Since its world premiere at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival, Andrew Garrison’s documentary Trash Dance has been a festival favorite, picking up audience awards at both Full Frame and Silverdocs. The film chronicles innovative choreographer Allison Orr’s attempts to wrangle a group of garbage men and turn them, and their trucks, into the participants in her latest project. Filmmaker spoke with the Austin, Texas-based Garrison, an experienced non-fiction director known for such films as Third Ward TX and The Wilgus Stories, about the process of making Trash Dance, which opens at the reRun Theater in Brooklyn today. Filmmaker: Why did …

Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and …

Ron Morales’ nifty second feature Graceland centers on Marlon Villar (Arnold Reyes), driver to corrupt senator Manuel Chango (Menggie Cobarrubias). The senator’s a pedophile with a penchant for underage hookers; Marlon — struggling to raise funds for an organ transplant for his ill wife — turns a blind eye. The two men’s daughters are friends, but when Marlon’s child is mistaken for the senator’s during a kidnapping, he has to lie his way into making sure the senator puts up the ransom funds. Running around Manila at the child-snatchers’ behest, Marlon and Morales take in a broad swath of pungent …

Mira Nair lounges casually on the edge of a bed in her downtown New York hotel room. Between sips of tea, she asks, “Is this okay?” as if the informal atmosphere might throw off the professional nature of our meeting. (It doesn’t.) To borrow Nair’s own sentiment, which she uses to describe the way she aims to feel on set, the director looks “at home in the world,” comfortable even when promoting a movie that’s designed to be unnerving. Based on Mohsin Hamid’s international bestseller, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Nair’s eleventh narrative feature, and a milestone in a filmography that …

The titular subject referred to in Shawney Cohen’s debut feature has nothing to do with ladies and lords, but with the Cohen family business – a combo strip club/motel in a small Canadian town. And The Manor has nothing to do with in the ins and outs of the sex industry, so to speak, but with the inner workings of the Cohen family, which includes Shawney’s 400-pound father (who bought the place when the director was only six) and 85-pound anorexic mother. Ultimately, the doc’s not so much north-of-the-border, reality TV than a nuanced portrait of a loving yet dysfunctional …

Youth culture didn’t start in the ’60s. In the parlance of today’s teens, the appropriate response to this might be “duh.” Teenage, director Matt Wolf’s artful new non-fiction film, uncovers the “hidden history” of youth culture and locates its origins in various youth movements in the first half of the 20th century. From German Swing kids to American Victory Girls, the film offers a veritable lexicon of lost teen vocabulary (“teen canteen,” “buzz bucket,” “boogie in the strut hut”), and reminds us that the invention of teenager culture depended on the invention of a new language — and one that …

Paul Schrader presented a screening of Taxi Driver in Toronto last weekend and spoke to the capacity audience of 450 at the Royal Cinema for an hour afterwards about his career and the changing state of filmmaking. As part of the Seventh Art Live Directors Series and presented by The Royal, he also showed a scene from his forthcoming The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan. Many in the audience watched Taxi Driver for the first time on the big screen, since many were not even born when the film shocked audiences in 1976. A major critical and box-office success, it launched …

One of the buzz titles at the Tribeca Film Festival this year is director Sam Fleischner’s sophomore feature, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors. The film has a compelling premise, as it deals with Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), an autistic 13-year-old boy from Brooklyn’s Rockaway Beach, who runs away from home and spends days on end traveling around on the New York subway system as his mother (Andrea Suarez) and sister (Azul Zorrilla) do their best to find him. Fleischner’s movie also garnered a modicum of attention as it was shot partly during Hurricane Sandy, and ultimately incorporated the storm into …

Bluebird, Lance Edmands’s quietly disquieting directorial debut, follows a cast of characters in rural Maine, where every good intention is rendered fruitless in the face of a tragic accident. Lesley (Amy Morton), the local school bus driver, passes over a sleeping student at the end of her shift, leaving him to freeze into a coma overnight. The boy’s drifting, negligent young mother, Marla (Louisa Krause), seeks solace in the possibility of a lawsuit, and distraction in a dalliance with her co-worker, while her own mother monitors the child’s health in the hospital. Lesley’s husband, Richard (John Slattery), is an inch …

While the lives of the working class are not the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of, they are at the heart of Laurie Collyer’s new film, Sunlight Jr. Starring Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon as a couple dealing with an unexpected pregnancy while trying to survive on minimum wage jobs, Sunlight Jr. premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend where it is sure to stir up a conversation about what it means to be numbered among the working poor in American society today. Filmmaker: Although income inequality and poverty is one of the biggest issues facing America right now, …