Directors
Interviews - Directors
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The Space of a Day: Ira Sachs Discusses Peter Hujar’s Day with Azazel Jacobs
With Ira Sachs’s highly recommended Peter Hujar’s Day opening today at New York’s Film Forum from Janus Films, we’re unlocking our paywall on Azazel Jacobs’s interview with Sachs from our Fall, 2025 print issue. (See also my interview with Sachs out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.) Both Sachs and Rebecca Hall will be doing Q&As this opening weekend. — Scott Macaulay The “making of,” in which process is made visible through behind-the-scenes chronicles—documentaries, YouTube tutorials and explainers of all sorts—is its own journalistic genre. These pieces invariably fixate on the facts. When it comes to feature films, for example, […]
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Childhood After Dark: Shih-Ching Tsou on Left-Handed Girl
Taipei first appears in Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl glimpsed indistinctly through a little girl’s kaleidoscope. A vivid, swirling combination of colors and shapes, it’s a fittingly vibrant entrance for Taiwan’s capital, a cultural center that Tsou—making her solo directorial debut more than 20 years after co-writing/-directing 2004’s Take Out with Sean Baker—captures as a layered panorama of neon-lit alleyways and crowded streets. Following a single mother and two daughters who return after several years in the countryside to carve out a new life for themselves in the big city, the film has been described by Tsou as a “neo-melodramatic tapestry,” […]
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Inherited Histories: Cherien Dabis on All That’s Left of You
Few films arrive with the urgency and necessity of Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, a work that positions itself as both historical epic and intimate confession. Emerging from the long shadow of displacement and erasure, it stands as one of the most vital contributions to Palestinian cinema in recent memory. Told through the voice of Hanan (played with piercing restraint by Dabis herself), the story begins with her son Noor, a teenager shot during a protest in the occupied West Bank, before spiraling outward to a multigenerational saga of exile, endurance and return. While Dabis’s Amreeka (2009) examined […]
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The Art of Arrival: Yashaddai Owens on Jimmy
Once in a while, never often, a film comes along that defies the protocols of the moment and delivers an unexpectedly wondrous impact. Thus it was that Jimmy sent this writer skittering down the internet hole in search of young Yashaddai Owens, writer-director-cinematographer-editor of this portrait of the young James Baldwin, about whom everything had seemingly already been filmed, revived, archived or written. Owens brings considerable powers of lyrical invention to the table in his debut feature, imagining and projecting himself into the past, 16mm Bolex in hand to capture the unfailingly imaginative contours of the young Baldwin (Benny O. […]
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Motherload: Mary Bronstein on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
With If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opening today from A24, we’re unlocking from behind our paywall Natalia Keogan’s interview with Bronstein, which is the cover story of our Fall, 2025 edition. — Editor “Something very bad is happening,” young mother Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) whimpers amid oncoming tears during a routine therapy appointment. In the throes of a severe bout of postpartum depression exacerbated by a lack of support from her husband, Caroline’s hour-long sessions at Montauk’s “Center for Psychological Arts” are a brief respite from a world that, in her mind, is more violent and evil than anyone […]
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“I Wanted It to Feel Like… Some Children Just Took a Camera and Documented a Few Hours of Their Life”: Director Stillz on His Edglrd-Produced “Barrio Triste”
Barrio Triste premiered at the Venice Film Festival weighted with at least a couple of expectations. It’s the debut feature for Stillz, known till now for directing music videos for Bad Bunny (who years ago took him on quite early in his career) and other artists. It’s also the latest feature produced by Edglrd, Harmony Korine’s creative conglomerate, following the frontal audiovisual assaults of Aggro Drift and Baby Invasion, both directed by Korine and themselves highly anticipated for how they would re-scramble cinema. In actuality, Barrio Triste (as might be expected from watching Stillz’s moodily evocative videos) evolves its own […]
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“We Put All the Magical Emphasis on the Stork World”: Tamara Kotevska on Her Toronto (and Venice) debuting “The Tale of Silyan”
The Tale of Silyan is the latest painstakingly crafted cinematic endeavor from Tamara Kotevska, co-director of the 2019 Sundance-winning (in three categories) and 2020 Oscar-nominated (in two) Honeyland; it’s a film certain to continue the awards-nabbing streak. Set in the village with the greatest number of white storks in Macedonia, the title refers to a 17th century folktale featuring a rebellious boy named Silyan whose father curses him for wanting to flee the hard work on the family farm — turning him into a stork, condemned to a life of eternal migration. The title also refers to one of the real-life […]
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“Something Sent to Me by the Film Gods to Break the Spell of Tragedy”: Ross McElwee on His Venice-Premiering Remake
You don’t need to have watched Ross McElwee’s films over the years in order to be moved by Remake, in which his ongoing saga of art and life collides in freshly shattering ways with the unlikely prospect of a Hollywood deal and the unthinkable death of his son Adrian. But if you have been following along (or catching up) with his journey from Sherman’s March through to Photographic Memory, the personal loss can all feel that much more poignant, as if you know him personally. That’s a function of his incredibly skillful, essayistic voice (and voiceover), in movies that are—as […]
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“Emotional Time Travel”: Sophy Romvari on Blue Heron
Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker Sophy Romvari draws inspiration from memories across her acclaimed shorts, while also conjuring up a whole new (cinematic) world to shield them from the passage of time. After Nine Behind, Remembrance of József Romvári and Still Processing, Blue Heron is a fully staged narrative following a Hungarian family of six moving into their new home on Vancouver Island. With the promise of a clean start, they try to rewrite the family history in present tense—an effort seen through the experiences of the youngest child, Sasha (Eylul Guven). Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the oldest, is affectionate and gentle towards her, […]
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“Duality is Emblematic of Identity”: Writer/Director James Sweeney on “Twinless”
Writer-director James Sweeney can’t pinpoint the exact time when he learned about the uniquely complex notion of twin loss and bereavement. But he can clearly recall what resonated with him the most before he wrote the first draft of Twinless in 2015. “It was the idea of this deep and singular form of grief, like a loss of self,” Sweeney remembers during a recent conversation with Filmmaker Magazine on his sophomore feature, which premiered in Sundance to rave reviews, and is opening theatrically on September 5 through Roadside Attractions. “It just seemed like such a multifaceted way to explore themes […]
