Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“What Is a Golf Course but the Gentrification of Land?”: Rafael Manuel on Filipiñana
In Filipiñana, tension often lives inside the image itself: a desiccated pine tree creaks against a bright blue sky; mangos left to rot on the branch. There is beauty here, but also decay. Rafael Manuel’s debut feature expands on his 2020 Berlinale-winning short (which is streamable courtesy of The Criterion Channel) to offer an extended yet precise parable about class, memory, and quiet violence in his home country, the Philippines—filtered through the microcosm of a golf course on the outskirts of Manila during a scorching summer day. The film follows Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a new tee girl, as she acclimates […]
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“A Lot of Disabled People Don’t Get to Take Big Risks”: Liz Sargent on Directing Her Sister in Take Me Home
Take Me Home is a film about a caregiver, and the spirit of caregiving infused the entire production. Writer-director Liz Sargent based the feature, her first, on her short of the same name, which premiered at Sundance in 2023. It stars Anna Sargent, her sister, as a woman with a cognitive disability who is the caregiver for her aging adoptive parents. In fact, this is a family of mutual caregivers whose routines are shattered during a central Florida heatwave. How Anna navigates her new emotional reality forms the story’s core, and in striving to locate her character’s need for autonomy, Sargent […]
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“It’s Like Funny Ordinary People”: Jay Duplass on See You When I See You
Twenty three years have passed since Jay and Mark Duplass made a seven-minute short titled This is John for $3—yes, three dollars—that premiered in Sundance in 2003 and effectively launched their careers. This year, Jay (who recently directed the intimately sweet The Baltimorons) is back in Park City as a director with See You When I See You, a darkly funny dramedy about coping with PTSD—and your family. “It feels excellent,” Duplass says about his return to the Utah mountains that’s hosting the Sundance Film Festival for the final time, before next year’s move to Boulder, CO. “Some of my […]
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“We Will Be Passing Out Little NOT AI Buttons to Our Audiences”: Valerie Veatch on Her Sundance-premiering Ghost in the Machine
Until now, the Silicon Valley hype cycle has defined the terms of the artificial-intelligence debate, with advocates predicting universal affluence and the end of all diseases while critics worry that computers will steal not only our jobs but our creative pursuits too. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine proposes a different possibility altogether: that “AI,” if you can even call it that, is just the latest in a long line of grift-y attempts by powerful, exclusionary white guys to remake the whole world in their own image. Connecting the dots between AI’s origins and such lamentable historical low points as the discredited […]
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“Fake Stuff Makes Me Feel Sick”: John Wilson on The History of Concrete
The History of Concrete, John Wilson’s first feature-length film, is far stranger and more compelling than the title suggests—and a perfect continuation of his oft-meandering, always philosophical practice. Yes, there are novel factoids about Ancient Rome, the removal of gum from city sidewalks and the oldest concrete road in America, but the plot often shifts and transmogrifies, in true Wilsonian fashion, before circling back to the topic at hand. For some, this constant zooming—out, in, away entirely—can be frustratingly disorienting. For those who enjoy the visual approximation of falling down a (preferably weed-induced) Wikipedia rabbit hole, this is non-fiction at […]
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“Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever
“It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor—who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke […]
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“We Just Love This Beautiful Outsider Art Form”: Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley on Home Haunts and “Room Temperature”
Making an appearance on DC’s, the blog of author Dennis Cooper, each October are haunted houses and their amateur offspring, “home haunts,” the Halloween home makeovers that with varying degrees of imagination turn suburban dwellings into highly personal expressions of horror . For Cooper, the acclaimed author of works such as Closer, Frisk, God, Jr., The Marble Swarm and The Sluts, these necessarily ephemeral stagings are a particular kind of outsider art, which makes their cataloguing each year on Cooper’s website a work of invaluable archiving; they are installations in dialogue with American horror movie iconography in which such figures […]
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Guy Maddin and David C. Roberts Discuss “Song of My City,” City Symphonies and the “Vivisection” of Cinema
Steam pouring from manhole covers, the neon-lights of 42nd street seen through rain-streaked taxicab windows, phalanxes of cops spied from tenement rooftops as they sweep a city block — David C. Roberts’s Song of My City distills the visual rushes of a score of 1970s and early ’80s New York City-set film classics into a 15-minute city symphony of sorts. Drawing inspiration from 1920s pictures such as Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Roberts has pulled shots from Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Across 110th Street, The Warriors in order to capture not just ’70s New York but the […]
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Subterranean Histories: Laura Poitras on “Cover-Up”
When we meet Seymour Hersh at his Washington office in Laura Poitras’s and Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up, the veteran journalist is framed by papers—documents piled on his desk, notebooks stacked against the wall, binders stuffed into bookcases. The man who began his career in 1959, broke stories about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and prison torture in Abu Ghraib and penned provocative counter-histories about the killing of Bin Laden and the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline is very much still at work. (Now on Substack, he’s recently been writing about the genocide in Gaza, Trump administration plans to […]
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Source File: Mark Obenhaus on “Cover-Up”
Mark Obenhaus has had an extensive career in television documentary, having worked with ABC News as well as on the PBS series Frontline, Great Performances and The American Experience. His subjects have ranged from the Kennedy assassination to UFOs to Robert Wilson’s groundbreaking opera, Einstein on the Beach, and he has won five national Emmy awards, two for the Frontline series “Abortion Clinic” and “Living Below the Line.” He worked with Seymour Hersh on projects including the Frontline documentary Buying the Bomb and brought his long relationship with Sy and understanding of the reporter’s working methods and very understandable sensitivities […]
