IFP Alumni Features in Sundance 2011

Big news for IFP alumni this week as Sundance Film Festival announces their slate. IFP is proud to have been a part of these films’ processes, from scripts and rough cuts at Independent Film Week, and through finishing and distribution with the Independent Filmmaker Labs.

IFP Alumni include US Dramatic Competition films Here, Gun Hill Road, On the Ice and Pariah. Kinyarwanda premieres in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

Premiering in the US Documentary Competition are Crime After Crime, Hot Coffee and If A Tree Falls.

Restless City (pictured) premieres in the NEXT Competition, festival favorite Incendies shows in Spotlight, and Granito and Those Amazing Shadows are in Documentary Premieres.

"I heart IFP because they were one of the first organizations to see promise in Pariah and in Dee [Rees, director] and I. We were so amazed because after the IFP Market ended in 2007, I thought, "well that's it, we're on our own again," but now looking back, that was just the beginning. Amy [Dotson] and team have been our constant champions, opening doors and giving counsel as we labored to get this film made. We're so grateful and excited to share this premiere with the IFP team." says Nekisa Cooper, producer of Pariah, which is an alumnus of Emerging Narrative 2007 and Narrative Lab 2010.

Says Kinyarwanda director Alrick Brown of his experience in the 2010 Independent Filmmaker Labs “[IFP are] goddesses on the hero’s journey. Thank you for the swords and the shields.”

Rashaad Ernesto Green, writer/director of Gun Hill Road said "Through IFP's No Borders, we met with festival programmers and industry professionals who became aware and excited about our feature film Gun Hill Road. We were able to establish relationships with many talented filmmakers and top executives that we may otherwise never have met. It was the beginning of a wonderful journey. Thank you, IFP, for the continued support. We look forward to returning the favor some day!"

You can read the full slate of projects over at Filmmaker Magazine.

Lab & Emerging Narrative directors in Filmmaker's '25 New Faces'

Every year we eagerly anticipate who the Filmmaker Magazine staff will highlight as the current class of hot indie talent in their "25 New Faces" issue. There's always a few surprises, and this year, we're pleased that a few of our own talented alumni have been highlighted-

Rebecca Richman Cohen participated in the 2009 Documentary Independent Filmmaker Labs with her film War Don Don, about the international defense team for, and war crimes conviction of a Sierra Leonean rebel leader. War Don Don has played and won awards at numerous festivals, and will air on HBO in September 29.


Victoria Mahoney and Susan Youssef were both among the powerhouse women directors bringing their features to this year's Narrative Independent Filmmaker Labs.

Victoria Mahoney's Yelling To The Sky, which Scott Macaulay calls a "powerful, emotionally nuanced debut feature about a New York City teenager growing up in a mixed-race family" features Zoe Kravetz, Tim Blake Nelson and Gabourey Sibide.

Habibi Rasak Kharban (Darling, Something's Wrong With Your Head) from Lebanese-Syrian-Brooklyner Susan Youssef is the first film to be shot in Gaza in 15 years. Habibi is based on the ancient Sufi parable of the Majnun Layla, the story of a man so smitten with a nearly unattainable woman he goes insane in his quest for her.

Habibi Rasak Kharban and Yelling to the Sky are both in post-production and are available for meetings with industry at Independent Film Week; industry interested in more information about these projects can register to participate here.

Matt Porterfield, is our fourth in the 25 New Faces. Porterfield came to Independent Film Week's Emerging Narrative program with his script Metal Gods in 2008. The script won our Panasonic camera package grant, but the shoot turned into his acclaimed Putty Hill, a Baltimore-based tour of the friends and family of a recently OD'd young man which debuted in Berlin and was recently picked up by Cinema Guild for a Fall theatrical release.

Congratulations to you all - we knew you when!

After the Doc Labs - Deep Breaths and Pasty Skin

by Erin Casper, Editor, OUR SCHOOL

Now that I’ve had a moment to recover from waking up at 7 a.m. every day, I’ve gotten to digest what happened over the last week at the IFP Documentary Lab.

