"The sleeper hit of the 2010 film-festival and indie-awards circuit, Mike Ott's moody micro-budget Littlerock patiently observes the California road trip of college-aged Japanese siblings Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka, also the film's co-writer) and Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto)." Karina Longworth in the Voice: "En route to Manzanar (the filmmakers leave viewers to draw on their own knowledge, if any, of what that destination portends until the film's very end), their car breaks down in the tiny desert town of Littlerock, where they soon fall in with a local crowd of young layabouts."
"Amid the keggers and daytime bike rides is plenty of drug use, an overdue loan, and a menacing alpha-male bigot (Ryan Dillon)," notes Bill Weber in Slant, "but Ott uses the threat of violence as a mere layer of mood, keeping his focus on the mutable, and often unspoken, themes of identity and the nature of attempts to explore and redefine it…...
"Amid the keggers and daytime bike rides is plenty of drug use, an overdue loan, and a menacing alpha-male bigot (Ryan Dillon)," notes Bill Weber in Slant, "but Ott uses the threat of violence as a mere layer of mood, keeping his focus on the mutable, and often unspoken, themes of identity and the nature of attempts to explore and redefine it…...
- 8/12/2011
- MUBI
Memphis-based filmmaker Kentucker Audley (Team Picture, Open Five), selected for Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces” list in 2007, is releasing today online his new film, Holy Land (pictured here, with stars Bunny Lampert and Cole Weintraub), and with it a platform for fellow directors working in the no-budget trenches. The site is called “No Budge Films,” and it is described simply as “a place to watch no-budget films… Post your short film or feature // for a short run or indefinitely.” Why such a simple site? “Because most films don’t get distributed + it’s cool to give away your film for free + you don’t owe anyone money because you raised your budget on Kickstarter,” Audley writes in his site’s mission statement.
After Audley told me about the site, I asked him a couple of questions which he answered by email. Our conversation is below.
Filmmaker: Why did you decide to become a de facto distributor?...
After Audley told me about the site, I asked him a couple of questions which he answered by email. Our conversation is below.
Filmmaker: Why did you decide to become a de facto distributor?...
- 8/3/2011
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Via his blog Cinemasparagus and two Twitter accounts (@evillights and @mastersofcinema), Craig Keller has been declaring Kentucker Audley's Open Five to be "the best American film of the year." This is no off-the-top-of-the-head, caught-up-in-the-moment declaration. In August, he posted an essay constructed of argument, anecdote, poetry, images and clips exploring the "conversation taking place between" Audley's Holy Land (which he wrote about in April when it was released) and Open Five, a film completed during more or less the same period, with Joe Swanberg manning the camera and David Lowery on sound. Last night, Open Five opened the 13th Indie Memphis Film Festival and, at precisely the same moment, began streaming — in full, for free and without ads, albeit for a limited time — on Audley's site.
- 10/22/2010
- MUBI
Mumblecore, the nascent film genre made by, about, and for navel-gazing, semi-articulate urban twenty-somethings, has gotten a bad rap for being about, well, navel-gazing, semi-articulate urban twenty-somethings. Memphis-based Kentucker Audley is one of the few mumblecore directors from the South, and in just a few years has already written, directed, and acted in a trio of features: the rambling, idiosyncratic character studies Team Picture (2007), Holy Land (forthcoming Internet release), and Open Five (screening in April). He also finds time to act in others' movies, including Passenger Pigeons, which premieres at the SXSW Film Festival on March 13. He recently discussed the cinematic movement he's associated with, his filmmaking technique, and how to break out of the genre's insular tendencies. Do you mind being lumped in the with mumblecore movement? Do you see your films as very different from Andrew Bujalski's,...
- 3/8/2010
- by Teddy Wayne
- Huffington Post
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