Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Child’s Pose Director Calin Peter Netzer on Rigorous Preparation, Letting Go on Set and Riding the Romanian New Wave
More than a year after winning the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlinale, Calin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose, a Romanian domestic drama that covers class and motherly impulses, is finally receiving a U.S. release, opening today at New York’s Film Forum and spreading to L.A. by week’s end. The latest entry in the ever-burgeoning Romanian New Wave, which has given us everything from Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills to Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas, Child’s Pose zeros in on wealthy Bucharest native Cornelia Keneres (Luminita Gheorghiu) and her family, paying particular attention to her connection to her grown son, Barbu […]
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Sebastian Junger on Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues
Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues is surely one of the most fitting tributes to a fallen comrade ever dreamed up. Founded by Sebastian Junger in the wake of the combat zone death of his Restrepo co-director Tim Hetherington (I interviewed both back in 2010) RISC, based on a Wilderness Medical Associates course adapted for combat, aims to provide freelancers in all media with the kinds of lifesaving equipment and techniques that may have prevented Hetherington’s shrapnel wounds in Libya from killing him. Indeed, when I first heard about RISC its mission seemed so obviously crucial – to give combat journos […]
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Berlinale 2014: A.J. Edwards on The Better Angels and Terrence Malick
Watch any sequence of A.J. Edwards’ poetic The Better Angels and the influence of executive producer Terrence Malick is abundantly clear. Edwards’ relationship with the Days of Heaven director started in 2005 when he worked as co-cinematographer on the documentary The Making of The New World as well as co-editor on The New World. Subsequently, he was second unit director and co-director on The Tree of Life, To the Wonder and the upcoming Knight of Cups, starring Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale and Natalie Portman, which Edwards reveals is definitely coming out this year. Thierry Frémaux must be doing cartwheels. The Better Angels, about the early life of Abraham Lincoln, started life as a Malick […]
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Las Marthas Filmmakers Cristina Ibarra and Erin Ploss-Campoamor on Documenting Colonial Tradition on the U.S.-Mexico Border
Just in time for President’s Day, Las Marthas, an unlikely and unexpected tribute to America’s founding father, makes its broadcast debut tonight as part of PBS’ Independent Lens Series. Set in the south Texas border town of Laredo, Las Marthas tells of a century-long tradition in which debutantes from both sides of the border commemorate George Washington’s birthday. Both the film and its subject matter stand apart from so many negative expectations about the U.S.-Mexico border — there is no talk here of the drug war or weapons trafficking. Instead, the month of celebrations that culminates with the debutante ball […]
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Berlinale 2014: Göran Hugo Olsson on Concerning Violence
After years as a multihyphenate creator of a raft of documentaries (one of which is titled, wonderfully, Fuck You, Fuck You Very Much [1998]), Sweden’s Göran Hugo Olsson has recently come to greater prominence. His documentary on soul singer Billy Paul, Am I Black Enough For You, secured international distribution in 2009, while 2011’s vibrant archive collage The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 took him to another level. Olsson’s new film, like its predecessor, screens in the Panorama Documentary strand of the Berlinale. Concerning Violence is based on Frantz Fanon’s famous 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, and focuses, in nine discrete chapters, […]
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Civil Unrest: Yoruba Richen on The New Black
A probing look at homophobia in the black community and its most important institutions (the church) through the prism of Maryland’s landmark passage of gay marriage during last year’s election, Yoruba Richen’s The New Black sheds new light on the battle over who gets to define what civil rights is. Richen talks to black Marylanders from all walks of life and activists on both sides of the ballot issue, from Conservative clergyman to LGBT volunteers, coaxing incredible candor from most of them. Not surprisingly, The New Black reports things that anyone who actually spends much time around black communities would know, but still seem […]
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Berlinale 2014: Josephine Decker on Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and Butter on the Latch.
At every festival, there are “did you see that?” moments which create a buzz among audiences and critics. One such early example at this year’s Berlinale came midway through Josephine Decker’s hypnotic, farm-set thriller Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, when the point of view of a violent, ambiguously-rendered sexual encounter suddenly switches to that of a cow, through whose eyes we see the next few scenes. It’s a playful, idiosyncratic touch which recalls the chimp’s flashback in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, although it would be wrong to attempt to draw obvious comparisons between Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and […]
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Apocalypse School: John Huddles on After the Dark
Titled The Philosophers in Europe, John Huddles’ most recent film After the Dark is a sneakily beautiful, remarkably thoughtful rumination on the final day of school for a portion of Abercrombie & Fitch photo shoot-ready philosophy students at an international school in Indonesia who engage in a thought experiment with their equally fetching professor (James D’Arcy). The experiment? Were the world to be nearly destroyed that very day by nuclear war, who amongst the group would be chosen to take shelter in a bunker, one too small for all of them, during the atomic holocaust and be charged with repopulating the world? Feelings are hurt, suppositions about […]
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Interview with Vic + Flo Saw a Bear Director Denis Côté
Quebecois filmmaker Denis Côté makes an unassuming, unabashedly regional kind of cinema, drawing on the rhythms and landscapes of his native province. It’s taken him a long time to get attention south of the border – I had to travel to the Toronto Film Festival to see his first film, Drifting States. He seemed to have a breakthrough of sorts in the U.S. with Curling, which at least got some attention on the festival circuit and was acquired by New Yorker Films, who never released it. Bestiaire, a semi-documentary shot in a Montreal zoo, got him more attention, and Vic […]
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Winter Requiem: Jessica Oreck on Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
The uncompromising yet lovely vérité doc Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys takes an unadorned, soulful look at a year in the lives of a pair of brothers who are among a collective of reindeer herders in rural Finland. A departure in many ways from the zany Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck’s new film is bloody and ice bound, showcasing a world of rustic north European life rarely glimpsed on screen. The grim slaughter of reindeer and the daily tribulations of running such an operation doesn’t escape the director’s eye; neither does the tenderness and decency of the people doing such work. […]
