Last night, Trilby and I were invited to a “pre-DOXA” private dinner with several of the DOXA board members (thank you Kenji Maeda, Dorothy Woodend & Joe Clark) and about a dozen other special guests.

The dinner (amazing Indian food!) was held at the house of Vikram Vij and Meeru Dhalwala who own Vij’s Restaurant in Vancouver.

Filmmaker Brishkay Ahmed was there and she showed the beginning of her latest film, Story of Burqa: Case of a Confused Afghan which led to a very lively debate.

Calling all BC short filmmakers!

The Vancouver Short Film Festival is now accepting entries for our 3rd annual festival. The two-day festival will take place at the Vancity Theatre in October (dates will be announced as soon as we can book!). Last festival, 45 films were screened and over $18,000 in prizes was awarded to both emerging and established filmmakers!

Students at all levels (not just colleges and universities now) and professional filmmakers from BC are eligible to enter. As is tradition, professional artists will receive an artist fee after screening at the festival, and this year we have a special deal for 5 students submitting from the same school. No more time limit, but remember, the shorter, the better!

You’ve worked hard to make your shorts, so we look forward to seeing them!

Check out The Vancouver Short Film Festival.

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from Portugal News Online.

One Portuguese film has been nominated for a major movie award while nine others are to be featured at the Rotterdam Cinema Festival in Holland, welcome recognition for a country that is striving to thrust its movie industry forward.

One Portuguese film has been nominated for a major movie award while nine others are to be featured at the Rotterdam Cinema Festival in Holland, welcome recognition for a country that is striving to thrust its movie industry forward.

The movie ‘1st Time 16mm’ by Portuguese film-maker Rui Goulart was nominated with an honourable mention at the Cinema Awards in Los Angeles.

It is the film-makers seventh full-length film, this time shot in Portugal, Italy, France and Spain.

Produced in 2008 with the support of Chiado Terrasse Filmes, the movie has now been distinguished with a nomination by one of the main official organisations in the USA in the realm of cinema, the Los Angeles Movie Awards.

‘1st Time 16mm’ tells the story of Miguel, a young film-maker who lives a series of adventures during the filming of his first full-length feature.

Cash-strapped but with an enormous will to succeed the production team chooses the cheapest form of filming, 16mm and go ahead with a project that they are the only ones to believe in.

Read the rest of this article from Portugal News Online.

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Eugene Kim, 26, a recent grad from Vancouver Film School was riding home in a bus one night when he stumbled with an amazing film opportunity. As he searched on his phone for free applications, he discovered an international film festival taking place in South Korea that was calling all filmmakers for a challenge: making a 29 second short-film with meaning and appeal.

Right away, he texted his roommates, Julien Trauman, Izabella Peregrino and Sebastien Dryland, also filmmakers recently out of film school, and pitched to them this idea. A week later, “One Last Shot” had been shot, finalized and was ranked 9th out of approximately 1000 shorts-films in the competition.

This adventure was only possible, thanks to the will and drive that these young filmmakers have. Directed by Julien Trauman and produced by Eugene Kim and Sebastien Dryland, the film has received many compliments from the Korean audience.

“We sat down on a Sunday, after a few nights of brainstorming and started sending out emails and making phone calls to get a crew together”, says Kim. “The script and shot list were finished that night, actors casted, and the concept of the film came together in only a few hours”, adds the producer who also counted with Sebastien Dryland to get everything done in such a short time.

The next day, they had a call time at 5 pm in a studio and the whole crew together. After seven hours – between equipment pick up and return, the film was in the can and ready to go to post-production. In three days, picture edit, sound design and color correction were finished and the movie was uploaded on the web, only four days before the announcement of the productions moving on to the next phase of the competition.

“Even though we made it to 9th place, we had to get a second 29” short together before knowing if we had made it to the next round or not”, explains Eugene Kim. Only now, they had to chose a theme amongst three that had been laid out by the organizers of the festival. “Life and…”, “Family is…” or “Between Hope and Hopeless”. From the previous brainstorming sessions, the director Julien Trauman had a concept that worked well with the third theme. The race was up once again.

The crew members from the first short jumped right in to make the second film. “Some had to find excuses to their every day jobs so that they could have the day off to be on set”, reveals Kim. This time, they had an important tool to bring more people on board.

“I showed a rental house our previous 29” and told them we are beginners in the industry and they got really excited with the idea of being part of it”, he explains. The actors casted had worked with Eugene Kim in a previous shoot and were convinced to volunteer for his new production after watching “One Last Shot”.

“Post-production was harder the second time, since all of us were busy working on other film sets and we had very limited time to finish ‘Dreams’”, says Kim. The director and editor, Julien Trauman, worked on the show every night for two hours during four days after working 14h days on a feature film. Color correction and sound design were finished on the same day after picture lock.

According to Izabella Peregrino, the director of photography, they “worked through the night, from 1am to 10 am straight”. “Because we had to submit  ‘Dreams’ that day, before 12am in Korea and with the time difference, we had very little time to make any mistakes”, adds the producer.

The final results come out on December 15th, but this team has already won something much greater than any prize they can imagine. “After grad I wasn’t really sure I could put together a project without the support from school and work on something that would make us proud, but we did it! These films gave us a huge confidence boost. If you have a good concept and you know the right people, you can make things happen”, admits Eugene Kim.

