Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Power to the Priya: Ram Devineni on his Augmented Reality Comic Book Series
I first met Ram Devineni, creator of India’s first augmented reality comic book, Priya’s Shakti, at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival in February, where he was presenting the graphic novel’s follow-up, Priya’s Mirror. (This work ended up taking the FilmGate Special Jury Award). With the series Devineni and his co-creators have revolutionized the comic book form, and not just technologically but also culturally. A survivor of gang rape in the first installment, Priya joins forces with acid attack survivors in the second, rendering the titular super-heroine tougher than your average Western badass chick. Devineni is participating in the Art, Technology […]
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Creative Fraternity: Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio on their SXSW Doc, May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers
Two decades of writing, producing, and finally directing some of the most commercially and critically successful films in the world have given Judd Apatow enough cachet to make nearly anything. After his directorial debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), took in more than $175 million in domestic gross revenue, his Apatow Productions produced an ongoing string of gargantuan hits, including Knocked Up (2007), Superbad (2007), Bridesmaids (2011) and Trainwreck (2015). But it is only within the last three years that Apatow has moved into a seemingly unlikely genre: documentary film. Last year saw his first nonfiction work as co-director with Michael […]
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SXSW 2017: Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff on The Strange Ones
Expanded from their 2011 short, Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff’s The Strange Ones starts with a house fire. A young boy (James Freedson-Jackson) stands paralyzed in front of it, and next we see him on the road with someone (claiming to be?) his older brother (Alex Pettyfer). Over the course of a long, strange road trip, we slowly put together some (but definitely not all) the pieces of a story of sexual assault and two people on the run from the law. Motels, diners and farms are among the upstate New York locations. The impressively assured, enticingly semi-enigmatic film had its premiere Saturday morning […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for Mr. Roosevelt Writer/Director/Star Noël Wells
Texas-born actress and comedian Noël Wells (Master of None, SNL, The Incredible Jessica James) steps into the director’s chair with her SXSW-debuting feature Mr. Roosevelt, which mixes a sort of low-key melancholic humor of self-discovery with a series of broader comedic set pieces also exploring issues of social anxiety, identity and relationships. For Emily, the offbeat comedian character played by Wells, comedy is both the source of identity and existential crisis. In a prologue, we see a young Emily perform at a school play to a laughing audience. She’s in tears afterwards until her mother explains to her that people […]
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Following The Money Shot: Ovidie on Her SXSW Investigative Doc Pornocracy
Originally trained in philosophy, and known as the “porn star intellectual” since the publication of her book Porno Manifesto in the early aughts, feminist pornographer Ovidie can now add hard-hitting investigative journalist to her CV. The French icon’s latest documentary Pornocracy, debuting at SXSW (and later in the month at CPH:DOX), is a stunning exploration of the dark underbelly of online porn — a shadowy world in which a single faceless multinational corporation, with numerous offshore accounts, controls what we see while exploiting the performers whose very livelihood it shamelessly steals. Filmmaker spoke with Ovidie prior to the doc’s March […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for Spettacolo Directors Jeffrey Malmberg and Chris Shellen
In Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 Spirit Award-winning documentary Marwencol, an artist constructs a one-sixth scale imaginary town, populated with miniatures, that is both his creative project and therapeutic enterprise; it’s through this work that he processes a violent attack that left him near-dead and brain-damaged. For the new Spettacolo, Malmberg, this time directing with filmmaker Chris Shellen, has focused on another individual for whom the world is a stage. Here, however, the scope is larger as theater director Andrea Cresti gathers each year the citizens of his small town in Tuscany to make a play based on their lives and histories. […]
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No Way Out: Brent and Craig Renaud on Their SXSW Doc, METH STORM: Arkansas USA
World premiering March 11th at SXSW is METH STORM: Arkansas USA, the latest HBO doc from the Peabody (and Edward R. Murrow and Columbia Dupont and Overseas Press Club) award-winning Renaud brothers. Unsurprisingly, the Arkansan siblings have taken a deeply humanistic approach to the meth epidemic with this film, following a soft-spoken DEA agent struggling to stem the flow of (cheap and extremely potent) Mexican cartel “ice” into his rural community. They parallel this narrative with that of a close-knit family of impoverished addicts, led by a no- nonsense matriarch who just can’t seem to catch a break. It’s been […]
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“Porn is Everywhere, Almost Like a Collective Unconscious”: Bruce LaBruce on his XConfessions Short Refugee’s Welcome
Bruce LaBruce is one busy renaissance man. The queercore icon — director of 11 features (not to mention numerous short films and music videos, and several theater works), visual artist and author — has now teamed up with Erika Lust’s XConfessions to release Refugee’s Welcome. The story of a Syrian refugee in Berlin who both suffers a hate crime and finds a poetic (and explicitly sexual) connection with a Czech punk, the short will be available on Eroticfilms.com (NSWF link, obviously!) on March 9th. (And today only for free — use the code BRUCE). Filmmaker spoke with LaBruce — who […]
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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 […]
