The ITVS Indie Roundup

A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval.

Werner Herzog fans rejoice! This 30-minute autobiographical documentary from 1986 shows the acclaimed German auteur meandering his childhood mountains and planning a never-completed filmmaking expedition to the Himalayas. If you ever need a solid example of how to raise money for media on Kickstarter, look to 99% Invisible. The design radio show and podcast broke the record this week for the amount of money raised for a journalism project with $147,000. Also, the podcast is fabulous. Run, swim, hitchhike, hang glide to Mississippi if you want to appear in James Franco’s film adaptation of As I Lay Dying. This week, open call casting began in Jackson this Wednesday, and another round will be held Friday and Saturday.

Speaking of literary adaptations, which great books do you want to see on the silver screen? The Simpsons is a treasure trove of cinema references, and this hilarious tumblr is ambitiously trying to catalogue them all. The history of the Olympics has been swimming parallel with the history of filmmaking: they were born a year apart, in 1894 and 1895 respectively, in Paris. 

UK filmmakers: Submit your short films to the 2013 London Short Film Festival by September 14. Indie filmmaker Ted Hope has leaped from producing in New York to steering the San Francisco Film Society. His reason? "The future doesn't come from Hollywood and New York,” he told Indiewire. “It's Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. I want to be at the center of that culture, that defines itself by innovation, wants to try new things and not live through risk mitigation, that wants to dream big. Everything that once represented the indie film community is out there now."