Seymour Wishman, a longtime producer, writer, legal expert and president of First Run Features, died on Jan. 29 at a family home in Bridgewater, Conn., his daughter Samantha confirmed to Variety. He was 79.
Over the past 38 years, Wishman had served as president of First Run Features. During his time at the N.Y.-based independent film distribution company, Wishman brought Michael Apted’s “28 Up” (and later the entire “Up” series) to the United States and helped Ross McElwee finish and release “Sherman’s March” — as well as McElwee’s other films, including “Bright Leaves” and “Six O’Clock News.” Wishman also released Spike Lee’s “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads” (the director’s first feature film and his graduate school thesis), Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman,” Jan Svankmajer’s “Alice” and many other independent pictures.
On the production side, Seymour co-directed and produced “Sex & Justice,” a documentary on...
Over the past 38 years, Wishman had served as president of First Run Features. During his time at the N.Y.-based independent film distribution company, Wishman brought Michael Apted’s “28 Up” (and later the entire “Up” series) to the United States and helped Ross McElwee finish and release “Sherman’s March” — as well as McElwee’s other films, including “Bright Leaves” and “Six O’Clock News.” Wishman also released Spike Lee’s “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads” (the director’s first feature film and his graduate school thesis), Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman,” Jan Svankmajer’s “Alice” and many other independent pictures.
On the production side, Seymour co-directed and produced “Sex & Justice,” a documentary on...
- 2/14/2022
- by Wyatte Grantham-Philips
- Variety Film + TV
Read More: Interview: Errol Morris Talks His Criterion Releases, Why 'The Unknown Known' Is "Superior" To 'Fog Of War' & More The 2015 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Idfa) is partnering with documentary pioneer Errol Morris for this year's Top 10 and retrospective programs. The filmmaker behind "The Thin Blue Line" has selected 10 documentaries by prominent directors with a reputation for innovation within the documentary genre. The selection includes work by the likes of Chris Marker, Dziga Vertov, Frederick Wiseman and Kazuo Hara. On Friday, 20 November, Morris will elaborate on the choices in his Top 10 at a masterclass chaired by American film theoretician Bill Nichols. Morris' Top 10 program includes: "Bright Leaves" (USA, 2002) by Ross McElwee"Fata Morgana" (Germany, 1971) by Werner Herzog"It Felt Like a Kiss" (UK, 2009) by Adam Curtis"Land Without Bread" (Spain, 1932) by...
- 9/29/2015
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
The festival will screen ten films picked by the Us filmmaker, who will also take part in a masterclass.
Errol Morris, the reverred documentary filmmaker, has revealed his top 10 programme for this year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Nov 18-29).
Each year, the festival invites an important figure in the world of documentary to compile a list of ten important works of factual film, all of which will be screened as part of the programme.
Morris’ selections include Werner Herzog’s surreal Fata Morgana, which is set in the Sahara Desert and features an exclusively Leonard Cohen soundtrack, and Dziga Vertov’s experimental early film Man With A Movie Camera.
Idfa will also show six of Morris’ films including his 1978 debut Gates of Heaven and his seminal investigative piece The Thin Blue Line.
Further screenings of his films will be: Fast Cheap And Out Of Control; Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall Of Fred A...
Errol Morris, the reverred documentary filmmaker, has revealed his top 10 programme for this year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Nov 18-29).
Each year, the festival invites an important figure in the world of documentary to compile a list of ten important works of factual film, all of which will be screened as part of the programme.
Morris’ selections include Werner Herzog’s surreal Fata Morgana, which is set in the Sahara Desert and features an exclusively Leonard Cohen soundtrack, and Dziga Vertov’s experimental early film Man With A Movie Camera.
Idfa will also show six of Morris’ films including his 1978 debut Gates of Heaven and his seminal investigative piece The Thin Blue Line.
Further screenings of his films will be: Fast Cheap And Out Of Control; Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall Of Fred A...
