If you have something to say...
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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
In all the fuss over Veronica Mars and Zach Braff raising millions of dollars on Kickstarter, people are getting stuck in the trees and missing the forest. The crowd-funding/Kickstarter movement in general is changing the fundamental paradigm of film financing from "investing" in films to "donating" to them.
Approaching the two-year anniversary of Tim's tragic death in Misrata covering the risings of the Arab Spring, Sebastian Junger, his close friend and co-director of their Oscar-nominated Restrepo has created an extraordinary documentary of his friend's life.
This year, I volunteered at Washington D.C., International Film Festival and got to meet some of the people involved, as well as see some of the films. My two favorites were Kings of Summer and The Deep.
Because of growing corporate interests -- mostly from the fashion industry -- one can have a free blast without even stepping foot onto the Empire Polo Club grounds.
Although demolished trees provide the film its unsettling backdrop, its real focus is the three families, and the meditative rhythm of their lives: hands rooting for potatoes, scythes mowing through swathes of cane, fish cleavers thumping against chopping blocks.
According to the Kickstarter's data, there was $274 billion collected last year (+238 percent from 2011). In comparison, VC's invested $26.5 billion in 2012 (-10 percent from 2011). Do you see the difference?
Television and cinema feed us images often setting an inhuman standard of beauty. Imperfections are airbrushed out and erased from the public's purview.
Cheap, amateurish and sometimes just plain hard to watch, Beasts enjoyed a wave of overwrought critical hosannas, going all the way back to when the film first was shown more than a year ago at the Sundance Film Festival.
Sam Rockwell is one of the funniest, most original and compelling actors working in films today. And one of the most underrated, in terms of awards or the kind of big-budget roles that turn someone into a star.
This year the Sundance Film Festival was all about the ladies. OK, maybe halfway about the ladies, which is still a very good sign.
Watching How to Survive a Plague reminds me that we have a voice, that we are stronger together than alone, and that we can be heard, if we don't let others silence us. It is history-telling at its best and a movie I can't forget.
Torrent's film tells the story of Neil Harbisson, who was born with achromatopsia, which causes complete color blindness. Harbisson helped develop the "eyeborg," a device that translates colors into sounds, giving him the distinction of being the world's first officially recognized cyborg.
"Educate girls, change the world." That's the simple and powerful mission of the new documentary film and social action campaign Girl Rising.
Written and directed by Cherien Dabis, May in the Summer is a disarmingly humorous, sharply observed and deeply affecting story about a Palestinian-American writer, May, who returns to her childhood home in Jordan in preparation for her summertime wedding.
As a data-driven leader, for years I have carried a prejudice against the value and power of storytelling, often thinking of stories as too anecdotal, bordering on the shallow.
Entrepreneurs and filmmakers are both visionaries. At the Sundance Film Festival it was evident that getting the two together to collaborate was going...
