Authors — Natalia Keogan
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“I Love the Kind of Cinema That [Tells You Everything] Through Images, Where Every Frame is Like a Painting”: Ena Sendijarević’ on Her Metrograph Series, Sweet Dreams
Amsterdam-based, Bosnian-born filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s two features to date, Take Me Somewhere Nice and Sweet Dreams, hone the filmmaker’s personal cinematic language while expanding the parameters of her own perspective. The former, her 2019 debut feature, follows a Dutch teen as she journeys to visit her ailing Bosnian father in the hospital. The latter, which will screen at NYC’s Metrograph beginning today, chronicles the decline of a wealthy Dutch family’s Indonesian sugar plantation at the turn of the 20th century. While her first feature explores the contours of Eastern and Western European relations—a subject Sendijarević is familiar with as a […]
by Natalia Keogan on Apr 12, 2024 -
“We Shot for Four-and-a-Half Days”: Tynan DeLong on Dad & Step-Dad
Cringe comedy and pathos converge with unlikely grace in Dad & Step-Dad, the debut feature from director Tynan DeLong. Expanded significantly from short films that DeLong crafted with recurring collaborators Colin Burgess (recent star of Ryan Martin Brown’s debut feature Free Time) and Anthony Oberbeck, the premise of the feature is nonetheless pretty straightforward. On a weekend trip to an Airbnb in upstate New York, titular dad Jim (Burgess) and step-dad Dave (Oberbeck) quarrel incessantly, both over the affection of teenage ward Branson (played hilariously by adult Brian Fiddyment) and for inconsequential paternal bragging rights over the other. Passive aggression […]
by Natalia Keogan on Apr 4, 2024 -
“It’s a Confusing World That We Inhabit”: Ryan Martin Brown on Free Time
In Free Time, writer-director-producer Ryan Martin Brown’s debut feature, directionless office drone Drew (comedian Colin Burgess) decides to quit his job. After all, the position is hardly fulfilling (nor is he particularly gifted at it), and why spend all day bleary-eyed behind a screen when all that New York City has to offer exists just outside the door? Soon enough, Drew’s naive work-life musings are proven to be drivel, and his joblessness puts a mighty strain on his few remaining social relationships. His WFH roommate Rajat (Rajat Suresh) doesn’t seem thrilled with Drew’s daytime presence in the apartment, nor does […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 22, 2024 -
Forgive My Laughter: Vera Drew on The People’s Joker
The following interview with The People’s Joker writer, director and star, Vera Drew, appears in Filmmaker issue #126 and now appears online as the film receives its U.S. theatrical release from Altered Innocence. Just as The People’s Joker was preparing to premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, a “strongly worded letter” arrived that threatened immediate legal action if Vera Drew’s scrappy, bold feature debut went ahead with its multiple planned screenings. Warner Bros. was less than pleased that Drew and co-writer Bri LeRose based their film on a trademarked DC franchise, and it likely didn’t help that the […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 18, 2024 -
“We Were a Bit Like a Circus That Came to Town”: Sara Summa on Arthur&Diana
Filmed during a genuine road trip between Germany, France and Italy, Arthur&Diana, the sophomore film from writer-director Sara Summa is fueled by experimentation. Summa and her real-life brother Robin play the titular sibling duo as they embark on a trip from Berlin to Paris in order to renew documentation for the car which carries them, itself a cherished familial relic. In tow is Diana’s two-year-old son, Lupo, also embodied by Summa’s own child. As they drive through Europe and encounter faces old and new—a magnetic young hitchhiker, the pair’s zany Parisian mother, Diana’s partner and co-parent—it becomes clear that their […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 17, 2024 -
“The Frame Is a Proscenium”: Graham Swon on An Evening Song (for three voices)
Set in 1939 and told through the intertwining perspectives of characters enmeshed in a bizarre love triangle, writer-director Graham Swon’s sophomore feature An Evening Song (for three voices) is as visually robust as it is dramatically intimate. The story revolves around married couple Richard (Peter Vack) and Barbara (Hannah Gross)—a pulpy crime writer and a prodigious novelist, respectively—who move to a rural Midwestern town after years of city living. Shortly after arriving, they hire a local young woman named Martha (Deragh Campbell) who the couple find independently alluring despite (or perhaps largely due to) her striking innocence and pious nature. […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 15, 2024 -
“I Don’t Feel Comfortable Making Cinema That Gazes From Afar”: Tatiana Huezo on The Echo
Located within the Mexican municipality of Chignahuapan in the state of Puebla, the rural village of El Eco acts as a microcosm for various stages of life and the oft-small moments that herald them in filmmaker Tatiana Huezo’s documentary of the same name. The Salvadoran-Mexican filmmaker weaves together intimate scenes among three local families, exploring themes of gender, labor and generational shifts in attitude amid a sprawling and bucolic—yet unpredictably volatile—stretch of Mexico’s highlands. The Echo is Huezo’s fifth feature, marking her return to nonfiction storytelling after helming her 2021 debut narrative film Prayers for the Stolen. With this transition, […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 14, 2024 -
“Any Independent Film Is a Miracle These Days”: Alice Lowe on SXSW 2024 Premiere Timestalker
World premiering at this year’s SXSW, writer-director-star Alice Lowe’s sophomore feature Timestalker certainly feels like it’s been a long time coming. Arriving eight years after Prevenge, her 2016 debut that she shot and starred in just weeks before giving birth to her eldest daughter, Lowe’s latest was stalled for a slew of reasons—motherhood, COVID, involvement in other projects—but Timestalker’s extended development served to sharpen Lowe’s filmic instinct while shooting, resulting in an ambitious, blood-spattered time loop rom-com more aesthetically and thematically assured than its 22-day shoot may have initially allowed for. Lowe stars as Agnes, an ordinary woman who we […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 8, 2024 -
“When You’re Filming in the Streets of New York, There’s No Need To Pretend”: Haley Elizabeth Anderson on Tendaberry
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 […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jan 23, 2024 -
“The Experience of Being an Outsider Is a Universal One”: River Gallo and Esteban Arango on Ponyboi
On a dreary Valentine’s Day in New Jersey during the early aughts, intersex laundromat employee and sex worker Ponyboi (River Gallo) finds themselves embroiled in a bungled drug deal. Estranged from his family and afraid of coming clean to his best friend (Victoria Pedretti) and her husband (Dylan O’Brien)—also Ponyboi’s boss and clandestine sexual partner—he decides to go on the run and permanently escape the Garden State. Along the way, he crosses paths with a rugged kindly stranger who’s shrouded in mystery and en route to Las Vegas. Just when he’s ready to hitch a ride to the desert, however, […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jan 20, 2024
