Danish director Bine Bach Damsgaard has joined the roster of Scandinavian production house Bacon. After working as a creative with Wieden+Kennedy New York, she stepped out as a director on her own two years ago with an award-winning film for Danish department store Magasin. Since then, she has done video content for Instagram phenom Leandra Medine Cohen and designer Gelareh Mizrahi, and her latest film for feminine care innovators Billie was recently shortlisted for a Young Director Award….
Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away, a production of RCA Records and Scheme Engine in association with American Masters Pictures, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and is scheduled to air on PBS on July 27. The documentary feature chronicles the life of legendary blues musician George “Buddy” Guy. Charles Todd, creative director of Scheme Engine, is one of the directors of the film, along with Devin Amar and Matt Mitchener. John Beug and Sheira Rees-Davies are the producers. Michael Kantor, Camille Yorrick, Devin Amar and Sheira Rees-Davies are executive producers. After spending his early years as a sharecropper in Lettsworth, Louisiana, Guy became one of the most influential guitarists of all time. A pioneer of Chicago’s fabled West Side sound, he is a living link to the city’s halcyon days of electric blues. Over the course of his career, Guy has garnered eight Grammy Awards and was honored with induction into The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Todd explores storytelling through experimental mixed-media, cinematic narrative, and live concert direction for clients and artists, such as Nike, the NBA, Nikon, HBO, Rihanna, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Travis Scott. His original shorts for Apple Music have evolved the music documentary genre into innovative films for artists like Lil Baby, The 1975, H.E.R. Marc Anthony, and Christine and the Queens. Scheme Engine is a BIPOC-owned creative studio and production/postproduction company….
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More