At Rumur we tend to make films that focus on people who go against the grain of the system. As we have matured, our characters have matured, but they are still outsiders who have difficulty going with the flow when the flow is going in a different direction than they think it should. Our very first film, "Half-Cocked" (1993), isn't a...
Last week a good friend, and academy nominated doc director, gave us some great notes on our rough cut. He had seen a somewhat earlier version of the film so it was great to hear his notes because we had already addressed about 80% of them. At the same time, he asked a series of sharp questions about what we were...
About a year and a half ago - when we launched our first kickstarter campaign to help fund Battle for Brooklyn (a doc we have been working on for 7.5 years), I did a great deal of planning. I took the game theory aspect very seriously. We knew that we had networks of people that we could tap into, and...
This week, in addition to hustling to finish Battle for Brooklyn, we have been working on an EPK (electronic press kit) for a Danish singer named Agnes Obel. Agnes moved to Berlin to be creative, and over the course of a few years she put together an album of seemingly simple songs based around piano melodies and singing. I write...
This fall, as the pace of education"reform" in New York cranked up, I started to pay more attention to what was going on. With two children in my local public school, I quickly realized that the more I looked, the less I liked what I saw. I began to write about the subject to try to get my head around...
If you’ve been to a protest in the last 10 years, you’ve likely heard the chant, “The people, united, will never be defeated.” The opposite is true as well. When the government pits community against community, as it is now doing in the process of promoting charter schools designed to compete with community schools, it's important to...
The internet is a terrible place to discuss ideas and work out complex feelings. Yet, in our hyper busy culture we seem to fall back on it more and more. It's difficult to make time for a community meeting, but we end up having our days taken over by comment wars. Over the last couple of years I have followed...
Most of the films that we make are in some way about the flow of information. We tend to follow stories about people who butt up against the power structures. In general they seem to get treated poorly by the mainstream media. So when I see and hear the media piling on Assange, I try not to...
Last Night I went to a screening of a friends film. This friend is a one-man band and after three years of working on the film he’s done- finished- kaput. However, I still have some notes for him….. It is a great film, but it could be better, and I believe, reach a much wider audience with a few tweaks. After...
The revolving door between government and industry doesn't just exist in the armed services and financial fields. A lot of the issues at play in our film, "Battle for Brooklyn" (click on link to see discussion of title) have to do with the revolving door between developers and the government and the government/developers and journalism. It's difficult to find a way...
As we get closer to having a finished film, we've started to focus increasingly on our plans for it. While strategizing about distribution, we are also thinking about presentation. The most important aspect of presentation is the name. For at least a year we have been working with the title "Battle of Brooklyn." However, we have become increasingly dissatisfied with...
About 10 years ago, after making several narrative feature films, we decided to give documentary filmmaking a try. Now we're pretty sick of documentary filmmaking and want to jump back into narrative. Through the making of Donor 67, we met Alana Sveta. We are currently working with her on the script called "Adam and Eva". In the meantime we are...