Directors
Interviews - Directors
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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 […]
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Animating the Inanimate: Interview with Charlie Collier
At 20 years of age, Charlie Collier of Zapamation may be a young filmmaker, but he’s already got almost eight years of stop-motion experience behind him. A self-taught animator, he says he was able to get into this partly because of the flexibility he gained from being homeschooled; he was able to incorporate animation into the curriculum. When he finished high school he decided to try his luck as a full-time freelancer. He hopes to attend film school some time in the future when he has built up “a little bit of a portfolio.” Collier has already created animations for clients […]
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“Tough Little Stories”: Director Walter Hill at 92Y Tribeca
Tuesday night at 92Y Tribeca in downtown Manhattan, critics Nick Pinkerton and Nicolas Rapold presented Walter Hill’s 1981 Southern Comfort and the man himself afterwards. “I’m very pleased that you’re looking at this movie 30 years later,” Hill first said when sitting down for a 57-minute Q&A. “You’ve made an old man happy. The movie, when it came out, got mostly bad reviews and did absolutely no business. Did better in Europe and Asia.” “Did better in Europe and Asia” is a common lament for American director prophets without honor in their own country. Hill’s not precisely one of those […]
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Culture Wars: Talking Brazilian Cinema and its Discontents with Director Kleber Mendonça Filho
The Brazilian drama Neighboring Sounds made it onto many critics’ best-of lists for 2012 and recently won Best Feature at the Cinema Tropical Awards in New York, which recognize excellence in Latin American cinema. The film’s director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, was in town to accept the award and to attend a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image of short films he produced over the last decade. The first of these shorts was made in 2002, the year Fernando Meirelles’ urban epic City of God burst onto the international scene and Madame Satã played at Cannes. In the decade […]
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Big Boy Writer/Director Shireen Seno
Receiving its international premiere in Rotterdam, Big Boy is photographer and filmmaker Shireen Seno’s lovingly lo-fi, Super 8-shot tale of a young boy, pressured by his family to “grow” — not emotionally but physically. Set in the 1950s, Seno intriguingly remembers in Big Boy a childhood in the Philippines she did not experience. Taking her inspiration from family tales as well as the visual traces previous generations have left behind, Big Boy, in the words of the Rotterdam programmer, is about a Filipino past that is “not only nostalgic, but also about the violence often hidden just below the surface.” […]
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Eytan Fox, Yossi
Ten years ago, Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox made an unexpected splash with Yossi & Jagger, a 67-minute wartime romance about two Israeli soldiers, the titular Yossi (Ohad Knoller) and Jagger (Yehuda Levi), who struggled to conceal their love during mandatory service at the Israel-Lebanon border. The film struck a chord with a great wealth of viewers, won Knoller an acting prize at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival, and announced Fox as a formidable directorial talent. As Fox tells it, it also allowed him to take part in a cultural revolution that’s unfolded in Israel—and beyond—throughout the last decade, giving him […]
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Five Questions with My Brooklyn Director Kelly Anderson
When she graduated from college in 1988, Kelly Anderson (director of My Brooklyn) had her heart set on moving to New York City and immersing herself in the independent documentary world. Working with the Association for Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF) provided a great springboard for contacts, but not much in terms of paying the bills. Pairing the practical obligations of a recent NYC transplant with a draw towards the progressive and activist attitudes that permeated neighborhoods like Park Slope at the time, Anderson moved to Brooklyn and immediately embraced the diverse lifestyle of its communities. What would become My […]
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Five Questions for Towheads’ Shannon Plumb
Premiering in Rotterdam, the disarming and oddly delightful Towheads is the feature debut of artist and experimental filmmaker Shannon Plumb. Exploring and extending aspects of her short-form Super-8 work within a feature context, Towheads is, on the surface, a familiar story of a bored housewife whose creative aspirations are stifled by the pressures of domesticity and the disinterest of a work-obsessed husband. But these frustrations are just the catalyst for a charmingly playful series of episodes in which Plumb’s character adopts various guises — a drag king, a pole dancer and many more — in an attempt to explore alternative […]
