Directors
Interviews - Directors
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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 […]
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5 Questions for Lovesong Writer/Director So Yong Kim
A 25 New Face from 2006, So Yong Kim’s Lovesong premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and opens today in New York from Strand Releasing. The below interview was originally published during the film’s Sundance premiere. While continuing to make subtle, emotional, character-based stories, So Yong Kim’s cinema has been one of change and evolution. Her debut feature, 2006’s In Between Days, spent several days surveying the burgeoning first love of two Korean teenagers living in Toronto. Largely filmed in Korean, and shot on a micro budget with non actors, the film landed Kim on our 25 New […]
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Trust Fund Kids in Hollywood: Mike Ott on California Dreams
In Mike Ott’s California Dreams (which I reviewed here), five aspiring actors are shown giving auditions and later acting out scenes in a film-within-the-film. Although this nested film is supposed to be a fiction, and also looks like one thanks to the gorgeous work of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, the script is drawn – or appears to be drawn – directly from the actors’ biographies. One of the fascinating aspects of California Dreams is that Ott never allows you to know for certain how much is real and how much is fabricated. It was therefore a pleasure to be able to […]