Like any other pasty editor toiling away in their dark office*, I am always eager to get out to filmmaking workshops. What pulled me away from my desk this week was the opportunity to be among ten dynamic first-time film making teams from around the country participating in a wonderfully comprehensive, and intense, post-production lab.

The first two days of the lab started off with all of the fellows introducing their projects and receiving in-depth feedback from our one-on-one and editing mentors. Our editing mentor, Mary Lampson, worked with us on figuring out how to make the leap from our late assembly stage to an early rough cut. For me – being a first-time feature doc editor – it was like having an intervention at a moment of vulnerability in the film’s structure, pacing, tone and style.

Since our film doesn’t have any music in it yet, we were a case study for the panel on how to work with a composer. We learned what works and doesn’t work when you describe the kind of music you are looking for (i.e. do not say things like, “this part needs some movement”) and when to start working with them (i.e. as early as possible). One good idea was to let your composer watch your film and create music based on their response to it, and then respond in turn by describing the specific parts you liked to spur on further brainstorming. Other ideas were to watch films with music you both thought worked and figure out why, and to listen to music together.

The rest of the week focused on the afterlife of the film with workshops and panels ranging from marketing and PR, to outreach, distribution, and legal issues. Somewhere around the grassroots marketing panel, it began to sink in how much work there is to do over the next year or so after picture lock. It seems almost like even more work than editing the film itself. A dizzying. Amount. Of work.

Now with this sobering realization in mind, I am itching to get back to the office and finish the film so it can take on its own unpredictable life in the world.

*Just kidding about the dark office, but I really am pasty as hell.

"Our Heads Are Spinning": The OUR SCHOOL team on IFP's Doc Labs

A couple of days into the IFP Documentary Lab, we began admitting to each other with increasing frequency that our heads are spinning. This, it turns out, is not so much a complaint as a battle cry.

Part nurturing cocoon for the creative process and part scared straight film camp, this crash course in finishing compresses in one week a preview of what all of us are inevitably going to go through in the last year of finishing and releasing our work. The result is curiously energizing. Bracing, one might say.

We started off gently, sharing clips and stories about our projects and taking in feedback on our cuts from an amazing group of editing advisers. In the process, we learned as much from hearing the discussion on other projects as we learned from the feedback sessions devoted to our own projects. (And we got to see some spectacularly successful pairings of experienced advisers and first-time filmmakers who practically started talking to each other in code within seconds of meeting each other.)

Then, as we moved into the finishing boot camp, we started to feel a bit like first-year med students doing dissection: excited to get some real-life knowledge, but not so thrilled yet about the prospect of dealing with all the guts and entrails.

The result is much like learning to ski: the slopes ahead of us after this week feel no less steep, but at least now we’ll know how to make it to the bottom in one piece.

Here is some of the wisdom we’ll carry with us as we brace ourselves for the trip:
• The whole process of filmmaking is about intention, a shimmering concept that encompasses choice-making, planning, social change goals, and - hopefully - meaning. Everything else follows from intention. This fact so obvious that we very frequently lose sight of it.

• The temptation to prematurely make things perfect is ultimately counter-productive. Imperfection is close friends with creativity, and bad ideas are often adjacent to the best ideas.

• Everyone is struggling. Hopefully. If you’re not struggling, you’re not digging deep enough to make the best movie you can - as our editing adviser, the wonderfully empowering Mary Lampson (Harlan County, Trouble the Water) said to us: “You have what's going on. But what matters is what is really going on.”

• You have to devote one hundred and twenty per cent of your time to making the best film you can. The other one hundred and twenty per cent of your time must go into raising the money to finish the film and getting it out into the world.

Felix Endara of DAMELO TODO blogs IFP Doc Labs

This week has been frantic. I’m a first-time producer working with a talented, but equally new-to-documentary director. Our experimental documentary, DAMELO TODO/GIVE ME EVERYTHING, focuses on the unique alliance born at historic Los Angeles bar Silver Platter when Latina immigrant transgender women meet queer avant-garde performance artists.

