Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“It Was Crucial to Bring a Native Lens into Each Area of the Creative Roles”: Jonathan Olshefski and Elizabeth Day on Without Arrows
Delwin Fiddler Jr., star of Jonathan Olshefski (a “25 New Face” of 2017) and Elizabeth Day’s Without Arrows, grew up on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in South Dakota, where he found his calling as a grass dancer (which led to championships on the pow-wow circuit and eventually even international fame. His work can be seen not only in the film but also in a continual loop at the Museum of the American Indian in D.C.). And then he spent over a decade in Philadelphia, making more money if not a better living. Having had enough of big city […]
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“The Process of Dehumanization that Happened to the Palestinians”: Kamal Aljafari on A Fidai Film
It’s been a busy year for Kamal Aljafari. One of the most innovative voices working in contemporary found footage cinema, the Palestinian filmmaker’s latest feature, A Fidai Film (which premiered this past spring at Visions du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland, where it won the Jury Award of the Burning Lights section) has propelled him to a wholly new level of fame – and deservedly so. Often traveling alongside his latest short film, UNDR (which premiered at IFFR), A Fidai Film has been screened in almost three dozen festivals, while Aljafari has been the subject of two major retrospectives at Anthology […]
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Border Crossings: Paul Schrader on Oh, Canada
The face of Leonard Fife (Richard Gere) is a slab—gaunt, ashen, with a firm, unsmiling mouth. In front of the camera, he’s at once impassive and confessional before his two interlocutors, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill). They’ve recruited the old man, a celebrated American documentary filmmaker now wasting away from cancer, to recount his life for posterity, in the process conjuring the young man (Jacob Elordi) Fife once was. Or was he? I’m not sure where Fife the Elder and Fife the Younger begin and end in Paul Schrader’s latest film. Nor could I tell you at which […]
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Sentient Images: RaMell Ross on Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’s 2018 feature debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a non-narrative portrait of its Alabama locale, shot entirely by the filmmaker over years of immersion, his instinctually captured material assembled into intricate juxtapositions. Few scale-ups for a second film have been more dramatic: Nickel Boys is a narrative feature adapted from a pre-existing text (Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys), proceeding in more-or-less linear order through an incident-filled narrative, with an on-record budget of around $23 million and production handled by Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films. The latter’s Joslyn Barnes was also a producer and […]
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The Truth Exhumed: Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat on Sugarcane
Beginning in 1894, the Canadian government forced Indigenous children to attend segregated boarding schools. The schools were designed to “get rid of the Indian ‘problem.’” Most were run by the Catholic church. For years, students spoke of abuse and whispered about missing classmates. This explanatory text opens Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s Sugarcane, establishing the basis for a piece of investigative journalism and a portrait of healing familial catharsis. After unmarked graves were discovered in 2021 on land once occupied by the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, NoiseCat and Kassie became interested in making a film about […]
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Order Fulfillment: Director Halina Reijn on Babygirl
It’s appropriate that Halina Reijn, the Dutch actress-turned-filmmaker who previously directed the Gen Z whodunnit Bodies Bodies Bodies, would look to ’90s erotic thrillers as fodder for her next feature. After all, her countryman Paul Verhoeven (she has a supporting role in his Black Book) is considered the de facto master of this genre, bringing his penchant for the perverse to Hollywood with pictures such as Basic Instinct. Babygirl, Reijn’s English-language feature debut as writer-director, is less enamored with this bygone era than it is interested in deploying its framework within a personal, subversively feminist perspective. But make no mistake: […]
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“You Can Be a Troubled Teen at Any Point in Your Life”: Filmmakers — and MacDowell Fellows — Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew on Their Metrograph Series
Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew met as undergraduate film students at NYU, where they honed a collaborative practice that responded to the high-budget, high-flown projects of their peers with DIY aesthetics and an emphasis on developing their own formal language. Folding in experiences from their respective careers in the worlds and subcultures of art, fashion, and publishing, First (2018), Negative Two (2019) and 38 (2023) form a triptych of canny portraits of New York subcultures and of personal lives unfolding in uneasy symbiosis with the internet. In advance of a series presented by Metrograph and MacDowell, where Chew and Durand […]
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“A Meditation on the Stigmas of Colonization”: Mati Diop on Dahomey
Mati Diop likes summoning spirits. In 2019’s Cannes-premiering Atlantics, the ghosts of young Senegalese men lost in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Dakar come back to haunt people in their bid to demand what is rightfully theirs. In her latest hybrid documentary, Dahomey—which won the Golden Bear at Berlinale this year—she exorcises the spirit of artifacts looted by the French from the West African kingdom of Dahomey between 1892-94. After centuries of lying inert in Paris’ Musée du quai Branly, 26 of these artifacts were restituted to Benin in 2021. Dahomey not only documents their long journey home […]
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“Stereotypes Help People Delegitimize Other People and Ideas They Want to Distance Themselves From”: Michael Premo on Homegrown
While the eruption of violence at the US Capitol on January 6th left most Americans dazed and confused — and too many journalists and talking heads scrambling to dissect the psyche of the rioters as if they were extraterrestrial beings and not our actual next-door neighbors — multimedia artist Michael Premo had been listening and filming throughout the summer of 2020 with open ears and eyes all along. His Venice-debuting Homegrown follows three diverse (yes, diverse) Trump-supporting “patriots”: an excited young father-to-be (to a biracial child) in New Jersey, an Air Force vet and rightwing organizer in “liberal” NYC, and […]
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“This World Is Hell for Women”: Magnus von Horn on The Girl with the Needle
Caroline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a young factory worker living in abject poverty, serves as our window into the perilous post-war landscape of Copenhagen circa 1919 in The Girl with the Needle. Her dire situation is compounded by her social position as a working class woman, particularly since her husband, Peter (Besir Zeciri), has been out of the picture since he signed up to fight in the Great War (despite the country’s broader policy of neutrality). After she becomes pregnant by her wealthy boss, Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), Caroline anticipates a new life of abundance and relative privilege. Of course, this inter-caste […]
