Elevating

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-- Top Series 2016 --

(Because TV is the new Film)

1. Transparent

2. Atlanta

3. Togetherness

4. The Girlfriend Experience

5. Search Party

6. Happy Valley

7. Catastrophe

8. Last Chance U

9. People Vs OJ Simpson: American Crime Story

10. Veep

Honourable mentions: House of Cards, The Night Of, Narcos, Stranger Things, Better Call Saul

Didn’t get a chance to see yet: Insecure, Halt & Catch Fire, Rectify, High Maintenance, Horace and Pete, Westworld, The Americans

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When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination.

Ingmar Bergman

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Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson’s stirring and thought-provoking stop motion film Anomalisa was one of the highlights of 2016. A beautifully crafted concept and although glum and melancholic at its core, lifted by an unmistakable wry sense of humour and an earnest exploration of human nature.

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Nerdwriter “breaks down just how prevalent such adequate movies have become and how we audiences are beginning to happily settle for such cliche-laden filmmaking.“ (via Playlist)

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- Top Films 2016 -

1. Victoria

2. Anomalisa

3. 13th

4. Arrival

5. Christine

6. Mustang

7. Moonlight

8. American Honey

9. Son of Saul

10. The Club

Honourable mentions: Paterson, Spotlight, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Divines, Everybody Wants Some, Certain Women

Films didn’t get to see yet: I, Daniel Blake, Tony Erdmann, Elle, Loving, 20th Century Women, Manchester By The Sea, Jackie, La La Land

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'Arrival': How DP Bradford Young Deconstructed Sci-Fi | No Film School

"Directors and cinematographers have to be equally vulnerable."

“Part of it was not shackling ourselves to genre. The science fiction genre has all types of good tropes that work that are tried and true, and that didn’t make sense for this story. In our process as filmmakers, we have to try and be really honest in how we tell a story, which, in this case, is to highlight the capacity and the beauty of human emotion.”

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'Chaos Brings Life': 10 Things We Learned from Andrea Arnold at Tribeca | No Film School

“The director of Fish Tank and Red Road shares the secrets to low-budget authenticity.... Andrea Arnold's characters are—like Arnold herself—restless spirits. Trapped in lives that are too small for them, they push boundaries to break open their worlds. From the volatile Mia in Fish Tank, Arnold's most celebrated film to date, to Wasp's Zoe, a single mother of four who wants to live her own life, Arnold has compassion for women with a devil-may-care attitude and the desire to live an untethered life.” 

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Original casting call flyer for Larry Clark’s Kids.

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Pablo Larrain’s The Club: a surreal, funny, tragic and bizarre story about faith, morality and loneliness. But also oddly about love.

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Jill Soloway Masterclass on The Female Gaze at TIFF 2016.

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A poignant essay written by Cassavetes in 1959, that’s still relevant today...

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Adult Life Skills: ‘What is a strong female character?’ | The Guardian

How Bafta-winning director Rachel Tunnard went from short films starring her own thumbs to making the year’s most relatable twentysomething comedy.

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Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s alluring, sumptuous and thought-provoking film Mustang is a remarkably self-assured debut. Encapsulating the confusing and wreckless feelings of growing up at a poignant time in their lives, we watch these sisters face their future in this a powerful and devastating coming of age story.

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As pointed out in this video essay, “The Social Network – Designing Dialogue,” Aaron Sorkin does with the character of Zuckerberg what every good script should do: give us character through action and then let the dialogue expand on those actions. The essay is essentially a crash course in Screenwriting 101, giving examples of great screenplays that handle exposition and dialogue well, some that are too expository, and even some that tell you what you should not do when it comes to explaining character backstory to the audience.

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'American Psycho' Screenwriter Guinevere Turner Wants You to Write the Worst Scene Ever Written | No Film School

Writer/director/actress, and one of the most influential proponents of LGBT cinema, Guinevere Turner, sat down with NFS to talk about her work as a screenwriter for such films as Go Fish, American Psycho, and The Notorious Bettie Page.

“My #1 piece of advice would be to just sit down and write something. Anything. Even if it sucks.”

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I may make a decision and move from that crossroads, at which point I find myself instantly at another crossroads. Therefore there is only movement. A screenplay is movement. It is written in time and expresses a passage of time. It is made in time, and it is viewed in time. It’s a movie, it moves.

Charlie Kaufman

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In this second On Story installation featuring Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonathan Demme, the duo look back on the vision, style, influences, and creative passion for Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, Stop Making Sense, Rachel Getting Married and Something Wild.