Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“It’s Very Important, When You’re Choosing Actors, To Make Sure They Possess Something That Remains Almost Unknown”: Director Constance Tsang on Her Cannes-Premiering Blue Sun Palace
Blue Sun Palace, Constance Tsang’s first feature, is a migrant story that’s vividly attuned to the temporal and emotional dislocation of those stranded far away from home. Set in Flushing, Queens—where the director grew up—the film follows three transplants as they forge new ties in the borough’s Chinese community, which Tsang depicts as a bubble suspended in time and space. Save for the occasional, blink-it-and-you-miss-it glimpses of road signs and billboards, there’d be no way of identifying this as a corner of New York City; Blue Sun Palace unfurls for the most part inside crammed apartments and massage parlors, where […]
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“I’ve Always Been Interested in Making My Own Version of Goodbye Dragon Inn: Director Carson Lund on His Cannes-Premiering Eephus
“Please stop me if any of the terms don’t make sense.” A few days before his feature debut, Eephus, will premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight, Carson Lund is sitting on a rooftop terrace in Cannes and worrying I may not catch all the jargon. Understandably. A chronicle of the last baseball game played at Soldiers Field in Douglas, MA before the grounds will be paved over and replaced by a middle school, the chat’s testing my—admittedly limited—knowledge of the sport. Yet how you’ll respond to Lund’s wistful film won’t depend on your level of inside baseball. It will depend on […]
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“We Question Together Hyper-Masculinity in Life as Well As In the War Movie Genre”: Roberto Minervini on The Damned
In The Damned, Roberto Minervini embeds us with Union Army soldiers ranging across the Western front in 1862, far from the battlegrounds in the East but no less at risk. But when you direct a Civil War movie in 2020s America, it can be hard for audiences to view it as solely a fictional matter, especially when you’ve previously directed two of the most revealing documentary cross-sections of the United States in the last decade, The Other Side (2015) and What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire (2018). It’s possible to watch The Damned as a rugged journey […]
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“You Can’t Go Into Your Hometown and Not Shoot Cinemascope”: Writer/Director Adam Rehmeier on His Early ’90s Nebraska-Set Comedy, Snack Shack
The logline for Snack Shack—two teenaged best friends spend the summer of 1991 working at a community pool food stand and get up to shenanigans—suggests a hyper-generic “one crazy summer”-type coming-of-age flick, but the film distinguishes itself with specifics almost immediately. It opens with AJ (Connor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriel LaBelle) at an off-track betting parlor intently watching the races with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They exchange gambling strategies and profane insults before deciding to bet their new winnings on one more long-shot race. They hit big, but upon leaving they see someone swipe their cab, making it […]
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“How Do I Capture the Storytelling That is Quintessential to South America, and Marry It to the Experience of Living Here in Florida?”: Director Kevin Contento on His Vimeo Staff Pick, From Fish to Moon
In The Conference of the Birds, the famous Persian epic written in 1177 by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, a group of birds gather and discuss their collective journey to meet their king, the Simurgh, a mythical winged creature. In this allegory for the human search for enlightenment and wisdom—despite our flaws—a sparrow cowers, hoping to avoid the quest altogether. “I do not wish to begin such a toilsome journey for something I can never reach…I shall be content to seek here my Joseph in the well,” she says, in one translation. “If I find him and draw him out, […]
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“We Were Together 24 Hours a Day for Six Weeks”: Bill and Turner Ross on Gasoline Rainbow
Gasoline Rainbow, the seventh feature by Bill and Turner Ross, marks a return to a world of young people familiar from the brothers’s early efforts 45365 (2009) and Tchoupitoulas (2012), which centered, respectively, on residents of Sydney, Ohio and New Orleans, Louisiana. Like those formative works, the duo’s latest is uniquely attuned to adolescent emotions and the rhythms of small town America—except with a broadened perspective and formal command afforded by 15 years of working in a variety of modes and milieus. The film follows five high schoolers from the fictional town of Wiley, Oregon who take to the open […]
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“Everything About Women Interests Me”: Lizzie Borden on the New York Feminisms Trilogy
In 2022, Lizzie Borden’s virtually unseen first feature Regrouping was restored and given its first-ever theatrical run. That film joins the now-canonical Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986) in what some have termed her “New York Feminisms” trilogy, all three of which are now screening together on the Criterion Channel for the very first time. Together, the three films set a blueprint for a contemporary model of feminist filmmaking deeply situated in her place and time that prioritized discussion and conflict as ways of building something new. A long-time fan and recent friend of Borden, I sat down […]
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“As Much As I Want to Explore a Character, I Can’t Lose Sight of Those Thriller Elements”: John Rosman on His Horror Drama Hybrid, New Life
Fifteen minutes into John Rosman’s elegantly scripted and emotionally harrowing debut feature, New Life, you’re wired into the psyche of Jessica Murdock, a young woman fleeing an unspecified old life and grappling with primitive elements of survival: where to sleep and what to eat. And, within a few scenes, where to live, find a job and rebuild. In her impressive feature debut, a fierce Hayley Erin brings both a feral intensity as well as a wary calm to these moments, which are of the sort found in many independent films dealing with women leaving bad relationships, or of those searching […]
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“I Was Definitely Paying Homage to Stories Set in Chicago”: Minhal Baig on We Grown Now
Through chronicling a critical turning point for the residents of Chicago’s now-defunct Cabrini-Green public housing project, writer-director Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now explores how the reverberations of this bygone time and place continue to register today. Set in 1992 amid the real-life death of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis—who was walking to school with his mother when a stray bullet struck him—Baig’s film follows young boys Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) as they grapple with the aftermath of the tragedy. Despite the oppressive living conditions due to Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) negligence, Malik’s home life is replete with […]
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“All Documentary Filmmakers Should Receive or Seek Out Some Kind of Training in Vicarious Trauma”: Alix Blair on Her Hot Docs-Debuting Helen and the Bear
Fourth generation Californian Paul McCloskey — aka “Pete” and “Bear” — is a former US Congressman who represented San Mateo County from 1967 (when he trounced Shirley Temple in the Republican primary) to 1983; a decorated Korean War vet, who torpedoed Pat Robertson’s ’88 campaign by revealing his lies about having served in combat; and an ultimately unsuccessful challenger to President Nixon in ’72, when the maverick Stanford Law grad went on Firing Line to make the case for his anti-Vietnam War platform to an electorate likely more receptive than the program’s highly condescending, pro-Cambodia-bombing host. That particular clip from the […]
