Recently we had the opportunity to spend eight days in New York City, where we made considerable headway on two Rock Fish Stew documentaries — BIG EARS and The Joseph Mitchell Project. Helping us on parts of this trip were the photographer Kate Joyce, a longtime RFS collaborator; Hiroshi Watanabe, a photographer and collaborator on Bull City Summer; and Ligaiya Romero, a New York-based […]
Bull City Summer Doc Film Featured in Two Film Festivals
Leaving Traces, the documentary film based on Bull City Summer by Ivan Weiss and Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials, will be featured in two exclusive and very different film festivals this coming weekend. *Saturday September 20, available online on demand, Leaving Traces, will be screened as part of the On Photography Film Festival, which is part of FOTOWEEK in Holland. This […]
Rock Fish Stew Seeks Fall Interns
RFS seeks two self-starting interns for the fall season 2014. Interns will help support current documentary projects, help manage the website and social media, contribute ideas and material, research and help write grants, transcribe interviews, and participate on a Kickstarter campaign. An interest in literature, film, and/or other creative endeavors is a plus. Video, photography, […]
“Leaving Traces”: After the Screening
Q&A’s can be a very fraught experience for me: The credits end, the lights come up, I’m all ready to talk shop about what I just saw … and within a few minutes somebody is droning on and on and I wish I’d just stayed home. Yet my desire for a kickass Q&A — where the audience discussion actually takes […]
“Leaving Traces” to Premiere at Full Frame Theater
Durham, NC — Rock Fish Stew is premiering “Leaving Traces,” a 75-minute documentary by RFS partner Ivan Weiss, at the Full Frame Theater at the American Tobacco Campus. Showtime is 6pm on July 12. The film follows a group of artists who converged on the Durham Bulls Athletic Park during the 2013 season for Rock Fish Stew’s […]
Tom Stoppard on Stew
From Stoppard’s play, Arcadia (1993, Faber and Faber), an opening scene set in Derbyshire, England in April, 1809: THOMASINA (a pupil, age thirteen): When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will […]
Behind the Scenes of a Documentary Film based on Jazz Loft Project
Here are a few production stills from the documentary film based on The Jazz Loft Project (JLP) that is currently in post-production. The film is directed by WNYC’s Sara Fishko, who was producer and host of the JLP public radio series for WNYC, and produced by Cal Skaggs and Jonathan Johnson at Lumiere Productions. WNYC’s […]
Museum Hours
At Rock Fish Stew we’re inspired by the work of filmmaker Jem Cohen. Lately we’ve been studying his 2013 work, Museum Hours, which tells a story set in contemporary Vienna, mostly in that city’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, particularly in the room devoted to the 16th century paintings of Pieter Bruegel. The film’s main characters are a […]
Field Notes from Kate Joyce: Tony Gwynn and the Art of Seeing
Many in the baseball world were moved by Monday’s news of Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn passing away at age fifty-four. For the past two days commentators and eulogists have compared him to an artist. How many in the art world would compare themselves to a baseball player, or seek influence from one? Last summer […]
Unhinged
This box of sixty-two cassettes arrived in the Rock Fish Stew offices this week. They contain recordings of Bonnaroo and Big Ears founder Ashley Capps’ legendary Knoxville public radio show, “Unhinged,” taped from WUOT‘s airwaves by a dedicated (and generous) listener, Matthew Range, from 1989 to 1992. A quick sample of Matthew’s handwritten tape labels […]