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Hawai’i International Film Festival 2024: Zoë Eisenberg on Chaperone
Mitzi Akaha in Chaperone
A chance encounter with a teenage Lothario who thought she was still in high school inspired Zoë Eisenberg to begin writing her solo directorial debut, Chaperone, which premiered at the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival and won the Breakouts Grand Jury… Read more
Hawai’i International Film Festival 2024: Gerard Elmore and Mitchel Merrick on Kūkini
Kūkini
A historical action-epic set in a 1790’s Hawai’i rift of inter-island warfare, Gerard Elmore and Mitchel Merrick’s 26-minute short Kūkini boasts kinetic chase scenes and battle sequences combined with a rigorous attention to cultural accuracy and practice: In addition to… Read more
Hawai’i International Film Festival 2024: Alika Tengan on Molokai’i Bound
Molokai’i Bound
I first learned of Alika Tengan (then Alika Maikau) when his short Mauka to Makai (co-directed with Jonah Okano) screened at the 2018 Hawai’i International Film Festival, where I was a member of the Made in Hawai’i jury. The film’s… Read more
“I Actually Feel Like the Firefly Was Caught in the Jar”: Tyler Taormina on His Cannes-Premiering Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
The below interview was originally published May 20, 2024, during the Cannes Film Festival, where Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point premiered in the Directors Fortnight section. It is being republished today, as the film is released nationally by… Read more
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Tokyo International Film Festival 2024: Tsuta Tetsuichiro on Black Ox
Telling the story of a small, subsistence farming mountain community whose few remaining members keep drifting away to nearby cities, Tsuta Tetsuichiro’s second feature, 2013’s The Tale of Iya, drew upon his background growing up in rural Japan. “I was actually born near there,” he explained. “As I observed the lifestyle of the people of Iya, the idea came to me naturally to make a film set there.” After shooting his first feature on 16mm film in black-and-white, Tetsuichiro upgraded to 35m color for Iya, whose physicality throughout the seasons overwhelms with brutally immersive snowstorms and epic mountain panoramas. For his […]
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“This is Going to Be the Most Circuitous Interview”: Alan Rudolph on Breakfast of Champions
25 years ago, Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions left theaters as quickly as it arrived, barely making a blip during a landmark year in American cinema save for a litany of negative reviews that all but celebrated its failure. (Luc Moullet might have been its sole admirer upon release.) Adapted from the Kurt Vonnegut novel of the same name, Breakfast captures a cross-section of American archetypes on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown; correspondingly, the film also feels like it’s also losing its mind. Rudolph, cinematographer Elliot Davis and editor Suzy Elmiger imbue Breakfast with a manic, comically grotesque […]
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“There is No Nice Way to Bulldoze a School”: Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham on No Other Land
Originally published February 27, 2024, just following the Berlin International Film Festival, this interview with No Other Land‘s directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham is being republished today, as the documentary opens at Film at Lincoln Center for a one-week run. — Editor Co-directed by an Israeli-Palestinian collective of four, No Other Land was filmed in the West Bank, in Masafer Yatta, where Israeli military and increasingly civilians have forced Palestinians out from their villages. Premiered at the 74th Berlinale, the debut feature won both the juried documentary award and the Audience Award in its section, Panorama—amply deserved honors for […]
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“There’s an Inherent Absurdity to the Lengths She Goes”: Josh Margolin on Thelma
When Josh Margolin first heard that his grandmother had nearly become the victim of a phone scam — in which someone pretending to be Margolin attempted to score thousands of dollars from the elder — he immediately felt ill at ease and violated on her behalf. But it didn’t take long for the writer-director to recognize a great story: What if his grandmother had given away her money and, upon realizing the scam, set out to get revenge? The result is Margolin’s feature debut Thelma, starring June Squibb in the eponymous role as a 93-year-old Los Angeles resident who doesn’t […]
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“A Nihilist Western”: Athina Rachel Tsangari on Harvest
It’s been nearly a decade since Athina Rachel Tsangari, the idiosyncratic Greek filmmaker who’s never one to repeat herself, has graced us with a new film. Tsangari is always looking for a new challenge: from the improvisational, genre-bending desolateness of The Slow Business of Going (2000), to her Greek Weird-Wave breakout Attenberg (2010) and game of hypermasculinity, Chevalier (2015), each new project takes on a whole different formal imagination. What links them together? Beyond their ostensible differences is Tsangari’s affinity for betweenness—that feeling of not belonging. This feeling is reflected in the films as much as in Tsangari’s life, bouncing […]
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“This Film is Done by YouTubers”: Benjamin Ree on The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
In 2020’s The Painter and the Thief, Norwegian director Benjamin Ree told the story of the unlikely friendship between artist Barbora Kysilkova and heroin addict Karl-Bertil Nordland through overlapping, sometimes contradictory points of view. He has used this approach again for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a telling—and repeated retelling—of the short life of Mats Steen, a young, disabled Norwegian gamer who died in 2014 from the rare degenerative disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy. While his loving family was devoted to giving Steen the best life he could have, in the immediate aftermath of his death they grieved the fact that […]
