Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Love 16mm”: Deniz Eroglu on The Shipwrecked Triptych
When I emailed gallery artist and filmmaker Deniz Eroglu to set up an interview about what I thought was his first feature film, The Shipwrecked Triptych, I asked what past work I should familiarize myself with to prepare. “I made another triptych in 2013,” he wrote back. “Maybe that will suffice?” 2013’s The Bedridden Triptych does indeed contain the embryonic seeds of Eroglu’s first formal feature film: three episodes in a darkly humorous vein, all shot on different formats, offering a kind of cross-section of Denmark, where the filmmaker was then based. The Shipwrecked Triptych turns Eroglu’s attention to Germany—first […]
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“I Wanted to Make Sure That My Version Was Additive”: Writer-Director Durga Chew-Bose on Adapting Bonjour Tristesse
“I’ve been young for so long, and so old for longer.” — Durga Chew-Bose, from Too Much and Not the Mood (2017) “Certain phrases fascinate me with their subtle implications, even though I may not altogether understand their meaning.” –-From the novel Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954) In 1955, eighteen-year-old Françoise Sagan’s debut novel Bonjour Tristesse, about a teenager and her widowed playboy father vacationing on the French Riviera, enjoyed three months atop the New York Times bestseller list. Otto Preminger’s lush CinemaScope film adaptation followed in 1958. The director’s clinically cool approach was tepidly received, though Jean-Luc Godard, […]
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“I Always Make What I Can and Not What I Want”: Bruno Dumont on The Empire
With The Empire, French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s career is now evenly split between two modes. His first seven films operated within an identifiably Bressonian tradition, while the five films and two mini-series following operate in a more comic, slapstick register. Conversations surrounding the starkness of this pivot—which began in 2014 with miniseries L’il Quinquin—are understandable yet potentially overstated, as there is strong connective tissue through all of his work. The two hapless detectives in L’il Quinquin and Coincoin and the Extra-humans (who reprise their roles in The Empire) drive their cop car on two wheels; a dune buggy wreck into […]
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“This is Part of Where Our Title Came From — the Amount That Women are Censored”: Annapurna Sriram On Her SXSW-Premiering Fucktoys
While sitting on a raft in the middle of a Southern swamp, AP (Annapurna Sriram) learns that her recent string of bad luck, missing tooth included, is caused by a curse. A psychic (played by New Orleans-based rapper Big Freedia) reveals that the only way for AP to free herself from the spiritual bind is to sacrifice an innocent lamb in an ancient ritual. The needed ceremony will cost AP $1,000, which she promises to raise in just a few days. This sets the plot of Fucktoys in motion, which finds AP traversing her pastel yet putrid birthplace of Trashtown […]
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“Slime Everywhere”: Grace Glowicki and U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy on Dead Lover
A lonely woman, solely referred to as Gravedigger, has never known romance due to the putrid scent she absorbs from her occupational namesake in the latest feature from director, star and co-writer Grace Glowicki following 2019’s Tito. One fateful night, Gravedigger’s lucky stars align when a handsome nobleman (co-writer Ben Petrie, Glowicki’s husband/frequent collaborator) becomes infatuated by this “fetid creature,” whose smell has the unexpected effect of turning him on. The film, however, is entitled Dead Lover, clearly alluding to the tragic conclusion of Gravedigger’s whirlwind romance. Desperate to rekindle their passion, she takes her lover’s only remains—a formidable ring […]
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“This Isn’t Air Bud or Lassie, Where the Dog is Always Happy-Go-Lucky”: Director Ben Leonberg on His Canine-POV SXSW Horror Film, Good Boy
From a simple observation of canine behavior —”What dog owner hasn’t wondered why their dog barks at ‘nothing?’” — Ben Leonberg has with his SXSW-premiering Good Boy created what he calls “a haunted house movie from an entirely new perspective.” Leonberg’s own dog Indy stars alongside Shane Jensen in this story of an ailing man who retreats to his family’s secluded rural cabin only to confront generational trauma and supernatural forces. With Larry Fessenden as the family patriarch, whose foreboding presence appears solely through distressed VHS tapes playing, Skinamarink-style, on outdated TVs, the house here becomes something of a liminal […]
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“Intersex People Don’t Need To Be Fixed”: Grace Hughes-Hallett on The Secret of Me
A seemingly breakthrough medical innovation from the ’60s set off a still-ongoing worldwide trend of surgeries performed on “atypical” babies. Those surgeries were celebrated in the context of the gender equality movements of the 70s, but over the long tail of history, the trauma inflicted by this innovation revealed those marginalized by the results: a largely hidden and, per the stats, sizable community of people worldwide assembled under the queer umbrella. Premiering at SXSW 2025, The Secret of Me is British director Grace Hughes-Hallett’s directorial debut, but you may already know her as the producer of 2018’s Three Identical Strangers. The main […]
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“I Aimed to Capture the Subtle Cruelties of Social Isolation”: Yana Alliata On Her Herzog-EP’d SXSW Drama, Reeling
Shorts filmmaker Yana Alliata, who has worked in various film industry jobs (Fox Searchlight, FX Networks and Film Finances) makes her feature debut in Reeling, a dark Hawaii-set drama that’s executive produced by Werner Herzog and deals with trauma, memory and the implicit horror of family gatherings. The movie begins with a long, gliding steadicam shot of Ryan (Ryan Wuestewald) entering his family’s ranch-style Hawaii home, where the clan is gathered for a Lu-au that’s also something of a memorial for the their late patriarch. The family is welcoming, but Ryan, beneath the forced smiles, signals fight-or-flight mode, a mental […]
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“Miami is the City of Hustle”: Jing Ai Ng on SXSW 2025 Premiere Forge
Common associations audiences might have with Miami: cruise lines, café con leche, beach parties, plastic surgery, Art Basel, Dexter, Scarface, a diverse and predominantly Latino and Caribbean population. AFI Conservatory graduate Jing Ai Ng wants to turn some of those tropes around with her debut feature Forge, premiering in the Narrative Spotlight section of SXSW 2025. The Malaysian-born filmmaker grew up shuttling between Southeast Asia and Miami and wanted to honor the Florida city she knew—that of first and second gen Asian subcultures, rare dim sum restaurants and a particular vein of white collar crime: art forgery. After first exploring […]
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“Women Like Gail are Often Vilified in the Media as Cold-Blooded Killers and Even Monsters”: Jessica Earnshaw on her SXSW-Debuting Baby Doe
Baby Doe is the latest from Jessica Earnshaw, whose Jacinta won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at Tribeca 2020. While that film followed a mother-daughter relationship bound up in drugs, incarceration and generational trauma, Baby Doe stars a happily married mother and grandmother who likely never even smoked a cigarette or garnered a speeding ticket. Indeed, Gail Ritchey was an unassuming conservative Christian living in rural Ohio until the magic of DNA matched the fifty-something to “Geauga’s Child,” a newborn left abandoned in the woods three decades ago. Which soon led to an arrest for murder (though […]
