Courtney Sheehan is a film programmer, writer, and business strategist. Most recently, she served as executive director for Northwest Film Forum, the independent film nonprofit in Seattle. She is a frequent contributor to The Independent.
De Pue was nervous about working with so many co-producers. “I was a bit afraid about it, I learned in school about it. When you have all these co-producers they bring in money but they also have their artistic choices and they can get involved at some point.
When De Pue returned by himself to Afghanistan, he realized he “had to rethink the way of filming and the way of working in Afghanistan, to go back to a really low profile way like we did in the preparations.”
The Lost Arcade is the feature documentary debut of director Kurt Vincent and producer Irene Chin. The film captures the…
How did the buying and selling stack up at this year’s TIFF? Courtney Sheehan takes the temp of the ever-feverish world of independent film exhibition and distribution by talking with Adam Birnbaum (Avon Theatre), Julie Anderson Friesen (Cinema Falls), and Andrew Carlin (Oscilloscope Laboratories).
Fittingly, Frederick Wiseman attended the 40th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival with his 40th documentary, In Jackson Heights, about a diverse New York neighborhood in flux. The Independent asks Wiseman to discuss the editing process, the communities he discovered in Jackson Heights, and the notion of screening all of his films in a continuous 100 hour stretch.
If cinema can function as a vehicle for a nation’s collective memory, Afghanistan only recently began to recollect itself. Pietra Brettkelly’s documentary, A Flickering Truth, mines the Afghan Film Archive for the nation’s cultural history and follows the team of people who are working to protect it and share it with the world.
Heroin addiction and life on the New York streets take center stage in Josh and Benny Safdie’s latest, Heaven Knows What. The morning after their North American premiere at TIFF, they riff on the why and what of it all with the film’s star and inspirational scribe, Arielle Holmes.
Sprinkle a little adamant optimism over a new digital partnership with The Flaherty Film Seminar and a heaping embrace of the educational market, and you have a few of the most recent distribution strategies that The Cinema Guild’s Ryan Krivoshey discussed with The Independent’s Courtney Sheehan at TIFF.
From his purview at TIFF 2014, Drafthouse’s Tim League weighs what is and isn’t apocalyptic about the future of distribution in a season of down box offices and new acquisitions such as Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence.