Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Nor Bad But What You Bring To It”: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency
In the first two films in their trilogy of environmental-themed documentaries, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle married — literally — their loving spirit of “ecosexuality” with urgent debates around the preservation of our natural resources. In 2014’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain — An Ecosexual Love Story, Stephens returned to her West Virginia home with Sprinkle only to find the eponymous ridges she remembered from her youth undergoing the environmentally-destructive coal-mining process of mountaintop removal. In the film, as Wren Awry wrote for Filmmaker, Stephens says, “Sometimes I feel like fighting [mountaintop removal] is a losing battle. Then I imagine that some […]
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“The Movie Stays the Same, Yet the Interpretation Is Often Very Different”: David Secter on the 60 Year Legacy of Winter Kept Us Warm
“Winter kept us warm,” reads an early line in T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land, “covering Earth in forgetful snow.” This season, often associated with loneliness and despair, heralds quite the opposite both in Eliot’s masterwork and in Canadian filmmaker David Secter’s. The latter’s 1965 feature debut, Winter Kept Us Warm, centers on the blossoming relationship between Doug (John Labow) and Peter (Henry Tarvainen), two University of Toronto college students. An upperclassman, the popular Doug spends more time socializing with his fraternity brothers than studying; conversely, freshman Peter feels awkward in his new surroundings, and as such greatly prefers […]
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“Crying and Editing at the Same Time”: Karla Murthy on Her Sheffield World Premiere The Gas Station Attendant
For much of her life, Karla Murthy listened as her father regaled her with tales of his troubled upbringing and eventual journey to America. Raised in poverty in India, Shantha Murthy spent years of his childhood destitute and working for meager wages at a restaurant, his only respite arriving in the form of an American couple who eventually sponsored his visa to the U.S. The rest follows a fairly simple pattern: he met a girl in his new home state of Texas, got hitched and started a family of his own. This, he claimed, was his true life’s goal; but […]
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Duty of Care: Sarah Friedland on Familiar Touch
Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch follows Ruth, an octogenarian woman experiencing memory loss as she transitions into assisted living. Played with luminous restraint by Kathleen Chalfant, Ruth is not someone we observe from a distance—we move with her. Told entirely from her perspective, the film unfolds through a sensory experience of time and memory. Through light, texture, sound and gesture, we come to understand what it means to live inside a body—and a mind—that is transforming. Ruth is looked after by Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a personal support worker, and Brian (Andy McQueen), the home’s doctor. Over time, she begins to […]
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Order of Operations: Wes Anderson on The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson has retroactively described the over-schedule and over-budget making of his fourth feature, 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as the kind of production that would never be allowed to happen now. That’s partly because of shifting Hollywood windows of financing possibility, but that’s likely also in part because the writer-director wouldn’t let it happen again. On 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson made sure to work in a more sustainable and flexible way. As Jason Schwartzman told Richard Brody in 2009, “Wes not only pitched a rough idea for a movie, he also pitched a rough idea of […]
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Writing Between Worlds: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich on The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
“For the pattern of unfulfilled desires has trapped the Antilles and America. From the time of the arrival of the conquistadors and the rise of their technical know-how (beginning with firearms), the lands from across the Atlantic have changed, not only in facial appearance but in fear. “So, far from contradicting, diminishing or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.”—Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage I recently had the opportunity to (virtually) sit down with my friend and fellow artist-filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehlrich to discuss […]
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“Shooting in the Fall, Premiering in June”: Travis Wood and Alex Mallis on Their Tribeca Debut The Travel Companion
Anxieties surrounding flight credits, male friendship and fraught filmmaking prospects fuel the bittersweet yet always amusing narrative of The Travel Companion, the feature debut from directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis. Co-written by the duo alongside their Chicago-based buddy Weston Auburn, the rough gist of the story is mined from a situation that Wood personally found himself in. Long designated as his best friend’s “travel companion”—a perk granted to a friend or family member of an airline employee’s choosing—Wood realized that his coveted status was on track to be upset by his pal’s serious girlfriend. As Wood avows, however, his […]
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“Dark, Difficult, Dank Spaces”: Rob Petit on His Tribeca World Premiere Underland
Based on British author Robert Macfarlane’s non-fiction book of the same name, Underland, the feature debut from Rob Petit, investigates the world hidden beneath our feet. In particular, the film ventures into the depths of a cave system in Mexico once used for ancient Mayan rites; a Canadian dark matter research facility located two kilometers beneath the surface; the exhilarating, if treacherous, storm drain system beneath Las Vegas; and a haphazardly abandoned uranium mine in the American Southwest. Composed of six chapters strung together by hypnotic narration from Sandra Hüller, Underland literally probes the human drive for discovery and, conversely, […]
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“A Brutal Honesty That Still Feels Poetic”: Walter Thompson-Hernández on His Tribeca World Premiere Kites
In the sprawling favela of Santo Amaro in Rio de Janeiro, Duvo (first-time actor Daniel Fernando do Prado Dorea Lima) currently sits at the top of the pecking order. Under the guise of enriching the community, Duvo and his armed militia regularly engage in illicit activity that, while lucrative, often culminates in death. When it comes to Duvo’s attention that the “help” he’s providing is anything but—in part by a cigarette-smoking guardian angel, whose untimely death was the product of police brutality—he becomes obsessed with a new, much more kid-friendly venture: he decides to finance a kite festival for the […]
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“Two Strangers Meeting Over Something So Unusual”: Paula González-Nasser on Her Tribeca World-Premiering Feature Debut The Scout
Back in 2022, a scrappy feat of independent filmmaking came across my radar. Written and directed by Florida native Justin Zuckerman, Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater is a Mini-DV shot journey of a young woman attempting to create space for herself amid the cacophony of New York City; it harkens to mumblecore while remaining entrenched in the unique hostility that young (even would-be) creatives currently face amid price-gouging and the decimation of DIY communities. This film was the first feature project undertaken in part by 5th Floor Pictures—the production collective co-founded by Ryan Martin Brown and Paula González-Nasser—itself an […]
