Each year Filmmaker Magazine announces 25 fresh young filmmakers that are doing good work and defining what independent film in America is. The list this year is a good mix of narrative filmmakers, documentary filmmakers and folks who do a variety of jobs like editing and cinematography.

You can read the entire list HERE but below check out a few of the folks who are making work that is in line with what we do here at TakePart:

Nicole Opper:
A dedicated educator beyond her work as a filmmaker, Philadelphia-based documentarian Nicole Opper sees her teaching as the key to refreshing her own vision of the medium and its potential. Trained at NYU’s undergraduate film program at Tisch, after graduating she quickly leapt into film education herself, teaching film courses at both public and private schools across New York City at a variety of age levels. “It’s important to have your perspectives challenged by young people,” she said. “They’re intuitive. They’re always challenging my way of doing things and my preconceived notions of how to construct stories.”

While teaching a class at a Brooklyn public school nine years ago, Opper met Avery Klein-Cloud, the spunky, opinionated youth at the center of Opper’s acclaimed documentary Off and Running. Avery is the black adopted daughter of white Jewish lesbians, and the film is an alternately wistful, touching and challenging portrait of her rocky coming-of-age. “She was a student in my very first class,” says Opper. “We kept in touch through the years, and we first started talking about the possibility of making this film when she was 16, halfway through high school.”

READ MORE ON OPPER HERE
______

Ian Olds:
We put director Garrett Scott on our “New Faces” list in 2002 following his accomplished short documentary Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story. Ian Olds edited that film and would later partner with Scott to direct the 2005 feature documentary Occupation: Dreamland. That feature won the Truer than Fiction Spirit Award, and just a day before the ceremony, Scott died suddenly of a heart attack. At the Spirits, a shaken Olds accepted the award for the film.

“After Garrett died I really thought I would no longer make documentaries,” says Olds. “The thought of starting a new documentary project without him seemed too painful and too fraught with the history of our working relationship to contemplate. Working with Garrett on those projects is where I really learned how to pay attention to the world. Garrett was a compassionate man with an incredibly sharp mind, and his emphasis on approaching the world with a cold eye and a warm heart is something I’ve tried to embrace in my own work.”

After going to Sundance with a fiction short, Bomb, in 2007, Olds decided to explore documentary again “as an experiment.” His film Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi, which previewed at Rotterdam, premiered at Tribeca, and was bought by HBO, was set to be a doc about “the mechanics of war journalism,” but when Olds’s interpreter, Naqshbandi, was kidnapped and murdered by the Taliban midway through shooting, the project took on a new urgency.

READ MORE ON OLDS HERE

______

Steph Green:
Last year, Steph Green found herself walking the red carpet at the Oscars, the director of an Oscar-nominated short film, arm-in-arm with an 11-year-old date. The man in question was Olutunji Ebun-Cole, the African-born, U.K.-bred star of her film New Boy. Adapted from a Roddy Doyle story, Green’s sharply observed narrative follows a young African refugee on his first day of school in Ireland, an experience shared by the wave of immigrants and refugees who have entered that country in the last decade. “The Irish have this rich oral tradition, and short films are closer to that than features, in a way,” Green comments. “No one tells an-hour-and-a-half story in person.”

Green’s career as a commercial and video director (among other accolades, she was one of Creativity magazine’s “Top Directors to Watch”) has also helped hone her short-form skills. One thing she has learned from commercial work, as well as from a few early years of working as an assistant to Spike Jonze, is how much of a director’s job involves simply discussing what it is they want to do. “You have to symbolically read every single choice — like, what is the metaphor of this lighting — and explain and defend it to many, many people.”

READ MORE ON STEPH GREEN HERE