Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“We Had to Test the Audience’s Own Morality”: Harris Dickinson on Urchin
Harris Dickinson’s characters are demarcated by specific class consciousnesses: Coney Island’s Frankie in Beach Rats, who cruises for older men on a webcam site; a particular brand of selfishness and vulnerability as a model and influencer in Triangle of Sadness; most recently, a supremely confident intern who casts a domineering spell over a tech CEO in Babygirl. Urchin, the film Dickinson chose as his feature directorial debut vehicle (he’s directed shorts before, as early as 2013), stars Frank Dillane (Fear the Walking Dead) as a homeless addict trying to rehabilitate after his latest stint in jail. I spoke to Dickinson […]
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“Seduction: the Cruel Woman Was Banned for 18 Years”: Monika Treut on her Queer Trailblazing Career
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since I last interviewed queer film pioneer Monika Treut. At the time trans identity was just starting to become tentatively accepted. Fifty Shades of Grey (a story centered around two straight, white, privileged cisgender protagonists into BDSM) had been released earlier that year, and was well on its way to becoming a glitzy Hollywood franchise. In other words, marginalized subjects the German filmmaker had been deeply and cinematically exploring for over three decades — Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Verführung: Die grausame Frau) hit screens in 1985! — were just beginning to […]
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Endgames: Alejo Moguillansky on Pin de Fartie
Pin de Fartie (2025), directed by independent Argentinian collective El Pampero Cine member Alejo Moguillansky, is less an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Fin de Partie (1957) than a centrifugal expansion unfolding into multiple nested narratives riffing on the play’s themes: death, departure and the approach of an ending. Marking a tonal shift from Moguillansky’s ensemble comedies, Pin de Fartie possesses a sense of wistful tragedy. The title refers to the end of a chess game; here, it signals the twilight of relationships––both filial and romantic––against the current approach of the end of civilization. Each sequence of Pin de […]
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“If We’re Not Still Excited by Cinema’s Untapped Potential, Then We’re in Trouble”: Mark Jenkin on “Rose of Nevada”
In 2012, Mark Jenkin wrote his self-proclaimed manifesto “Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13,” a series of vows of chastity à la Dogme 95; among other strictures, the Cornish director promised to shoot his films in black-and-white, keep them under 80 minutes and use only natural or available light, post-synched sound and diegetic music. Only a handful of projects Jenkin’s made since then would meet all those criteria. But even as his productions have steadily gotten bigger after his BAFTA-winning 2019 breakthrough Bait, his filmmaking approach hasn’t drastically changed. Jenkin wears many hats—aside from writing and directing, he routinely edits and […]
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“It Doesn’t Feel Like There’s a Collective Reality Anymore”: Lee Anne Schmitt on “Evidence”
Documentary essayist Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature Evidence is, artistically speaking, both a concerted continuation and marked departure. On the one hand, it furthers her career-long penchant for braiding political rhetoric, environmental portraits and American mythology; on the other, it filters these observations through a distinctly personal lens, even featuring a rare on-screen appearance for the director. The film opens with Schmitt showcasing an impressive collection of dolls, childhood gifts that her father brought back from frequent international business trips. Their national diversity and craftsmanship is impressive—most adorn traditional garb, some possess the ability to blink—yet they all translate the […]
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“A ‘Classic’ of a Film You Never Knew Existed”: Aaron Brookner on His NYFF-Debuting Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars
While many (likely most) maverick artists have at least one unrealized moonshot project, few have a record of the high stakes drama of development behind the scenes of that lost dream. And even fewer have a record that’s as cinematically riveting as Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a fascinating look at the titular theater legend as he goes about crafting — artistically, managerially, financially — the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, his massive, multinational, 12-hour opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. And far fewer documentarians have a nephew like Aaron Brookner, […]
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“We Knew This Chemistry Is Something That We Could Count On”: Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki on NYFF Animated Feature, Bouchra
In Bouchra, 3D animated anthropomorphic animals may populate the world, but the intricacies of their lives are unmistakably human. This approach is par for the course for the film’s co-directors, the Brooklyn-based visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, whose bite-size episodic project 2 Lizards captivated viewers during the early stages of lockdown in 2020—and landed them on our 25 New Faces of Film list the same year. In the latter project, the eponymous 3D-rendered lizards (voiced by Bennani and Barki) shoot the shit about celebrities, news coverage, pandemic-era anxieties and the morbid relief of being able to shirk social […]
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“I Needed to Rely on What I Knew”: Lucrecia Martel on Her First Documentary, “Landmarks”
“To tell you the truth, I was actually quite scared about making a documentary.” It’s a luminous morning in early September and Lucrecia Martel is chewing mate leaves in the restaurant room of a hotel a stone’s throw away from the Adriatic. Her latest, Landmarks, is her first nonfiction work, but to insist on the apparent break from the rest of her oeuvre feels misleading. A chronicle of the trial for the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar—a member of the indigenous Chuschagasta community killed by a white landowner and two former cops in Tucumán, Argentina—the film still speaks to her […]
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“Shooting on Film Felt Right—Joy’s an Analog Lady”: Nathan Silver on His NYFF Documentary Short, “Carol & Joy”
In 1971, Jean Eustache set a camera in front of his grandmother Odette and invited her to speak. The film that emerged, Numéro Zéro, is a vivid document of one woman’s life told without embellishment. The frame is almost fixed—broken only by a zoom or reframe—but Odette’s words animate it with a striking urgency as she chain-smokes, drinks whiskey, fields interruptions and insists on telling her story on her own terms. Domestic minutiae becomes monumental: Eustache reveals not only the power of a raconteur but also the radical act of listening and granting someone the time and space to summon […]
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“I Kind of Think Like a Rock Band”: Hal Hartley on Self-Distribution, Personal Filmmaking and His New Feature, “Where to Land”
Hal Hartley’s Where to Land, his first feature in 11 years, presents a familiar, potent lattice of miscommunication within a small community. Joe Fulton (Bill Sage), a filmmaker referred to as “the quiet and unassuming elder statesman of American romantic comedies,” decides to prepare his last will and testament while also jockeying for a job as a cemetery groundskeeper. The timing of his estate planning combined with the drastic professional pivot concerns some of the people in Joe’s life, most of whom assume that he’s near death. His actress girlfriend Muriel (Kim Taff) and niece Veronica (Katelyn Sparks) panic about […]
