Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Was Raised by a Journalist, I Am a Journalist, and Here Was Someone Taken from the Earth Simply for Doing Her Job”: Erin Lee Carr on her HBO Doc Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall
Erin Lee Carr’s latest two-part doc for HBO tackles one of the grizzliest — and weirdest — true crime cases to make international headlines in recent years. In fact, the tale at the center of Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall is likely already familiar to HBO viewers, as Tobias Lindholm’s six-part narrative series The Investigation is based on the same bizarre event. It was back in 2017 that the Swedish journalist Kim Wall, living with her boyfriend in Denmark at the time, went missing in the waters right off Copenhagen following a trip in a homemade midget submarine built […]
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“These Were People Who Were Searching for a Place to Dream”: Nollywood Director Ike Nnaebue on his True/False-debuting No U-Turn
Ike Nnaebue’s No U-Turn—its title a reference to an interrupted journey the Nollywood director embarked on as an impoverished 20something and is now determined to finish—is an ambitious cinematic quest. Part of the Generation Africa project, the Berlinale-selected film is a cross-country trip across the continent to find out exactly why young people are still compelled to risk life and limb to reach Europe — 26 years after Nnaebue himself tried and failed to do the same. (And ended up with multi-award-winning filmmaking fame back home in Lagos instead.) To learn all about the road (bus) trip and any insights Nnaebue […]
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“The Power Was in the Conversations, So I Knew I Had to Help the Viewer to Hear Them”: Tomasz Wolski on his Doc Fortnight-Debuting 1970
Tomasz Wolski’s 1970 is a riveting work of ingenious artistry. (And one of the highlights of last November’s IDFA, where it screened in the Best of Fests section.) It was during that chaotic titular year that food prices skyrocketed, and Gdansk’s striking shipyard workers would spark nationwide protests across Poland, which would culminate in the triumphal Solidarity movement a decade later — but not before the Communist leaders at the time decided to quash the threatening uprising with lethal force, calling in army units, tanks, and militiamen with guns. None of which we actually see in 1970. Indeed, the veteran Polish documentarian has […]
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Wreckers of Civilization : Marcus Werner Hed and Dan Fox on their Doc Fortnight-premiering Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle
Marcus Werner Hed and Dan Fox’s Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, which NY-premiered February 24 as part of this year’s hybrid Doc Fortnight, certainly lives up to its billing as “a unique portrait of living for art’s sake.” The story began in the UK’s pre-punk days in Hull — a port city never to be remembered for its music scene — when a group of resident weirdos rebranded themselves as COUM Transmissions and began staging colorful happenings on the city’s grey streets. Artists and musicians came and went (and moved to London); the […]
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39 Shooting Days and One Year of Editing: James Vaughan on Friends and Strangers
Acquaintances Ray (Fergus Wilson) and Alice (Emma Diaz) bump into each other in Brisbane, discover they’re both about to drive back to Sydney and decide to stop along the way for a night of camping—one of the first of many unexpected detours in Friends and Strangers, a fresh, funny and unorthodox rarity of an arthouse comedy. The title of this 2021 Rotterdam premiere gives some indication of how writer-director-editor James Vaughan’s feature debut unfolds: it takes some time to discern that Ray is the film’s main subject, as he keeps encountering new people and the film seems like it could go […]
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Welcome to the Dollhouse: Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney on Strawberry Mansion
In the year 2035, dream-auditing is a prolific but thankless business, especially for James Preble (Kentucker Audley). Scrummaging through an individual’s archived dreams via an endless collection of VHS tapes, Preble finds himself constantly stuck between mundane reality and the elusive world of someone’s REM cycle. The primary goal of slumming through this government job? Dream taxation. One afternoon, as he visits the home of Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller and, in the dream world, Grace Glowicki), a welcoming but mysterious dream tax evader, the lines between consciousness and unconsciousness grow blurred. A love story, a comedy, a 1980s children’s fantasy […]
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“The Way Forward is the Only Exit”: Payal Kapadia on A Night of Knowing Nothing
In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed Gajendra Chauhan, a B-list actor and member of the right-wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), as chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India. Recognizing this as yet another BJP maneuver to saffronize (rewrite with right-wing policies and Hindu-nationalist agendas) curriculums, students protested and struck. Police arrested and tortured such dissenters across national institutes; administrations hiked up entry exam fees and cut nonconforming students’ stipends. Persisting today, the BJP’s violent acts of suppression especially affect students of the Dalit caste. But film students across campuses (including the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute) continue […]
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“The Pandemic was Raging but the People I was Filming were Unfazed”: Jenny Perlin on her Doc Fortnight-Opening Bunker
Multimedia artist Jenny Perlin, whose work includes 16mm hand-drawn animated films, videos, installations, and drawings (some of which are in MoMA’s collection), opens this year’s hybrid Doc Fortnight with Bunker, a literal underground film. Beginning back in pre-pandemic 2018 Perlin took a cross-country road trip, hoping to explore the lives of men (almost all straight, white and middle-aged) who call decommissioned nuclear silos and military bunkers home. Along the way, she also meets the (demographically similar) businessmen building, selling and sometimes even living the fear-driven American dream. Filmmaker caught up with Perlin a few days before the doc’s February 23rd […]
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A Restaurant’s Democratic Promise: Director Lisa Hurwitz and Her Doc, The Automat
When The Automat director Lisa Hurwitz left her family’s home in Southern California to go to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, she found that the place where she was most comfortable was the school’s cafeteria, the Greenery. “I made new friends there every day and there was a different food every day,” she says. Hurwitz’s academic focus wasn’t film: “I took one documentary filmmaking course, just before I graduated.” But she also had a job projecting 35mm movies at Olympia’s Capitol Theater, aka the Picture Palace, which was operated by the Olympia Film Society and was the venue for […]
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“I Believe that Valuing African Audiences Will Break the Pattern of Cliches That We Have Become Accustomed To”: Akuol de Mabior on Her Berlinale-Debuting doc No Simple Way Home
South Sudanese director Akuol de Mabior’s No Simple Way Home is a gorgeous example of what African filmmakers can accomplish if Westerners would just get out of their way. A world premiere in the Panorama section of this year’s Berlinale, the doc is produced by Kenyan filmmaker Sam Soko (Softie) and the South African duo Tiny Mungwe and Don Edkins of STEPS (Social Transformation and Empowerment Projects) as part of the organization’s Generation Africa initiative, “a pan-African anthology of 25 documentary films from 16 countries in Africa, on the topic of migration.” And it tells a tale not of folks […]
