Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Link Between Exploration and Exploitation”: Eleanor Mortimer on How Deep Is Your Love
Barbie Pig, Gummy Squirrel, Psychedelic Elvis Worm. These are not quirky colloquialisms for party drugs or Trolli candies, but rather taxonomic shorthand for deep sea creatures. For her debut documentary feature, director Eleanor Mortimer boarded a research vessel for an extended two-month expedition in the deep Pacific and encountered these alluring and alien animals firsthand. How Deep Is Your Love chronicles the work undertaken by taxonomists, who are slowly trying to identify the estimated 1.75 million undiscovered ocean species. Already a herculean task, the looming likelihood of rampant commercial deep sea mining—which intends to extract precious minerals like cobalt, nickel […]
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“I Put 30 Years of My Life Into 80 Minutes”: Myrid Carten on Her True/False Documentary, A Want in Her
Interweaving home movies, intimate phone calls, previous art school projects and deeply moving footage shot over an intense seven-month timeframe, A Want in Her documents increasing tumult within the filmmaker’s immediate family. The documentary may be the feature debut of moving-image artist Myrid Carten, but the inclusion of charming mini-DV footage shot by the director in her youth proves that, in many ways, she’s been a personal storyteller her whole life. (Even if the early ‘00s footage is more interested in parodying America’s Next Top Model than capturing the cracks already materializing in her family’s foundation). The film opens by […]
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“I Feel Like the World is Literally on Fire”: Lemohang Mosese on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Ancestral Visions of the Future
Following its premiere in Venice’s 2019 Biennale College Cinema section and North American launch at Sundance 2020, Lemohang Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection became a noteworthy arthouse success, scoring wide international distribution and eventually gaining a place in the Criterion Collection. Now six years later, Mosese has premiered his follow-up feature Ancestral Visions of the Future, shifting to a poetic, hybrid documentary form while retaining his previous work’s expressive tempo and eye-searingly colourful outdoor cinematography. Whilst Burial was concerned with the maintenance of longterm dynastic communities in Lesotho, the landlocked country of his birth fully enclosed […]
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“Maybe an Individual is Only as Interesting as the Energy Surrounding Them”: Angelo Madsen on His True/False-debuting A Body to Live In
Angelo Madsen’s A Body to Live In is a doc as unconventional in form as its leading man. Comprised of various formats (16mm, VHS, archival, 2K) overlaid with underground voices (Annie Sprinkle and Ron Athey are probably the best known), the film takes us on a winding journey through the life and philosophy of photographer-performance artist-ritualist Fakir Musafar, one of the founders of the modern primitive movement. With the archival Musafar (born Roland Loomis in 1930) as our guide we’re introduced to an unheralded slice of LGBTQ+ history that includes gay BDSM parties, the first piercing shop, body modification as […]
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“Now the Main Person Talking about Lilly is Joe Rogan”: Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens on John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office
John Lilly’s very Californian trajectory from Cold War scientist to New Age visionary, aided by prodigious consumption of LSD and ketamine, feels quaint from today’s vantage. The Silicon Valley inventors and tech pioneers who could be considered his present-day counterparts mostly went the opposite route—first taking psychedelics and proclaiming lofty ideals, then turning to ever more terrifyingly real fantasies of world domination. Such comparisons account for the wistful experience of watching John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s documentary portrait of Lilly, which premiered at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. That’s not to say […]
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“He Realized It Was Useful to Stop Running From the 500 Pound Maus Chasing After Him”: Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin on Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse!
Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse! centers on a legendary cartoonist who’s long struggled with being eclipsed by his own creation. Decades ago Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Holocaust-focused, autobiographical graphic novel Maus launched the underground artist into mainstream fame, and its success prompted him to follow up with the explanatory MetaMaus so he could finally stop having to publicly dissect the most painful time in his family’s history. (Needless to say, the plan backfired spectacularly.) Fast forward to today, when calls to ban Maus — and other “uncomfortable” books — make the moral of the story […]
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Mirror Mirror: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Berlinale 2025 Premiere The Ice Tower
With The Ice Tower opening today in New York from Yellowveil Pictures, we’re reposting Savina Petkova’s interview with writer/director Lucile Hadžihalilović out of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. The Ice Tower plays at the IFC Center, with Beatrice Loayza moderating a Q&A with the director Friday, October 3, and Filmmaker Editor-in-Chief Scott Macaulay moderating on Saturday, October 4. — Editor We didn’t have to wait too long after Earwig (2021) for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic new offering, The Ice Tower. The whistling sounds of mountain winds announce the arrival of the Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), both to the set of […]
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Taking Everything to Extremes: A Conversation Between Michael Almereyda, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on The Brutalist
“Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.” So wrote the spectacularly good Brutalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fair guess Brady Corbet and his longtime co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold have encountered this quote, and that they recognize the affinities between architecture and movies. Being good in either medium requires a sure knowledge of your materials, an ability to translate imagined designs into physical reality, to assemble and guide teams of inspired collaborators and to know or intuit more than a little about visual textures, space and light and how to move […]
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Inspired by Springfield and Sesame Street: Osgood Perkins on The Monkey
“Everybody dies, and that’s life,” one character proclaims in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, approaching the inevitability of suffering with a wink and a grin. In between executing a real-estate agent via shotgun blast and setting fire to an occupied baby stroller, this more deliberately comedic outing from the writer-director behind Longlegs is all about the strange catharsis of helplessly laughing through life’s horrors. Adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, The Monkey follows twin brothers Bill and Hal (Christian Convery in childhood, Theo James in adulthood), who discover a sinister wind-up “organ grinder” monkey toy among their […]
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You Can Never (Maybe?) Break the Chain: Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Hot Milk
Spanish seaside entanglements, a combustive mother-daughter relationship, mysterious, painful malaise, the veiled threat of healing and new currents of love trail Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Nearby, watching her life pass by is Sofia (Emma Mackey), a doctoral student in anthropology and caregiver since she was a young girl to her defiant mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), mostly restricted to a wheelchair. A story of self discovery, queer kindling and medical melancholy among these three fascinating women in a sun-baked setting, Hot Milk, premiering at the 75th Berlinale, is one of the most buzzed new titles in the Competition section. The directorial debut […]
