Authors — Natalia Keogan
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“Someone on the Verge of Screaming Back at the World” Sujin Jung on Her Student Short Film Showcase Winner Cocoon
Three generations of women clash during a Korean holiday in writer-director Sujin Jung’s Cocoon. Made as her MFA thesis film during her studies at Loyola Marymount University, the film centers on Jisoo (Alexes Josephine Lee), a young girl who experiences anxiety-induced selective mutism. This becomes a point of contention between Jisoo’s mother, Hyunsook (Taehee Kim) and her mother-in-law (Joy Kim), who express their respective frustration with the girl’s condition in vastly different ways. When the family matriarch harshly punishes Jisoo due to her inability to speak, Hyunsook decides to stand up for her daughter, subverting traditional expectations in the process. […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 26, 2025 -
“A Lot of Pent-up Grief with Life”: Calleen Koh on Her Student Short Film Showcase Winner My Wonderful Life
Loosely based on her mother’s grueling daily schedule, Calleen Koh’s delightfully animated My Wonderful Life brings to life the deranged fantasies that can plague the overworked. Office drone Grace Lee falls strains her body beyond its breaking point—the demands of her workplace, family and even a local stray cat cause her to collapse on the job. When she wakes up in the hospital, she feels an odd sense of relief and relaxation. She can finally rest without feeling guilty; as a result, she resolves to extend her hospital stay by any means necessary. When her body begins to heal itself, […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 26, 2025 -
Read Interviews With the Sixth Annual Student Short Film Showcase Winners, Awarded By The Gotham, JetBlue and Focus Features
Graduate students hailing from UT Austin, Temple University, UCLA, Loyola Marymount University and CalArts are the winners of the sixth annual Student Short Film Showcase, co-presented by JetBlue, Focus Features and The Gotham, Filmmaker‘s publisher. In a refreshing turn this year, all of the awardees are women. Indeed, their films focus on the rift in perspective between young women and the generation that came before them. Nicole Chi’s Los Mosquitos explores the tension between a 15-year-old Honduran teen and her adorable younger cousin who, to her chagrin, becomes a bottomless vessel for adult praise; Eva Steinmetz’s Marina chronicles a difficult […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 26, 2025 -
“The Movie Stays the Same, Yet the Interpretation Is Often Very Different”: David Secter on the 60 Year Legacy of Winter Kept Us Warm
“Winter kept us warm,” reads an early line in T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land, “covering Earth in forgetful snow.” This season, often associated with loneliness and despair, heralds quite the opposite both in Eliot’s masterwork and in Canadian filmmaker David Secter’s. The latter’s 1965 feature debut, Winter Kept Us Warm, centers on the blossoming relationship between Doug (John Labow) and Peter (Henry Tarvainen), two University of Toronto college students. An upperclassman, the popular Doug spends more time socializing with his fraternity brothers than studying; conversely, freshman Peter feels awkward in his new surroundings, and as such greatly prefers […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 23, 2025 -
“Crying and Editing at the Same Time”: Karla Murthy on Her Sheffield World Premiere The Gas Station Attendant
For much of her life, Karla Murthy listened as her father regaled her with tales of his troubled upbringing and eventual journey to America. Raised in poverty in India, Shantha Murthy spent years of his childhood destitute and working for meager wages at a restaurant, his only respite arriving in the form of an American couple who eventually sponsored his visa to the U.S. The rest follows a fairly simple pattern: he met a girl in his new home state of Texas, got hitched and started a family of his own. This, he claimed, was his true life’s goal; but […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 19, 2025 -
“Shooting in the Fall, Premiering in June”: Travis Wood and Alex Mallis on Their Tribeca Debut The Travel Companion
Anxieties surrounding flight credits, male friendship and fraught filmmaking prospects fuel the bittersweet yet always amusing narrative of The Travel Companion, the feature debut from directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis. Co-written by the duo alongside their Chicago-based buddy Weston Auburn, the rough gist of the story is mined from a situation that Wood personally found himself in. Long designated as his best friend’s “travel companion”—a perk granted to a friend or family member of an airline employee’s choosing—Wood realized that his coveted status was on track to be upset by his pal’s serious girlfriend. As Wood avows, however, his […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 9, 2025 -
“Dark, Difficult, Dank Spaces”: Rob Petit on His Tribeca World Premiere Underland
Based on British author Robert Macfarlane’s non-fiction book of the same name, Underland, the feature debut from Rob Petit, investigates the world hidden beneath our feet. In particular, the film ventures into the depths of a cave system in Mexico once used for ancient Mayan rites; a Canadian dark matter research facility located two kilometers beneath the surface; the exhilarating, if treacherous, storm drain system beneath Las Vegas; and a haphazardly abandoned uranium mine in the American Southwest. Composed of six chapters strung together by hypnotic narration from Sandra Hüller, Underland literally probes the human drive for discovery and, conversely, […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 9, 2025 -
“A Brutal Honesty That Still Feels Poetic”: Walter Thompson-Hernández on His Tribeca World Premiere Kites
In the sprawling favela of Santo Amaro in Rio de Janeiro, Duvo (first-time actor Daniel Fernando do Prado Dorea Lima) currently sits at the top of the pecking order. Under the guise of enriching the community, Duvo and his armed militia regularly engage in illicit activity that, while lucrative, often culminates in death. When it comes to Duvo’s attention that the “help” he’s providing is anything but—in part by a cigarette-smoking guardian angel, whose untimely death was the product of police brutality—he becomes obsessed with a new, much more kid-friendly venture: he decides to finance a kite festival for the […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 9, 2025 -
“Two Strangers Meeting Over Something So Unusual”: Paula González-Nasser on Her Tribeca World-Premiering Feature Debut The Scout
Back in 2022, a scrappy feat of independent filmmaking came across my radar. Written and directed by Florida native Justin Zuckerman, Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater is a Mini-DV shot journey of a young woman attempting to create space for herself amid the cacophony of New York City; it harkens to mumblecore while remaining entrenched in the unique hostility that young (even would-be) creatives currently face amid price-gouging and the decimation of DIY communities. This film was the first feature project undertaken in part by 5th Floor Pictures—the production collective co-founded by Ryan Martin Brown and Paula González-Nasser—itself an […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 9, 2025 -
Our 16 Most Anticipated Films of the 2025 Tribeca Festival
Although the heat has yet to properly arrive, today’s kickoff of the annual Tribeca Festival, now firmly ensconced in its post-Cannes calendar slot, signals the unofficial start to the summer season among the New York City cinema-going sect. Running from June 4 through 15, the program this year boasts 118 feature films with an impressive 95 world premieres among them. Even if the word “film” is no longer centered in the festival’s actual title, it certainly remains the concerted programming focus. Though there are also plenty of offerings in their TV, games, audio, interactive and Tribeca X sections—the latter of […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 4, 2025
