Microcinema

It's time for our annual 10 Filmmakers to Watch list. We’ve pooled our resources and brainpower to get the scoop on who’s who this year.

Editor's Note: This collaborative reporting effort was led by Nikki Chase, Maddy Kadish and Beth Brosnan.

South by Southwest (SXSW) has become a convergence of film, interactive media, and music, as the lines between these media have increasingly blurred. So it's appropriate that David Dworsky and Victor Köhler's documentary, Press Play Pause, was chosen for an opening night premiere.

Choosing The Independent's 10 to Watch is like trying to predict the future, or the stock market, or the weather in New England. The films on this list are in all stages of production and the filmmakers range from seasoned professionals to debut artists. So you might wonder how we named this particular group. How, exactly, does one go about predicting what 2010 has in store?

What happened at AIVF over the last 30 years?

I first became aware of AIVF when Martha Gever was editor of The Independent. I marveled at this national organization that put out each month a magazine chock full of weighty, intellectual and critical articles on film and video.

In 1973, a young, cinema-loving bohemian couple fled the high rents of Manhattan for the more affordable suburbs of Huntington, NY. Once there, Vic Skolnick and Charlotte Sky found that they had also fled, inadvertently, the vibrant independent cinema scene in New York City, which was then in its heyday, with more than a dozen arthouses sprinkled throughout the boroughs.

Watching 2,000 short films in four months isn’t something you take on in your free time. It requires a finely honed system. For Roberta Munroe, one of the Sundance Film Festival’s two short film programmers, that system resembles an assembly line of video playback equipment.

As I start writing this, I’ve just ejected from my VCR the 349th entry for this year’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival and…well…it looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.

“At this moment, my biggest dream is
to find the source of our HVAC leak without having to shut theaters and tear into walls,” says Karen Cooper, executive director of New York City’s Film Forum. “There’s nothing less glamorous than a broken machine.”