- 9/29/2015
- ScreenDaily
The Sundance Film Festival announced today that it will hold a series of panels titled the "Art of Film Weekend" which will take place Jan. 29-31. This new initiative should create more buzz worthy moments during a period when the Festival is traditionally winding down. The slate will kick off with a conversation between Festival founder Robert Redford and George Lucas that will be streamed online at Sundance.org. In a release, Festival Director John Cooper noted, "Exploring cinema, body and soul, Art of Film Weekend will take aspiring filmmakers and film-loving audiences behind the scenes to see the creative, collaborative spirit of artists at every stage of the independent filmmaking process that is so core to our Festival." A full rundown of the panels are as follows: Power of Story: Visions of Independence — Kicking off Art of Film Weekend, join Robert Redford and George Lucas—two iconic filmmakers who...
- 1/8/2015
- by Gregory Ellwood
- Hitfix
Sundance's Art of Film Weekend (January 29-31) will highlight writers, directors, producers and actors, along with cinematographers, editors and many more below-the-line cinematic craftsmen, and will kick off with a career-spanning discussion with fest founder Robert Redford and George Lucas. Additional panels on topics including artistry in film music, virtual reality, visual design, editing and documentary will follow. Highlights include talks with "Her" production designer K.K. Barrett, editing maestro Sarah Flack ("Lost in Translation") and doc filmmakers Ross McElwee ("Bright Leaves") and Sam Green ("The Weather Underground"). Full Art of Film Weekend lineup below. Sundance 2015 runs January 22 through February 1 in Park City, Utah. (Read our interview with the fest programmers here.) Power of Story: Visions of Independence — Kicking off Art of Film Weekend, join Robert Redford and George Lucas—two...
- 1/8/2015
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Thompson on Hollywood
Sundance Selects’ digital label has agreed terms with First Run Features to bring select titles from the latter’s documentary library to SundanceNOW’s subscription VoD service Doc Club.
SundanceNOW has licensed 39 documentaries for the Doc Club programme curated by documentary programmer Thom Powers around monthly themes.
The collaboration kicks off in July with Culinary Cinema including A Table In Heaven, A Matter Of Taste and Kings Of Pastry.
August brings a Ross McElwee retrospective including Charleen, Bright Leaves and Photographic Memory.
“First Run Features has been our highly esteemed colleague in distribution for many years, and we are thrilled to bring their films to our ever-growing online community of documentary and independent film aficionados,” said Sundance Selects president Jonathan Sehring [pictured].
SundanceNOW has licensed 39 documentaries for the Doc Club programme curated by documentary programmer Thom Powers around monthly themes.
The collaboration kicks off in July with Culinary Cinema including A Table In Heaven, A Matter Of Taste and Kings Of Pastry.
August brings a Ross McElwee retrospective including Charleen, Bright Leaves and Photographic Memory.
“First Run Features has been our highly esteemed colleague in distribution for many years, and we are thrilled to bring their films to our ever-growing online community of documentary and independent film aficionados,” said Sundance Selects president Jonathan Sehring [pictured].
- 6/12/2013
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Do you know who Jacques Bolsey was? Also known as Jacques Bogopolsky, he was the inventor of the Bolex movie camera, the name of which is derived from his own. If you’d like to know more, especially given that his Wikipedia page is really bare, there’s a documentary in the works about him and his importance to cinema history, as well as how he’s now influencing a new product called the Digital Bolex. And if you really, really want to see it, you can help it reach its budget goal of $35,000. The funny thing is, this doc, titled Beyond the Bolex, is seeking crowdfunding through Kickstarter to tell the story of something that was itself a huge Kickstarter success (the Digital Bolex, not the original, obviously). That’s half of the focus, while the other half looks back on Bolsey’s version, a camera that anyone who isn’t a film school reject will...
- 3/23/2013
- by Christopher Campbell
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Ross McElwee made his reputation with a highly original film called Sherman’s March and has continued to draw on his family history in such low-key, first-person features as Bright Leaves. His latest effort, Photographic Memory, is another cinematic diary which follows two separate but related streams. McElwee has photographed his son Adrian in home movies since he was a boy, but lately they don’t seem to be on the same wavelength. Now grown up, Adrian is a somewhat aimless young man, and an enigma to his father. This gets McElwee to thinking about what he was like when he was 20-something, so he decides to return to the small French village where he spent some time during...
