”The only way to survive is to take photos,” declares Libuše Jarcovjáková, the iconoclastic star/narrator/guide of Klára Tasovská’s visually arresting (and eye-catching titled) I’m Not Everything I Want to Be. Nominated for the Teddy Documentary Award at this year’s Berlinale, the all-archival film is a globetrotting, black and white trip back in time (primarily to the 80s and 90s) viewed entirely through the rebelliously inquisitive eyes of this “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” (in the words of curator Sam Stourdzé). And words. For not only did Jarcovjáková obsessively collect images of both her defiantly unglamorous self and her decidedly adventurous life, […]
On your way up. Take me up. On your way down. I won’t let you down. — Robert Nesta Marley As a form, the biopic and even more specifically the musical biopic, is an often fraught endeavor, one whose pursuit brings its makers along well-worn paths of pitfalls and dead ends. With his fourth feature, Bob Marley: One Love, Reinaldo Marcus Green meets this challenge head on, capturing a vision of Marley in a time of great upheaval. In the 1970s, Jamaica was embroiled in turmoil — a result of staggering levels of poverty and political rivalries. In ‘76, through gang […]
Dream Team, the third feature by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, is another in the writer-director duo’s run of genre pastiches that double as sociopolitical parables. Here, the influence of ’90s basic cable TV thrillers is channeled into an episodic story about a pair of Interpol agents (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) who travel to Mexico to investigate the mysterious death of a corral smuggler. Shot by Horn in characteristically textured 16mm, the film unfolds between a variety of West Coast locales stretching from Baja California to Vancouver. As the body count rises and rumors of a physic coral […]
Little known in the Anglophone film world (although a recent book in Edinburgh University Press’s ReFocus series might suggest an impending course correction), Antoinetta Angelidi is one of the most creative and distinct directors of the last half-century. Raised in and around Athens, Angelidi found solace in art in her adolescence after a traumatic childhood rape left her speechless. Though she initially took to painting, she was an avid moviegoer and, later, after a dream in which a Magritte-styled work exhibited a tiny movement, she turned to cinema. A student activist, she fled Greece for Paris with just the clothes […]
Fading though they are, I still have fond memories of the UA Crossbay I movie theater in Ozone Park. Founded in 1924, the Queens theater went out of business in 2005 and was converted into a Modell’s Sporting Goods, then a Raymour & Flanigan furniture outlet (“sadly fitting,” writes one user in the comments section of the theater’s Cinema Treasures page, “since most people watch movies sitting or lying in their beds nowadays”). The marquee still remains, sporting a branded logo of its current tenant rather than a rundown of the week’s releases. I also remember having seen many movies […]
“A squirmy treatise on sexual insecurity and relationship oneupmanship” is how I described Ben Petrie’s fifth short film Her Friend Adam when profiling the Canadian writer-director-actor for Filmmaker‘s 2016 25 New Faces list. That film starred Petrie and real-life partner Grace Glowicki as a couple whose relationship is unexpectedly destabilized when he spies a suggestive text message on her phone. He admitted at the time that the short was inspired by a “private lash of jealousy” he experienced in a similar moment with Glowicki, and our profile concluded with him working on a screenplay for this forthcoming first feature. You […]
Pete Ohs, a 2013 Filmmaker 25 New Face, describes his Slamdance-premiering comedy/drama Love and Work as “a film about an imaginary past as a way to figure out where we went wrong in the present.” A minimalist, slightly absurdist romantic comedy, the picture represents both a continuation of the pared-down production model Ohs described to Filmmaker upon the release of his previous Jethica as well as a dramatic departure. Instead of the Jethica‘s lo-fi naturalism, Ohs here goes for a clipped rhythms and a more deadpan affect as his two potential workmate lovers who meet in a shoe factory navigate […]
After her feature directorial debut The Fallout (2021), a film about a high-school shooting, Megan Park was feeling the weight of its emotional aftermath. “When you make a movie, you live in that world for years,” she tells Filmmaker at Sundance Film Festival. “I wanted an escape, and I wanted to be nostalgic.” So she went back home to Canada and started thinking about what became the genesis of My Old Ass, a bittersweet coming-of-age comedy, and, gradually, a reflective tearjerker that left Sundance audiences sobbing. “It was this idea of the last time your whole family sleeps under one […]
Tendaberry, the feature debut from writer-director Haley Elizabeth Anderson, follows 23-year-old protagonist Dakota (first-time actor Kota Johan) throughout an entire calendar year as she experiences day-to-day life in New York City. Specifically, Dakota and her boyfriend Yuri (model Yuri Pleskun, who previously appeared in the Safdie Brothers’s Heaven Knows What) reside in the South Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, which is alight with sunbathers and Coney Island-bound tourists in the summertime, but otherwise very quiet—save for the constant hum of ocean wave and gulls—during the off-season. A permanent air of loneliness engulfs Dakota when Yuri travels back to Ukraine to […]
When writer-director Nora Fingscheidt first encountered Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir, The Outrun, and read the story of Liptrot’s journey through alcoholism and her eventual healing on a remote Scottish island, she was living in Los Angeles and feeling somewhat disoriented. “I was a bit lost in this gargantuan city,” she tells Filmmaker recently in Park City, where her film, The Outrun, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “I missed Europe a lot. Reading this brutally honest story taking place at the edge of the world, on this tiny remote island, created a big longing in me to go and film […]