As the clock struck twelve on New Years Eve, the blood ran cold through my veins. My stomach tightened into a knot so tense that I could barely finish my glass of six dollar champagne without feeling like I would spew vomit all over my girlfriend. It was New Year’s Eve, and we had decided to get drunk alone out of exhaustion of going to parties and our shared social anxiety issues. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t the fact that another year had been set upon us to painfully endure that made me nauseous, nor was it the disgustingly sweet champagne …

“On a set I feel like the strongest person in the world,” says Mikael Buch, quickly adding, “In real life, things are far more complicated!” Buch’s new film, Let My People Go!, is his first full-length feature. But in directing and co-writing this frisky combination of sexual farce, romantic comedy, and family drama revolving around a young, gay, Jewish Frenchman named Ruben (Nicolas Maury) and his international misadventures, Buch had some stalwart support, including co-writer Christophe Honoré and actor Carmen Maura (of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown fame). “All these people gave me the confidence I needed,” says …

Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme has made Hollywood spectacles (The Silence of the Lambs, The Manchurian Candidate), eccentric indies (Rachel Getting Married, Something Wild), timeless rock docs (Stop Making Sense, Neil Young Journeys) and other unclassifiable delights. At the 12th annual Festival International du Film de Marrakech, Demme’s filmmaking legacy was honored with both a formal tribute, and an invite to give a “masterclass” to an enraptured Moroccan audience. Filmmaker sat down with Demme to discuss his iconoclastic career. Filmmaker: For decades, you’ve been slinking between narratives and documentaries. What interests you more? Demme: I’ve always followed my enthusiasm. If …

What began as a short film, Joshua Tree 1951: A Portrait of James Dean, became a feature film almost by the insistence of social media. Director/writer Matthew Mishory says the initial shoot for the film took place in Joshua Tree, California, over a few days in 2010. When he returned to Los Angeles, he edited a trailer and posted it online, not thinking much of what would happen. Almost immediately the trailer went viral and expectation was that it was going to be a feature film. “Our production team got together and decided, well, we really ought to be making …

In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning director of When the Mountains Tremble, Pamela Yates — whose memoir of Guatemala’s struggles, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, revisits the footage and topics of her debut  — and Bernardo Ruiz, whose film Reportero airs on POV on January 7 at 10:00PM, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Yates and Ruiz share where they’ve been, …

It’s a late fall Sunday afternoon and Rick Macomber is setting up his Canon C300 on a bridge near Harvard Square to shoot some inserts for a music video. The video is for the band Air Traffic Controller, and the plan today is to shoot two sequences of a couple that illustrate “happier times” in their relationship. Rick will first be shooting them crossing the bridge, and then they’ll move to Harvard Square to shoot some additional scenes. With his production company Macomber Productions Rick has been shooting music, promotional and wedding videos since 1995 and has been using DSLRs …

Part realism and part fantasy, half 35mm and half 16mm, part post-colonial and part colonial, half a swooning love story and half a clear-eyed political assessment, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu functions, as he puts it in this interview, within a structure of oppositions. Simultaneously a rebuke – and vindication – of the concept that “the personal is the political,” Tabu is a carefully constructed film in two halves, each of which comments upon the absences articulated in the other. We start in present-day Portugal, with Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a middle-aged woman who works for an unidentified lefty non-profit. Pilar is of …

The last half of my 20s and the first half of my 30s were spent in Los Angeles working in mainstream television (That 70s Show) and film (Jesus People). I never made much money, but I did get to live out my dreams of visiting Kathy Griffin’s house, serving crumpets to my favorite comedic actress, Lisa Kudrow, and brushing my leg up against my favorite dramatic actress, Holly Hunter. In the mid-90s, I took for granted the fact that gay characters were becoming well represented on television. After all, my favorite TV shows were thirtysomething and My So-Called Life and …

Aquí y Allá (“Here and There”) is a film about home and separation; of returning to where you left and trying to reintegrate with a life that has, for all intents and purposes, gone on without you. Dreams and opportunities; responsibility and consequence; hope and fear–these are all central not only to the film, but to the day-to-day life of every human being around the world. As such, Aquí y Allá exceeds the admittedly weighty (and very touching) premise of Mexican emigration to the U.S.–and all the tensions and the void that can come of it–to strike a relatable chord regardless of …

Since making his transition from actor to writer/director in 2000 with the raucous comedy 101 Reykjavik, Baltasar Kormákur has rapidly established himself as one of the most gifted and versatile European filmmakers. The Icelandic multi-hyphenate has moved with seeming ease from grand family dramas (The Sea) to gritty police procedurals (Jar City) and poignant comedies (White Night Wedding), while also turning out English-language indie thrillers such as 2005′s A Little Trip to Heaven (starring Forest Whitaker, Julia Stiles and Jeremy Renner) and the 2010′s Inhale, with Diane Kruger, Dermot Mulroney and Sam Shepard. Though Kormákur had arguably the biggest film of his career this year with Contraband – the Mark …