Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“On The Set It Was a Funeral Everyday”: Kaouther Ben Hania on “The Voice of Hind Rajab”
Almost no film has devastated me as much as Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. In an age of numbing doom-scrolling, we may be unprepared for the impact when a single story is given the thoughtful, shattering treatment by an empathetic filmmaker. That story made headlines: a 6-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind, called the Red Crescent emergency center in Ramallah in January 2024 begging for help because a tank was shooting at her family’s car. Recently been nominated at the Oscars for Four Daughters and The Man Who Sold His Skin, Ben Hania sought permission from Hind’s […]
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Liz Garbus on Non-Fiction Filmmaking
Liz Garbus broke into documentary features with The Farm: Angola, USA, an unnerving portrait of the notorious Louisiana prison. Made when Garbus was 24, it looks eerily prescient today. Garbus has since directed a string of influential works covering the spectrum of the documentary genre. Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer used the Gilgo Beach serial killings to uncover police corruption in Suffolk Country. What Happened, Miss Simone?, a wide-ranging look at Nina Simone, won Emmy and Peabody awards. All In: The Fight for Democracy tackled voter suppression. She’s explored shorts, features and series for every available platform, from […]
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“It Was Too Dangerous To Make This Film in America”: Eugene Jarecki on The Six Billion Dollar Man
Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man, much like its main character Julian Assange, is a doc destined to spark controversy. Jam-packed with gripping never before seen footage (much of it captured by Ecuadorian embassy CCTV) and an eclectic roster of interviewees (from Edward Snowden to Pamela Anderson), the film offers a sort of vertigo-inducing alternative history of the WikiLeaks founder and his tabloid-sensationalized troubles; and in doing so asks us to reconsider the media narrative that’s long been built by unseen hands around him. For how much of what we know about the information freedom fighter is actually “true,” […]
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Director as Dinner Party Host: Dan Trachtenberg on “Predator: Badlands”
Architect of the three last films in the Predator franchise (the previous two being the 1719-set Prey and animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers), Dan Trachtenberg would be the first to tell you that many of Predator: Badlands’s gorgeous landscape shots are inspired by Terrence Malick or Sergio Leone. In the same breath, he’d also be quick to mention how composer Sarah Schachner’s score for the video game Anthem served as a launching pad for the this film’s music—Trachtenberg creates something new by unifying artforms most people don’t group together. With Predator: Badlands, for the first time the franchise […]
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“There Were Many Fragmented Aspects to Sara Jane’s Testimony”: Robinson Devor on “Suburban Fury”
Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, made in collaboration with writer Charles Mudede (who also co-wrote Devor’s 2005 acclaimed narrative feature Police Beat and 2007’s provocatively disturbing Zoo), is as counterintuitively intense as its title might imply. The unconventionally riveting doc takes us on a wild and winding (car) ride back in time, via the backseat reminisces of its enigmatic star Sara Jane Moore, who in September 1975 tried to shoot President Gerald Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Eschewing recreations for cinematically staged interviews with the infamous nonagenarian (who passed away in September at age 95), along with evocative archival […]
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Inner Landscapes: Tenzin Phuntsog on “Next Life”
An image of the Dalai Lama gives diasporic texture to an otherwise anonymous suburban American house; the camera tracks to the next room, where a father, mother, and son sit like statues. A Tibetan doctor arrives, and father Pala (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar) tells him that Western medicine cannot seem to explain the pain he feels in his heart. The doctor takes his pulse, not to know his heart rate, but to listen to something deeper and more intangible hiding in the inner self. The blood rushing through his veins rumbles like a river running beneath the earth, the sound filling […]
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From Mail-Order to Online: Tom Davenport on Founding Folkstreams, the Pioneering Online Streaming Site
When I first discovered the works of Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch—academic anthropologists who opted to make films rather than books about their research subjects—my appreciation of their work was hampered by some lingering questions: “How in the world did they distribute this? Who paid for this? Who was watching this?” Sure, the government pays for them, universities buy them and academics screen them for students, but these filmmakers are also studied and appreciated within cinephile circles in a way that, say, 1940s newsreel directors are not. How did these filmmakers find an audience outside the ivory tower? […]
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“It was Extremely Brutal”: Max Keegan on “The Shepherd and the Bear”
High in the Pyrenees, a centuries-old way of life approaches its twilight amid a controversial rewilding scheme. France’s government has for decades airlifted brown bears from Slovenia to repopulate those hunted out of existence by the region’s hunters. But the bears are apex predators who threaten the flocks of a community of shepherds, whose earth-bound traditions don’t readily coexist with state-mandated policy. Within this context, British filmmaker Max Keegan illuminates richly human connections with stirring observational portraiture in The Shepherd and the Bear, whose Academy Award-qualifying run begins Friday Nov. 21 at New York City’s Cinema Village. Much more about […]
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“We Are an Accumulation of These Encounters”: Lynne Sachs on Her IDFA-Debuting Every Contact Leaves a Trace
Every Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she’s collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into “how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking” (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film). As a collage of words, sounds and images collide it becomes increasingly clear that Sachs’s mission to understand how each of these random contacts has changed her in some profound […]
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“The Ethical Work Hasn’t Stopped Now That the Film has Premiered”: Monica Strømdahl on Her DOC NYC-Premiering Flophouse America
Flophouse America is the unnervingly intimate feature debut of Monica Strømdahl, an internationally award-winning photographer who spent 15 years documenting the impoverished communities that have sprung up in rundown motels throughout the US. Which is how she met Mikal, an energetic, 11-year old boy who’s called home the hotel room he’s shared with his parents since the day he was born. Thus began a three-year cinematic collaboration, shot almost entirely in the aforementioned home, between the Norwegian director and the marginalized trio she captures through her quietly unwavering lens. Which allowed her, and now us, to serve as a silent […]
