Directors
Interviews - Directors
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Read Interviews With The 2021-22 Student Short Film Showcase Winners, a Collaborative Award From The Gotham, JetBlue and Focus Features
The winners of the third annual Student Short Film Showcase, a collaborative award bestowed by The Gotham, JetBlue and Focus Features, are currently available to stream here at Filmmaker, on Focus Features’s YouTube channel and in the air as part of JetBlue’s in-flight entertainment selection. More than 20 graduate film schools submitted works to be considered for the Student Short Film Showcase, and the winners selected for the 2021-22 slate hail from diverse backgrounds and schools across the country. Columbia College Chicago grad Akanksha Cruczynski creates an amusing yet melancholy work of autofiction with Close Ties to Home Country, which […]
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“We Wanted the Film to Feel Like a Memory, a Dream of Childhood…”: Director James Ponsoldt on His Coming-of-Age Neo-Noir, Summering
In Summering, James Ponsoldt‘s return to cinema following several years of episodic television work, four young girls, best friends about to enter different junior high schools, find their final moments of group bonding upended by a shocking discovery: a dead body. Encountered near a secret spot they dub Terabithia (after the YA novel and film Bridge to Terabithia), the gruesome find turns into a challenge. What if rather than calling the police or telling their parents these friends could actually solve the mystery of this deceased middle-aged man’s identity and cause of death? It’d be both a kind of end-of-summer […]
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“By No Means a Film Against Boys”: Alli Haapasalo on Girl Picture
Girl Picture, the sophomore feature from Finnish director Alli Haapasalo, ditches hokey coming of age conventions while preserving the crushing emotional weight inherent to being a teenage girl. The film’s protagonists—best friends Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) and Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen), alongside Mimmi’s lover Emma (Linnea Leino)—navigate the threshold of impending adulthood, oscillating wildly between manic self-centeredness and graceful altruism, encapsulating the disparate emotional poles one must traverse to arrive at self-actualized adulthood. What truly sets Girl Picture apart from the otherwise cloyingly twee coming of age landscape is its depiction of teenage sexual awakenings as something that can be natural, pleasurable […]
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“Without the Consent of our Child Protagonists We Would Not Have Made the Film”: Lidia Duda on her Locarno-Premiering Doc Fledglings
Premiering at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Lidia Duda’s Fledglings is an entrancing look at a trio of seven year olds who bravely travel far from home to board at a school for the visually impaired. Forced to rely only on themselves, their teachers — and most importantly one another — Zosia, Oskar and Kinga spend their days mastering everything from handrails to utensils, to spelling words and playing the piano. Not to mention navigating often overwhelming emotions. (At least for the creative Zosia and sensitive Oskar, whose developmental disabilities can sometimes stress the besties out. Kinga, on the other […]
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“The Very First Cut Lasted About 25 Hours”: María Álvarez on Her Proust Documentary, Le temps perdu
María Álvarez’s 2020 doc Le temps perdu (premiering theatrically on these shores at NYC’s Film Forum August 12th) is the second film in an exquisite trilogy, beginning with 2017’s Las cinéphilas and ending just last year with the IDFA debut of Las cercanas. All three docs are poetic meditations on the intersection of art, aging and memory, similarly focused on vibrant geriatric characters whose connections to cinema, literature and music (in ascending part order) are as profound as life itself. In the case of Le temps perdu reading becomes, in the apt description of one enthusiastic gent, “a creative act” — and an epic one at that. For […]
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“The ‘Broken Heroine Narrative’ — That’s Something I’m Very Interested in Subverting”: Lily Baldwin on Her Audible Podcast, Stories of the Stalked
Director, choreographer and dancer Lily Baldwin has appeared in these pages several times over the last decade in interviews about her work across both short film and virtual reality. But throughout this time, one project — alternately creatively compelling and deeply distressing — has been a persistent focus. In a story she details in our interview below, it began as Glass, an autobiographically-inspired thriller about a woman being stalked, that placed in the IFP (now Gotham) Emerging Storytellers program in 2014. It then morphed into a multi-part documentary TV series before finally now hitting download queues as a six-part Audible […]
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“I Want to Be the Rod Serling of Cinematography”: An Interview with Little Odessa DP Tom Richmond
The following interview with director of photography Tom Richmond appeared in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1995 issue. Richmond died yesterday in New York at the age of 72, and this interview is now published online for the first time. — Editor “I want to be the Rod Serling of cinematography,” says Tom Richmond, whose distinctive and varied lensing has graced three recent films: the “Tex Avery meets Bonnie and Clyde” Love and a.45; the hyper-realist heist noir Killing Zoe; and Little Odessa, James Gray’s intimate epic about Brighton Beach’s Russian mafia. “The way Serling could get into you…”Richmond continues. “I want [my […]
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“We Can Shoot the Sun and the Characters Dramatically, but the World is Humble”: Writer/Director Max Walker-Silverman on A Love Song
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 […]
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“It Came Out of Me Almost Fully Born”: Writer/Director Lena Dunham on Her New Feature, Sharp Stick
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 […]
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“There Are Only So Many Ways to Light a Kitchen with a Low Ceiling”: Ellie Foumbi and DP Tinx Chan on Our Father, The Devil
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. […]
