The last time I saw Seattle, Barack Obama was a president-elect. I arrived November 2008 on a road trip with two close friends, both of whom had worked full-time to get Obama elected. The trip had a practical function — to help one of them move to L.A. — but in earnest it felt like a victory lap. We traveled through Denver, Missoula and Vancouver before reaching Seattle, our last stop as a trio. We celebrated Thanksgiving in the city. We caught a screening of Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme’s ode to a multicultural America. With the end of the […]

Maya Maffioli and Michael Pearce were classmates at the National Film and Television School in England. They now join forces as editor and writer/director, respectively, of Beast, a romantic psychological thriller that debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017. Maffioli has edited more than two dozen short and feature-length projects since 2007. Below, she discusses balancing the film’s many tones, the striking lead performance from Jessie Buckley (Taboo) and why “a good love story on screen is always unbeatable.” Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that […]

Dead Pigs marks the feature film debut from writer/director Cathy Yan. Born in China with an MFA from NYU’s Tisch, Yan directed three shorts (According to My Mother, Down River, Last Night) prior to her first feature. She hired Federico Cesca, a fellow Tisch alum and the DP on last year’s Patti Cake$, to shoot Dead Pigs in Shanghai. Cesca spoke with Filmmaker ahead of Dead Pigs‘ premiere at Sundance about the challenges and rewards of shooting this project. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to […]

As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? This is a phenomenal question. On my very first movie I learned incredibly quickly that the film loves spontaneity – it devours it. One of the things that made Marlon Brando’s career was the beauty everyone discovered in his spontaneity. Cinema is a little bit like jazz that way, where it needs a certain form or […]

Why not pair, rather than pit against one another, the great films of a given year? This was the question that led me to reconsider the year-end top-10 list in terms of double features. In 2016 and 2015 I ranked my favorite double features of the year on this very site. I love the double bill for its flexibility. You can pair films based on any connective tissue: style, setting, subject matter, theme, time period, director, star. Viewing and thinking about films this way urges you to consider them anew. What do we think of the suburban woes of Lady […]

“I like to save things,” Mike Zahs says in the opening seconds of Saving Brinton, “especially if they’re too far gone.” He’s referring, in the moment, to the stray animals that have hobbled onto his property over the years: a lost cat that birthed 11 kittens, a rotund dog named Tuesday. He’s also alluding to his great passion project, which originated at an estate sale in 1981. Zahs found a cache of mysterious boxes from the estate of Frank Brinton, a showman who traveled the country with his wife from 1895 to 1909 to project films and other pre-cinema entertainments […]

“A friend of mine has this absolutely fantastic story that we should all do together.” Barbara Kopple heard these words, she tells me, on a phone call last year with producer John Morrissey (American History X). She’s likely heard such preambles before. Kopple has directed documentaries for more than 40 years, from her landmark labor-strike feature Harlan County U.S.A. to her profiles of Woody Allen (Wild Man Blues), the Dixie Chicks (Shut Up & Sing) and the late, eternally great Sharon Jones (Miss Sharon Jones!). Morrissey wanted to pitch Kopple a film on Collier Landry, an L.A.-based filmmaker whose mother […]

For film writers who, like myself, remain chained to New York, NYFF marks the time of year when the much-hyped (or -hated) titles from the festival circuit finally pay us a visit. NYFF represents the last stop for many of the reliable sampler of films from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and elsewhere before they enter theaters and launch their awards season runs. At last, we get to see the films the more important writers have already grown tired of debating on Twitter. From Sundance this year comes Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a coming-of-age queer romance set in 1980s Italy. A […]

Seventeen years ago, Agnès Varda filmed her own hand in horror. The blotches, the wrinkles, the bulging blue veins: These may as well be the hands of a stranger. “My hair and my hands keep telling me that the end is near,” she says in her 2000 film The Gleaners & I. Despite the forebodings of death in Gleaners and 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès is still with us; what a gift it is to have her still around. Varda, now 89, has partnered with French artist JR to co-direct another freewheeling, full-of-life documentary. Faces Places overflows with the […]

Recy Taylor walked home from church on a warm September night. A 24-year-old black woman in Abbeville, Alabama, a sharecropper and mother, Recy was the most religious member of her family and regularly went to church by herself. A full house awaited her at home: her siblings, her father, her husband, and her daughter Joyce. The year was 1944. On her way home, a group of seven white boys abducted Recy and forced her into the nearby woods. The young men gang-raped her at gunpoint. One month later, an all-white, all-male jury refused to indict any of these men. The […]