VITAMIN’S DANNY DELPURGATORIO, creative director/director of Filmworkers Club’s motion graphics division, directed a short with a Vitamin crew of 15 that showcases July 27 at the July 24-29 Blue Whiskey Independent Film Festival in Palatine.
The 15-minute horror film, Other, is about a brilliant doctor – played by theatre actor David Steiger – who, through a series of unconventional experiments to alter his own grim prognosis, discovers an unimaginable scientific loophole.
It shot over three days at Filmworkers’ Astro Lab last September after several weeks of preproduction. Freelance writer Tony Williams wrote the script based on DelPurgatorio and Vitamin art director Rob Foster’s conception; Vitamin’s Larissa Shames produced, Filmworkers’ Matt Egan edited and freelancer Andrew Wehde was DP.
Also screening among BWIFF’s 33 films are filmmaker Zachary Mehrbach’s avant-garde The Last Interview, July 24; Red Balls, an improvised mockumentary directed by Andrew Morris and Steve Coulter’s comedy short, The Diet Situation, July 26.
JOHN MOSSMAN’S FEATURE directing debut, action drama Into the Wake, produced with his Diesel Brothers Films partner Tim Miller and with Amy Rising, screens July 21, 23 and 25 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Miller stars as a man on the run who is lured back to a clan war on the river of his youth.
It was shot in 2010 over 12 days on a $53,000 budget with a small crew and cast in the Bridgeport truck yards and along the bluffs of southwestern Wisconsin, where the challenges were heavy rain, mosquito bites, bugs and poison ivy.
Mossman and Miller made the shorts Jell-Ohh Lady, Choices, and Spaceman Dan’s 243rd Flight.
Mossman is the founder of The Artistic Home theater and coordinates IFP/Chicago’s mentorship program.
GLASS CITY FILMS (Separation Anxiety, Happily After) is in development on its latest feature, the post-apocalyptic horror Chrysalis. John Klein directs a script by Ben Kurstin, about three survivors of a bioterror attack fleeing the ruins of Chicago.
Glass City has signed with L.A.-based producers representatives Circus Road Films to sell their first two features, which they have been self-releasing to date.
HORROR FILMMAKER MARC SELZ has launched the new production company Psycho Logical Pictures, LLC. The company’s first project is the thriller short Dead Spot, inspired by The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Dark Side.
Selz directed the features Satanic Panic, The Rockville Slayer, and Short Cut Road. Selz says he’s working with some big names in horror on a new feature script, too, but he’s not ready to name them.
SUSANA DARWIN wrapped production June 28 on Hatboxes, a romance between two women, a secular Jewish lawyer and an Orthodox milliner. Etta Worthington of Fernwork Productions is producer.
SECRET LIFE SECRET DEATH, Milwaukee filmmaker Genevieve Davis’s hybrid documentary-narrative, was inspired by her grandmother Minnie’s experience as a single mother embroiled with the 1920s Chicago Outfit. It premieres July 20 and 24 at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
AFTER FIVE MONTHS IN JAPAN last year, Junko Kajino and I are back from our second, two-month stay in Fukushima, Japan, for our in-progress documentary Uncanny Terrain. It’s about organic farmers whose land was contaminated with nuclear fallout from the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant triggered by the March, 2011 Great Japan Earthquake and tsunami.
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