Blurring the Lines
Ohio-based filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s 3-hour and 45-minute documentary A Lion in the House follows five families with…
Making Films
Voices from Issues Past
What happened at AIVF over the last 30 years? Coming up with a coherent and entertaining way to answer that…
AIVF: And What it Meant to Me
I first became aware of AIVF when Martha Gever was editor of The Independent. I marveled at this national organization…
Movies on the Move
The original idea was to drive filmmaker Ben Blaine into the countryside and abandon him, but since Ben can’t drive…
One-Two Punch
I thought that making Monster’s Ball was rough. I vowed upon wrapping that film that I would never make another….
On the Margins of the Multiplex
In 1973, a young, cinema-loving bohemian couple fled the high rents of Manhattan for the more affordable suburbs of Huntington,…
Q&A – James Schamus
Writer, producer, and film executive James Schamus has had about as brilliant a career in independent film as they come,…
Hell or High Water
In 1998, I joined the production team of Julie Gustafson’s Desire, a documentary about teenage girls from three diverse New…
Moving Images
Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004) was an unqualified hit. The documentary, which followed Spurlock as he ate nothing but…