Director Julien Trauman

Here are the inks to both films. The password for both videos is graveley.

Dreams: http://vimeo.com/33331455
One last shot: http://vimeo.com/32110576

 
Contacts:

Julien Trauman – director/ editor – julientrauman@hotmail.com
Eugene Kim – producer/ sound designer – gnworldst@gmail.com
Sebastien Dryland – producer – seb-d@hotmail.co.uk
Izabella Peregrino – director of photography – izabellaperegrino@gmail.com
Lewis Wu – production designer/ special effects supervisor – chi_wu@tru.ca
Isabella Marengo – production designer – isabella_marengo@hotmail.com
Siobhan Duggan – production designer. – dsiobhan@hotmail.com

by James Rocchi.

At this year’s Sundance film festival, which played out over 10 freezing days in Utah and came to a close last Sunday, the divide between American cinema and the news stories defining the nation’s mood seemed narrower than ever.

From abuses of military power abroad to the financial meltdown at home, to the long, sad aftermath of hurricane Katrina, real-world concerns were being tackled in challenging and provocative ways by the films in competition. And not only by those in the documentary section, which can be relied upon to respond sharply to recent events. These stories were also being told by dramatic features.

Read the rest of this article from the Guardian.

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by Jackson Chan.

The iPhone Film Festival will host a screening and Q&A this Friday evening at Macworld | iWorld with an international group of filmmakers who go beyond using their iPhones to capture a pet’s adorable antics or a favorite song at a concert — these filmmakers see their phones as a tool to tell a story. More than 800 films have been submitted to the festival, with the requirement that the film’s footage was shot entirely on an iPhone. A select group of filmmakers will be debuting their new films, and their festival-winning shorts will be screening as well.

Since the iPhone introduced video recording as a feature, a new breed of independent filmmaking has emerged. The short films highlighted at the festival exhibit a lushness that belies the diminutive size of the camera the footage was shot on. With the introduction of 720p HD video recording in the iPhone 4, and subsequently 1080p in the iPhone 4S, filmmakers can shoot high-quality footage on a shoe-string budget. Furthermore, many accessories, such as lens attachments and camera stands, are available for the iPhone, adding to the filmmaking capabilities of the device and allowing for different effects and steadier shooting.

Read the rest of this article from All Voices.

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by Jamilah King.

It’s days before the Sundance Film Festival and Aurora Guerrero is busy. The 40-year-old filmmaker is set to debut her first feature-length project “Mosquita y Mari” at the festival in Park City, Utah, on Saturday, but it’s Wednesday and she finds herself in Los Angeles preparing to get in front of the camera for a television spot on up-and-coming filmmakers to watch.

It’s not exactly a standard Hollywood story. Her independent film is a teenage love story between two Chicana best friends who grow up in South East Los Angeles’ vibrant immigrant community. It relied largely on a grassroots funding campaign to raise money for production. But those facts have helped to lock in her place on the year’s indy film radar. When asked if there’s any one person who helped make all of it happen, she doesn’t hesitate.

Read the rest of this article from Color Lines.

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by Ian Wang.

The Sundance Film Festival is once again upon us, having officially kicked off Thursday, January 19 in Park City, UT. While the bulk of the attention is usually given to feature films, the Shorts Program has also been a cinematic treasure trove, often launching many young filmmakers onto the path of making their first features. Among this year’s shorts are two Asian American filmmakers, Andrew Ahn and Kangmin Kim. Coincidentally, they are both of Korean descent and members of the same 2011 class at CalArts. Hyphen chatted with them briefly this week to learn more about their lives and their films.

First up is Andrew Ahn, a Korean American born and raised in LA’s Koreantown. The child of Asian immigrants, he went to an Ivy League school — in his case, Brown — to study Biology, but switched his major to English and became interested in filmmaking after taking some video production classes. Subsequently he enrolled in the MFA Film Directing program at CalArts and graduated there in May 2011. His previous short film, Andy, won the best narrative short award at the 2011 San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Read the rest of this article from Hyphen Magazine.

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from Reuters.

With the Sundance Film Festival starting next Thursday and the Oscars not too far off, the movie buffs at online travel adviser Cheapflights (http:///www.cheapflights.com) have compiled a top 10 list of their favorite film festivals across the globe. Reuters has not endorsed this list:

Read the rest of this article from Reuters.

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by Laxmi Birajdar.

The country focus on Germany at this year’s Pune International Film Festival (Piff) is part of the ongoing celebrations of Germany and India’s 60 years of diplomatic relations under the Germany and ‘India 2011-2012: Infinite Opportunities’ banner.

Inaugurated by the consul general of the Federal Republic of Germany, Leopold-Theodor Heldman on Friday, the session in ‘Country Focus: Germany’ was graced by director of the Hof Film Festival, Germany, Heinz Badewitz, filmmaker Johannes Naber, faculty from Film and Television Institute of India Indraneel Bhattacharya and director of Max Mueller Bhavan, Pune Michael Flucht.

“As we take on the ambitious task of strengthening ties with India across politics, business, science and research, we believe culture, art and especially filmmaking and cinema is a more fitting platform for exchange of ideas. We wish to bring this to India for connoisseurs, especially those in the Oxford of the East,” Heldman said.

Read the rest of this article from Times of India.

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