Directors
Interviews - Directors
-
Taking Everything to Extremes: A Conversation Between Michael Almereyda, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on The Brutalist
“Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.” So wrote the spectacularly good Brutalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fair guess Brady Corbet and his longtime co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold have encountered this quote, and that they recognize the affinities between architecture and movies. Being good in either medium requires a sure knowledge of your materials, an ability to translate imagined designs into physical reality, to assemble and guide teams of inspired collaborators and to know or intuit more than a little about visual textures, space and light and how to move […]
-
Inspired by Springfield and Sesame Street: Osgood Perkins on The Monkey
“Everybody dies, and that’s life,” one character proclaims in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, approaching the inevitability of suffering with a wink and a grin. In between executing a real-estate agent via shotgun blast and setting fire to an occupied baby stroller, this more deliberately comedic outing from the writer-director behind Longlegs is all about the strange catharsis of helplessly laughing through life’s horrors. Adapted from Stephen King’s short story of the same name, The Monkey follows twin brothers Bill and Hal (Christian Convery in childhood, Theo James in adulthood), who discover a sinister wind-up “organ grinder” monkey toy among their […]
-
You Can Never (Maybe?) Break the Chain: Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Hot Milk
Spanish seaside entanglements, a combustive mother-daughter relationship, mysterious, painful malaise, the veiled threat of healing and new currents of love trail Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Nearby, watching her life pass by is Sofia (Emma Mackey), a doctoral student in anthropology and caregiver since she was a young girl to her defiant mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), mostly restricted to a wheelchair. A story of self discovery, queer kindling and medical melancholy among these three fascinating women in a sun-baked setting, Hot Milk, premiering at the 75th Berlinale, is one of the most buzzed new titles in the Competition section. The directorial debut […]
-
“Genocide Brain”: Christine Haroutounian on Berlinale 2025 Premiere After Dreaming
The title of Christine Haroutounian’s first feature, After Dreaming, suggests a waking state, but the whole film hangs in a region where the divide between facts and hallucinations is never entirely clear. A follow-up to her 2020 short World—a cantankerous, Armenian-set study of end-of-life caretaking centered on a young woman and her dying mother—Dreaming sees the Los Angeles-born filmmaker return to her ancestral turf for a surreal road trip across a country still haunted by ongoing clashes with neighboring Azerbaijan. Dreaming, however, “is not a war film,” Haroutounian told me before her feature travelled to Berlin, where it premiered in […]
-
“Meredith Understood That I Needed the Freedom to Create My Own Interpretation of Her Work and Life”: Billy Shebar on his Berlinale-Premiering Meredith Monk Doc, Monk in Pieces
Billy Shebar’s Monk in Pieces stars Meredith Monk, an artist so singular as to be unclassifiable. (A collage of Zoom-interviewed academics who expound on the titular composer-singer-director-choreographer – and creator of new opera, music theater works, films and installations – is like watching proverbial blind men describing an elephant.) A progenitor of what we now call “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk began her career in the downtown NYC art scene of the ’60s and ’70s — a time and place not all that kind to female boundary busters. (Indeed, New York Times reviews ranged from scathing to the […]
-
“The Film is Not a Resistance Film”: Juanjo Pereira on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Under the Flags, the Sun
A row of men sit proudly on horses as a white flag drifts languidly in the wind. The beating sun lights the crowd, who applaud dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s ascent to power in 1954, and with it, the promise of “peace, progress and fraternity.” Time slows down as an ominous atmosphere envelopes this scene, foreshadowing what the future holds for Paraguay. Juanjo Pereira’s debut feature film, Under the Flags, the Sun, is a profound exploration of Stroessner’s dictatorship almost entirely made with archival footage, the film crafts a portrait of the open wounds of the 34-year dictatorship. The film premieres tonight […]
-
“It Carries the Weight of Improvisation but Also Inevitability”: Liryc Dela Cruz on his Berlinale-premiering Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte)
Liryc Dela Cruz’s Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte) takes the simplest of storylines and renders it infinitely complex. Three Filipino siblings, all domestic workers in Italy who’ve not seen each other for years, reunite at an extravagant villa the elder sister inherited after the death of her longtime employer. They reminisce about childhood over Filipino delicacies the younger sister and brother have brought, and stroll the vast grounds that the new owner meticulously preserves as if she were still a servant and not the lady of the house. But as the languorous day draws to a close […]
-
Nine Years of Storytelling: Seth and Pete Scriver on Endless Cookie
Sundance is capable of showing some fairly excruciating and/or formulaic comedy, but one alternative this year was the shaggy DIY delight of Endless Cookie. Tucked away in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, this Canadian animation from half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver (who are white and indigenous, respectively) daisy-chains stories about their family history, from the far-flung Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba (where Pete lives) to 1980s downtown Toronto (where they logged time together). Stories from the past blur with the constant activity of the house and environs where Pete’s children and dogs live as Seth visits to record people’s […]
-
“…How To Put Myself in a Situation Where the Outside Pain Helps Me Reach the Inside Pain…”: Stefan Djordjevic on His IFFR-Premiering Wind, Talk to Me
German philosopher Ernst Bloch was noted for his introspection and study around what he termed the “utopian imagination.” He put forth the concept of simultaneous non-simultaneity: the possibility that people could live in different temporalities while inhabiting the same place at the same time. Moving image work, by its very nature, can illustrate this idea like no other art form can – even without special effects or CGI. From frame to frame, sequence to sequence, a collection of purpose-built images and sounds floats through their own unique space-time continuum, evoking an awakening, a recognition, creating a genre-defying ode to staying […]
-
“Compassion Should Rule the Day, Not Punishment”: Director Cole Webley on His Sundance-Premiering Drama, Omaha
A family of four—an unnamed Dad (John Magaro), his children Ella and Charlie (Molly Belle Wright and Wyatt Solis), and their Golden Retriever—hit the road at the start of Omaha, towards Nebraska. We don’t get to know too much about them at first—just that they have an old car that needs a little push, and they’ve been evicted from their home, forced to collect their most treasured possessions quickly, like they are saving memorabilia during a fire. We don’t even know why they are heading there. Cole Webley’s deeply compassionate gut-punch of a movie, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic […]
