Directors
Interviews - Directors
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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 […]
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“So Many Sequins!”: Penny Lane on Her Tribeca-Debuting Docuseries Mrs. America
Kudos to Anonymous Content and Fremantle for putting together a project focused on the most wholesome of beauty pageants and thinking, “We need the director of Hail, Satan? for this!” Indeed, while the idea might seem absurd on its surface, it’s no more so than the notion of married women from 18 to 80 (and up) going toe to toe (or heel to heel) in evening gowns and swimsuits, sacrificing precious time and exorbitant amounts of money for the chance to wear the Mrs. America crown. And veteran filmmaker Penny Lane, whose 2023 doc Confessions of a Good Samaritan followed […]
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“It Became More a Story About How the Artwork, and All the Commotion Around It, Affected His Mental Health”: Ole Juncker on His Tribeca-Debuting Take the Money and Run
Ole Juncker’s Tribeca-premiering Take the Money and Run follows Jens Haaning, a Danish conceptual artist to whom the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg loaned $83,000 — money that was to be tangibly incorporated into a specific commission for their 2021 group exhibition centered on the future of working life. (Which was not so creatively titled “Work it out.”) Unfortunately for the museum, Haaning decided to incorporate the dollars into his own personal life instead, though he did deliver a piece called Take the Money and Run — a pair of empty frames — along with an email explaining the […]
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“The Best is Always Zero Budget”: David Verbeek on Tribeca 2025 Premiere The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard
In a contemporary take on Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard depicts a woman who lives amongst wolves being whisked away and plunged into human society. Director David Verbeek presents this jarring story as a kind of apocalyptic fairytale, in which a feral woman learns what it means to be human while humanity itself is bracing for the end of the world as they know it. Mostly set on a repurposed offshore oil rig, the film explores how the interests of men and nature inevitably clash in the face of impending […]
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“‘History’ with a Capital ‘H'”: Mascha Schilinski on Cannes 2025 Award-Winner Sound of Falling
Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling was so rapturously acclaimed upon its premiere on the first full day of Cannes 2025 that some thought they’d already seen a possible Palme d’Or winner. In the end, her film shared the Jury Prize with another adored Competition title, Sirât, whose end-times death-trip might seem to overshadow the ordinary-sounding logline for Sound of Falling: four generations of girls on a farm in Germany. But this film swiftly establishes itself as an equally virtuosic secret history and sustained experiment in female subjectivity in kaleidoscopic form, drawing on scenes and notes from journals and voices from […]
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“There Was No Going Around Gaza”: Raoul Peck on Cannes 2025 Premiere Orwell: 2+2=5
Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 opens with a credit sequence featuring images of what appear to be microscopic larvae wriggling across the screen. The message seems clear: something nefarious is afoot on this globe, but still in its incipient stages. If we fail to act, it’s going to get much worse. In recent years, the filmmaker has made direct, no-nonsense use of the nonfiction form to address, from various angles, the rot of white supremacy, its historical roots and its unchecked future. Building on I Am Not Your Negro, Silver Dollar Road, the miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes and […]
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“There’s a Reason We Call Them ‘Films’ and Not ‘SD Cards'”: Francesco Sossai on His Cannes-Premiering The Last One for the Road
The film festival world can be so depressingly homogenous that to come across a title straying beyond its aesthetic and storytelling conventions is nothing short of exhilarating. The Last One for the Road is one such film. Conversant as it may be with a long and varied set of influences—from 1960s Italian comedies all the way to Aki Kaurismäki—Francesco Sossai’s second feature synthesizes its touchstones into something that feels bracingly alive. It heralds its writer-director as a new talent to watch, and confirms that the most exciting Italian cineastes working today are those shooting a long way away from the […]
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“It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains
Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and symbolic. Similarly, Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes last weekend, is only in some layers a dark comedy about the varied pains experienced by a rural Icelandic family undergoing a separation of parents Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Horses […]
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“Anytime I Could Minimize the Use of Verbal Language and Rely on Other Means to Advance the Story, That’s What I Did”: Lloyd Lee Choi on His Cannes-Premiering Lucky Lu
There’s something about the high-pressure nature of the migrant experience that can make films about it elicit more anxiety than your average thriller. So it is with Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu. Set in New York’s Chinatown—a backdrop captured by DOP Norm Li as a caliginous labyrinth of alleyways and sepulchral rooms—Lee Choi’s feature debut centers on the titular Lu (Chang Chen), a Chinese delivery rider who’s spent years away from his wife and daughter, and now, having drummed up enough cash to secure an apartment for three, readies to welcome them to the city. Title notwithstanding, however, Lu might […]
