Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Jonathan Paley, Ballplayer: Pelotero
Although its population is just 2% the size of the US’, the tiny, impoverished Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic accounts for a fifth of all the young men who go on to become Major League Baseball players. How such an astounding share of pro baseball players come from the DR was what Jonathan Paley and his co-directors Ross Finkel and Trevor Martin set out to explore in Ballplayer: Pelotero. However, what they discovered was that, in addition to being a country ripe with baseball talent — one that the MLB has spent considerable resources mining for the past 50 […]
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All in the Family: Jonathan Caouette on Walk Away Renee
I’ve been struggling to find a metaphor for the very special, not to mention most unusual, connection between director Jonathan Caouette and Renee Leblanc, his mentally ill and frequently institutionalized mother and the subject of his most recent film, Walk Away Renee. The closest I could come is really a parallel, and it lies within Caouette’s body of work. In his 2010 surreal short All Flowers in Time, a beautiful young woman, played by Chloe Sevigny, has an indefinable relationship with an adolescent boy. In a bizarre world where young people’s eyes can turn glowing red, the two seem to […]
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Alma Har’El on her Shia LaBeouf-Starring Sigur Ros Video
Containing the same truthful fusion of fantasy and reality as found in her documentary Bombay Beach, filmmaker Alma Har’el’s latest work is a provocative and dramatically compelling short film for the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, made as part of the group’s Mystery Film Eeperiment. For the Project, the band invited a dozen filmmakers to select a track from their new album, Valtari, gave them the same modest budget, and told them to do what they saw in their heads. “The idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom,” they wrote on their site. […]
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POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox and Cristina Ibarra on Women in Film
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season today — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox was […]
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POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox and Cristina Ibarra on Doc Filmmaking as an Act of Faith
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox […]
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Andrew Neel and Louisa Krause Talk King Kelly
While there have been many films riffing on reality tropes in the last several years, few have been as cleverly conceived and entertainingly executed as Andrew Neel’s debut fiction film, King Kelly. Set in the world of amateur webcam porn, the film depicts a monstrously fascinating Tracy Flick for our oversexualized social media age. Played ferociously by Louisa Krause, Kelly is a high-school student who runs a profitable one-woman porn empire from her suburban bedroom, with her parents none the wiser. Stripping on cam, uploading details of her everyday life and ruling over her chat room with a gonzo glee, […]
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POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox and Cristina Ibarra on Doc Filmmaking as Vocation
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox […]
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POV @ 25: Jennifer Fox & Cristina Ibarra on Choosing Documentary Filmmaking
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is this week running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, acclaimed documentarian Jennifer Fox — whose 20-year project, My Reincarnation, kicks off the 2012 POV season this Thursday — and The Last Conquistador director Cristina Ibarra, a relative newcomer to the non-fiction scene, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Despite radically different backgrounds and, at the time of the conversation, being literally continents apart — NYC resident Fox […]
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Nacho Vigalondo on Extraterrestrial
If a massive UFO descended upon the city you lived in, what would you do? Would you cower in fear, waiting for rescue? Or would you rally a ragtag band of resistance fighters to confront this encounter of the third kind? Or maybe you would do nothing, waiting for the aliens to make the first move and inviting a cosmic game of chess with the fate of Earth at stake. Nacho Vigalondo offers his own answer to this question in his latest film, Extraterrestrial, a romantic comedy/science fiction synthesis about a love triangle struggling to resolve itself in the wake […]
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Director Nisha Pahuja on The World Before Her
India-born, Toronto-bred Nisha Pahuja’s beautiful and poignant The World Before Her won the World Documentary Competition Award at Tribeca Film Festival, where it premiered a few weeks ago. And while Pahuja grew up and lives in Toronto, she still has a fascination for her homeland. The World Before Her is her third film, after Diamond Road and Bollywood Bound, and her second dealing with India. It presents two sides of the country. For one segment of the film, Pahuja’s crew follows 20 “Miss India” contestants as they endure the pageant’s controversial month-long training regimen. The audience accompanies the women on […]