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- 10/12/2012
- by Leonard Maltin
- Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy
When Ross McElwee heeded the call to become a filmmaker in the mid 1970s, he enrolled in M.I.T.’s film program and studied with pioneering cinéma vérité documentarians Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. Lighter, smaller cameras and advancements in sync-sound made it possible for one man to do what a film crew did not too many years before. McElwee would synthesize the lessons learned and use the new technology to create a distinctive kind of cinema.
McElwee’s films are often filed in the “personal documentary” category. Like many labels, personal documentary seems inadequate, if not downright misleading. Yes, his family, friends, and ex-lovers appear in his films. He frequently visits places in his past, and yes, he narrates and shows up in his films, but it is always to a larger purpose–nuclear proliferation in Sherman’s March, violence and media in Six O’Clock News, the tobacco industry in Bright Leaves.
McElwee’s films are often filed in the “personal documentary” category. Like many labels, personal documentary seems inadequate, if not downright misleading. Yes, his family, friends, and ex-lovers appear in his films. He frequently visits places in his past, and yes, he narrates and shows up in his films, but it is always to a larger purpose–nuclear proliferation in Sherman’s March, violence and media in Six O’Clock News, the tobacco industry in Bright Leaves.
- 10/10/2012
- by David Licata
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
"The agony and perverse ecstasy of unrequited love permeate Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea," writes Graham Fuller at the top of his interview with the director. Also in the new March/April 2012 issue of Film Comment: Jonathan Rosenbaum remembers Gilbert Adair (plus a few online exclusives: Adair on Mae West and his "Cliché Expert's Guide to the Cinema"), Anton Dolin examines "The Strange Case of Russian Maverick Aleksei German" (see, too, J Hoberman's 1990 piece for Fc on German) and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life tops the Reader's "20 Best Films of 2011" Poll — plus comments.
Then there are the shorter bits from the issue online: Nicolas Rapold on Pablo Giorgelli's Las Acacias and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg (more from Eric Hynes [Time Out New York, 4/5], Eric Kohn [indieWIRE], Anthony Lane [New Yorker], Dennis Lim [New York Times], Karina Longworth [Voice], Henry Stewart [L] and Michael Tully [Hammer to Nail]), Phillip Lopate on Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's This Is Not a Film...
Then there are the shorter bits from the issue online: Nicolas Rapold on Pablo Giorgelli's Las Acacias and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg (more from Eric Hynes [Time Out New York, 4/5], Eric Kohn [indieWIRE], Anthony Lane [New Yorker], Dennis Lim [New York Times], Karina Longworth [Voice], Henry Stewart [L] and Michael Tully [Hammer to Nail]), Phillip Lopate on Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's This Is Not a Film...
- 3/7/2012
- MUBI
Ross McElwee ("Sherman's March," "Bright Leaves") will be a guest of honor at Durham, North Carolina's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and as part of his trip to the festival, he has programmed a series of eight features and two short films to be a part of a special retrospective series about families. “There are, of course, countless documentaries about American families. There are many about other people’s families, but the documentaries selected for this program are films about the families of the filmmakers,” said McElwee. “They are a kind of autobiographical subset of a larger documentary category, and thus exhibit a whole additional layer of emotional, psychological, and aesthetic complexity. The viewer of these films must not only consider what is happening before the camera but also how events portrayed in the film are connected to the person behind the camera—the filmmaker who also happens to be a daughter,...
- 3/7/2012
- by Bryce J. Renninger
- Indiewire
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 12-15) has chosen to highlight the career of Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson ("Freedom Riders," "A Place of Our Own") for its annual Full Frame Tribute. In addition, the festival has announced that this year's Thematic Program -- curated by filmmaker Ross McElwee ("Bright Leaves") -- will focus on family. Titles for both the Thematic Program and the Full Frame Tribute will be announced in March. ...
- 1/18/2012
- Indiewire
For this week's Doc Talk I'd like to spotlight two highly recommended films involving the South: Ross McElwee's personal ancestry exploration from 2003, Bright Leaves, and Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano's civil rights film Neshoba: The Price of Freedom, which finally gets a theatrical release this Friday (in NYC; next month it opens in La).
