The sun is harsh in Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song. Intense in the mid-day, it beats down on Faye (Dale Dickey) — ruddy, her face lined by hard living, her blonde hair lightened further by all the incandescent days. Ensconced in her small trailer sitting in a lakeside patch of dirt somewhere in Colorado, the widow waits for a man, also familiar with loss, she knew decades ago. She wrote to him — will he show up? It’s not a spoiler to reveal that he does, in the form of Wes Studi, and theirs is a bittersweet, gently melancholic connection […]
It’s been 13 years since Lena Dunham emerged: first with 2009’s web series, Delusional Downtown Divas and the feature Creative Nonfiction, then, a year later, with breakthrough Tiny Furniture, an intensely personal, incredibly low-budget film that follows a recent college grad named Aura (Dunham) struggling to find her place in her hometown of New York City post-Oberlin. Supported by a cast of Dunham’s real-life friends and family, Tiny Furniture was a critical success that directly sprouted the quintessential Girls, the HBO series that depicts millennial mania, malaise and, at times, loathsome mediocrity. Five years after Girls’s final season, Dunham’s work is less focused on self-reflection […]
The past haunts Marie, a chef in a retirement home in the small French village of Luchon. An exile from violence in Africa, she has closed herself off to all but a handful of friends. Then, a new arrival forces Marie to confront a world she has tried to forget. Written and directed by Ellie Foumbi, Our Father, The Devil was shot on a 20-day schedule. It was developed in part through Venice’s Biennale College Cinema. The film screened at the Venice Film Festival and recently at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award. […]
Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, the intrepid duo that wrote, directed and starred in By Hook or by Crook, still possess a collaborative spark that has outlived their ability to make art together. After their groundbreaking, ultra low-budget queer film premiered at Sundance 20 years ago, Howard immediately enrolled in film school at UCLA; Dodge, on the other hand, found the festival landscape far too overwhelming for his taste and decided to focus on sculpture, video art and writing. While they both followed their respective paths after By Hook or by Crook, they remain very close friends and respected colleagues. […]
Filmmaker last interviewed veteran multimedia artist Cathy Lee Crane about her first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front, which combined staged performances and archival footage from the National Archives in DC to present the strange but true entanglement of a WWI German saboteur with the progressive labor movement of activist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. While Crane’s latest selection of works likewise resurrects buried US history, they tread territory even further back in time, all the way down to the border, and are currently being shown a continent away. Throughout the month of July, the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin will be showcasing several projects […]
“I couldn’t love someone who doesn’t share that love at the top of a volcano,” says French volcanologist Katia Krafft early in Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, a film that’s both a spectacular, eye-searing documentary about the history and science of volcanoes and achingly existential romance. Katia, a geochemist, and partner Maurice Krafft, a geologist, met, fell in love and—“disappointed in humanity” —turned away from the tumult of the 1960s to find a life on the outskirts of the primordial, amidst drifting ash and near-psychedelic lava pools. “We contemplate lying at the edge of the abyss,” Katia says. Like today’s […]
On their very first date in 2013, Antonio Campos pitched The Staircase to Sofía Subercaseaux. It would be years before the now married team officially began work on the project. In the interim, their collaborations have included Christine (Sundance 2016), written and directed by Campos and edited by Subercaseaux, and Piercing (Sundance 2018), produced by Campos and edited by Subercaseaux. Campos became known for his acclaimed independent work with production company Borderline Films (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Simon Killer, James White). After directing episodes of The Punisher and The Sinner (the latter of which he also executive produced), he makes […]
“There is an inner life to a human being that can be as dangerous as any animal in the forest.” So asserts David Cronenberg in his supremely self-aware book-length 1993 interview Cronenberg on Cronenberg, tracking a career that has supplied us with indelible nightmare images: ravenous parasites, murderous mutant children, an exploding head, a slimy gun extracted from a pseudo-vaginal slit in a man’s abdomen—to name a conspicuous few. Recalling the early films, it’s almost easy to forget that the jolting imagery emerges from compelling atmospheres of isolation and estrangement. Cronenberg’s reliable quotient of ghastly mayhem has always roared up […]
LA-based digital artist and filmmaker Martine Syms makes her feature debut with The African Desperate, a deeply funny and unflinching survey of the embedded racism within what the artist classifies as “elite spaces.” Syms previously made 2017’s Incense, Sweaters & Ice, a 69-minute art installation that depicts three generations of Black women and the nature of their surveillance. With The African Desperate, Syms vies for a more personal angle by centering her film on Palace (frequent collaborator Diamond Stingily), a Black MFA student who’s finishing her degree at Bard College, where the director received her MFA in 2017. While the […]
Director Andrew Semans’s 2012 debut feature, Nancy, Please, follows Paul (Will Rogers), an unraveling Ph.D. candidate obsessed with reclaiming his dog-eared, notes-filled copy of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit from a spiteful ex-roommate (Eleonore Hendricks). Despite his increasingly desperate attempts, Paul just can’t get Nancy to relinquish the book from their formerly shared apartment. As the ex-roomie continues to live rent-free in Paul’s head, his deteriorating mental state prevents him from completing his thesis. Less interested in why Nancy won’t relinquish the book than why Paul so easily accepts his newfound submissiveness, Nancy, Please is a dark comedy about not being […]