2-2-07
Heading South by Southwest
Joe Swanberg, the 25-year-old enfant terrible behind 2005’s Kissing on the Mouth and 2006’s LOL is opening a feature film at the South by Southwest Film Festival for the third year in a row.
Swanberg’s new Hannah Takes the Stairs premieres at SXSW in Austin, Texas, March 9-17. Long the number one showcase for new music talent, SXSW has grown in recent years to be one of a handful of top film festivals in North America.
A relentlessly DIY filmmaker who shoots and edits his own work, Swanberg specializes in queasily intimate portraits of young adult sexuality, shot in verite-style DV and developed in collaboration with his cast.
Greta Gerwig, who appeared in LOL only in a series of cheesecake cell phone photos, stars in Hannah as the title character, a production company intern who becomes the center of a love triangle between two writers and best friends.
Swanberg has some ringers in his cast this time around: an assortment of acclaimed fellow filmmakers, whom he befriended on the festival circuit, making acting turns. Most prominent is Andrew Bujalski, writer, director and co-star of the slow-building cult favorite Mutual Appreciation. Bujalski and Swanberg have been linked for both their raw aesthetic and their neobohemian milieu. Cast includes Mark Duplass, Todd Rohal, Kent Osborne and Ry Russo-Young.
This is also the first Swanberg feature in which he worked with an outside production company, Austin-based Film Science, which produced the Sundance-premiered, Independent Spirit Award-nominated Old Joy starring Will Oldham.
Swanberg is producing his second season of the online serial “Young American Bodies” for Nerve.com, and is in production on another feature, with the working title Inappropriate Relationship Project, about the friendship between a college professor and student.
See www.hannahtakesthestairs.com
Now You Know, the 2003 feature financed by local Lumberyard Productions, has been released on home video by the Weinstein Company.
Now You Know is the directorial debut of Jeff Anderson, who stars in Kevin Smith’s Clerks franchise. Smith is executive producer.
Jeremy Sisto stars as a man whose fiance calls off their wedding. They return to New Jersey to sort out their relationship. With Rashida Jones, Anderson, Heather Paige Kent, Todd Babcock, Paget Brewster, Trevor Fehrman, and Smith.
Lumberyard partners and former Libertyville High School classmates Eric Nordness, Thomas Stelter and Alek Petrovic raised the “just-under $1 million” budget from private investors and took the film on a small, self-distributed theatrical run in ‘03 before the Weinsteins picked up the film and shelved it.
The release coincides with the Weinsteins’ DVD release of Smith’s Clerks II, in which Anderson co-stars.
See www.lumberyardproductions.com
Ricardo Islas’ horror thriller Lockout will screen in the 23rd Chicago International Latino Film Festival, April 13-25.
Islas’ films To Kill a Killer, Night Fangs and Bad Blood have played at CILFF in years past.
“Lockout is about a man who moves his family to Wisconsin, where he sees something so scary that he blacks out and can’t communicate with other people,” Islas said.
Starring producer Cyn Dulay, Kris Desautels and Claire Davenport. Executive producer is Salomon Carmona. Mark Harris of 1555 FilmWorks also produced.
Lockout also screens Feb. 24 in the Nevermore Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina.
Islas, of Alpha Studios, is in post-production on the bilingual thriller El Dia de los Muertos, about a man who comes from Mexico to Chicago to avenge an attack on his daughter. Mexican marquis actor Carmona is co-star and executive producer, as he was on Islas’ 2003 bilingual feature To Kill a Killer. Christina De Leon, Jim Kirwan, Rosa Frausto, Mark Edwards and Dulay star. Dulay, Harris and Tony De Leon are producing. DP is Mikael Kreuzriegler.
See www.alphaflicks.com.
Tim Kinsella of local bands Joan of Arc and Owen has posted the trailer to his debut feature Orchard Vale to the film’s Web site www.orchardvalethemovie.com. Amy Cargill, editor of the documentaries Nice Bombs and My Brother’s War, is editing and producing through her Normal Pictures.
Deri Tyton, whose Toot’s and Blows did the festival circuit in 2004, is casting his latest feature Love Bones, an urban thriller slated to shoot this spring through Tyton’s Legenderi Films.
Toot’s and Blows, a romance between a poet and a drug dealer, premiered at the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Black Harvest Film Festival. Tyton premiered his latest film, Party Line, Jan. 14.
See www.myspace.com/legenderifilms or email markarmystrong62@aol.com.
Stephen Cone is in production on the short film Young Wives, adapted from his own play which premiered at Collaboraction’s Sketchbook ‘06. Lindsay Gould and Sandra Delgado star. Cone is producing with Dale Rivera through Cone’s own Cone Arts and Collaboraction. Collaboration executive director Anthony Mosely is executive producer.
“Young Wives concerns a funny, provocative meeting between two young women which gradually reveals itself to be much, much more than it seems,” Cone said. See www.collaboraction.org.
Faith Diggs of Faith Productions is in post on the film Abused Authority.”It’s about a ruthless, abusive police officer who never abides by the law himself and ends up facing serious consequences,” Diggs said. She’s looking for an editor and a composer. Email faithproductions@comcast.net.
Cal Sade, a local actor, has launched a Filmmakers Networking Group which meets Wednesdays 7-9 p.m. at Borders, 830 N. Michigan, 2nd floor cafe.
Ed M. Koziarski is in post-production on the feature film Okinawa Project. Email edk@homesickblues.com.