With Sundance behind us, the next major American festival is waiting in the wings. The SXSW Film Festival lineup has landed, and there’s a lot to dig through.
Read More: SXSW 2017 Episodic Lineup to Include ‘Dear White People,’ ‘American Gods’
Unlike Sundance, which attracts a lot of industry attention around a handful of high-profile titles, SXSW is more about discovery. As usual, there are a lot of compelling possibilities in the program, from the newcomers in its competition sections through the more peculiar and surprising offerings in the Visions section. IndieWire got a few tips from SXSW Film director Janet Pierson and extracted these promising possibilities.
Small Stories, Big Steps
The festival’s narrative feature competition is often the place where filmmakers on their first or second feature get a sudden boost. It was there that Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” and Destin Cretton’s “Short Term 12” both took off.
Read More: SXSW 2017 Episodic Lineup to Include ‘Dear White People,’ ‘American Gods’
Unlike Sundance, which attracts a lot of industry attention around a handful of high-profile titles, SXSW is more about discovery. As usual, there are a lot of compelling possibilities in the program, from the newcomers in its competition sections through the more peculiar and surprising offerings in the Visions section. IndieWire got a few tips from SXSW Film director Janet Pierson and extracted these promising possibilities.
Small Stories, Big Steps
The festival’s narrative feature competition is often the place where filmmakers on their first or second feature get a sudden boost. It was there that Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” and Destin Cretton’s “Short Term 12” both took off.
- 1/31/2017
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
YouTube
2013 was a banner year for the WWE’s Tag Team Division. Team Hell No, The Shield (Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins), and The Brotherhood (Cody Rhodes and Goldust) are the three teams that held the Tag Team Titles in 2013, and all played a part in elevating not only the titles themselves, but also the prospects of every other team in the division.
The Shield’s run as champs in particular was an important contributor to the rise of The Usos as a credible and beloved Tag Team. If not for the spectacular, show stealing match The Usos had against Rollins and Reigns during the Money In The Bank 2013 Pre-Show, I’m not sure the WWE would have gotten behind the charismatic and wildly entertaining siblings to the degree that they have.
Looking at 2013, it was impossible not to be optimistic about what Tag Team Wrestling would deliver in 2014; that...
2013 was a banner year for the WWE’s Tag Team Division. Team Hell No, The Shield (Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins), and The Brotherhood (Cody Rhodes and Goldust) are the three teams that held the Tag Team Titles in 2013, and all played a part in elevating not only the titles themselves, but also the prospects of every other team in the division.
The Shield’s run as champs in particular was an important contributor to the rise of The Usos as a credible and beloved Tag Team. If not for the spectacular, show stealing match The Usos had against Rollins and Reigns during the Money In The Bank 2013 Pre-Show, I’m not sure the WWE would have gotten behind the charismatic and wildly entertaining siblings to the degree that they have.
Looking at 2013, it was impossible not to be optimistic about what Tag Team Wrestling would deliver in 2014; that...
- 3/6/2014
- by Matthew J. Douglas
- Obsessed with Film
In Martha Stephens’ lovely, evocative and deceptively simple Pilgrim Song, Timothy Morton (Team Picture) plays James, a newly unemployed elementary school music teacher from Louisville, Kentucky. A gangly fellow with a large red beard, some mean fiddle skills and an unreliable sense of direction, James finds his future hanging in the balance in more ways than one after he’s laid off from his teaching gig. Seeking some sort solace following his dismissal and an unspoken trauma that has pushed him apart from his girlfriend Joan (Karrie Crouse, also the film’s co-writer), he sets out on a trek across Kentucky’s Sheltowee Trace …...
- 5/10/2013
- by Brandon Harris
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
"The sleeper hit of the 2010 film-festival and indie-awards circuit, Mike Ott's moody micro-budget Littlerock patiently observes the California road trip of college-aged Japanese siblings Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka, also the film's co-writer) and Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto)." Karina Longworth in the Voice: "En route to Manzanar (the filmmakers leave viewers to draw on their own knowledge, if any, of what that destination portends until the film's very end), their car breaks down in the tiny desert town of Littlerock, where they soon fall in with a local crowd of young layabouts."
