Authors — Ritesh Mehta
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“It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains
Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and symbolic. Similarly, Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes last weekend, is only in some layers a dark comedy about the varied pains experienced by a rural Icelandic family undergoing a separation of parents Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Horses […]
by Ritesh Mehta on May 23, 2025 -
“Working with Non-Actors, Children, Animals, Crowds and on Water”: Hasan Hadi on Cannes 2025 Premiere The President’s Cake
An autocrat forcing the populace to celebrate his birthday—where’s the novelty in that? Little children on terrifying birthday-dessert-making duties embarking on a perilous adventure in the big war torn city? Now that’s a story! According to Iraqi director Hasan Hadi, that’s a story worth salvaging from Saddam Hussein’s reign that, along with the American wars, plagued audiences’ longterm perceptions of Iraq and its cinema. So, he decided to make his feature debut with The President’s Cake, a realistic yet fable-like narrative—a project developed at the Sundance Feature Film Program, then received an SFFILM Rainin Grant and was selected for preview […]
by Ritesh Mehta on May 18, 2025 -
“We Literally Burned Our Actual Set”: Writer-Director Ryan Coogler and Producers Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian on Sinners
Even before its smashing opening weekend theatrical success, Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s first original directorial outing since his 2013 indie hit Fruitvale Station, was knocking loud on the box office doors. Early reviews praised the film’s unique genre-bending vision, weaving vampire lore and Irish songs into a 1932-set horror-musical dramatic thriller about identical Black twin brothers leaving behind their Chicago gangster lives to return to their sharecropper roots in the Mississippi Delta and start their own juke joint—that is, before the vampires come a-seducing. Before that, Smoke and Stack, twins played by Michael B. Jordan in a bravura dual performance, throw […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Apr 24, 2025 -
“Intersex People Don’t Need To Be Fixed”: Grace Hughes-Hallett on The Secret of Me
A seemingly breakthrough medical innovation from the ’60s set off a still-ongoing worldwide trend of surgeries performed on “atypical” babies. Those surgeries were celebrated in the context of the gender equality movements of the 70s, but over the long tail of history, the trauma inflicted by this innovation revealed those marginalized by the results: a largely hidden and, per the stats, sizable community of people worldwide assembled under the queer umbrella. Premiering at SXSW 2025, The Secret of Me is British director Grace Hughes-Hallett’s directorial debut, but you may already know her as the producer of 2018’s Three Identical Strangers. The main […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Mar 9, 2025 -
“Miami is the City of Hustle”: Jing Ai Ng on SXSW 2025 Premiere Forge
Common associations audiences might have with Miami: cruise lines, café con leche, beach parties, plastic surgery, Art Basel, Dexter, Scarface, a diverse and predominantly Latino and Caribbean population. AFI Conservatory graduate Jing Ai Ng wants to turn some of those tropes around with her debut feature Forge, premiering in the Narrative Spotlight section of SXSW 2025. The Malaysian-born filmmaker grew up shuttling between Southeast Asia and Miami and wanted to honor the Florida city she knew—that of first and second gen Asian subcultures, rare dim sum restaurants and a particular vein of white collar crime: art forgery. After first exploring […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Mar 9, 2025 -
“I’ve Been Trying to Coin the Phrase ‘Hangout Horror'”: Alexander Ullom on SXSW 2025 Premiere It Ends
In the last decade, a growing number of films and TV shows have iterated the time loop: Russian Doll‘s nested doll approach, Inception‘s infinitely spinning top. Alexander Ullom’s feature debut It Ends subverts those genre expectations at every turn—or rather, at every absence of a turn. Premiering in SXSW 2025’s Narrative Feature Competition, the film might superficially be grouped alongside similar-sounding genre titles like It, It Comes at Night and How It Ends. But as Ullom explained to me, his intentions were both more playful and somber. In a sense, this story about four zoomers who get into a car […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Mar 7, 2025 -
You Can Never (Maybe?) Break the Chain: Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Hot Milk
Spanish seaside entanglements, a combustive mother-daughter relationship, mysterious, painful malaise, the veiled threat of healing and new currents of love trail Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Nearby, watching her life pass by is Sofia (Emma Mackey), a doctoral student in anthropology and caregiver since she was a young girl to her defiant mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), mostly restricted to a wheelchair. A story of self discovery, queer kindling and medical melancholy among these three fascinating women in a sun-baked setting, Hot Milk, premiering at the 75th Berlinale, is one of the most buzzed new titles in the Competition section. The directorial debut […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Feb 19, 2025 -
COVID Zombies in the Fire: Meera Menon on Didn’t Die
Three weeks before the Sundance Midnight Madness premiere of her zombie dramedy Didn’t Die, director Meera Menon (whose credits appositely include episodes of The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead) and her partner Paul Gleason (who co-wrote and shot the film) lost their home in the Eaton fire that devastated Altadena, Los Angeles. Not only that, the film’s producer Erica Fishman and her partner Geoff Boothby, who edited the film, also lost their home in the fire. The irony is that Didn’t Die centers on a group of five in the zombie apocalypse, trying desperately to hang on to their […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Jan 29, 2025 -
“We Have to Think Deeply about Community Policing”: Geeta Gandbhir on The Perfect Neighbor
Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered in the US Documentary section of this year’s Sundance, is likely one of the first feature docs primarily composed of police body camera footage. Sifting through footage with editor Viridiana Liberman (The Sentence), Gandbhir builds out a suspenseful and heartbreaking portrait of neighborly violence in a close-knit Central Florida community, after white woman Susan Lorincz fatally shot Ajike Owens—Gandbhir’s sister-in-law’s best friend, though Gandbhir didn’t know Owens personally. Given the world context of a déjà vu US regime, the ongoing reverberations of Black Lives Matter and the steady bulldozing with anti-democratic and dangerous legislation […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Jan 27, 2025
