Cinereach
Local filmmakers Robert Devor and Charles Mudede are having a great year. They recently won The Stranger’s Genius Award for filmmaking, and now they have been honored with the prestigious Cinereach Grant for their film Untitled Sarah Jane Moore Project. The film is about former radical leftist and FBI agent Sarah Jane Moore, who attempted an assassination of Gerald Ford in 1975. She is the only woman to take a shot at an active president and served 32 years in prison for her attempts. The filmmakers have collaborated on such award winning films as Zoo and Police Beat. Follow the link above for more information about the film as well as Devor and Mudede’s work.
ALL YOUR FILMMAKING QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Questionland
This week’s “Questionland” topic is filmmaking. Experts in the field such as Charles Mudede, Adam Sekuler, Jane Charles, Sean Porter, Jennifer Roth and Eugene Mazzola are available through the site to answer all your burning questions regarding filmmaking, financing and friend making. Topics range from finding a producer to accruing a crew for a 15-year-old director to getting work as an extra. You can just browse others’ questions and answers, but feel free to participate in the discussion. Ask your questions at the link above.
SHABAZZ PALACES, ROB DEVOR & CHARLES MUDEDE ARE GENIUSES
The Stranger
Local hip hop duo Shabazz Palaces has just won The Stranger’s first ever Genius Award for Music. MC/producer, Ishmael Butler and drummer/mbira player, Tendai Maraire, along with all the Genius winners, received a sheet cake exclaiming “You are a frickin’ genius” as well as a no-strings-attached reward of $5,000. The Genius Award for Film was given to Rob Devor and Charles Mudede for their work on Sundance-premiered films such as Police Beat, Zoo and this year’s Unnamed Sarah Jane Moore Project. The Stranger Genius Awards Party is going down on September 17 at the Moore Theatre where winners will accept their awards and Shabazz Palaces will perform. Congrats to all!
FILMMAKER MAGAZINE NAMES TWO SEATTLE PRODUCTIONS IN TOP 25 INDIE FILMS OF THE DECADE
Flimmaker Magazine
Filmmaker Magazine selected two Seattle films to be among its Top 25 Indie Films of the Decade. Coming in at 17 is the Iraq war documentary Iraq in Fragments by Seattle native James Longley. And at 24 is Zoo a shot in Seattle drama directed by Robinson Devor and written by Charles Mudede. To see the full list, follow the above link.
“ZOO” FILMMAKERS BEGIN SHOOTING NEW DOCUMENTARY
Northwest Film Forum
The filmmaking team of “Zoo” and “Police Beat” – writer/director Robinson Devor, writer Charles Mudede and cinematographer Sean Kirby, in association with producer Zach Sebastian’s “Pamphlet & Parable” – have begun filming a new documentary on Sara Jane Moore, a suburban, middle-aged wife and mother who attempted to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford on September 22, 1975 outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Despite the San Francisco locale, Devor is keeping things local to Seattle. He brought crew down from Seattle, rented gear from Oppenheimer Camera, and is using Modern Digital for transferring and post. For more information about this project, follow the above link.
LOCAL HIP-HOP CHERISHED BY CHARLES MUDEDE
The Stranger
What the bulk of the great albums of this year have in common is each is organized by a ruling concept. This does not mean they are concept albums, in the sense of Dr. Octagon’s Dr. Octagonecologyst, Handsome Boy Modeling School’s So, How’s Your Girl, and other works designed by Dan the Automator. No, the rappers of the current moment are not playing roles that can be easily discarded on the next concept album. We get strange truths from the concepts made by these rappers/producers—the black Han Solo, Shabazz, the Dro Bots, the Cigar Rock Star. For them, the new world around us, a world that has gone through considerable changes, demands this unified and systematic approach to rap and beats.