The reason I revisited McElwee's film is primarily because of the recent death of Oscar-winning screen legend Patricia Neal (Hud), who appears briefly in the doc. But it also ended up fitting in somewhat with Neshoba, because both films deal with a Southern history, both concern events that previously inspired fictionalized Hollywood movie plots (Bright Leaf for the former, Mississippi Burning the latter) and both follow modern stories relative to the historical material.
As for Neshoba, aside from the fact that it opens this weekend, I was intrigued about the film's subject matter...
The reason I revisited McElwee's film is primarily because of the recent death of Oscar-winning screen legend Patricia Neal (Hud), who appears briefly in the doc. But it also ended up fitting in somewhat with Neshoba, because both films deal with a Southern history, both concern events that previously inspired fictionalized Hollywood movie plots (Bright Leaf for the former, Mississippi Burning the latter) and both follow modern stories relative to the historical material.
As for Neshoba, aside from the fact that it opens this weekend, I was intrigued about the film's subject matter...
- 8/12/2010
- by Christopher Campbell
- Cinematical
By Aaron Hillis
Lists are breezy reads, but there can be an unfortunate disposability to the data because arbitrarily numbered "Ten Best" somethings or "Five Things You Should Know About" whatevers literally demonstrate quantity's domination over quality. And now that I've sucked all the fun out of the room, here's a practical but otherwise unranked list of ten auteurist gems . nine of which are already on DVD . that deserve their layers of dust blown off. (Sorry, "Zero Effect" and "11 Harrowhouse," but the list dictates the rules!)
"One From the Heart" (1982)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
The fires of over-ambition still smoldering in his belly after "Apocalypse Now," Francis Ford Coppola's follow-up was a decadent fiasco that bankrupted him, and might have seemed at the time as if the director had returned half-mad from the Filipino jungles. Epically staged on the Zoetrope studio lot, Coppola's hypertheatrical Vegas romance-cum-musical fantasy stars...
Lists are breezy reads, but there can be an unfortunate disposability to the data because arbitrarily numbered "Ten Best" somethings or "Five Things You Should Know About" whatevers literally demonstrate quantity's domination over quality. And now that I've sucked all the fun out of the room, here's a practical but otherwise unranked list of ten auteurist gems . nine of which are already on DVD . that deserve their layers of dust blown off. (Sorry, "Zero Effect" and "11 Harrowhouse," but the list dictates the rules!)
"One From the Heart" (1982)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
The fires of over-ambition still smoldering in his belly after "Apocalypse Now," Francis Ford Coppola's follow-up was a decadent fiasco that bankrupted him, and might have seemed at the time as if the director had returned half-mad from the Filipino jungles. Epically staged on the Zoetrope studio lot, Coppola's hypertheatrical Vegas romance-cum-musical fantasy stars...
- 7/31/2008
- by Aaron Hillis
- ifc.com
Makers of six docus vie for WGA award
The Writers Guild of America on Thursday announced the nominees for its first documentary writing award for a feature film, a field of six pictures including two political studies but no nom for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. The nominated pictures are The Hunting of the President, which alleges a campaign against Bill Clinton from his early days in Arkansas through his impeachment; Control Room, an inside view of the Arab television network Al Jazeera during the war in Iraq; Bright Leaves, a reflection on Big Tobacco by the great-grandson of a tobacco baron; Home of the Brave, a study of murdered civil-rights activist Viola Liuzzo; In the Realm of the Unreal, which follows artist, novelist and janitor Henry Darger; and Super Size Me, a first-person take on the perils of overeating fast food. Of those films, only Super Size Me has been nominated for a best documentary Academy Award.
- 1/28/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
DGA nominates 5 docus' helmers
The DGA named the nominees Wednesday for its documentary filmmaker award, a field that includes the most profitable docu ever, Fahrenheit 9/11. The nominees were Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni for The Story of the Weeping Camel; Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski for Born Into Brothels; Ross McElwee for Bright Leaves; Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11; and Jehane Noujaim for Control Room. All but Noujaim are first-time nominees for this award. It was Noujaim's second nomination; she won the award in 2001 for Startup.com. The winner will be announced Jan. 29 at the 57th annual DGA Awards dinner at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles.
- 1/20/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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