"Amid the keggers and daytime bike rides is plenty of drug use, an overdue loan, and a menacing alpha-male bigot (Ryan Dillon)," notes Bill Weber in Slant, "but Ott uses the threat of violence as a mere layer of mood, keeping his focus on the mutable, and often unspoken, themes of identity and the nature of attempts to explore and redefine it…...
"Amid the keggers and daytime bike rides is plenty of drug use, an overdue loan, and a menacing alpha-male bigot (Ryan Dillon)," notes Bill Weber in Slant, "but Ott uses the threat of violence as a mere layer of mood, keeping his focus on the mutable, and often unspoken, themes of identity and the nature of attempts to explore and redefine it…...
- 8/12/2011
- MUBI
Memphis-based filmmaker Kentucker Audley (Team Picture, Open Five), selected for Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces” list in 2007, is releasing today online his new film, Holy Land (pictured here, with stars Bunny Lampert and Cole Weintraub), and with it a platform for fellow directors working in the no-budget trenches. The site is called “No Budge Films,” and it is described simply as “a place to watch no-budget films… Post your short film or feature // for a short run or indefinitely.” Why such a simple site? “Because most films don’t get distributed + it’s cool to give away your film for free + you don’t owe anyone money because you raised your budget on Kickstarter,” Audley writes in his site’s mission statement.
After Audley told me about the site, I asked him a couple of questions which he answered by email. Our conversation is below.
Filmmaker: Why did you decide to become a de facto distributor?...
After Audley told me about the site, I asked him a couple of questions which he answered by email. Our conversation is below.
Filmmaker: Why did you decide to become a de facto distributor?...
- 8/3/2011
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Mumblecore, the nascent film genre made by, about, and for navel-gazing, semi-articulate urban twenty-somethings, has gotten a bad rap for being about, well, navel-gazing, semi-articulate urban twenty-somethings. Memphis-based Kentucker Audley is one of the few mumblecore directors from the South, and in just a few years has already written, directed, and acted in a trio of features: the rambling, idiosyncratic character studies Team Picture (2007), Holy Land (forthcoming Internet release), and Open Five (screening in April). He also finds time to act in others' movies, including Passenger Pigeons, which premieres at the SXSW Film Festival on March 13. He recently discussed the cinematic movement he's associated with, his filmmaking technique, and how to break out of the genre's insular tendencies. Do you mind being lumped in the with mumblecore movement? Do you see your films as very different from Andrew Bujalski's,...
- 3/8/2010
- by Teddy Wayne
- Huffington Post
I'll post a bit later about all the stuff in the new Filmmaker magazine that's not online. It's a particularly good issue, I think, and one of the things which is print-only is Alicia Van Couvering's look at five films that found their money and went into production in 2010. We decided to do a financing-oriented corrective to all the doom-and-gloom stories out there, and this one is full of practical tips for filmmakers looking to crowdsource and raise money through other unconventional means. One of the films she writes about is Kentucker Audley's Open Five, which is our 25 New Face filmmaker's follow-up to his Team Picture. Here's Alicia's lede: Though it’s not a new idea to “pass the hat” to raise money for a film, “crowdsourcing”...
- 1/19/2010
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
By Michael Atkinson
Our official "B-movie" distribution stream -- straight-to-dvd releases -- grows in number and variety every year, as fewer films can be, or at least are, affordably shown theatrically than ever before. And these titles still can't qualify for awards or polls of any kind, or often even reviews, as the number of theatrical screens continues to drop. Does this make any sense? Here're my favorites from this year, the movies that first saw American screens (big or small) on digital video in 2008, be they brand new or decades old.
1. "Sophie's Place"
Lawrence Jordan, U.S., 1986
The renowned yet all-but-forgotten avant-garde filmmaker's grand animated masterpiece, a Victorian-styled dream-collage-painting-fever-feature brimming with hundreds of inexplicable epiphanies and a sense of visual magic that is all but utterly unique to Jordan. This honey was ensconced in Facets' lavish, under-celebrated set "The Lawrence Jordan Album," which in itself is more of an...
