This is a cut/paste from The Daily Rumpus's Stephen Elliot's daily email--which is often good and always worth at least a quick read. Today, however, if you subsitute "film" for "book" and "filmmaker" for "writer", he could have just as easily been talking about the new film world for independent filmmakers. Take a read:

"...I didn't read too far into The Four Fingers of Death on my phone. I could imagine when I would, during a long train ride, for example, if I didn't have anything printed on paper. But then I don't finish the vast majority of books I start. When people offer me their books I usually turn them down, or encourage them to contact our books editor. I need a recommendation from someone other than the author. Sometimes they're offended. One of my favorite cartoons was in the New Yorker years ago. A woman had an unwrapped present containing a book. She says, "Oh, homework." If I could find that comic I'd frame it.

When you'll really want a book on your phone is when it contains essential knowledge, things you need to know for your work or your home or your child. It's hard to imagine reading on the phone being relaxing, which is what I feel when I'm in love with a book. I relax into it.

But people are reading books this way, and you have to meet your audience. You can't change the book, the text remains the text, but you can change the readers experience. Whenever I publish a book I bring the publishers a cover before they bring me one. Then, if they don't like it, they're challenged to do something better. Why would that be any different if your book was an app? Why would you want your publisher to design the experience of reading your book on a phone? Apple, in this equation, is just a printer. You bring the printer your book, your cover, the specifications, and they print the book and send it to you in boxes on a truck. But that doesn't even explain it. Eli Horowitz designed a book that opened in four places and had a comb inside. Books have sizes and textures and kerning and fonts, all of which matter.

You can sell a book through kindle and the ibookstore, but why would you stop there when there's so much more you can do. Think of it like this, if the screen is the environment of the book then the app allows you to design the chair your reader sits in, and how much light comes through the window, and the vista.

I was talking with Nato Green about the rise of the community, web 2.0's response to web 1.0. He said it wasn't necessarily a good thing, that it could play to extremes. That I should look at how it was empowering the right. But to me that wasn't the point. You can't protest air..."

Stephen Elliot/The Daily Rumpus/August 30, 2010

I recently came across this review I wrote for MovieMaker Magazine back in 1999 and was reminded how great I think this film is. Find it at your video store, demand it from Netflix, do what you must, but see SANTITOS!

Santitos (reviewed 1999)

This may be Director Alejandro Springall's feature film debut, but his wealth of experience, both as a docu­mentary filmmaker and a producer (most recently of Cronos) from Mexico has primed him well for this wildly humorous and beautifully executed story. Moving effortlessly from saints who appear in oven doors to a rapturous collision of the mysti­cal and mundane, Santitos is the story of a young widow who has recently suffered the loss of her only child-a daughter who never woke up from a tonsil operation. Haunted by not being allowed to see her daughter's dead body, Esperanza is convinced by a vision of St. Jude that the child hasn't really died after all. Her journey of discovery (and also, ultimately, of sexuality) provides a litany of experiences at once defining, precarious and bizarre. Springall has fashioned a rare, whimsical tone in this story that promises redemption in return for faith, and in this milieu-home to melodra­ma and fervent religion-we find the perfect pitch for a gentle parody of naive superstition. Festival audiences have roared with delight at this boldly sexual story , and a recent re-editing after its Sundance premiere has left the film a lustrous pearl amid a sea of indie entries.