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Talkhouse

Shannon Plumb has shot over 200 short films, which have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and on international screens. She started by shooting herself as various characters, acting out three-minute situations using humor and silence as her vehicles for storytelling. In 2013, her first feature film, Towheads, premiered at MoMA as part of New Directors / New Films; it is now streaming on the <a href="https://www.criterionchannel.com/towheads" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Criterion Channel</a>. You can see her short films at <a href="http://shannonplumb.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">shannonplumb.com</a> and Towheads is available on Netflix and iTunes. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, director Derek Cianfrance, and their two sons.

Shannon Plumb

Film

Dear Hollywood

Baltasar Kormákur is an Icelandic actor and filmmaker whose work spans theater, movies and television. His latest film, Apex, starring Charlize Theron, Taron Egerton and Eric Bana, is now streaming on Netflix. He is the director of Icelandic films including 101 Reykjavik, The Sea, Jar City, The Oath and The Deep, the latter of which was shortlisted for the foreign language Academy Award. Since 2008, Kormákur has directed and produced several non-Icelandic features, such as Contraband, starring Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster and Kate Beckinsale; 2 Guns, with Denzel Washington and Wahlberg; the epic adventure movie Everest, with an ensemble cast featuring Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Sam Worthington, Emily Watson, Keira Knightley, Robin Wright and Jake Gyllenhaal; the ocean survival tale Adrift, starring Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin; and the survival movie Beast, starring Idris Elba and Sharlto Copley.

Baltasar Kormákur

Why I Make Extreme Survival Movies

Jeremy Frindel is the founder of <a href="http://www.substratumfilms.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Substratum Films</a>, specializing in cinematic portraiture exploring the resilience and majesty of the human spirit. In 2013 Jeremy released his first feature film, <a href="https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/onetrackheart">One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das</a>. Distributed by Zeitgeist Films, the film screened theatrically across the US, and won the Best Documentary prize at the Maui, Dharamsala and Gold Coast Film Festivals among others. Jeremy is in post-production now on his next project, Spacefox, a feature documentary following the reinvention of Marty Friedman from lead guitarist in Megadeth to one of the most famous TV comedians in Japan. The Doctor From India, his second feature, opens June 1 at the Quad Cinema in New York City and is screening across the U.S. courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

Jeremy Frindel

In Movies, I Tell People’s Transformation Stories. Here is My Own.

Kate Novack is an Emmy-nominated producer and director of documentary films. Her first feature as director, <a href="https://www.thegospelaccordingtoandre.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Gospel According to André</a>, a documentary portrait of the iconic fashion journalist André Leon Talley, is released by Magnolia Pictures on May 25. Previously, Kate was a producer and writer on Page One: Inside the New York Times, which premiered at Sundance in 2011, and a producer on the HBO feature film A Table in Heaven. With her longtime producing partner Andrew Rossi, Kate has worked as a story consultant on several films, including CNN&#8217;s Ivory Tower (2014), which she also co-produced, and The First Monday In May (2016). Prior to making films, Kate was a reporter at Time, where she covered film, design, television and the arts. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children.

Kate Novack

Falling for New York (in 35 mm)

Director Elissa Down’s 2008 debut feature film, The Black Balloon, starring Rhys Wakefield, Luke Ford, Gemma Ward, and Toni Collette, won six Australian Film Institute Awards and received more than 30 prizes around the world. Since then, Elissa has directed two episodes of the award-winning Australian comedy series Offspring, and adapted and directed the bestselling Colleen Hoover novel Confess into a TV series for Awestruck (Awesomeness TV) that was a hit on go90. Her latest film, <a href="http://lionsgateathome.com/the-honor-list" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Honor List</a> starring Meghan Rienks, Sasha Pieterse, Karrueche Tran and Arden Cho, is now out on digital, DVD and on demand.

Elissa Down

Finding My Moments

Claudia Weill is a film, television and theatre director. Her feature films include Girlfriends, It’s My Turn, and the Academy Award-nominated The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir. She has directed theatre at Williamstown, the O’Neill, Sundance, ACT, Manhattan Theatre Club, the Public Theatre (Donald Margulies’ Found A Peanut), Pasadena Playhouse, EST and Irish Rep (The Belle of Belfast). Weill&#8217;s TV work includes Sesame Street, Thirtysomething (Emmy), My So-Called Life, Face of a Stranger (Emmy for Gena Rowlands) and Girls (HBO). She teaches TV Directing at the New School and Columbia University and serves on the Executive Committee for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to which she was the third woman admitted as a director in 1981.

