Authors — Taylor Hess
-
“I Can’t Try to Be an Activist If People Don’t Know My Real Story”: Tangerine’s Mya Taylor
“I can’t keep beating around the bush because I’ll eventually run out of bushes to beat around,” sighs Mya Taylor. We’ve just spent 90 minutes together in her hotel room at the 59th London Film Festival. In that time, I don’t speak much, but when I do, I’m drawing parallels between Taylor and Marlon Brando. To be fair, I’d just seen Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon, so referencing some uncovered Brando philosophy from the documentary during my conversation with Taylor felt pertinent at the time. Mya Taylor is a black trans-woman born in 1991, so in retrospect, the comparison is pretty ridiculous. […]
by Taylor Hess on Oct 29, 2015 -
A Sense of Crisis: Directors Paula Ortiz, Mercedes Moncada, and Hanna Sköld at the San Sebastián Film Festival
“Life doesn’t have punch lines or a plot. It unfurls in ways that are somewhat random,” says Laurie Anderson. We’re sitting in a small room with fluorescent lighting and acoustically challenged walls. Anderson is wrapping up her last morning at the San Sebastián Film Festival with her newest hit, Heart of a Dog. She isn’t happy I showed up for the interview without having seen her film. I wasn’t happy myself, having missed the screening after several bus route missteps when I arrived in town the night before. If I hadn’t missed the film though, I wouldn’t have gotten the […]
by Taylor Hess on Oct 6, 2015 -
Lolo’s Julie Delpy and Eugenie Grandval at the Venice International Film Festival
“She’s an auteur,” Eugenie Grandval tells me. “She has a lot to do on set between directing other actors and creating as she goes. I’m just there to be supportive.” Grandval is the co-writer of Lolo, a comedy about a single-mom whose love life is sabotaged by her only child. The auteur whom Grandval is referring to is her co-writer and the film’s director and star, Julie Delpy. Together, the writer duo recently traveled from Lolo’s world premiere at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival to their North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Several decades ago, Delpy […]
by Taylor Hess on Oct 5, 2015 -
“I Didn’t Really Like Directors”: The Fits Filmmakers Anna Rose Holmer and Lisa Kjerulff at the Venice International Film Festival
About 4,500 miles away from my home state, I find myself back in Ohio. What’s cool about a film festival is experiencing stories from different places all over the world on the same screens all day everyday. What’s not cool about a film festival is spending more time experiencing Ohio on a screen than discovering Italy outside on the street. But in the case of two Cincinnati-based stories programmed in the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, I was delighted to be transported home. I use “home” loosely. I’m actually from Cleveland, and it’s not as if the stop-motion iteration of […]
by Taylor Hess on Oct 1, 2015 -
“We Basically Had Pianos Falling the Whole Time”: The Creative Team of MA at the Venice International Film Festival
With Celia Rowlson-Hall’s bold and original MA opening today in New York at the IFC Center, with wider digital distribution next month, we’re reposting Taylor Hess’s interview with the writer/director/star and her collaborators out of Venice. Check the IFC site for screenings and Q&A moderators, who include, tonight at 8:30 PM, Lena Dunham. Barefoot on a sandy shore of the Mediterranean coast, I’m only mildly bothered by the luxury cruise ships obstructing the horizon. It’s an otherwise picturesque pre-dusk afternoon in Venice, and I’m focused mostly on keeping up with Celia Rowlson-Hall, who sets an intimidating pace as we walk […]
by Taylor Hess on Sep 30, 2015 -
“I Wish Filmmakers Could Approach PR as Part of the Filmmaking Process”: Agata Burdzy on Festival Publicity
Athens was the first European Capital of Culture in 1985. For the 2016 title, Wroclaw, Poland and San Sebastian, Spain were both selected four years ago. Since then, various cultural projects and initiatives funded by the European Commission have been developed as both cities prepare for the tourism boosts and international attention in the coming year. One of the biggest arthouse cinemas in Europe called the New Horizons Cinema, for example, opened in Wroclaw as one these projects. And with more developments underway, city pride among local inhabitants, as well as possibilities of discovery for passing travelers, flourishes. I don’t […]
by Taylor Hess on Sep 15, 2015 -
“It’s Possible That There are Two Bosses”: Goodnight Mommy Directors Severin Fiala and Veronica Franz on Gender Disparity and Directing as a Team
Austrian filmmaker Severin Fiala accused me of being a sexist. We were in Poland, and it was the night his film, Goodnight Mommy, won the Audience Award at the New Horizons Film Festival. I found his accusation horrifying, tantalizing and ultimately not inaccurate. In the last year, I’ve interviewed 57 women and zero men. My intention wasn’t to disregard men, but rather, to hear from women. My goal wasn’t to create a ghetto whereby the marginalized are defined by their gender, but to try and normalize standards from which the male-dominated industry was built and still prevails today. I wanted […]
by Taylor Hess on Sep 9, 2015 -
Women Directors in Locarno: Anne Émond, Athena Rachel Tsangari, Petra Costa and Lea Glob
Chevalier is a film about six men vacationing on a yacht in the middle of the Aegean Sea. After the world premiere in the main international competition at the Locarno International Film Festival, I climbed an arduous, though relatively small Swiss mountain to sit down with director Athina Rachel Tsangari during her final hours in Locarno. My own last hours in Switzerland were spent with Anne Émond, whose film Our Loved Ones also celebrated its world premiere in Locarno. Our Loved Ones is about how a suicide affects a family living in a small town outside Quebec. Both Our Loved […]
by Taylor Hess on Aug 31, 2015 -
“We Couldn’t Do Our Jobs If We Weren’t Social People”: Diane Henderson on Festival Programming
I’m chastising two filmmakers for walking out of Nanni Moretti’s My Mother, the closing night film at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw. I make some argument about how films, even bad ones, deserve the attention of at least their running times, and I gloat about having suffered through the entirety of Moretti’s newest flop myself. Two weeks later, on my second morning at the Locarno Film Festival, while watching the World Premiere of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie, which will premiere in the U.S. later this fall at the New York Film Festival, I’m almost amused by the […]
by Taylor Hess on Aug 25, 2015 -
Five Women Directors Discuss their Art and Craft at the New Horizons Film Festival
On the fourth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death, I was watching the opening night screening of Amy at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, another documentary about a legendary musician who died at the age of twenty-seven, was also slated in the New Horizons program. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the controversial German filmmaker who made over 40 films before his death at thirty-seven years old, was the subject of Fassbinder, a documentary also screening in Wroclaw. The Actress, a documentary about the Polish movie star Elżbieta Czyżewska, who fled from communist Warsaw to New […]
by Taylor Hess on Aug 12, 2015