Our official "B-movie" distribution stream -- straight-to-dvd releases -- grows in number and variety every year, as fewer films can be, or at least are, affordably shown theatrically than ever before. And these titles still can't qualify for awards or polls of any kind, or often even reviews, as the number of theatrical screens continues to drop. Does this make any sense? Here're my favorites from this year, the movies that first saw American screens (big or small) on digital video in 2008, be they brand new or decades old.
1. "Sophie's Place"
Lawrence Jordan, U.S., 1986
The renowned yet all-but-forgotten avant-garde filmmaker's grand animated masterpiece, a Victorian-styled dream-collage-painting-fever-feature brimming with hundreds of inexplicable epiphanies and a sense of visual magic that is all but utterly unique to Jordan. This honey was ensconced in Facets' lavish, under-celebrated set "The Lawrence Jordan Album," which in itself is more of an...
- 12/17/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
By Michael Atkinson
Ah, minimalism, the miserable hairshirt pajamas so many critics still love to put on in the semi-privacy of their vocations, ostensibly separating them from the herd of passive filmgoers like enlightened monks separated from the peasantry -- or, at least, so it may seem to the mainstream, who have been trained from the cradle to desire only distraction, and for whom a movie that deliberately fails to deliver narrative excitement is akin to water torture. Honestly, both are fair and comprehensible positions, and if you can decry the ignorant impatience of the many viewers intolerant of the new movie by Jia Zhangke or Pedro Costa or Tsai Ming-liang, you could also legitimately wonder when and where art film asecticism steps over the border into pretentious tedium. (Just because it's not a terribly commercial gambit doesn't mean it can't be overexploited by filmmakers -- take Costa's "Colossal Youth,...
Ah, minimalism, the miserable hairshirt pajamas so many critics still love to put on in the semi-privacy of their vocations, ostensibly separating them from the herd of passive filmgoers like enlightened monks separated from the peasantry -- or, at least, so it may seem to the mainstream, who have been trained from the cradle to desire only distraction, and for whom a movie that deliberately fails to deliver narrative excitement is akin to water torture. Honestly, both are fair and comprehensible positions, and if you can decry the ignorant impatience of the many viewers intolerant of the new movie by Jia Zhangke or Pedro Costa or Tsai Ming-liang, you could also legitimately wonder when and where art film asecticism steps over the border into pretentious tedium. (Just because it's not a terribly commercial gambit doesn't mean it can't be overexploited by filmmakers -- take Costa's "Colossal Youth,...
- 9/16/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
Filed under: Comedy, Independent, New Releases, DVD Reviews, New on DVD, Home Entertainment
Team Picture trailer
Just last week I received the latest release from the critic-led Benten Films -- Kentucker Audley's mumblecore film Team Picture, which comes out on DVD today. Imagine a Slacker sort of world with everyday life and a collection of varied people, but without the rolling conversation of UFOs and Like a Virgin pap smears.
Audley's style is to show a more realistic life without the allure of stars or irresistably charismatic actors. He leads the film as a slacker musician who really encapsulates the ideas of slackerdom in every area of life -- indifferent to his girlfriend's unhappiness, the need for a future path, and even the quirks of his roommate. While not for moviegoers looking for a fast-paced, tightly written story, Team Picture does have some charm as a sort of dead-pan voyeuristic look into modern slackers.
Team Picture trailer
Just last week I received the latest release from the critic-led Benten Films -- Kentucker Audley's mumblecore film Team Picture, which comes out on DVD today. Imagine a Slacker sort of world with everyday life and a collection of varied people, but without the rolling conversation of UFOs and Like a Virgin pap smears.
Audley's style is to show a more realistic life without the allure of stars or irresistably charismatic actors. He leads the film as a slacker musician who really encapsulates the ideas of slackerdom in every area of life -- indifferent to his girlfriend's unhappiness, the need for a future path, and even the quirks of his roommate. While not for moviegoers looking for a fast-paced, tightly written story, Team Picture does have some charm as a sort of dead-pan voyeuristic look into modern slackers.
- 8/27/2008
- by Monika Bartyzel
- Cinematical
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