Castillo, who won the Student Academy Award for his innovative short film which, in a sense, recreates the early days of purist animation by recasting them in a postmodern, personal pshere. His first award winning film, S.P.I.C., garnered a Student Academy Award and led him to meetings with everyone from HBO to Nickelodean. Still, Castillo is committed to drawing these captivating, witty, and humble stories from his own life.
So check out and vote for his Heinz commercial and in a few weeks, check the Indiepix website to buy the amazing collection of short films!

It is no secret to my friends and loved ones that I adore Meira Blaustein and Laurent Rejto, co-founders of the Woodstock Film Festival. In my brief tenure in the film industry, they are a rare couple who prove that working in the film industry does not have to be synonymous with cynicism or dishonesty. I met Laurent at South by Southwest over a year ago and we immediately hit it off. I had the opportunity to meet his beautiful and inspiring wife Meira soon afterward, and she has since become one of my favorite people in the world (and this is not hyperbole). I hope that our personal and professional relationship continues, well. . . . indefinitely.
I could go on and on, but that would defeat my purpose here. A few days ago, I opened up my inbox and recieved this message about Laurent and Meira’s eldest son. And because I want to respect them, and the memory of their son, I do not want to change any of it, but rather reprint the message I received from Laurent, encourage people to look into Julian and his life, and keep the memory alive of a person who I never knew, but who, from knowing and loving his parents, I am positive was a remarkable human being.

Julian Pelle Blaustein Rejto passed away on Sunday, June 10th 2007. He was 18 years old.
Julian was born on Super Bowl Sunday, January 22, 1989 in Albany, NY. He was five weeks premature and severely disabled.

Julian grew up in Pine Bush, New York in a beautiful red farmhouse. Growing up, Julian was the most beautiful baby. One of his favorite places to sit was under the giant maple tree by the house. He could sit there for hours and just stare with a huge happy smile at the swaying branches. He loved opera. It made him beam. He loved to laugh and he loved to be kissed and hugged, and indeed, he got plenty of that.

Julian was the subject of the film documentary FOR LOVE OF JULIAN, written and directed by his mother, and narrated by Susan Sarandon. All those who worked on the film were volunteers whose lives had been touched by Julian. They wanted to help bring his story to life and to make it count and they did.

When Julian was 5 years old, he moved to the Center for Discovery in Harris NY, where he found a nurturing and caring home filled with love and the best professional care. He was happy there, well taken care of, and loved by many.

From his first hours of life to his last, people said Julian was a trooper. He had a love for life that transcended all odds and all his disabilities. His middle name, Pelle, means miracle in Hebrew, and thoughts of the movie “Pelle the Conqueror” and the great soccer player Pele were vivid in his parents’ minds when they named him. Julian conquered many odds and overcame many obstacles, until finally, he could do it no more.

Julian is survived by his brothers Daniel and Adam, his parents Meira and Laurent, his maternal grandfather Ikutiel and his paternal grandmother Michelle. He will be greatly missed by the thousands who came to know him in the film, his many relatives and his countless friends, including the staff at Albany Ronald McDonald House that knew him first, the teachers at the Brookside School and the many dedicated friends at the Center for Discovery.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial contributions be made in Julian Pelle Blaustein Rejto’s name to the
Center for Discovery
PO Box 840
Ben Mosche Road
Harris, NY 12472

For more photos, visit http://farmhousefilms.net/julian/julian2/

After watching a videotape of his parents kill a small pig on their summer farmhouse, a young boy videotapes himself as he kills a girl, just because he wants to see what it feels like to do so. A middle-aged woman, who still lives at home under the scrutiny of her dominant mother, sits on the edge of a bathtub and uses a razor blade to cut her labia, just before sitting down for that routine dinner with said mother (”THE PIANO TEACHER”, 2006). After a seemingly endless routine of working, buying, eating, and shopping, a family decides to destroy all their possessions and commit group suicide (”THE SEVENTH CONTINENT”).

Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michael Haneke presents the social failures of middle class Europe and slices them open with a fine blade for audiences to inspect and discuss. Each film deals with how the modern Family is presently unequipped to survive the alienation caused by the growth of technology, consumption, and capitalism.

Haneke consistently uses an abrupt, off-screen violence that derives its strength from sound FX instead of traditionally confrontational visual carnage, creating a distancing, analytical stage for his ideas. By forcing us to endure visceral depictions of the failure of the family, Haneke asks us to question Western values at large, which he believes deadens the bond between human beings.

When a father prefers to watch the stock market rather than talk to his son, destruction follows. When a family can no longer communicate because they are too busy wondering how to keep the summer house in tip-top shape, as their daughter suffers from loneliness, destruction follows. One plus one is two. What Haneke states is just as simple. The stylistic skill with which he stages harrowing truths to the film-going audience puts him in a rank with the most important filmmakers of our time.

I recently watched “BENNY’S VIDEO” (1992) - having already seen it and been completely disarmed by its frank portrayal of a spoiled youth with little else to do than commit murder just because he wants to know what it feels like. The film slays bourgeois comfort to the very end - when the parents attempt to cover up their son’s dirty deeds by crushing up the victim’s body into bits (none of this occurs on-screen, mind you) so that they can protect their comfy “reputations”, the son hits them with a final blow: handing them in to the authorities with taped footage of their cover-up plan.

The Australien (ha!) Film Commission spearheaded an impressively convincing digital video art project entitled “UFO Wave 2006″ which provided funding of short segments involving UFO sightings. The clips were then scattered throughout the internet, most notably YouTube (which is where I found them), and hired writers to craft “background stories for the sightings, and answered thousands of e-mails using a fictional persona”. In one particularly chilling clip, a family driving a car is suddenly terrified by a blinding white light and a deafening sound. The segments were created “to give people a taste of the drama and excitement of a UFO Close Encounter, creating a genuine sense of wonder” and “to show skeptics that they often rely on faith rather than evidence (Many skeptics made bold statments about the clips being nothing more than balloons, space junk, stars etc - without doing their research).” Check them out for yourself here .

Hey folks,

Okay, there’s this dope-sounding movie coming out shortly. It’s called Joshua. It one of those ‘creepy evil child’ kind of movies that I’ve loved since Children of the Corn. The film screened at this year’s Sundance Film Fest, was nominated for the grand jury prize (and won the cinematography award, for those of you who look past the director and stars…), and just happens to spotlight one Sam Rockwell, who in my estimation is one of the greatest actors working today. Vera Farmiga, fresh off The Departed, also appears, cementing her place as one of the brightest up-and-comers in the business. And so, with all this, as well as a slew of glowing reviews (with comparisons to Hitchcock…not too shabby in the suspense world), why do I need to see a preview that gives away the entire movie in a minute and a half?!

I have a love-hate relationship with movie previews, that is now bubbling over into serious emotional strife. It used to be that a good film’s preview would tease and titilate, would give the viewers just a little taste…and then leave ‘em hanging. There’s nothing I liked better than to tell a friend about the incredible movie coming out in a month, but have absolutely no ability to describe the plot. I mean, that’s why you pay the admission price, right? To move from not knowing to knowing. Now the studios seem to feel that in order to get the average movie-goer to plunk down ten bucks in the theater, they have to convince him that the movie is worth seeing ABSOLUTELY AND WITH NO DOUBT FROM THE VERY BEGINNING ‘TIL THE FREAKIN’ MPAA CREDIT ROLLS! Literally, after watching this preview, the only thing I don’t know is who says the last line. (Check it out HERE to judge for yourself, but don’t yell at me if it ruins it, I warned you!)

