by S Shyam Prasad.

Nagatihalli Chandrashekar, called ‘meshtru’ (teacher) by almost everyone in the film industry, continues to make films on socially relevant topics, despite a few setbacks recently. His latest film, Breaking News, has been released (see the review) and the director-writer talks about a host of issues.

Read the rest of this article from Bangalore Mirror.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 238 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

I’m Peter D. Marshall and I created this film directing blog in 2007 as an online movie making resource center for Independent Filmmakers like yourself.

(As of May 23, 1692 film making posts have been published on this blog!)

For over 38 years I’ve worked (and survived) in the Film and TV industry as a Film Director, Television Producer, First Assistant Director and Creative Consultant. (See IMDb Credits.)

In 1999, I started my website, ActionCutPrint which has grown into one of the top film directing websites for Independent Filmmakers on the Internet today featuring online movie making courses, film directing articles, film and television books and filmmaking workshops.

In 2000, I started publishing my free monthly film making ezine, The Director’s Chair which is read by over 5500 filmmakers in 105 countries around the world. (You can read 129 back issues here.)

To fulfill my goal of mentoring and teaching, I developed several filmmaking workshops that I have presented over the past 18 years: from Canada to Singapore to Dubai. I am also a directing instructor at the Vancouver Film School.

So if you want to keep up to date on the latest Online film and television resources, please Bookmark this Page Now or Subscribe to this blog to read daily film making articles written by myself and other film makers from around the world.

by Adam Dawtrey.

Your director is insisting that it’s artistically essential to shoot in Iran. Who are you going to call?

In the ever more international and complex world of indie filmmaking, the completion guarantor sits not only at the heart of the financing process, but can serve as an ersatz problem solver. Film Finances, the company that invented completion bonds in 1950, remains the first port of call for many producers looking to make such impossible dreams become reality.

“We did a film in Iran recently,” says Film Finances co-president Kurt Woolner. “The filmmaker thought it was important to shoot there, guerrilla style. It might seem crazy, but the producer came up with a well-thought out plan with a lot of contingencies, so we are able to provide the bond.”

Filmmakers sometimes chafe at the creative restriction of a completion guarantor telling them where, how and with whom they can shoot. But as bonders point out, it’s the completion funding, that gives filmmakers the freedom to pursue their vision by securing the considerable amounts of money from multiple sources that they need to do so.

Read the rest of this article from Variety.

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by Gary Susman.

Sure, Hollywood is fixated on the young, chasing teenage dollars, looking for the next fresh hotties, and sending stars over 25 to the glue factory get botoxed. And yet, this summer, some of the most eagerly anticipated movies are coming from directors old enough to collect Social Security. There’s Ridley Scott, behind this year’s most anticipated sci-fi epic, “Prometheus;” there’s Woody Allen, with another comedy/travelogue, “To Rome With Love”; and there’s Oliver Stone, with all-star crime thriller “Savages.” Not bad for directors who are 74, 76, and 65, respectively.

In an industry that places such a premium on youth, directing seems to be one of the few jobs where age is considered an asset, not a liability. Many of today’s top directors are men (and, in a handful of cases, women) who’ve been at it for decades. When it comes to managing hundreds of people on an eight- or nine-figure production, experience counts, as does level-headedness, maturity, authority, reliability, and other qualities that grow more pronounced with age.

Read the rest of this article from Moviefone.

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Mac Techie Help!

I am on a Mac (OS 10.6.8) and I use Firefox 12.0.

How do I get rid of the pink dots around the no follow links on my pages?  I can see no plugin or extension that I can turn off. Click to see pdf copy of sample page – Nofollow2

Thank you very much for your help

Peter

by Dre Rivas.

A couple weeks ago documentary filmmaker Lee Storey won her case against the Commissioner of Internal Revenue after the IRS said she could not deduct expenses from her film, Smile ‘Til It Hurts: The Up with People Story.

Since her primary job is that of a lawyer, the backwards thinking went – and because her documentary (despite making the rounds at some festivals in 2008 and her continued efforts to make the film a success) failed to become profitable – her filmmaking is nothing more than a hobby and deductions were not justified. See, if her documentary did turn a profit and if the success of her documentary allowed her to quit her day job to be an actual filmmaker instead of an aspiring filmmaker, then she could deduct those expenses.

Read the rest of this article from Film.com

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by Xeni Jardin.

Virgin America, the airline on which you can watch Boing Boing’s very own television channel with our hand-picked videos, is producing the “first-ever film made at 35,000 feet,”— Departure Date. Photography took place on Virgin airplanes and covered “3 continents, 28,000 miles, and 20 hours of in-flight shooting.”

Departure Date was written and directed by award-winning writer and director Kat Coiro (L!fe Happens, While We Were Here and A Case of You) and stars Ben Feldman (Mad Men), Nicky Whelan (Hall Pass), Philip Baker Hall, Luis Guzmán, Janeane Garofalo and Max Brown.

Read the rest of this article (and see the trailer) at Boing Boing.

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by Michael Phillips.

With movies that are blatantly, ridiculously in love with the theater and its practitioners, the harshest critics tend to be those who love both mediums with equal, sentimental passion — the sort of feeling found in every frame of “Children of Paradise,” Marcel Carne’s 1945 epic set in the early 19th century Parisian entertainment district known as the Boulevard du Temple, also known as the Boulevard of Crime.

Not everybody loves this film. Undeniably Carne’s work, written by Jacques Prevert, swoons over its own poetry, while following the tale of a notorious actress (played by Arletty) and the men who love her, chief among them the mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault). But its power to enthrall remains strong, and a restored version plays Chicago this week at the Music Box Theatre.

Screenwriter Prevert’s story went before Carne’s cameras at an extremely dicey time, August 1943, in Vichy-controlled southern France. The Allied invasion of Sicily and the Italian armistice forced the production to relocate to Nazi-controlled Paris.

Read the rest of this article from Chicago Tribune.

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by Darnell L. Moore.

TFW is excited to highlight the inventive work of several phenomenal women filmmakers in a forum that runs from today through Friday. Carmen Torres, tiona m., Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Anna Barsan, Pratibha Parmar, and Nev Nnaji reflect on the plight of women filmmakers in a male-dominated industry, feminist approaches taken up in filmmaking, filmmaking as both an art form and modality for social change, and their processes.

Read the rest of this article from The Feminist Wire.

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by Cristina DC Pastor.

What’s your film about? I asked Ahlam Darwish, 17, from Jerusalem, while waiting for her film to screen at the Curious Pictures studio in Manhattan.

“It’s about a very talented, young girl who plays the piano, but what many do not know is that she is about to go blind,” Darwish replied excitedly.

Who is this girl?

“Me,” she replied before erupting into giggles.

Darwish, an upbeat Arab-Israeli with a smiling face, is one of 10 teens who created short films about their worlds with the UK-based Films Without Borders. It’s a nonprofit organization that works with young filmmakers from “disadvantaged backgrounds” to create films that “break down barriers, build bridges and create a dialogue.” A curated selection of their films were screened in New York this April.

“The Gift,” Darwish’s 20-minute documentary about her love of piano music and her struggle with imminent blindness, was one of the films. The others included “The Ticket,” a story about finding love in a lost bus ticket; “Unknown Circumstances,” a tale of superstition set in Israel; “Love & Obsession,” about a shy girl learning to dance who ends up teaching her classmates her unique style of dancing; and “Football the Wonderful Game,” which chronicles the lifestyle of a devoted football fan in all its hilarity.

Read the rest of this article from Feet in 2 Worlds.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 238 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”