look at indie film...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2003

Quick Sundance Notes

From Indiewire.com's excellent Sundance coverage comes the story of the screening of Open Hearts, by Danish director and Dogme groupie Susanne Bier:In the middle of this witty, winning Dogme 95-sanctioned melodrama about infidelity and mourning, the Park City projectionist accidentally screened the film in the wrong order: after the mistake was determined, the audience voted passionately to continue watching and piece together the narrative in their heads. One happy viewer was rumored to comment, "It's just like watching Memento."...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2003

Now Go Vote For This One

This beautiful, entertaining Sundace Online entry, Lots of Robots is, amazingly, the product of one guy, animator Andy Murdock. Read about it at Wired. I love it, and not just because he has a website all about the making-of. Murdock's comments on the still above: This is the first shot I created fof LOR. I had just purchased my new machine for home and I wanted to take it for a spin. I looked out window into the garden...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2003

The Broad from The Piano Starts Talking

SCENE: A Park City Mill-about ELVIS MITCHELL scans the lobby, sees HOLLY HUNTER standing, quiet and alone. He says to himself, "What the [expletive deleted, Utah S.C. 1999-104.2.1] is this, The Piano? Why ain't that broad talking?", and determines to do something about it. The result is in today's NY Times: the actress gives Elvis her thoughtful views on indie film marketing, audiences' different reactions to Sundance and Cannes, and translating fleeting Sundance buzz into actual box office success. "On...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2003

Sundance Online: Vote For My Favorites

Breakbeat meets media hacking in Stephen Marshall's S-11, which was made for GNN, Guerilla News Network. Where Norman Cowie's Scenes from an endless war (which screened last month before Souvenir (November 2001)) used FoxNews sampling to underline media complicity, Marshall's S-11 is more powerfully and closely edited for musical and rhythmic effect, which enhances its criticism of the current administration's entire approach to the terrorist threat. From the Flash Filosopher, Billy Blob comes Bumble Being, the bee version of "the...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2002

State Department denies visa to Abbas Kiarostami to visit NY Film Festival

According to this wire report, the US State Department has refused to process a visa for the director Abbas Kiarostami, the godfather of Iranian cinema and one of the most highly acclaimed filmmakers in the world. His latest work, Ten, has its US premier tonight at the NY Film Festival. In the NY Times review, A.O. Scott called it "a work of inspired simplicity." Check the movie index for more discussions of Kiarostami, his previous films, and his perspective on...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2002

If only we'd ALL been at the Toronto Film Festival LAST year...

Of course, I don't mean the whole world; just all New Yorkers. The terrorists' message would have gotten an auto-reply saying, "Sorry, you missed us. We're all in Toronto, eh?" Alas, it was not to be. This year, however, everyone DOES seem to be in Toronto. And they're all making short films dealing with September 11th. Just look at the list of directors participating in 11'09"01, a collection of 11 shorts put together by a French director, Alain Brigand: Ken...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2002

On Film Festivals

The guys at Cyan Pictures are back from their location in Kentucky and have some hi-larious and endearing accounts of the shoot. Check it out, and compare it to the folies we had in France during the shooting of Souvenir. Ahh, the memories. Cyan & Co. are editing for the 9/27 Sundance submission deadline. I'll be taking Diet Coke to their editing suite in the middle of the night. This article has an archetypical Canadian aura, basically about how the...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2002

Submitted to Slamdance. We're traveling

Submitted to Slamdance. We're traveling to UT and AZ for the weekend, location scouting for the Sundance/Slamdance season. Yeah, that's it, location scouting....
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Posted by greg allen at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2002

Poking around Slamdance's website to

Poking around Slamdance's website to get my submission stuff ready. It's HI-larious, obviously made by someone who pokes around dry film festival websites for a living. That led me to Bitter Films, where Don Hertzfeldt flogs and writes about his animated shorts and celebrates "107 awards, four Grand Prizes, and a rather spooky cult following." There's a production journal, which looks good, if a little random. (Pot, Kettle. Kettle, Pot. I know.) Gotta keep the random quotient high to please...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2002

Festivals Update: Submitted Souvenir November

Festivals Update: Submitted Souvenir November 2001 to the Evora International Short Film Festival, held in November in Évora, Portugal. On hearing this, a Portuguese-Ohioan friend of mine praised the town effusively. (He just got back from a trip to the other homeland last week, so I was predisposed to send something to Portugal anyway.) NYC Flava: An easy dozen real estate underlings are milling around outside the window right now, including a couple of blondes with Lily Pulitzer dresses (aren't...
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Posted by greg allen at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2002

I submitted applications Monday for

I submitted applications Monday for three festivals, and almost submitted to a fourth, when I belatedly realized I'd already sent them a tape two+ weeks ago. Festivals submitted today: Tehran (Iran) International Short Film Festival, the Winterthur (Switzerland) International Short Film Festival, and the San Diego Film Festival. The one I almost resubmitted was Interfilm Berlin, probably because I had Berlin on the brain today. (Olafur, the artist I mentioned in the previous post, lives in Berlin, and I just...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:37 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2002

While surfing for Cannes reports,

While surfing for Cannes reports, I found this great Indiewire interview with Abbas Kiarostami from the 2001 Double Take Documentary Film Festival, timed to the premiere of ABC Africa, his doc about AIDS in, well, Africa. Some highlights: The film was made during "location scouting," when he was still deciding whether to accept the UN's invitation to make a documentary. "But when I actually started using [the digital cameras] -- and when I realized its possibilities and what I could...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2002

Went to an IFP24 Market

Went to an IFP24 Market orientation meeting tonight. This doesn't mean Souvenir's been selected for the market yet; it was a Q&A session for filmmakers hoping to participate in the Market. Here are the bullet points, primarily as they relate to Souvenir: In the section Souvenir's entered, they'll select 15 shorts from probably 2-300 submitted. The major prospects for a short film are pretty clear, and the Market is useful for at least the first two (in order of priority...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2002

Today: Picked up my bulk

Today: Picked up my bulk order of 20-minute VHS tapes Started duping screening copies of the movie (eight and counting, so far) Prepped entry packets for the Int'l Short Film Festival Berlin, the AFI Fest in LA, and the Mill Valley Film Festival in the Bay Area. All these festivals are in Oct./Nov., after the NY Film Festival, the ideal/dream festival for Souvenir (November 2001). Also, because I've been remiss in my Steven Soderbergh references lately, I finally found out...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)

April 24, 2002

Cannes short films shortlist

Sure enough. Here is the list of short films selected for Cannes. Two US films, including one by Bruce Terris, who was Pete Jones' 1st Assistant Director on Stolen Summer/Project Greenlight. Watching Terris' constant pushing/complaining about the importance of shot lists stuck in my head and proved to be very helpful advice for shooting Souvenir, btw....
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Posted by greg allen at 12:58 PM