I guess they figure that the modern film audience is jaded, and with the prevalence of high-end home theaters, and emerging new media delivering such varied and speedy access to content, we don’t want to wait to see the movie. That we have no patience for surprise or free thought. The pity is that previews no longer get me interested in seeing a film, but actually, the complete opposite.

No Country For Old Men, the newest Coen Brothers’ film (based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, my new fave after his phenomenal book The Road had me in tears) comes out soon. In the past I’ve been all over any new information I could gather about their releases, waiting with bated breath for the smallest glimpse. Now? You couldn’t pay me to watch a preview. Until I see a teaser that taps me into what I love about movies, without spoon-feeding me every twist and turn before I get the chance to chomp down on a single twizzler, count me out. I’ll just walk into the multiplex blindfolded, pick my movies russian roullette style. What’s the worst that could happen?

…oh yeah…Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 3 is on the way…damn…well, you have to roll the dice. That’s the fun of it, right? After all, if you never saw a bad movie, how would you know a good one?

-Jason

Hi folks. Jason here. Neophyte Idiepix-er and world-weary filmmaker. The other day I got to thinkin…

…about politics. Now, I by no means consider myself an expert in this arena, except of course in the expression of my own thoughts and opinions. I’ve got a frickin’ PHD in shootin’ my mouth off! But from my seat it really does seem like we’re in trouble. As the beloved Wrestler-Governor Jesse Ventura put it in Predator, one of my favorite guilty pleasure films, “We’re in a world of hurt.”

This blog is ostensibly about film, so I won’t go any further than that, except to say that if you’re a person who feels our country’s political system and our place in the global community is rock solid, that our mission has truly been accomplished, I suggest you stop reading now. After all, there’s surely something sufficiently distract-I mean, entertaining, on TV at this very moment…

One theory about what’s wrong with our current version of democracy blames our transforming capitalist economy. In short, that lawmakers are so irrevocably attached to big business, so hopelessly subservient to the teensiest beck and call of Corporate America, that they no longer represent the will of the people. True? Who knows. But it’s more than understandable. After all, if Exxon/Mobil offered you $200,000 for an hour-long speaking engagement, you might spend a spell considering it. C’mon, now! I can feel that defiant look. But let’s all tether our high horses out back for a sec…

The fact of the matter is that this situation is not unique to politics. It’s everywhere. The almighty dollar rules us all, twisting minds with a speed that would convince Sauron to trade in the One Ring for a new model. You see it in education and healthcare, in fashion and farming. In film? Well, I haven’t seen Spiderman 3 yet, but for some reason I’ve really been craving a big mac…

But not in independent film, right? Not there. We hope and pray that outside the studio system there lurks a small but hardy band of true artists, unconcerned with financial gains, oblivious to commercial success, who are made truly and fully complete simply through the creation of a piece of art, and the joy of sharing it with the world. That somewhere there exists an enlightened land where the words film and business have been ripped away from each other and gone their separate ways. Eh…I dunno…

What is independent, really? Is it the twenty million dollar films the studios release with that monicker, camouflaged through their independent divisions, stocked with stars, armed with a juicy P&A budget and a national distribution deal? Or is independent the kind of films I’ve made, with budgets that couldn’t get Tom Cruise’s stand-in out of bed? That must be the case, right? Beholden to no one. Free creative expression. Ah, if only. Because regardless of how small your budget is, there’s always someone to answer to. Even if that someone is your Aunt Sylvia. Unless you’ve gathered your film’s budget by racking up the Visa bill, folks want to know what’s doin’. As they should. Film investors deserve to make their money back. Heck, people who put their faith in artists to turn a buck probably deserve sainthood for how often it works out! Not to mention the fact that on the vast majority of projects, success and failure is completely dependent on collaboration. No man is an island. Except maybe Stanley Kubrick, but even he needed some dude to push a dolly.

What do you think, folks? Does true independence exist in film today? In politics? In life?

Okay, I’m gonna head back to my jungle hut now. If I don’t make a new spear before the sun sets there won’t be any weasel for dinner…