I had been familiar with IFP’s Documentary Rough Cut Lab because my colleagues at Arts Engine had been Lab Leaders, and as DocuClub’s Manager, I have programmed the work of Lab alumni Nicole Opper, Augusta Palmer, and Miao Wang at our works-in-progress screening series DocuClub. Participating in the Lab, however, has given me the opportunity to see things from a filmmaker’s perspective that I previously had not given much consideration.

For one, I’ve been blown away by my fellow Lab filmmakers’ projects. I appreciate the wide range of the work and I’m honored to be in their company.

Similarly, it has been incredibly valuable to spend concentrated time with industry experts who have used our films as case studies to give us tips on their areas of expertise. For example, yesterday we covered outreach and audience engagement. While this is an area that we have been developing since we were still in production, learning that we should focus on our “devout” (the core people who you can count on to see your film) and, to a lesser extent, “probable” (those who might be more peripheral) audiences was helpful. Even more illuminating was to hear that we should not waste our energy on those deemed “possible” (e.g., a broad category such as the 18-24 year-old nightclub patron) as this is a much sought-after, and thus hard to pin, category.

Part of our work in the next few weeks, then, is to continue to narrow down our core audience, while also seeking and securing outreach partners--those communities and groups who are invested (either via subject matter or our social-issue goals) in the success of DAMELO TODO.

David Soll, Director of PUPPET, takes in IFP’s Doc Labs

We're already three days into the lab, so I have a bit of catching up to do. I didn't get to the blogging as quickly as I should have, and Danielle has good reason to be mad at me (you don't want Danielle DiGiacomo mad at you, by the way. She puts smiley faces on your Facebook page.). Regardless, here we go and let's decide together to make the best of where we are.



(Caitlin Boyle, Film Sprout counsels David Soll on outreach)

I can imagine having at one point earlier in life thought "wouldn't it be amazing if someone created a program that X," wherein X stands for the entire mission statement, schedule, description, leaders, mentors, editing advisers and first-time filmmakers involved in the IFP Documentary Lab. Which is to say, I'm impressed, and I'm impressed to the point that I find it hard to believe this fantastic idea was actually put in to effect.

Here is a program that takes ten first-time documentary feature filmmakers (also ten narrative filmmakers, in their own lab [we don't mix well]) who are entirely dissimilar from one another in sensibility and subject matter, yet share with each other varying degrees of bewilderment with the state of our films, our careers, and the industry. Which are three very large things about which to be bewildered, and together suggest a common state in which nearly every first time filmmaker is finding themselves these days.

(Jon Reiss talks about the long tail)

If you are a bewildered filmmaker - as I am (although I shouldn't speak for the entire group. some of the other filmmakers look really un-bewildered, in fact) - what the lab offers you appears at first to be a crash course in finishing, distribution models and editorial decision making. But then you arrive on the first day, they go ahead and fill you in on everything else the Lab actually is. Now, you've read all this in the literature ahead of time, but because you are not especially bright (you are, remember, trying to make an independent documentary feature in 2010), your lab leaders are nice enough to go over the scope of the program one more time. First, you realize they aren't just offering you a 'crash course', but relationships with mentors and editing advisers who are among the finest documentary talents in the business. And then you realize they selected three of these folks to actually be "lab leaders" - which means they are running the lab, in person, for every minute of this week, and together serving a function somewhere between that of batting coach, psychotherapist and rabbi. And then, you realize, they've picked filmmakers as your peers who each have compelling, hugely exciting projects of their own. And then, when you're starting to think Okay, this week looks pretty good to me, they tell you this whole thing isn't just one week at all. No, it's actually a YEAR, and will include continued mentoring with each adviser/leader/mentor offering one on one meetings outside the scheduled sessions, phone calls, letters, emails, text messages to help you continue resolving issues and facing down the intimidating landscape of independent film. And THEN, after offering you (are you kidding?) all this support, they - almost it seems just to mess with your head - they have the nerve to tell you the entire program is free.

So my point is, after a few days, my point is that yeah, I think the Lab is a good idea.