Filmmaking
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“The Biggest Challenge Was That Janis Has Led an Incredibly Interesting and Varied Life”: Director Varda Bar-Kar on Janis Ian: Breaking Silence
Janice Ian: Breaking Silence
Even if you don’t count yourself has a diehard Janis Ian fan, the singer-songwriter’s songs, such as her 1967 hit “Society’s Child,” when they appear in Varda Bar-Kar’s compelling bio-doc, Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, will strike a memory chord, so… Read more
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“The Cause of Fascism was the Capitalists”: Igor Bezinović on Fiume o morte!
In 1919, poet, playwright, aristocrat and nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio led an expedition of disgruntled legionnaires from the Italian army to occupy the city of Fiume, now a part of Rijeka in modern-day Croatia. D’Annunzio’s irredentist conquest initially sought to reclaim the former Roman province of Dalmatia for the new state of Italy. D’Annunzio treated his occupation of Fiume with the same romanticism as his writing, even going so far as to obsessively have him and his men filmed and photographed to project a propagandistic ideal. These images, along with D’Annunzio’s continued popularity in Italy, have muddled history, with the event […]
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“The Power of a ‘Like’ When Someone Needs It Is More Powerful Than We Realize”: Tracie Laymon On Her Heartwarming Bob Trevino Likes It
To this cranky viewer constantly engaged in a battle to limit his social media time, the concept of Tracie Laymon’s debut feature, Bob Trevino Likes It, almost feels like time-travel science fiction, a trip back to a world where social media provided positivity and good vibes, not toxic rancor, nefarious scammers and wellness grift. In the comedy drama, now in release from Roadside Attractions, an adrift young woman, Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira), who is forever let down by the gross insensitivities of her biological father (French Stewart), finds both a pal and needed self affirmation by randomly befriending a man […]
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“What Does It Mean to Translate Spirituality into Cinema?”: Sabbath Queen Artist and Filmmaker Danielle Durchslag Interviews Sabbath Queen Director Sandi DuBowski
During the making of his 2001 film about lesbian and gay Orthodox Jews, Trembling before G-d, documentary filmmaker Sandi DuBowski met one potential subject, rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, a “queer bio-dad” who also founded Lab/Shul, the “everybody-friendly, God-optional” congregation. But, as Dubowski relays below, aside from not really fitting the film’s specific brief, Lau-Levine “was too much of a diva and wanted his own movie.” With his most recent picture, Sabbath Queen, DuBowski has more than obliged, following the dissident rabbi for over 21 years, turning what could have been a straightforward biographical portrait into a rich and complex saga that […]
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Necessary Filmmaking: An Excerpt from Jake Mahaffy’s Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling
A Filmmaker 25 New Face from 2005, Jake Mahaffy has been making microbudget films for two decades and has now distilled his creative and production philosophies in a new book, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means, published April 2025 from Routledge. In the excerpt below, Mahaffy outlines several foundational concepts microbudget filmmakers should embrace.—Scott Macaulay Ownership, Intelligent Design and Creative Control Limitations imposed upon you are called “restrictive,” but limitations you impose on yourself are “creative choices.” Professionals set their own rules all the time. Regardless of budget, directors will force themselves to […]
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“I Really Like to Self-Analyze Myself”: Giovanni Tortorici On His Luca Guadagnino-Produced Debut Feature, Diciannove
Diciannove, the autofictional debut feature of director Giovanni Tortorici, captures one year in the life of a young Italian man, Leonardo, who decamps from a London business school to study literature in Siena, where he soon becomes obsessed with the study of 17th century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli. Wandering amidst the medieval architecture of this small central Italian city when he’s not holed up at home, reading from among his stacks of books, Leonardo mostly eschews social invitations from attractive female students while, with quickly fading bursts of enthusiasms, engaging in a series of anti-social actions, including a revenge campaign […]
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“Raise Your Head, We are Making an Honorable Film”: Heiny Srour on the Restored Leila and the Wolves and The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived
Refusing a single dominant system of values in Lebanon as the secular daughter of a working class Lebanese Jewish father and an Egyptian aristocrat mother provided filmmaker Heiny Srour with what she has called a “wide-angle view of the world,” from which she has felt fit to critique, without embellishment, failures of the Arab left. Though ultimately disappointed by the revolutionary Middle East organizations of the ‘60s and ‘70s, who could lapse into anti-semitism or sexism, she’s noted the exceptions of the Lebanese Communists (who were, however, too weak to enact a substantial difference for women) and the DFLP (Democratic […]
