Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Canadians in “Space”: Stéphane Lafleur on Viking
While Stéphane Lafleur’s third feature, 2014’s Tu Dors Nicole, chronicled the summer malaise between of aimless Quebecois post-grads, his follow-up, Viking, explores a different, slightly otherworldly strain of existentialism. High school gym teacher David (Steven Laplante) gets the opportunity to revive his dreams of becoming an astronaut by joining a behavioral research team called the Viking Society that will mirror the first manned mission to Mars. This B-team plans to replicate the mission in a controlled environment that resembles the probe—i.e., a Quonset hut in the desert—where they will game out potential interpersonal conflicts between the five-member crew in order […]
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“Keeping Track of the Blood Continuity was a Constant Thing”: Rebekah McKendry on Glorious
An unwritten rule of public restroom usage is that one should never attempt to strike up a conversation with the person one stall over, and that’s doubly true if the person next to you is an all-powerful god sent down from the cosmos. After a night of grieving and binge-drinking leads to hugging the toilet bowl at a gross rural rest stop, Wes (Ryan Kwanten) finds himself in that scenario when the person in the stall introduces themselves. That person is nothing more than a voice funneled through a gloryhole, but what that voice requests of Wes (and why) raises […]
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“I Tried to Make the Film So Everyone Can Find Their Own Bowie”: Brett Morgen on Moonage Daydream
Documentary innovator Brett Morgen once again pushes the boundaries of creative non-fiction filmmaking with his latest doc, Moonage Daydream. Morgen was given access by the artist’s estate to over five million works in the archive — music, film clips, artwork, musings, interviews, photographs and recordings, some of which have never before been seen or heard. The resulting two hour and 20 minute-long film is a kinetic, sometimes euphoric tribute to Bowie and his multitude of stage personalities, career offshoots, and personal reflections. As with his other archive-based work (Jane, Cobain: Montage of Heck), Morgen’s approach is unconventional. Utilizing some of the alternative forms […]
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“It’s Not Funny if It’s Not Bright”: Greg Mottola on Confess, Fletch
I read Confess, Fletch for the first time in high school and, ever since, it’s remained a personal favorite. That often surprises people when I tell them that, not least because the name “Fletch” is less associated with Gregory Mcdonald’s genuinely funny novels than Chevy Chase’s considerably goofier incarnation of the journalist-sleuth in 1985’s Fletch and 1988’s Fletch Lives. The original Fletch adaptation essentially retains the structure and basics of Mcdonald’s original but changes the tone to better suit Chase. For better and worse, Mcdonald’s books string together often hilarious dialogue exchanges with aspirationally Hemingway-esque connective prose; they work better when the emphasis is on […]
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19 Months from Conception to Completion: Daniel Goldhaber on How to Blow Up a Pipeline
Daniel Goldhaber’s second feature, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, takes its title and broader inspiration from Andreas Malm’s non-fiction manifesto, published by Verso. Malm’s book is heavy on the language of comrades and cadres, an exhortation to ecoterrorism to the already sympathetically inclined—and, as a friend pointed out, it’d be more accurately titled Why to Blow Up a Pipeline, as instructions aren’t provided. While Goldhaber’s version of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t a manual as such, its commitment to depicting the means by which one might achieve its title goes much further than most. Eight protagonists from all over the country […]
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“My Social Location as a Member of a Fraternity Makes My Voice a Credible One”: Byron Hurt on His PBS Independent Lens Doc Hazing
As someone who never understood (okay, downright loathed) the conformist culture of so-called Greek-letter organizations, I didn’t bother to catch Byron Hurt’s (Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Soul Food Junkies) latest doc Hazing when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival back in the spring. But fortunately, the film—which takes a deep historical, as well as personal, dive into what Wikipedia defines as “any activity expected of someone in joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person’s willingness to participate”—will now be launching the new season of PBS’s Independent Lens, which […]
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“I Believe in a Holistic Approach to World Building”: Sophie Jarvis on her TIFF-Debuting Psychological Drama Until Branches Bend
Veteran production designer Sophie Jarvis’s assured feature debut Until Branches Bend is one smartly executed, unexpected gem. Premiering in the Discovery section of this year’s TIFF, the psychological drama (really a contemporary horror film) follows a cannery worker named Robin (2016 TIFF Rising Star Grace Glowicki) whose life is upended after discovering a creepy bug in a peach while (conveniently) alone at break time. Unable to get her boss to take the very real threat of a catastrophic invasion seriously — and perhaps risk a factory shutdown — she decides to go public with her unappetizing finding, which entails sounding […]
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Duration and Velocity: An Interview with Larry Gottheim
Despite making decades of fascinating film work and playing a pivotal role at Binghamton by founding the film department and bringing Ken Jacobs onboard, Larry Gottheim remains an under-celebrated figure in the American avant-garde. With Fog Line (1970)—an 11 minute single-take of fog slowly rising in a meadow, trees asymmetrically clustered, framed by telephone wire—he found a semblance of universal acclaim in the underground. The “first period” of Gottheim’s work (of which Fog Line is a crucial part) takes an approach largely inspired by the stoic film observations of Andy Warhol, a rubric of silence and static framing which trains […]
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“We Were Filming at a Time When Putin Was Arresting Opposition”: Sarah McCarthy on Her Telluride-Premiering Doc Short Anastasia
Sarah McCarthy is no stranger to navigating the myriad challenges posed by authoritarian states. Indeed, the Australian doc-maker has shot in precarious political places throughout the world, from the Philippines, to Saudi Arabia to Russia—where she’s returned time and time again. Nor is she a stranger to the Toronto International Film Festival, where following on the heels of feature-length works (The Sound of Mumbai, The Dark Matter of Love) she now debuts her latest short Anastasia; and the innocuous title, much like the film’s titular character, belies one powerful punch. Anastasia Shevchenko is a Russian civil rights advocate who’s been arrested […]
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“Directing When You Are an Editor Feels Like Cheating”: Cinque Northern on His Telluride Doc Short Angola Do You Hear Us?
Having already made the prestige fest rounds to great acclaim this year—from Tribeca to the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage outdoor film series just this summer—Cinque Northern’s Angola Do You Hear Us? is now a must-catch at Telluride. The documentary short follows the incomparable actor and playwright Liza Jessie Peterson on her artistic and spiritual mission to bring her one-woman show The Peculiar Patriot to none other than the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The film also explores all the baggage, bureaucracy and ultimate blocking that was met with a work centered on racial injustice (that deftly connects the capitalistic dots […]
