Film Schools

In her role as managing director of the Illinois Film Office, Betsy Steinberg spends a lot of time talking with filmmakers on both coasts and overseas. “In Chicago, and around the state, the abundance of looks is never-ending,” she says. “Every filmmaker says it is the most under-photgraphed place in the movies.”

Choosing The Independent's 10 to Watch is like trying to predict the future, or the stock market, or the weather in New England. The films on this list are in all stages of production and the filmmakers range from seasoned professionals to debut artists. So you might wonder how we named this particular group. How, exactly, does one go about predicting what 2010 has in store?

Whether or not to pursue an education in the film industry has long been a hot topic. Clearly, there are identifiable pros and cons of electing to formally study film, more particularly choosing to concentrate on a single element, such as screenwriting.

These days, it’s fairly easy to find an excellent place to learn how to make narrative films. Ten Best lists exist by the fistful, and a Google search of “learn filmmaking” returns more than 30,000 hits.

When it comes to taking filmmaking classes abroad, the question is not so much “Why?” as it is, “Why not?” As anyone with a passion knows, procrastination and perfectionism are barriers to creativity, and they can become all the more pernicious when you're stuck in an unchanging daily routine.

What happened at AIVF over the last 30 years?

I first became aware of AIVF when Martha Gever was editor of The Independent. I marveled at this national organization that put out each month a magazine chock full of weighty, intellectual and critical articles on film and video.

Although the cinematic possibilities of Hawai’i—those that lay beyond the tropical tropes of tourism and military patriotism— have always been clear to local residents of the island, only recently has there been notable validation of that truth.

In July, acclaimed Indian-born filmmaker Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala) unveiled her latest project: a film lab for aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters from East Africa and South Asia.

The so-called “Film Brat” generation of the middle to late 1970s has been blamed for, or credited with, many things regarding independent filmmaking—from sparking off a studio-sanctioned Golden Age (Scorsese, Coppola) to ushering in a studio-sanctioned Dark Age (Lucas, Spielberg).