Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Could Only Shoot When I Had Increments of $200 to Spend”: Lizzie Borden on Working Girls, Harvey Weinstein and Changing Perceptions of Sex Work
Highly respected but rarely screened, Working Girls, Lizzie Borden’s 1986 feature about a group of women working an extended shift in a Manhattan brothel, finally makes its way to home video this week thanks to the Criterion Collection. Presented in a new 4K digital restoration, the film is long overdue for reappraisal, and not merely due to the struggles currently faced by sex workers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Borden’s previous feature, Born in Flames, was defiantly scrappy and overtly political. Working Girls represents an upgrade in production value while retaining Borden’s unwavering interest in feminist politics, race relations, workers’ rights […]
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Shooting on a Moving Period Russian Train: Juho Kuosmanen on Cannes 2021 Competition Premiere Compartment No. 6
In Juho Kuosmanen’s debut feature The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, a Finnish boxer (and baker) gets a title shot at Helsinki Olympic Stadium against the American featherweight champion. At their joint press conference, the Finnish media is desperate to hear from their distinguished foreign guest: “What do you think of our country?” The real Olli Mäki lost by second-round TKO, but this movie about a small nation jostling for recognition on the world stage took top honors at Un Certain Regard in 2016. Kuosmanen is back at Cannes this year and he’s gone up a class: […]
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“We Had No Idea about the LSD, or that Napa Had a Farm….”: Mike Plante and Jason Willis on Their Cramps/Mutants Punk Doc, We Were There To Be There
One of the most storied shows of the punk era was seen by just a tiny audience at an unlikely venue — a California mental hospital. The punk rockabilly band The Cramps and theatrical art-punk band The Mutants played the Napa State Hospital on June 13, 1978, one of a series of concerts programmed at the institution for its residents during that era. What made this concert different was its documentation — it was recorded on old Sony equipment by Bay Area documentarian Joe Rees and his Target Video crew. “Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I’m not […]
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“What is Our Duty Today as Viewers?”: Abdallah Al-Khatib on Cannes (ACID program)-Selected Documentary Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege)
A movie could be made out of the making of Abdallah Al-Khatib’s heartbreakingly poetic Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege), screening in the ACID program at this year’s Cannes. The film’s title refers to Yarmouk, a district in Damascus that served as the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 until its destruction in 2018. In 2013 the Al-Assad regime set up a siege, depriving Yarmouk’s residents of food, medicine and electricity while haphazardly dropping barrel bombs on what it deemed a rebel stronghold. An accidental filmmaker, Al-Khatib—born and bred in Yarmouk until ISIS expelled him in 2015—was a […]
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Battle Cry: Beth B and Lydia Lunch on Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over
Beth B’s films take you deep into the darkness of the human psyche. With a body of work that includes shorts, features, video installations and episodic television, she creates from a place of pure opposition and resistance, standing up against oppressive systems of control and calling them out with the knowledge that discomfort and provocation are what creates dialogue and generates positive change. B’s films are not easy. B’s new documentary film, Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, may be her most compelling and powerful film yet, as it looks at musician, writer and provocateur Lydia Lunch’s 45-year career […]
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Pregnant Pauses: Matías Piñeiro on Isabella
Matías Piñeiro’s sixth feature and seventh Shakespeare-related film, Isabella, begins with purely abstract images whose use here is new in his work: four different shades on the blue spectrum, alternately lighter and darker in smaller and smaller concentric rectangles. The smallest, central rectangle fades to purple before three different shades of that color pulsate outward to the largest rectangle. The rectangles then dissolve into one unified purple that fills the rectangular frame containing the film itself, which starts gently pulsating in different shades under silent opening titles. These abstract color studies (whose resemblance to the work of James Turrell was […]
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“Digital Cinematography is Mostly Mired in a Sort of Default Realism”: Brandon Colvin on A Dim Valley
Fifteen minutes into Brandon Colvin’s third feature, A Dim Valley, Albert (Whitmer Thomas) presents Ian (Zach Weintraub) with a generously packed bowl of marijuana, which the two proceed to light up. Shortly thereafter, they witness a surreal vision in the forest near the field research camp where they’re spending the summer, but to call this a drug-induced departure from realism would be inaccurate. From the very beginning of this whimsical backwoods tone poem, Colvin establishes something like a stoner ambiance: pacing is lethargic, odd bits of behavior are lingered on, glassy-eyed stares into the middle distance proliferate. There’s a sense […]
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Love and Memories: Director Phil Lord Interviews Director Heidi Ewing About Her Debut Narrative Feature, I Carry You With Me
This article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 2021 edition. It is being posted today online in conjunction with I Carry You With Me‘s release in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. Arriving amidst a number of recent pictures exploring notions of hybridity—mostly documentaries that incorporate narrative or meta elements—nonfiction filmmaker Heidi Ewing’s feature dramatic debut, I Carry You With Me, deploys its formal invention in movingly unexpected ways. Taking the recounted memories of an undocumented Mexican couple living in New York, Ewing tells a swooning, deeply romantic period love story. And it’s one that achieves an arresting sobriety with contemporary […]
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“You Can Do Anything with Film, Just Like You Can Do Anything with Writing”: At MoMA, the Experimental Cinema of Neelon Crawford
Working primarily with a hand-wound 16mm Bolex, Neelon Crawford made a series of experimental films from 1968 through 1980. Shot in the US, the United Kingdom, and South America, the films explored light and movement in a variety of landscapes. Crawford manipulated the image through film stocks, filters, frame rates, double- and triple-exposures, animation, editing, and printing, at times adding soundtracks to imagery that ranged from observational to abstract. Crawford’s films were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Cineprobe series in the 1970s and were distributed by Canyon Cinema, among others. After For the Spider Woman in 1980, he […]
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“The Whole Impetus for Queer Comics is to Make our Lives Visible”: Vivian Kleiman on Tribeca World-Premiering No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics
Directed and produced by Vivian Kleiman, Tribeca premiere No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics provides a glimpse into the lives and works of comic artists Alison Bechdel, Rupert Kinnard, Mary Wings, Howard Cruse, and Jennifer Camper, who were integral to the development of the first queer comics in the underground comic scene. Kleiman does a phenomenal job in placing the vibrant energies of the pioneering artists in dialogue with younger artists while framing their comic works within the larger context of intersectional identities and the history of the LGBT community. When asked about the creative influences that […]
