Authors — Alex Lei
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“A Nihilist Western”: Athina Rachel Tsangari on Harvest
It’s been nearly a decade since Athina Rachel Tsangari, the idiosyncratic Greek filmmaker who’s never one to repeat herself, has graced us with a new film. Tsangari is always looking for a new challenge: from the improvisational, genre-bending desolateness of The Slow Business of Going (2000), to her Greek Weird-Wave breakout Attenberg (2010) and game of hypermasculinity, Chevalier (2015), each new project takes on a whole different formal imagination. What links them together? Beyond their ostensible differences is Tsangari’s affinity for betweenness—that feeling of not belonging. This feeling is reflected in the films as much as in Tsangari’s life, bouncing […]
by Alex Lei on Oct 30, 2024 -
“Nostalgia for When Things were Terrible”: Conner O’Malley, Danny Scharar and Jack Bensinger on Rap World
There’s an honesty to Rap World, the feature debut of co-directors Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar, beyond its vérité stylings. With Scharar playing the director, Ben, Rap World is a mockumentary following three friends—Matt (O’Malley), Casey (Jack Bensinger) and Jason (Eric Rahill)—from Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, as they trudge through one long night in a quixotic attempt to make a rap album. It is January 11th, 2009: a month earlier The Dark Knight was released on home video, in nine days George W. Bush will leave office, the Great Recession looms and America feels like it is on the cusp of some […]
by Alex Lei on Oct 24, 2024 -
DIY Baltimore: New/Next Film Festival 2024
“Another year, another New/Next” looks to become a certainty in Baltimore. After last year’s inaugural festival, it wasn’t known if New/Next Film Festival was a one-off event or if the Maryland Film Festival would return from hiatus. In 2024, both happened a couple months and a block apart in Station North, and both announced on their closing nights that they will be back for 2025. For the foreseeable future, Baltimore has two tentpole, unjuried independent film festivals; what is not certain is how they are going to interplay with each other as establishments, rather than events with question marks attached. […]
by Alex Lei on Oct 11, 2024 -
“North Dakota is Trump Country Today”: John Hanson and Rob Nilsson on the 4K Restoration of Northern Lights
It would be easy to call 1979 a red letter Cannes for New Hollywood: Apocalypse Now got Francis Ford Coppola his second Palme d’Or (split with Volker Schlöndorff for The Tin Drum), Terrence Malick received Best Director for Days of Heaven. Outside of the spotlight of official competition, another American film playing in the International Critics’ Week walked away with the second ever Camera d’Or for best first feature. Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, Northern Lights returned the pair to their North Dakota roots by documenting 94 year-old Henry Martinson, a socialist organizer instrumental in the victory of […]
by Alex Lei on Oct 2, 2024 -
Festival Report: The 2024 Maryland Film Festival
Baltimore filmmakers and audiences commingled in and around the historic Parkway Theater at the physical center and symbolic heart of the city from May 2 – 5 for the 25th anniversary edition of the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF). When MdFF announced in 2022 that they would be ceasing operations the following year, including all screening activity at the Parkway (its home since the renovations finished in 2017), I thought the fest could go the way of so many things in the city’s arts district, Station North: quiet abandonment and disrepair. It is a testament to the institutional strength of the […]
by Alex Lei on May 15, 2024 -
“The Pitch Is a Performance”: Emily Mackenzie and Noah Collier on Carpet Cowboys
A ten-gallon hat floating in the ocean and psychedelically patterned polypropylene western wear wandering empty hotel halls might not seem like images from a documentary about the changing nature of American commerce, but those costumes define the dreams at the heart of Emily Mackenzie and Noah Collier’s Carpet Cowboys. After becoming obsessed with the seemingly drug-induced carpet designs lining every banal conference room and casino floor in the United States, Mackenzie and Collier stumbled upon Dalton, GA, known then as the “Carpet Capital of the World.” The pair went in, Mackenzie holding the boom and Collier the camera, with little […]
by Alex Lei on Aug 25, 2023 -
“Festivals Should Reflect Their Community”: Eric Allen Hatch on New/Next Film Festival’s Inaugural Edition
In November 2022, the Maryland Film Festival announced it would stop public-facing operations the following year, including the following year’s edition of the festival and new and repertory screenings at Baltimore’s Parkway Theater, in order to “prioritize a planning process to develop a new business model and plan that will chart the future trajectory of the organization.” Barely six months later, the New/Next Film Festival was announced, running from August 18 to 20 in the festival’s previous home, The Charles Theater, just a few blocks south of the Parkway. Leading the charge, or at the very least facilitating it, is […]
by Alex Lei on Aug 7, 2023
