Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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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 […]
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Stowe Story Labs Awards $50,000 Short Film Production Grant to Ali Imran Zaidi for The Boy with the Dinosaur Head
Stowe Story Labs is awarding their inaugural $50,000 Short Film Production Grant to Ali Imran Zaidi for The Boy with the Dinosaur Head, a story about a first-grade foster child whose teacher is “trying to help him out of his shell after a localized extinction level event.” Zaidi is a Black List Feature Writers Lab alum, and an inaugural fellow in Riz Ahmed’s Pillars Fund Artist Fellowship for Muslim Creators supported by Amazon, Disney and Netflix. He is currently developing a TV series with Ley Line Entertainment. Zaidi’s short will be directed by Imran J. Khan, whose debut coming-of-age feature, […]
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Chicken & Egg Announces Seven Award Recipients, One Finalist For 2025
Chicken & Egg Films, the organization that champions women and gender-expansive documentary filmmakers with funding, mentorship, and access, today announced more than $550,000 in grants to seven recipients and one finalist of its 2025 Chicken & Egg Award. Each cohort member will receive a $75,000 grant: a $50,000 unrestricted career grant and $25,000 to be applied to a project the filmmaker will work on during their breakthrough award year. The Award recipients are Rita Baghdadi, Kelly Duane de la Vega, Carola Fuentes, Angelo Madsen, Habiba Nosheen, Jenni Olson, and Anupama Srinivasan. The 2025 Chicken & Egg Award Finalist is Marcela […]
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Five Films that Influenced Alex Thompson’s Hospital Thriller, Rounding
Rounding, the new film from Alex Thompson, who directed Saint Frances and, with 25 New Face partner Kelly O’Sullivan, Ghostlight, is in theaters today from Doppelgänger Releasing. Below, Thompson discusses five of the cinematic influences upon his darkly anxious hospital-set thriller. To say that Rounding is an experiment is an understatement. Borne in the backyard in Kentucky during the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rounding was an attempt take the same team and ethos that made Saint Frances and apply it to a different genre and specificity. These are five films that influenced us along the way. Bunny Lake […]
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“Only Four Weeks for Prep — Including Casting — and 16 Days to Shoot the Entire Film”: Paolo Maria Pedullà on Producing Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
Director Joel Alfonso Vargas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2024 on the basis of his short film, Mad Bills to Pay, which is now a debut feature selected for both the 2025 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. “A shoestring-budget production” realized by a “minimal team,” Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) is also a debut feature for producer Paolo Maria Pedullà, a UK National Film and Television School graduate whose previous work includes associate producing Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God as well as shorts and various high-end TV shows. Below, Pedullà discusses […]
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Clandestine Sexual Development in China: Making 1 Girl Infinite
One night in the summer of 2022, I received a text message from a producer to whom I had sent the script for 1 Girl Infinite, hoping she might help me make the film. Her message read: “I love the script. But I won’t be able to do it because it’s dangerous.” I was not surprised by her comment. In China, filmmakers must pass the bureau censorship to release their work. I was acutely aware of the fact that the details of my film had no chance of approval for a domestic theatrical release in China, despite it being a […]
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“In a Way This Film Asks, What is Lost by the Virtual?” Ira Sachs on his Sundance-Premiering Peter Hujar’s Day
Among the features premiering this year at the Sundance Film Festival, there are none — on paper — simpler than Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day. Arriving just two years after he premiered his Passages at the festival, Sachs reunites with actor Ben Whishaw for a picture that’s one 76-minute dialogue between two friends in a New York apartment in 1974. What’s more, that dialogue is not some dramatically sculptured theatrical two-hander building to third act epiphanies but, rather, a transcription of an actual conversation between art photographer Hujar and artist Linda Rosenkrantz, who was conducting interviews for a book in […]
