March 2005

Aimee Mann is one tough woman to track down. After a month of scheduling and rescheduling an interview time, I was finally about to sit down and talk with Mann about her role as composer of independent film soundtrack, and about how the art of film inspires her as a songwriter.

Flipping through the catalog of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the faces of American narrative filmmakers are unsurprisingly still predominantly male, reflecting the state of the industry at large. However, there are a few renegade female faces that thankfully interrupt the gender homogeneity.

Los Angeles-based artist, photographer, and conceptual filmmaker Sharon Lockhart makes films as minimal as they are pensive. There’s a predilection for long takes, little edits, and a fixed, straight-ahead framing within which actions transpire. Repetitions and circularity permeate. Time is let to elapse.

Rebecca Miller needs to recharge. Well, her phone at least.

While covering the 2003 St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase, where one of my films was showing, Joe Williams, film critic of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote an article in which he referred to me as the “godmother of the St. Louis filmmaking community.” I was flattered but also a bit embarrassed. I have no idea how he came up with it, but the name stuck. More and more people began calling me “the godmother,” and I felt slightly uncomfortable bearing the title without really knowing what it meant. I certainly didn’t start my career in film as any kind of godmother.

Is America ready for gospel cinema? Independent producer Reuben Cannon thinks so. The former veteran casting director sees a vast, untapped audience similar to that which propelled Mel Gibson’s 2004 religious epic The Passion of the Christ to a multi-million dollar success. Except in Cannon’s version, the untapped audience is made up of several million black Americans from across the economic strata—a “core audience,” Cannon suggests, who are socially conservative and woefully under-served at the local cineplex.

Dear Doc Doctor:

I think I made the mistake of putting myself in my film as the inquisitive filmmaker—as a woman, I’m not sure if the role really suits me. What can be done at this stage to save the film?