Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“The Millennial Decline That’s Taking Place in the Present Moment”: Theda Hammel on Stress Positions
Premiering in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Stress Positions—the feature debut from writer, director and star Theda Hammel—takes place during the not-so-distant summer of 2020. While this setting immediately evokes recollections of quarantine, protest movements and rapidly-changing health and safety standards, Hammel isn’t striving to present a time capsule. Instead, the filmmaker opts for a satirical take on how the pandemic shaped generational notions of social justice, artistry and personal identity, particularly among New York’s well-to-do queer fringe. Hammel plays Karla, a trans woman whose relationship with Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), her cis lesbian girlfriend, has […]
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“My Shooting Process Involved a Mix of Planned Setups and Spontaneous Captures….”: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen on Her Sundance-debuting A New Kind of Wilderness
Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind of Wilderness is a film structured in a way I’ve not seen before. With a title that likewise could apply to the psychic space into which the audience is thrust, the rural Norway-set doc is an intimate, first-person narrated, cinematic essay from a director whose story it is not. Indeed, straight from its bold opening, the viewer is left abruptly disoriented, forever second-guessing whose eyes we are actually looking through. It’s a deft structural feat that in turn emotionally transports us into the shoes of the free-spirited, forest-dwelling – and above all grieving – Payne family, five […]
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“Being a Latina Immigrant Offered Me Personal Insight Into the Culture That Influenced and Inspired This Great Artist”: Carla Gutiérrez on Her Sundance-Premiering Frida
Though 2024 marks seven decades since the passing of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, it often feels as if the ubiquitous artist never actually died (or lived) at all. A feminist/Chicana/indigenous/disabled/nonbinary icon ahead of her (if not outside the concept of) time, Frida Kahlo has long been celebrated as more phantasmagoric myth than flesh-and-blood painter (as opposed to her corporeal hubby Diego Rivera). Indeed, the visage that first radiated from her own canvas has since reverberated — and been commercialized — down through the ages. (One of many ironies in the lives of the staunchly communist couple who traveled […]
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“Victim Cinema is for People that are Convinced”: Felipe Gálvez on The Settlers
The Settlers simulates several different types of Westerns without committing to one mode. The set-up of Felipe Gálvez’s first feature is classic: Scottish soldier MacLennan (Mark Stanley), American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and their Chilean mestizo guide Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), who’s been pressed into service from a chain gang, are sent on a mission by landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). Making their way on horseback across the Chilean landscape, the three are captured in long zooms and accompanied by the booming tympani of Harry Allouche’s orchestral score. If that music places The Settlers somewhere in the realm of ’50s westerns, […]
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“I Don’t Want to Corner You”: Michel Franco on Isolation, the Commonality of Trauma and Memory
In nearly all of his eight narrative features, Mexican director Michel Franco has worn his appetite for the most distressed and tormented of human dramas on his sleeve. His characters have vascillated between acts of abject cruelty and silent, practically stoic indifference to their own behaviors, as well as the rueful consequences of their often misguided choices. With each new entry in Franco’s body of work, his approach displays a deft hand for framing and a keen eye for the subtleties of the human condition. In the case of his new Memory, premiering in U.S. theaters today after bowing at […]
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Cinema of Bread and Roses: An Interview with Maggie Renzi and John Sayles
Near the end of Matewan (1987), socialist union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper), a guiding light and galvanizing force for a West Virginia town of striking coal miners under siege, attempts to console frustrated young Danny Radnor (Will Oldham), a nascent preacher and union man. Overwhelmed by the violence and hardships they’ve suffered, the boy gives into despair, declaring in rage and desperation that it’s every man for himself. Joe’s stirring reply is that they must all look after each other, no matter what. Though followed by a long-brewing scene of climatic violence, this quiet but deeply moving moment between […]
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The Passionate Epicures: The Taste of Things Director Tran Anh Hung Interviewed by Frederick Wiseman
A long-gestating passion project for Tran Anh Hung, The Taste of Things takes as its starting point Marcel Rouff’s eccentric, echt-French novel The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet, which follows Dodin-Bouffant in the wake of the death of his longtime cook and occasional sexual companion Eugénie. For his adaptation, Hung retains a few of the book’s incidents but otherwise chooses to tell the story of Dodin-Bouffant and Eugénie’s life before the novel starts. A period romance set in 1889, Taste begins with a lengthy sequence of pure cooking—when I saw the film at Cannes, a woman behind me moaned […]
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At Home With His Memories
In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes about a simple psychological test used on children, “the house test.” He quotes the critic Anne Balif: “Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house, which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations.” If he is sad, however, writes Bachelard, “The house bears traces of his distress.” For Bachelard, the home, and particularly the childhood home, is a place where “a great many […]
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“Let’s Make It Feel Like You’re Watching TV During Y2K”: Directors Brian Becker and Marley McDonald on Time Bomb Y2K
Where were you on December 31, 1999? Despite years of hearing Prince’s pleas to party, many Americans spent the evening at home, bewitched by a bizarre mix of sentimental reverie and fear. The end of the century, it turned out, was a time for reflection and mild panic. Media coverage warned that computers might register the year 2000 as the year 1900. Chaos could ensue, and you did not want to be caught in the club when the “millennium bug” caused the lights to go out and nuclear warheads to whirl mid-air. As Lisa de Moraes wrote in the Washington […]
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Bad Education: Writer/Director Molly Manning Walker on How to Have Sex
The act of recalling our earliest sexual encounters can unleash a wave of secondhand embarrassment for the people we used to be. What we previously said, did or even desired as unyieldingly hormonal adolescents will undoubtedly incite full-body cringes for as long as our psyches choose to preserve those encounters. Yet no staggering quantity of cautionary tales can—or, arguably, should—dissuade young people from fantasizing about the ideal circumstances for losing their virginity and navigating previously uncharted sexual waters. While there’s nothing wrong with romantic idealization, the idea of experiencing pure satisfaction during a formative sexual exploit is, at the very […]
