Rooftop Films will host their first ever Gala on January 31 at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan to raise funds for Rooftop’s vital community programs as well as celebrate two gifted, creative and fearless artists who have made a contribution to the art of filmmaking this past year: Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson) and Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople).
Arts Alliance Media is providing theatre management system software and support to the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. For the duration of the Festival, running in Park City, Salt Lake City and at Sundance Mountain Resort, Utah, from January 19-29, Sundance Institute will deploy AAM’s Screenwriter TMS at six Sundance Film Festival screening locations, where it will enable staff to schedule content and monitor all screens from one easy to use interface.
Rooftop Films has awarded sixteen cash and service grants to alumni filmmakers, including The Rooftop Filmmakers’ Fund Garbo NYC Feature Film Grants, which were awarded to directors Robert Greene and Kirsten Johnson. Greene will receive a monetary grant of $15,000 to help finish his new film, Bisbee ‘17, and Johnson will receive a $10,000 grant to support her film, Deadpan.
Syrian dreams of freedom, young women’s sexual fantasies and an intellectual playboy are among the subjects found in the eight films nominated for the 2017 Dragon Award for the Best Nordic Documentary. The grand prize of 100,000 krona is one of the largest awards for documentary film in the Nordic countries.
TimePlay and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers today announced the selection of three student filmmaker finalists in the Vista Project, a new big-screen interactive storytelling competition for students.
Six documentary projects have been selected to receive funding from the AFI Docs/NBCUniversal Impact Grants. They include Almost Sunrise by Michael Collins, Care by Dierdre Fishel, Check It by Toby Oppenheimer and Dana Flor, Newtown by Kim A. Snyder, Raising Bertie by Margaret Byrne, and They Call Us Monsters by Ben Lear.
One of the most distinctive aspects of writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s new drama Manchester by the Sea is the quality of its sound design. “Making a quiet movie is hard, because, as a sound designer, you want to infuse every scene with something more than dialogue,” said supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Jacob Ribicoff. “But you have to resist that temptation and keep it quiet and let the performances speak for themselves.”
The upcoming feature film Maine follows the journey of a married woman from Spain to reclaim her identity while solo thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, a trip that is sidetracked when a lone American hiker pursues her. Cinematographer Donald R. Monroe said, “Simply getting to our locations proved a major hurdle. Frequently, each day began by transporting the entire production over a mile via ATVs; then the shooting crew would walk an additional ten minutes to the location. We were often far from battery charging and data transfer stations— the high-capacity P2 cards allowed us to be largely self-sufficient.
The just released short film, The Refuge, focuses on the Gwich’in people of Alaska and Northern Canada and their more than three decade fight to protect the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling and other threats. Filming in such a remote location was severely challenging. As there are no cars in Arctic Village, bulky film equipment had to be transported by ATV or carried on foot. Electricity was also at a premium. Directors Kahlil Hudson and Alex Jablonski had access to just one electrical outlet for use in charging camera equipment and computers.
New York Women in Film & Television has awarded its $7,500 Ravenal Foundation Grant to Debra Kirschner for Mallwalkers. Kirschner also wrote the script. The film follows a retired music teacher – a recent widow and a lifelong goody-goody – who is coaxed by her daughter to take daily walks in the local mall. There she connects with a wild posse of seniors who suspect foul play at the mall, and she becomes determined to put a stop to it.
