Oak Cliff Film Festival 2019: American Movie Humorously Captures The Grueling Independent Filmmaking Process

The Oak Cliff Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Dallas, Texas across multiple movie theaters, including the iconic Texas Theater.

The 1990s were the decade that redefined the American cinema scene through homegrown indie productions directed by the likes of Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino that provided an overhaul to the very concept of American indie movies. Suddenly, these rags-to-riches stories made it seem possible for anyone to make a movie. It’s fitting then that the decade would end with a documentary exploring how, even in this blossoming age of homegrown cinema, it’s still immensely difficult to make a movie. This documentary was American Movie, a Chris Smith directorial effort that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and was screened in 35mm at the Oak Cliff Film Festival yesterday.

Shirkers Is A Fascinating Exploration of A Cinematic Passion Project That Never Was

I've mentioned before how Netflix really did just crush it in terms of the quality of their original movie output in the last three months of 2018 and easily rising towards the top of that stellar crop of movies (which really is quite the feat!) is the documentary Shirkers. Directed by Sandi Tan, the feature is named after a motion picture she made with her friends and a film teacher mentor, Georges Cardona, in Singapore in the early 1990s. She poured her heart and soul into this film, all of her passion for cinema drove her to complete something that hadn't really been seen before in the film industry of her home country of Singapore.

Minding the Gap Is Must-See Top-Notch Documentary Filmmaking

When director Bing Liu set out to make Minding the Gap, his primary goal seemed to be to look at the abusive childhoods that he and his two best friends had endured and how that abusive behavior had impacted their modern-day lives. It's hard to imagine that director Bing Liu ever thought, in the process of filming the everyday lives of his childhood pals, hed end up with something that has such precise build-up and tragic pay-off's that it feels like it could belong in a traditional narrative feature. In the confines of a film, these turn of events would be held back by the fact that they are, after all, fictional, just performers reading a script, whereas Minding the Gap is capturing reality itself, complete with raw revelations about the complicated lives of Bing's best friends.