Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Building Trust with the Gringo Mariachi: Aaron I. Naar on Mateo
The story of Matthew Stoneman, “America’s first gringo mariachi singer,” at first sounds more like fodder for the next Will Ferrell vehicle. But in the hands of IFP Doc Lab alum Aaron I. Naar this weirder-than-fiction tale transforms into something far deeper. After a prison stint led to the New Hampshire native’s education in both the Spanish language and Cuban music, the unassuming Stoneman turned his life not just around, but upside-down. With both patience and compassion Naar follows this truly remarkable artist with the voice of an angel as he battles his demons, and ultimately sacrifices everything to realize […]
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Place of Passage: J.P. Sniadecki on The Iron Ministry
The Iron Ministry takes place on a moving train, whose compartments expand over the course of the film to reveal a host of rocking sights: hanging raw meat, cigarettes floating in water, boxed goods in transit, and myriad people engaged in conversations about politics and its impact on their daily lives. The people and their destinations are often both left unnamed, with a ceaseless sense of forward motion remaining as the greatest takeaway. “This is a civilized train, so please feel free to piss, shit, and throw trash all over the aisle,” says a young boy early on in parody of […]
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Steering Away From “Ooga-Booga” Horror Movies: John McNaughton on The Harvest
In 1985, a pair of brothers who owned a video equipment rental business in Chicago offered local filmmaker John McNaughton $100,000 in financing if he could come up with a low-budget horror movie. They probably got a little more than they bargained for when McNaughton delivered Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a chilling (though also blackly comic) character study loosely based on the experiences of real life sociopath Henry Lee Lucas. McNaughton eschewed slasher movie conventions in favor of an ultra-realistic, serious-minded film with no escape hatch for the audience; one of the greatest cinematic representations of the banality […]
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“When You Have a Message or Issue-Driven Film, It’s Already an Act of Patriarchy”: Hubert Sauper on We Come as Friends
Hubert Sauper’s new film We Come As Friends is more non-fiction poetry than traditional documentary. Following his Oscar-nominated Darwin’s Nightmare, We Come As Friends is set in South Sudan as it becomes its own country. A new (or, rather, the same old) colonialism is represented by rapacious outside interests pressing in on Sudan from all sides, desiring the country’s oil and natural resources. Amidst it all, Sauper and his collaborators build their own tiny aircraft, complete with a wind-up music box on the dashboard, and fly it into a nexus of cultural communication gaps, deception, corruption, violence and a rhapsodic […]
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“I Was Getting Hate Mail Before I Even Started Shooting”: Keith Gordon on The Singing Detective
Writer-director Keith Gordon had one of the best film schools imaginable in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when he broke into the business as an actor and appeared in several now classic movies including All That Jazz, Dressed to Kill, and Christine. He must have learned quite a bit watching the likes of Fosse, De Palma, and Carpenter direct, because his own filmography is one of the most consistent in all of contemporary American cinema. Gordon has directed five features to date, every single one of which is an uncompromised treasure – and each one is different from the […]
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Five Women Directors Discuss their Art and Craft at the New Horizons Film Festival
On the fourth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s death, I was watching the opening night screening of Amy at the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, another documentary about a legendary musician who died at the age of twenty-seven, was also slated in the New Horizons program. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the controversial German filmmaker who made over 40 films before his death at thirty-seven years old, was the subject of Fassbinder, a documentary also screening in Wroclaw. The Actress, a documentary about the Polish movie star Elżbieta Czyżewska, who fled from communist Warsaw to New […]
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Looking and Listening: Jem Cohen on Counting
Hewing closely to the tradition of documentary as diaristic essay, Jem Cohen’s Counting moves from New York to Sharjah as the cinema eye ruminates on street life, destruction, displacement and disparate urban portraiture. Divided into 15 chapters, Counting seldom forces any conclusions, drawing on the viewers’ emotional responses to its alternately lyrical structure and literal depictions — the removal of Brooklyn’s iconic Kentile Floors sign among them. Filmmaker spoke to Cohen about where Counting falls in the documentary tradition, and how his approach was not all that different from his most recent “narrative,” Museum Hours. Counting is now in theaters from Cinema Guild. Filmmaker: What is your process on an essayistic […]
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“A Freudian Tale of the Boy, the Adult and the Old Man”: Stevan Riley on Listen to Me Marlon
Since his death, Marlon Brando has become a legend, but the actor and the man himself have gotten lost. British director Stevan Riley’s documentary Listen to Me, Marlon attempts to restore the person underneath the myth. To some extent, that’s an impossible task; even Brando himself, heard on self-recorded audio tape, talks about how movie audiences project themselves into actors. Drawing on hundreds of hours of tape recorded by Brando, as well as other audio and video sources, Riley assembles the autobiography the actor never gotten around to writing. Instead of interviewing other actors and directors about the Method, Elia […]
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Dukhtar Writer, Director, Producer, Editor Afia Nathaniel at the Munich International Film Festival
Released in Pakistan and set to open in New York and L.A. later this fall, Dukhtar tells the story of a mother and her ten-year-old daughter who flee from their home in the mountains of Pakistan. Below, first-time feature filmmaker, writer, co-producer and co-editor Afia Nathaniel speaks with me after the German premiere in Munich. Filmmaker: Did you always want to be a filmmaker? Nathaniel: I’m originally from a big city in Pakistan called Lahore, where I grew up and was educated. We didn’t have any film schools or film industry, but I always loved writing and storytelling. I never […]
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Meet Me in Montenegro at the Munich Film Festival
Meet Me in Montenegro is a romantic comedy about two lovers, a Norwegian dancer and an American filmmaker, who meet by chance during a visit to Berlin. The film is based on the real-life romance between co-writers, producers, and editors Linnea Saasen and Alex Holdridge, who both also star in the film as the fictional portrayals of their real-life characters. On the eve of the German premiere in Munich, I sat down with Saasen, her co-producer Ineke Hagedorn, and co-actress Jenny Ulrich. The Orchard has recently released the film in the U.S. and Canada, and it’s also available on digital […]
