Authors — Damon Smith
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Bruno Dumont, Hors Satan
An abiding presence at the Cannes Film Festival, where he has twice won the Grand Prix, French writer-director Bruno Dumont (Flanders) is arguably one of the most celebrated and least understood auteurs of the contemporary European film scene. Hailed as a neo-Bressonian wunderkind for his remarkable debut Life of Jesus (1997), a portrait of grinding life among provincial French youth, the onetime philosophy teacher returned two years later with Humanité, an opaque detective story that baffled many observers and even incensed some of Dumont’s staunchest champions. Subsequent films, the notoriously carnal Twentynine Palms (2003)— a kind of metaphysical horror exercise […]
by Damon Smith on Jan 17, 2013 -
Ken Burns, The Central Park Five
If you have a confession, then you have a conviction. At least that was the open-and-shut premise at the heart of the Central Park Jogger case, a crime story that inflamed racist paranoia in late ’80s New York City, stoking sensationalistic media coverage and frenzied outrage in the era of Bernard Goetz, Tawana Brawley, and the Bensonhurst murder, when the city was gripped with tensions that seemed ready to combust at any moment. After a white Wall Street banker from the Upper East Side was raped, beaten, and left for dead on April 19, 1989, while out for her nightly […]
by Damon Smith on Nov 21, 2012 -
Director Ciarán Foy on Citadel
After graduating from the National Film School of Ireland, Dublin-based filmmaker Ciarán Foy plied his trade directing a handful of shorts (including the larkish techno-driven Scumbot, in which a radio-controlled hooligan goes berserk and ultimately turns on his mates), finally winning a bounty of awards for his four-and-a-half-minute malicious-pixie tale The Faeries of Blackheath Woods. Encouraged by the response, Foy set to work in 2007 on a script based on a traumatic personal experience it had taken him years to shake: At age 18, he was randomly assaulted by a gang of toughs near his council flat and viciously threatened […]
by Damon Smith on Nov 7, 2012 -
Julia Loktev, The Loneliest Planet
Following up on her tense, distressingly visceral narrative feature Day Night Day Night, which anatomized the final hours of a female suicide bomber preparing for an operation in Times Square, Brooklyn-based filmmaker Julia Loktev leaves the cramped urban space of contemporary Manhattan for the majestic wilds of the Caucasus Mountains in The Loneliest Planet, where a Western couple, Nica (Hani Furstenberg) and her fiancée Alex (Gael García Bernal), have embarked on a hiking holiday in post-Soviet Georgia. Navigating their way through the emerald landscape with the help of a guide, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), whose war-scarred personal history seems to hang […]
by Damon Smith on Oct 24, 2012 -
Peter Nicks, The Waiting Room
If you’ve ever endured an hours-long wait at the emergency room of a city hospital— sick, injured, frustrated — or accompanied someone on an infuriating quest to find urgent medical help, then you’ve probably wondered aloud, why is it taking so long? In his enthralling new documentary The Waiting Room, winner of the Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award at the 2012 Full Frame Film Festival, Bay Area filmmaker Peter Nicks wheels us into the chaotic emergency room of a teeming public hospital in Oakland, CA, serving a mostly uninsured patient population. Adopting an immersive, all-in approach that owes a strong debt […]
by Damon Smith on Sep 26, 2012 -
Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy, Francine
Named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2007, New York–based co-conspirators Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy gravitated toward moving-image storytelling after earning master’s degrees in photography at the School of Visual Arts. Exploring the porous borders between narrative and nonfiction, while importing many of the techniques they’d learned as MFA students in another visual discipline, Shatzky and Cassidy debuted two equally memorable, conspicuously stylized shorts that year, The Delaware Project (fiction) and God Provides (a nine-minute doc), which premiered at the Rotterdam and Sundance Film Festivals, respectively. In 2011, The Patron Saints, a six-years-in-the-making “hyperrealistic” feature […]
by Damon Smith on Sep 12, 2012 -
Mads Brügger, The Ambassador
Two years ago, Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger received heaps of praise and a certain level of notoriety for his North Korea documentary, The Red Chapel, a surreally funny glimpse at the repressive routinization of daily life inside the hermit kingdom that won the Grand Jury Prize for international documentary at Sundance. To some, the controversial film was merely a highwire stunt: Brügger managed to gain entrance to the totalitarian state (along with two gagmen, one a self-described “spastic”) by posing as a communist theater director attempting to mount a comedy in the interest of cultural exchange. The disadvantages of his […]
by Damon Smith on Aug 29, 2012 -
Carol Morley, Dreams of a Life
In 2003, when the badly decomposed body of 38-year-old Joyce Vincent was found on a sofa in her flat above a busy shopping district in Wood Green North London by bailiffs for the Metropolitan Housing Trust seeking back due rent, the news shocked the public. Nobody had reported her missing, even though she had been dead for three years. A pathologist could not determine the cause of her demise because nothing remained except a skeleton. Questioned by the police, neighbors admitted to noticing a foul odor emanating from the apartment but had never reported it. Stranger still, the television was […]
by Damon Smith on Aug 1, 2012 -
Yung Chang, China Heavyweight
Back in 2007, Montreal-based filmmaker Yung Chang examined the deleterious effects of grand-scale modernization in China on two cruise-ship employees in his celebrated documentary Up the Yangtze. Trailing his subjects as they minister to the needs of well-to-do passengers embarking on “goodbye tours” of river communities that will soon be flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, Chang offered a moving account of the wealth divide as well as the impact of unprecedented change on common people. Up the Yangtze screened at numerous festivals including Sundance, Full Frame, Hot Docs, and IDFA, winning Best Documentary at the Vancouver International Film […]
by Damon Smith on Jul 4, 2012 -
Kirby Dick, The Invisible War
Over two decades, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick (Twist of Faith) has explored edge territory in sex, art, and philosophy with films like Private Practice: The Story of a Sex Surrogate, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, and Derrida, a playful portrait of the impish French poststructuralist thinker riffing on life and language during his tenure in New York City. In recent years, Dick and his producing partner Amy Ziering have zeroed in on institutional power, scrutinizing the hypocrisies and often dangerous doublespeak of powerful, secret-shrouded entities like the MPAA (This Film Is Not Yet Rated) and the […]
by Damon Smith on Jun 20, 2012
