Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Five Questions for The Last Laugh Director Ferne Pearlstein
Originally published during the Tribeca Film Festival, where the doc on humor and the Holocaust had its premiere, here is Paula Bernstein’s interview with director Ferne Pearlstein about The Last Laugh. The film is opening in theaters today and plays in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. There has been no shortage of documentaries about the Holocaust but, until now, none of them have featured Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock and Louis C.K. In Ferne Pearlstein’s The Last Laugh, which premieres today at the Tribeca Film Festival, she delves into the history of humor about the Holocaust, exploring the ethical questions […]
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Mended Bond: Kris Avedisian and Jesse Wakeman on the Unpleasant Fraternity in Donald Cried
Lacking appropriate words, forcing an uncomfortable embrace and remembering once-forgotten regrets are common symptoms during a chance encounter with an old friend who, through the passage of time and often distance, has become little more than a stranger. Once that unexpected moment ends, most people return to their everyday routine, but what if, because of uncontrollable circumstances, one had to actually spend the day in the company of that somebody you used to know? Debutant Kris Avedisian sets his feature Donald Cried, in which he also stars as the title character, around such possibility and charges it with unbearably cringe-worthy […]
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True/False: Chico Pereira on His Modern-Day Documentary Pastorale, Donkeyote
Contained within its sly title, as well as its inventive narrative, Spanish filmmaker Chico Pereira’s second nonfiction feature, Donkeyote, is a modern-day pastorale, at once an homage to the director’s childhood hero, his Uncle Manolo, and Miguel de Cervantes’ classic tale of a man who sets out to become one of the heroes of his own imagination. The story weaves together fragments of memory, dreams, metaphysics — and a good dose of illusion. Playing the role of Sancho Panza is the elegant, stalwart and self-possessed donkey of the title, a burro called Gorrión (“sparrow”, in Spanish). With his dog Zafrana […]
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True/False: Anna Zamecka on Her Transcendent Documentary Debut, Communion
First-time Polish director Anna Zamecka watched many films in preparation for shooting her début feature, Komunia / Communion. Inspired by many works of both fiction and nonfiction, one in particular had an emotional impact. Nagisa Oshima’s Boy (Shonen) from 1969 is based on real events reported in Japanese newspapers at the time about Toshio Omura, a boy forced by a conniving father to participate in dangerous scams in order for him to stay with the family. While Zamecka’s young protagonist, Ola — a 12-year-old living with Marek, her alcoholic father, and Nikodem, her autistic brother, in a cramped and crumbling-down […]
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Bleak Moments: Ronald Bronstein on Frownland
This interview with Frownland director Ronald Bronstein (a 2007 25 New Face) by fellow 25’er David Lowery was originally published in 2006. It is being reposted this week as Frownland receives a rare NYC screening this coming Sunday at the Alamo Drafthouse — projected by Bronstein himself. Click for tickets. Traveling on the festival circuit and spending days in darkened theaters, one grows accustomed to the ebb and flow of certain trends in independent film. Talkative, shakily digital twentysomething dramedies; sensitive tone poems; documentaries both edgy and lyrical. Then a film like Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland comes out of nowhere and […]
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“I Was at a Point in My Life When I Needed to Take a Risk”: Barry Jenkins on his Debut Feature, Medicine for Melancholy
Nominated for Best Director and Best Picture Academy Awards for his beautiful and incisive Moonlight, Barry Jenkins has long appeared in the pages of Filmmaker. He was a 25 New Face in 2008 and then, just months later, graced our Winter, 2008 cover for his debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy. Online for the first time, here is my interview with Jenkins about the film, an interview that’s a great read and a fascinating look back at the career beginnings of one of our best directors. Usually lacking the budget to build elaborate sets, independent films have most often been shot […]
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Meet the Team Behind Zucchini, the Blue-Haired, Swiss Boy That’s Stolen Hollywood’s Heart
If comforting hugs could be delivered in visual form, My Life as a Zucchini would be the warmest of them all. Kindhearted but not sugarcoated, Claude Barras’ first animated feature has quickly become a global phenomenon, winning many international awards and now an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. Its most delightful victory, however, is in dealing with hardship and tragedy with honest tactfulness wrapped in colorful design. Social realism filtered through the magical physicality of stop-motion is the recipe at the root of this touching adaptation of French scribe Gilles Paris’s novel, for which Girlhood director Céline Sciamma […]
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“I Have a Problem with that Whole Narrative of Coming from Someplace Bad and Getting Out of It”: Micah Magee on Her Debut Feature, Petting Zoo
Favorably compared by Variety to fellow Texas filmmakers Terrence Malick and Rick Linklater, San Antonio-raised Micah Magee has been based in Europe for over a decade. But despite having made several shorts there, when it came time to direct her first feature her heart returned to the Lone Star state. Petting Zoo, shot in San Antonio and cast primarily with locals with little acting experience, is a deeply felt coming-of-age story that captures what its like to be young in Texas as perhaps no film has before. Based on Magee’s own experiences of teenage pregnancy, Petting Zoo follows Layla (in […]
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Five Questions for American Fable Writer/Director Anne Hamilton
The below interview was originally published during SXSW 2016, when debuting filmmaker Anne Hamilton premiered her ’80s-set, gothic thriller, American Fable, which melds del Toro-esque fantasy with a critique of Reagan-era economic policy. The film opens today in New York at the IFC Center. World premiering in the Visions section of SXSW is American Fable, the debut film from 2014 AFI Directing Workshop for Women graduate Anne Hamilton. Before beginning her career in film by working on the set of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Hamilton studied law and philosophy, and, as she relates below, she applied aspects of […]
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“I’ve Always Been Cautious of Measuring Success”: Kazik Radwanski on How Heavy This Hammer
After premiering on home soil at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s second feature film, How Heavy This Hammer, screened at the Berlin International Film Festival to critical acclaim. A New York premiere, as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual winter First Look series, wouldn’t surface until a year later where, in anticipation of its Gotham debut, it was deemed by the Village Voice as “striking, clear-eyed, and very, very funny” and “justly celebrated as one of the best Canadian films in years.” A microbudget film about an overweight Canadian father saddled with a combative attitude and love for computer games (well, one […]
