West African mythology is an integral facet of Nikyatu Jusu’s filmmaking. Whether in her directorial stint on an episode of The CW’s Two Sentence Horror Stories or the melanated day-walking vampires in her short film (and 2019 festival circuit hit) Suicide by Sunlight, the Sierra Leonean-American writer/director has made it her mission to introduce American audiences to the folklore of her heritage. If she also manages to revamp tired (and overly Eurocentric) monster tropes while she’s at it, then so be it. It’s fitting, then, that Jusu’s feature debut Nanny manages to do a little bit of both. When a […]
Thrown from a second floor window, a box television clocks old Leonor (Sheila Francisco) square on the head. She wakes up inside her work-in-progress movie script, an homage to ’80s Pinoy action movies, able to steer the rest of the unwritten plot in first person. Back in reality, the retired movie director lies comatose in a hospital bed while her sons–one flesh and blood, the other a ghost–wander and wonder around, trying to option their mother’s unfinished script to pay the bills. Will Leonor wake up in time, if at all, to retain agency of her comeback story? When you […]
The racist roots of Ivy League academia are molded into an intangible boogeywoman in writer/director Mariama Diallo’s feature debut Master. While the film takes place on the fictional campus of Ancaster—located in the greater Boston area—much of the film’s insights on matters of race and gender stem from Diallo’s own undergraduate experience at Yale. In fact, the titular term “master” refers to what would more commonly be known as “head of house,” or the senior member of a college within a wider university system. If this term still seems convoluted and archaic, it’s likely because it’s largely a British custom, […]
The following conversation between directors Quentin Tarantino and Alexandre Rockwell was published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1993 issue, as these films hit commercial release. It is being reprinted today, as Reservoir Dogs celebrates the 30th anniversary of its premiere at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Friendship, loyalty, and honor–all are classic film themes which, ironically, can sometimes be hard qualities to find in the world of filmmaking. For every film that beats the odds and manages to get made, independent or otherwise, there are a hundred shattered deals, broken promises, and crushed filmmakers left in the shadows. This year two filmmakers […]
World premiering January 24th in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance, The Mission marks the feature-length doc debut of Helsinki-based writer and journalist Tania Anderson, who, on a cold winter day back in 2016, happened to pass by a pair of English-speaking young men in familiar suits discussing the perils of temptation. Which prompted the open-minded British-Swiss-American to wonder not, “What the heck are Mormon missionaries doing in Finland?” (my first question), but “What makes them tick?” And from this combination of curiosity and accidental eavesdropping the idea for The Mission was born. To find out more about the film, which […]
Framing Agnes, the title of Chase Joynt’s (No Ordinary Man) latest genre-queering film – world premiering in the Next section at this year’s Sundance – refers to a controversial trans woman who, in the 1960s, participated in a groundbreaking gender health research study at UCLA. It also refers to the fact that, historically, trans people have never been allowed to leave the frame. Or, paradoxically, enter the frame (if not a blond beauty like Agnes or Christine Jorgensen). So how does Joynt place Agnes in his cinematic frame without framing her? The answer is with an abundance of artistic ingenuity […]
Trying to make it as a twenty-something in a band is hard enough. But when that band is Slave to Sirens, the Middle East’s first all-female metal group, the stakes and the obstacles can seem off the charts. Which is exactly what makes Moroccan-American director and cinematographer Rita Baghdadi’s Sirens, world-premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance, so engrossing. The film focuses on the band’s co-founders and guitarists Lilas and Shery, who over the course of a brisk 78 minutes navigate friendship and sexuality, artistic vision and international fame – all within the explosive confines of […]
Cynicism is the dramatic foil in To the End, Rachel Lears’s Sundance Documentary Competition follow-up to her 2020 Sundance picture Knock Down the House. In that film she followed four women — political newcomers hailing from diverse walks of life, all motivated to action by the Trump presidency — as they mounted underdog campaigns to win House seats. That one of the women was New York candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave the film a rousingly satisfying ending, even as other women’s losses made clear the forces opposing progressive generational change. Employing a similar structure, To the End follows three young activists […]
A House Made of Splinters is Simon Lereng Wilmont’s exquisite followup to The Distant Barking of Dogs, his likewise stunning feature debut (that was awarded Best First Appearance at IDFA 2017, and went on to be Oscar shortlisted two years later on these shores). With this latest, world-premiering January 23 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, the Danish director returns to the suddenly-in-the-headlines front line of Eastern Ukraine to once again focus on the youngest victims of an endless war. This time he trains his lens on Eva, Sasha and Kolya – three children temporarily removed from substance-abusing parents and […]
The eerie, nagging feeling of being watched is elevated to a hauntingly tangible reality in Watcher, the feature directorial debut of Chloe Okuno. Co-written by Okuno (recently acclaimed for helming the “Storm Drain” segment in the horror anthology V/H/S/94) and seasoned screenwriter Zack Ford (who in 2021 ran for mayor of Skaneateles, NY before ultimately relocating to L.A.), the film follows Julia (Maika Monroe) and Francis (Karl Glusman), a young American couple who relocate to Bucharest for Francis’s work. Shortly after settling into their minimalist new digs, Julia begins to notice an unsettling presence in her most intimate spaces. As […]