michele's blog

Hurricane Katrina inspired a bevy of documentary films, but none captures the personal loss more artfully than Matt Faust's six-minute film home, which won Best Documentary Short at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. The Independent spoke with Matt Faust about his experience making the film and its inspiration, the loss of his family home.

Shelly Kling-Yosef's Gefilte Fish (watch the trailer) tells the story of a young woman torn between her pre-nuptial family tradition to kill and prepare gefilte fish versus her sympathy for the live carp swimming in her bathtub. Kling-Yosef, who grew up in Haifa and graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in Jerusalem, produced the film in Israel. Here she talks with The Independent about the making of her short film Gefilte Fish which screened at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

George Griffin's experimental film The Bather incorporates a woman showering, text across the screen, and a flipbook that comes to life through animation. Griffin, who grew up in Tennessee and now lives in New York City, has an impressive body of work including cartoons, narratives, docs, and musicals. Here he talks with The Independent about his short film The Bather which screened at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and can currently be seen online.

Tribeca Film Festival has gathered a diverse selection of short films ranging from experimental animations to personal stories, along with comedy and drama gems from across the globe. In fact, the two festival-winning short films – home (Best Documentary Short, directed by Matthew Faust, and The North Road (La route du Nord) (Best Narrative Short, directed and written by Carlos Chahine) – were both directorial debuts. Here is a small sampling of several short films that deserve another look.

As publications create their 'must-see' lists for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, we decided to take a different approach: directorial debuts. With the festival's start date of April 22 fast approaching, The Independent offers our picks of buzz-worthy independent films by first-time directors, including Entre Nos (see trailer), Off and Running (see trailer), and Original (see trailer).

The Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting announced the release of a new draft of the New York City's permit rules. Under the proposed rules, which are designed to codify procedures that have existed in practice since the office was established in 1966, a permit would be required for a shoot if production equipment or vehicles create an obstruction, but not for productions that only use hand-held cameras or tripods that don’t cause an obstruction. What do New York filmmakers think of the new guidelines?

Legendary filmmaker Errol Morris brought us such groundbreaking films as The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. Now Morris's body of work will be the subject of Nonfiction, a forthcoming book of photographs compiled by Nubar Alexanian, which chronicles the past 15 years of the director's career. The book's release will coincide with Morris's next movie, Standard Operating Procedure, a look at the Abu Ghraib scandal.

We've been thrilled with all the e-mail we've received since the site went live. And we're happy that hundreds of former AIVF members have activated their personal accounts (if you haven't yet done so, please head on over to the Interact page). Meanwhile, we've received a lot of questions, such as "Who are you?" and "Do you want to write about my film?" Publisher Michele Meek responds to these inquiries and more on her blog.