RICHARD BERKOWITZ IN DIRECTOR DARYL WEIN’S SEX POSITIVE. COURTESY REGENT RELEASING. Most young filmmakers quickly define themselves in terms of both their creative roles and genre specialties, however Daryl Wein has so far benefited from doing exactly the opposite. Born in Santa Monica in 1983, Wein grew up in Connecticut and commuted to auditions in New York City as he pursued a career as a child actor, mostly in commercials. At the same time, Wein’s father’s interest in chronicling their family life on home video lead the young thespian to become fascinated with being on the other side of the […]
ERIC NDORUNKUNDIYE AND JOSEF “JEFF” RUTAGENGWA IN DIRECTOR LEE ISAAC CHUNG’S MUNYURANGABO. COURTESY FILM MOVEMENT. For Lee Isaac Chung, filmmaking is linked to tackling challenges and obstacles above and beyond those inherent to the cinematic process. The son of Korean immigrants, Chung was born in Denver in 1978 and grew up on a farm in rural Arkansas. He attended Yale and was studying biology, on track to become a doctor, when he discovered arthouse movies. Rather than continue on his path to a medical career, Chung took a filmmaking class given by Michael Roemer and went on to earn an […]
Danish cinema currently has numerous talented fiction directors – everybody from Lars von Trier, Christopher Boe, Ole Bornedal, and Susanne Bier to Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lone Scherfig – and now Anders Østergaard is bringing attention to the country’s documentary output. Born in Copenhagen in 1965, Østergaard studied at the Danish School of Journalism, graduating in 1991, before deciding to eschew a career as a journalist to become a documentarian. Throughout his career, he has been concerned with the boundaries of non-fiction and with the idea of documentary itself. Østergaard’s debut film, Gensyn med Johannesburg (1996), […]
ADRIEN BRODY, RACHEL WEISZ AND MARK RUFFALO IN DIRECTOR RIAN JOHNSON’S THE BROTHERS BLOOM. COURTESY SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT. When his first film was released in 2005, Rian Johnson became an overnight sensation; but, as is so often the case, that “overnight” success took many years of work to achieve. Johnson was born in 1973 in Silver Spring, Maryland, and grew up in Denver, Colorado, and San Clemente, California. He came from a family of film lovers and by the time he was in seventh grade he was making movies, taking his Super 8 camera with him whenever he could. When he […]
POLICE MUGSHOTS OF POLITICIAN LARRY CRAIG AS FEATURED IN DIRECTOR KIRBY DICK’S OUTRAGE. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Whether his subjects have been small and personal or large and institutional, documentarian Kirby Dick has always dedicated himself to telling important and often provocative stories. Dick was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1952, graduated from the Film and Video Program at the California Institute of the Arts and subsequently did postgraduate studies at the American Film Institute. He made his directorial debut in 1986 with Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate, but afterwards segued into television work, taking eleven years before […]
JOHANNES KRISCH AND URSULA STRAUSS IN DIRECTOR GÖTZ SPIELMANN’S REVANCHE. COURTESY JANUS FILMS. Contemporary Austrian cinema has been dominated by the works of its two best known names, Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl, but now the name of the prodigiously talented Götz Spielmann can be added to that list. Spielmann was born in 1961 in the town of Wels, but grew up in the country’s capital, Vienna. As a child he was drawn to film and he began writing and directing in his teens; when he was just 17, he had his first film shown on television. Between 1980 and […]
TONI SERVILLO IN WRITER-DIRECTOR PAOLO SORRENTINO’S IL DIVO. COURTESY MUSIC BOX FILMS. If Paolo Sorrentino represents the future of Italian cinema, then the country’s filmic output certainly should be exciting in years to come. The highly accomplished writer-director was born in Naples in 1970, and first became involved in filmmaking in the mid-90s when he was an assistant director on a couple of films, The Gas Inspector and Drogheria (both 1995). Finding himself poorly suited to production work, Sorrentino transitioned into screenwriting, jointly penning Polveri di Napoli with the film’s director Antonio Capuano in 1998. The same year, he wrote […]
MICHAEL CAINE AND BILL MILNER IN DIRECTOR JOHN CROWLEY’S IS ANYBODY THERE? COURTESY STORY ISLAND ENTERTAINMENT. Along with Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, John Crowley is part of a recent wave of Irish theater influx into film. Born in 1969, Crowley is a philosophy graduate from the University of Cork in Ireland who first became involved in theater as a student, seeing it as a way to get into directing film. He began directing plays in Dublin in the early 90s and was successful enough that already in 1996 he was working in London’s West End. After a few years, […]
ANNA FARIS AND SETH ROGEN IN DIRECTOR JODY HILL’S OBSERVE AND REPORT. COURTESY WARNER BROS. In terms of the sheer number of great filmmakers it has produced recently, the North Carolina School of the Arts is pretty much untouchable, and its latest alum in the spotlight is writer-director Jody Hill. Hill, a native of North Carolina, attended the university along with a prodigious group of classmates including directors David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel and Jeff Nichols, as well as writer-actors Danny McBride and Paul Schneider, D.P. Tim Orr and soundman-turned-writer Chris Gebert. After graduation, Hill briefly worked in television in […]
ASKHAT KUCHINCHIREKOV AND FRIEND IN DIRECTOR SERGEY DVORTSEVOY’S TULPAN. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS. The image of Kazakhstan and its cinema took a hit recently with the unwanted attention of a certain Borat Sagdiyev, however the rise to prominence of the highly talented writer-director Sergey Dvortsevoy should help redress that national image problem. Dvortsevoy was born in the Kazakh city of Chimkent in 1962 and initially had no particular interest in film. After high school, he attended aviation college in the Ukraine and the Radiotechnical-Institut in Novosibirsk, Russia, in order to become a radio engineer for Aeroflot, the Russian aviation company, a […]