Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Karaoke Girl’s Visra Vichit-Vadakan and Sandi Sissel
Receiving its world premiere in the 2013 Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Awards Competition, San Francisco-based Visra Vichit-Vadakan’s Karaoke Girl is an evocative character study of a Bangkok working girl, a singer in a nighttime karaoke bar for whom memories of her rural past and dreams of romantic fulfillment form a pulsing lifeline away from an emotionally depleting world. A hybrid documentary/fiction film, Karaoke Girl stars newcomer Sa Sittijun as a character largely based on herself. The documentary sections of the film follow her back to her real hometown, and feature interviews with her real family, while the “fiction” sequences are […]
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Five Questions with Big Words Writer/Director Neil Drumming
Big Words is the feature debut of writer/director Neil Drumming, former editor and music reviewer at Entertainment Weekly.The film follows the disparate storylines of James, John and Malik–three 30-something black men that used to constitute the hip-hop group D.L.P. (“Down Low Poets”). The triad has had little contact over the decade-plus since they split and each of them struggles with their sense of identity and regrets, struggling to look forward on the otherwise wildly hopeful night of Barack Obama’s inaugural election in 2008. Over the course of Big Words, we gradually learn piece-by-piece what drives James, John and Malik, what […]
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Sam Neave, Almost in Love
Director Sam Neave and his producer/star Marjan Neshat are both Iranian-born, but the films they tend to make together — including 2003’s Sundance entry Cry Funny Happy and their terrific new two shot high-wire act Almost in Love — focus on the romantic travails of upper-middle-class Westerners in ways that are as funny as they are earnest. Their newest film, despite its intentionally schematic, downright arty structural contrivance, is a surprisingly rich meditation on friendship, the difficulty of settling down and the importance of being earnest. Performed in humorous and melancholy shades by an odd assortment of performers, most notably Ms. Neshat, Gary Wilmes, Alan Cumming and Alex Karpovsky — who […]
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They Should Be Grateful: An Interview with Abbas Kiarostami
There is a reassuring softness to the touch of Abbas Kiarostami’s films. At a moment in which so many of cinema’s reigning masters exhibit a violently firm command of their work (Von Trier, Haneke), Kiarostami seems happily inclined to set his viewers free through the gauzy mazes of nuance that make up his cinema, encouraging them to come to their own conclusions. That’s not to say that Kiarostami’s hand isn’t as exacting as that of his perpetual Cannes competitors, but rather, that Kiarostami’s careful grip manifests itself in a carefully light touch. That light touch can be frustrating to those […]
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Five Questions with Bully Director Lee Hirsch
Far more insidious than strep or the flu, Lee Hirsch’s Bully investigates a different sort of contagion infiltrating classrooms across the country. Centering on the South and Midwest — Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma — Hirsch and his crew peer into the lives of families and children that are dismantled and uprooted by relentless acts of bullying. While most surrender to the cyclical ostracizing, downplaying the shame before their parents and superiors, others seek solace in suicidal measures. Following its premiere at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival, Bully shocked and educated audiences with its frank portrayal of the ramifications […]
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Five Questions with I Send You This Place Directors Peter Ohs and Andrea Sisson
The debut film from husband and wife team Peter Ohs and Andrea Sisson (also known collectively as Lauren Edward, a composite of their middle names), I Send You This Place is a very unconventional documentary which tackles themes of mental health, creativity and the natural world through the prism of the couple’s trip to Iceland. Gorgeously shot and made with genuine invention by Ohs and Sisson — whose backgrounds in science and design bring a fresh approach to their interpretation of the non-fiction form — I Send You This Place establishes the pair as directors with a bright future. Filmmaker spoke to the […]
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Five Questions with Would You Rather Director David Guy Levy
David Guy Levy’s Would You Rather takes the cruel purity that lies under the surface of children’s games and takes it to the extreme. Gone are schoolyard pranks, naive sadism and the ability to “chicken out.” In their place are deadly stakes, earnest schadenfreude and no escape. Citing Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Jonathan Lynn’s Clue and Agatha Christie as influences, Levy dove into the project with gusto. And armed with a host that would match the childish glee of the game’s inspiration (genre icon Jeffrey Combs), the director succeeded in crafting a memorable and poignant twist on a familiar pastime. Filmmaker […]
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Matt Boyd on A Rubberband is an Unlikely Instrument (+ Exclusive Teaser)
In the quickly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint during the mid-aughts, Walter Baker — a collector of sound, a street musician, a man of many talents and eccentricities — lives with his wife Andrea, a poet, and their adolescent son Sidney. Baker spends his days rummaging through barren lots and decaying Greenpoint docks recording sound, or lurking in the subway, using an extra large rubber band to make unearthly yet remarkably compelling quasi-music. Baker’s skills on the rubber band improve throughout Matt Boyd’s singularly self-possessed, unforgettable doc-narrative hybrid A Rubberband is an Unlikely Instrument, while his home life becomes more […]
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Director Cate Shortland on Lore
In telling the story of Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), a 14-year-old daughter of Nazi parents who travels across a devastated Germany in 1945, Cate Shortland’s Lore, adapted from Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room, plays with fire. As the director acknowledges, it could easily be misread as a statement that (Gentile) Germans were also victims of World War II. Instead, the film suggests what it’s like to fall from great privilege. Without fully understanding what it means to be a Nazi and what responsibility for evil her parents hold, Lore goes from being rich and well cared for to being treated […]
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Five Questions with Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder Director Christopher Felver
Lawrence Ferlinghetti makes a brief appearance in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz — an appearance Christopher Felver wanted to include in his new documentary about the poet and First Amendment hero. But when Felver realized he couldn’t get the footage for what he felt was a reasonable price, he didn’t see it as a make or break moment. After all, as someone who’s been training his camera on Ferlinghetti for 30 years, Felver had plenty of raw material. Assembled from footage shot as far back as the 1980s, Felver’s Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder opens February 8 at the Quad Cinema […]
