Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“Making a Movie is Just a Succession of On-Set Challenges”: Ari Aster on Eddington
Ari Aster previously used the horror genre as a lens to examine dysfunctional family dynamics in Hereditary and break-up messiness in Midsommar. He then pivoted to the manic surrealism of Beau is Afraid, which immerses viewers in the title character’s perma-anxious mindset, generated by his mother’s domineering hold on his entire world. In Eddington, Aster pivots again, away from individual psychological portraits towards a more panoramic view of recent political history. Set in the eponymous fictional New Mexico town during the initial months of COVID, Eddington uses a contested election between its bar-owning neoliberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and […]
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“Fairy Tales Are the Stories We Tell Our Children to Warn Them…”: Writer/Director Kelsey Taylor on Her Suspenseful Debut Feature, To Kill a Wolf
For viewers watching Kelsey Taylor’s terrific debut feature, To Kill a Wolf, it’s easy to miss that its very loose source material is the 17th-century children’s fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood. Yes, there’s a girl lost in the woods, a woodsman, a grandma (arguably), and a wolf, although the latter is hardly an obvious figure. But the relationships between these characters and their backstories are newly invented, mapping onto contemporary anxieties and fears as much an archetypal narrative structures. Consider To Kill a Wolf something of a remix, the kind where the source material haunts rather than dictates, and […]
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“I Finalized the Script Two Weeks Before the Crew Arrived”: Alexandra Simpson on No Sleep Till
Against the darkening skies of an imminent hurricane in Atlantic Beach, Florida, disparate characters become unmoored in No Sleep Till, the feature debut from French-American filmmaker Alexandra Simpson. Shot in the coastal enclave where she partially grew up with her father, Simpson’s film casts a “European gaze” (she was largely raised in Paris and attended film school in Geneva) tinted by a palpable nostalgia for a place she never truly knew and that she believes could one day disappear as a result of a natural disaster. There’s a laconic quality to No Sleep Till, but the absence of narrative-driving dialogue […]
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“We Created the Film to Address How Journalism Was Perpetuating Anti-Trans Bias”: Sam Feder on Heightened Scrutiny
As someone who started calling myself “bigendered” decades ago, trans visibility has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s a relief to no longer have to explain being nonbinary to puzzled and often dubious cisgender folks (gay and straight alike). On the other hand, it’s infuriating to watch as one’s existence is then abruptly erased and turned into an “ideology” by right-wing transphobes. And it’s downright demeaning to have one’s identity suddenly hijacked and transformed into a hip “cause” by cisgender liberals. (The dehumanization inevitably leading to dangers like the NYTimes breathless bothsidesism reporting on […]
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Palestinians in Purgatory: Mahdi Fleifel on To A Land Unknown
Midway through To A Land Unknown, Palestinian-Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s narrative feature debut, Palestinian cousins stranded in Athens—sharp Chatila (Mahmood Bakri), his wife and kid back in Lebanon’s camps, and sensitive Reda (Aram Sabbah), working hard to rein in his drug addiction—find themselves wanting to help Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan new to Athenian streets, get to his undocumented refugee aunt in Italy. The duo’s passage to Germany—to Europe, to freedom, to the autonomy of running their own cafe in some Arab enclave of Berlin, to everything neither Palestine nor Lebanon can offer them in the world’s current […]
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Cinema without Adjectives: Rita Azevedo Gomes on Fuck the Polis
In Rita Azevedo Gomes’ cinematic universe, a characteristic blend of literary adaptation and cinematic innovation creates simultaneously concrete and oneiric landscapes—places where the wandering subject, camera, plot and spectator become absorbed by the unknown, yet strangely familiar, territory before them. With Fuck the Polis, her most bold and daring film to date, the Portuguese filmmaker continues her cinematographic explorations of word, image, time and human emotions. Making its world premiere at FIDMarseille 2025, Polis follows Irma, who around twenty years ago, believing herself condemned, traveled to Greece. She now retraces that journey, moving from island to island in what becomes […]
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“A Lot of Movies Right Now are Just Shrugs”: Frederic Da on iPhone-Shot Found Footage film Isaiah’s Phone
With Isaiah’s Phone, French-American filmmaker Frederic Da caps off an informal trilogy cataloging the contemporary teenage experience by corralling his film students at a private high school in Santa Monica as crew and on-camera as actors. Short “Ava Dates a Senior” was expanded into the ensemble feature Teenage Emotions—both of which are lensed on multiple iPhones and had their premieres at Slamdance. Da’s latest, Isaiah’s Phone, employs a diegetic, found footage framing device, following a young student Isaiah (Isaiah Brody) as he navigates the difficulties of high school. On-screen text up top teases “a horrific act of violence,” explaining that […]
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“Everybody Involved in This Was a Total Loser”: Alex Ross Perry on His Exhaustive Essay Doc Videoheaven
Part eulogy for a bygone commercial space, part rigorous investigation of its origins and subsequent representation in popular culture, Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven leaves virtually no stone unturned during its nearly three hour runtime. Composed entirely of clips that take place in or otherwise center video stores—from Body Double to Seinfeld to Stranger Things—the essayistic documentary features droll narration from Maya Hawke (who stars in the latter) waxing poetic about their rise and fall, both physically and on screen, in six chapters. The role of pornography, corporate chains and the front-facing employees within these spaces is exhaustively charted; notably, Perry […]
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“I Wanted to Write a Trans Woman Who Had Really Bad Politics”: Filmmaker Louise Weard on the Abject Tragicomedy of Her DIY Epic Castration Movie
Louise Weard is obsessed with castration. The idea for her five-part DIY epic Castration Movie came when she was reviewing footage for a supercut of onscreen “dick destruction” subtitled Texas Birth Control—and, she notes with amusement, eating little phallic pickles. Weard has an infectious laugh, and the things she finds funny tend to reflect her unique form of good-natured miserablism. Her characters are marginalized people who get the shit beaten out of them, physically and emotionally. Some are marginalized in ways that attract sympathy from her audience. Others, like the incel who’s the protagonist of the film’s first chapter, are […]
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“Freedom Could Stem From the Experience”: Nicole Chi on Her Student Short Film Showcase Winner Los Mosquitos
In the absence of their mothers, two foster siblings slowly fortify a sisterhood in Los Mosquitos, Nicole Chi’s lushly atmospheric short. Made as part of her graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the film centers on women within the local Honduran community—which Chi has closely worked with in the past—and is largely composed of a cast of non-professional actors. This includes protagonists Abby (Abigail Hernandez), a rebellious 15-year-old, and Nata (Natalia Rodríguez), her younger cousin who’s freshly arrived in the US. As the girls navigate this stark change in their living situation, tensions naturally arise: Abby begins […]
