Authors — Scott Macaulay
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“I Really Like to Self-Analyze Myself”: Giovanni Tortorici On His Luca Guadagnino-Produced Debut Feature, Diciannove
Diciannove, the autofictional debut feature of director Giovanni Tortorici, captures one year in the life of a young Italian man, Leonardo, who decamps from a London business school to study literature in Siena, where he soon becomes obsessed with the study of 17th century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli. Wandering amidst the medieval architecture of this small central Italian city when he’s not holed up at home, reading from among his stacks of books, Leonardo mostly eschews social invitations from attractive female students while, with quickly fading bursts of enthusiasms, engaging in a series of anti-social actions, including a revenge campaign […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2025 -
“Telling the Story Non-Linearly Felt Essential Because That’s How Trauma Often Works”: Alex Burunova On Her SXSW-Premiering Relationship Drama, Satisfaction
Emma Laird is both incandescent and haunted as she limns the before and after of trauma in Alex Burunova’s SXSW-premiering debut feature, Satisfaction. As Lola, a composer and pianist, Laird is charismatic and full of life in the past and painfully muted in the present, a contrast that engineers the film’s central narrative mystery. Through memory-triggered flashbacks and forwards, Satisfaction orbits around a moment of trauma, the film’s editing rhythms and narrative structure mirroring the emotional evasiveness and repression that Lola must deploy during a Greek island vacation with her musician boyfriend, Philip (Fionn Whitehead). But repression as self-preservation can only […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 13, 2025 -
“This Isn’t Air Bud or Lassie, Where the Dog is Always Happy-Go-Lucky”: Director Ben Leonberg on His Canine-POV SXSW Horror Film, Good Boy
From a simple observation of canine behavior —”What dog owner hasn’t wondered why their dog barks at ‘nothing?’” — Ben Leonberg has with his SXSW-premiering Good Boy created what he calls “a haunted house movie from an entirely new perspective.” Leonberg’s own dog Indy stars alongside Shane Jensen in this story of an ailing man who retreats to his family’s secluded rural cabin only to confront generational trauma and supernatural forces. With Larry Fessenden as the family patriarch, whose foreboding presence appears solely through distressed VHS tapes playing, Skinamarink-style, on outdated TVs, the house here becomes something of a liminal […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 9, 2025 -
“I Aimed to Capture the Subtle Cruelties of Social Isolation”: Yana Alliata On Her Herzog-EP’d SXSW Drama, Reeling
Shorts filmmaker Yana Alliata, who has worked in various film industry jobs (Fox Searchlight, FX Networks and Film Finances) makes her feature debut in Reeling, a dark Hawaii-set drama that’s executive produced by Werner Herzog and deals with trauma, memory and the implicit horror of family gatherings. The movie begins with a long, gliding steadicam shot of Ryan (Ryan Wuestewald) entering his family’s ranch-style Hawaii home, where the clan is gathered for a Lu-au that’s also something of a memorial for the their late patriarch. The family is welcoming, but Ryan, beneath the forced smiles, signals fight-or-flight mode, a mental […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 9, 2025 -
19 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival
The 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival kicks off today in Austin, TX, and below are 19 films that we at Filmmaker are particularly excited about and recommend you check out. It Ends. The title is a promise in 25 New Face Alexander Ullom’s brain-teasing debut feature, premiering as the director is all of 27 years old. Four zoomers get into a car, start driving, but then the road never ends—are they in a horror film, a puzzle, neither, both? Ambitious and often very funny, It Ends will keep you guessing not just about what’s going on, but what kind of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 7, 2025 -
Anora, Didi and Baby Reindeer Are Multiple 2025 Film Independent Spirit Award Winners
Sean Baker’s Anora was the big winner at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards, held yesterday at California’s Santa Monica beach. The film, about a stripper’s ill-fated marriage to a Russian oligarch’s son, picked up prizes for Best Film, Best Director and, for Mikey Madison’s lead performance, Best Lead Performance. Other films and TV shows picking up multiple wins were A Real Pain (Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Performance), Didi (Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay) and Baby Reindeer (Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series, Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted Series, Best Ensemble Cast in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 23, 2025 -
Atropia, Seeds Win Top Prizes at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Hailey Gates’s war-training satire Atropia won today the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, about Black farmers in Georgia and their relationship to both the land and U.S. agricultural policy, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. In the international categories, the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic went to Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s UK/India/Canada production about a Western India urbanite grieving the loss of his father. Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears). Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار), Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s documentary about the feminist teachings of a councilwoman in a small Iranian […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 31, 2025 -
“In a Way This Film Asks, What is Lost by the Virtual?” Ira Sachs on his Sundance-Premiering Peter Hujar’s Day
Among the features premiering this year at the Sundance Film Festival, there are none — on paper — simpler than Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day. Arriving just two years after he premiered his Passages at the festival, Sachs reunites with actor Ben Whishaw for a picture that’s one 76-minute dialogue between two friends in a New York apartment in 1974. What’s more, that dialogue is not some dramatically sculptured theatrical two-hander building to third act epiphanies but, rather, a transcription of an actual conversation between art photographer Hujar and artist Linda Rosenkrantz, who was conducting interviews for a book in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 30, 2025 -
“The Story Is Like a Lot of My Peers, Friends and Family”: Director Rashad Frett On His Sundance Competition Drama, Ricky
Rashad Frett arrives at Sundance with his debut feature, Ricky, following work as a combat medic, a stint in business school, and directing an independent TV pilot he called “a Connecticut version of The Wire.” Along the way, he heard the stories of peers who cycled in and out of the criminal justice system system. So, when enrolled at NYU Tisch Graduate Film School, he used those stories as inspiration for his thesis short, Ricky. “We had ex-offenders, police officers, parole officers, judges and family members of the incarcerated all involved and consulting on the script,” Frett told Filmmaker when […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2025 -
16 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival
The penultimate edition in its long-running Park City location, the Sundance Film Festival began today, and, as I note every year, the event is a bellwether when it comes to an assessment of the American independent film scene. The acquisitions scorecard will influence the decisions of future film investors, the films premiering here will be eagerly and instantly viewed by festival programmers the world over, and, we hope, promising new directorial careers will be launched. And that’s in addition to perhaps the largest goal, which is for films here to make bracing, uplifting, healing, disturbing, entertaining, provocative and necessary statements […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 23, 2025
