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“I Was Definitely Paying Homage to Stories Set in Chicago”: Minhal Baig on We Grown Now
We Grown Now
Through chronicling a critical turning point for the residents of Chicago’s now-defunct Cabrini-Green public housing project, writer-director Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now explores how the reverberations of this bygone time and place continue to register today. Set in 1992 amid… Read more
“All Documentary Filmmakers Should Receive or Seek Out Some Kind of Training in Vicarious Trauma”: Alix Blair on Her Hot Docs-Debuting Helen and the Bear
Helen and the Bear
Fourth generation Californian Paul McCloskey — aka “Pete” and “Bear” — is a former US Congressman who represented San Mateo County from 1967 (when he trounced Shirley Temple in the Republican primary) to 1983; a decorated Korean War vet, who… Read more
“We Wanted To Show a Teacher with All His Weaknesses, Who Doesn’t Know Everything, Who Sometimes Makes Big Mistakes…”: Laurent Cantet on The Class
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French director Laurent Cantet, whose films include Human Resources, Heading South, The Workshop and his Palme d’Or-winning The Class, died today at the age of 63. With this sad news we are reposting Brandon Harris’s interview with Cantet about The Class… Read more
A Film To Read: Matiás Piñeiro, Tomas Paula Marques and Gabi Saidón on You Burn Me
You Burn Me
New York-based Argentinian director Matiás Piñeiro’s work is without a doubt, a celebration of intertextuality. After continuously exploring the female roles in Shakespeare’s comedies from 2011’s Rosalinda up until 2020’s Isabella, he was drawn to a text which seemed impenetrable,… Read more
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“With a Documentary, It’s More Difficult to Find Humor”: Martín Rejtman on Riders
A decade ago, I interviewed Argentinian filmmaker Martín Rejtman for an hour, walking through the general scope of his career before discussing his then-most-recent feature, Two Shots Fired, which may help flesh out the parts of this interview relating to his first feature, Rapado. Rejtman’s new film, Riders, is only his second documentary. As I wrote in my dispatch on Visions du Réel 2024, where the film premiered, Riders kicks off in May 2020, with extended global lockdown fatigue ramping up; after an opening rally of delivery drivers protesting their horrible conditions (“It is inadmissable to normalize the bodies of […]
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“It’s Not about the Days of the Dead, It’s About the Dead in my Family”: Lourdes Portillo on The Devil Never Sleeps
The following interview with filmmaker Lourdes Portillo by Bérénice Reynaud was originally published in our Spring, 1995 print issue, and it is being reposted today alongside the sad news that Portillo has passed away at the age of 80. — Editor “We’ve been told forever that films should be objective, but we knew that was not going to get us anywhere, because if you don’t have a point of view, you don’t have anything,” comments Lourdes Portillo on her approach to Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the 1986 film she co-directed with Susana Munoz. Nearly ten years […]
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“A Lifetime of Loving Ape Movies and Primate Documentaries and Bigfoot-Adjacent Things”: David and Nathan Zellner on Sasquatch Sunset
Since the dawn of man, there have been anthropomorphic recreations of the lives of primates (they are our evolutionary ancestors, after all). And since the legend of the Sasquatch was first told, there have been numerous recorded sightings of the elusive “Bigfoot,” albeit with most footage deemed a hoax carried out by opportunistic fraudsters in possession of hairy full-body suits. The most infamous came in 1967 in the form of footage shot by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin in Northern California—fleeting frames that, depending on whom you ask, could either be easily debunked or serve as ineffable proof of the […]
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“The Charismatic Leader Leads People, But What Toward?”: Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey on Their HBO Docuseries The Synanon Fix
Currently unspooling across four episodes on HBO and continuing to stream on Max is The Synanon Fix, the latest true-crime catnip from the cable channel that’s not a juggernaut of the genre. And while the Sundance-debuting docuseries does involve the usual “suspects” (a cult, a cache of weapons, attempted murder via a venomous snake), it’s also the latest HBO Original from director Rory Kennedy and writer Mark Bailey (Ethel, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing). Which means it’s less interested in lurid details and more focused on actual individuals with an optimistic vision who are drawn into — and failed by […]
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“I Love the Kind of Cinema That [Tells You Everything] Through Images, Where Every Frame is Like a Painting”: Ena Sendijarević’ on Her Metrograph Series, Sweet Dreams
Amsterdam-based, Bosnian-born filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s two features to date, Take Me Somewhere Nice and Sweet Dreams, hone the filmmaker’s personal cinematic language while expanding the parameters of her own perspective. The former, her 2019 debut feature, follows a Dutch teen as she journeys to visit her ailing Bosnian father in the hospital. The latter, which will screen at NYC’s Metrograph beginning today, chronicles the decline of a wealthy Dutch family’s Indonesian sugar plantation at the turn of the 20th century. While her first feature explores the contours of Eastern and Western European relations—a subject Sendijarević is familiar with as a […]
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“The Step from Being a Human to Becoming a Monster is Much Shorter than We Think”: Oksana Karpovych on Her ND/NF Doc, Intercepted
While the on-the-ground horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have been viewed around the world, often in real time — and even formed the basis of this year’s Best Doc Feature Oscar winner, Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol — Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych has chosen to take a much different and rather innovative approach to documenting the war. Intercepted premiered this year at the Berlin International Film Festival before traveling to CPH:DOX and now, tomorrow night, New Directors/New Films, and while it contains no shortage of cinematically-framed images of both devastation and defiant rebuilding, it predominantly captures our […]