Claudia Weill

From Girlfriends to Girls and Beyond

Matthew Porterfield has written and directed four feature films, Hamilton (2006), Putty Hill (2011), I Used To Be Darker (2013) and <a href="http://sollerspoint.oscilloscope.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sollers Point</a>, which opens in New York on May 18 and Los Angeles on May 25. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Harvard Film Archive and has screened at the Whitney Biennial, the Walker Arts Center, Centre Pompidou, Cinémathèque Française, and film festivals such as Sundance, the Berlinale, and SXSW. His first narrative short, Take What You Can Carry, premiered in the Shorts Competition in Berlin in 2015. Matthew teaches screenwriting, theory, and film production at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and is currently developing his next feature, Check Me In Another Place. (Photo by Matisse Rifai.)

Matthew Porterfield

A Filmmaker’s Guide to Beating Writer’s Block

Writer-director Dominic Savage became involved with film at an early age, appearing at age 10 in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. After graduating from the National Film and Television School in 1991, he made a series of documentaries for Channel 4 and the BBC. As a fiction filmmaker, he has written and directed the television films Nice Girl (2000), When I Was 12 (2001), Out of Control (2002) and Freefall (2009), as well as the two-part film Dive (2010), starring Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan and Gina McKee, and the fully improvised drama Born Equal (2007), starring Colin Firth, Anne-Marie Duff, Robert Carlyle and David Oyelowo. His TV series include True Love (2012), a semi-improvised five-part drama starring David Tenant, and The Secrets (2014), a five-part BBC drama series of standalone single films starring Olivia Colman, Alison Steadman and Emilia Fox. He made his feature debut in 2005 with the award-winning Love + Hate, and his second feature, The Escape, starring Gemma Arterton and Dominic Cooper, is now in theaters through IFC Films.

Dominic Savage

Blurring Fiction and Reality

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Cynthia Hill lives and works in North Carolina. Hill’s company, Markay Media, which has produced award-winning documentary films and television work, is based in Durham. Hill and chef Vivian Howard recently took home an Emmy for outstanding culinary program for A Chef’s Life, the docu-series they co-created which airs on PBS to an audience of 4 million viewers per episode. Hill previously won an Emmy for directing the show, which has recently concluded its fifth season. She also directed the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Private Violence, and an eight-part series on NASCAR called Road to Race Day for Complex Networks. (Picture by Jeremy Lange.)

Cynthia Hill

How to Make It as a Filmmaker Outside New York and Los Angeles

Writer-director Michael Pearce was born and raised in Jersey, and studied Film Directing at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth and the National Film &amp; Television School, where his graduation film, Madrugada, won Best Short at The Royal Television Society Awards. His next short film, Rite, was nominated at the 2011 BAFTAs and BIFAs, and his 2013 short Keeping Up with the Joneses was nominated at the 2014 BAFTAs and BIFAs. In 2013 Michael was selected to be part of Channel 4’s Coming Up scheme, through which he made Henry, his debut TV drama. His debut feature, <a href="https://www.beastthefilm.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Beast</a>, starring Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and is in theaters through Roadside Attractions from May 11.

Michael Pearce

Under the Influence

Dan Gregor&#8216;s first feature as writer-director working in film and TV. He is currently a writer on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and his past TV credits include How I Met Your Mother, The Comedians and Adult Swim&#8217;s NTSF:SD:SUV. His debut feature as writer-director, <a href="http://lionsgateathome.com/most-likely-to-murder" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Most Likely to Murder</a> starring Adam Pally, Rachel Bloom and Vincent Kartheiser, is now available on VOD.

Dan Gregor

My Porno Tape Story

Brendon Small is a director and stand up comic. He’s also the creator, writer, and musician behind the animated series Metalocalypse and Home Movies and the band Dethklok. Look for the album Galaktikon II: Become the Storm and the Galaktikon comic from Albatross Comics. (Picture by Jim Donnelly.)

film essay