Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“Letting Go…Trusting that the People You’ve Casted Will Bring it to a Better Place”: Karishma Dube on Bittu
Karishma Dube’s Bittu begins with sound before image, a vague squabble over black before it drops you into the middle of a world in motion. The opening shot is not held long before cutting to the next. It is one among many, does not announce itself as the beginning, and is not so contrived and defined that you can remember exactly when the film began. Suddenly, the viewer’s immersed in a story that started well before they became a witness to it. The opening shot introduces the film’s namesake little girl, Bittu, as played by the phenomenal first time performer […]
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Shot Reverse Shot: The Inheritance Director Ephraim Asili in Conversation with Residue Director Merawi Gerima (Part Two)
(Click here to read part one of Gerima and Asili’s conversation.) Gerima: Since we’re talking about the realities of Black cinema: when you don’t have time or money, a lot of times rehearsal plays an important part. I wanted to ask you about your process with your actors before you got to the studio. Did you have time to rehearse? Asili: Not as much as I would’ve liked, but what we did have, that I would say was even better than rehearsals was, I had written about half of the script, but I had pretty elaborate backstories. So, when I went […]
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Shot Reverse Shot: The Inheritance Director Ephraim Asili in Conversation with Residue Director Merawi Gerima (Part One)
As I wrote last year in my 25 New Face profile of Ephraim Asili, his first feature, The Inheritance, begins when “Julian (Eric Lockley) moves into his late grandmother’s house and initiates an experiment in Black collective living. The influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, evident in the film’s poster onscreen and the house’s boldly painted walls, is mixed with Asili’s personal memories of Philadelphia’s MOVE members (the Philadelphia native first met them as a teenager) and living in a Black Marxist collective. Shot, per Asili’s usual practice, on 16mm, The Inheritance marks a shift from overtly experimental to essentially narrative work. […]
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“In a Strange Way, the Film Feels Absolutely New to Me”: Director Tom DiCillo on the Release of the Director’s Cut of His 2006 Feature, Delirious
Set in and around New York’s meatpacking district in the mid-aughts, Tom DiCillo‘s 2006 drama/comedy Delirious is a film about mercenary paparazzi, venal agents and managers, and the commercial manufacture of fame. That said, the picture, available now on Blu-ray and digital platforms in an official directors cut 15 years after its release, is surprisingly sweet. Set well before Instagram and TikTok created new categories of celebrity, Delirious depicts a world where genuine human emotion can co-exist amidst planted Page Six items and staged photo calls. In a rich performance snapping from broad comedy to lacerating self-pity Steve Buscemi plays Les […]
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Pre- and Post-Pandemic Rohmer: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi on Berlinale 2021 Premiere Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Even after two of his features were derailed by the pandemic, Japanese director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi had a busy 2020. After breaking out with his 2016 film Happy Hour, Hamaguchi returned in 2018 with what he described as his first “commercial film,” Asako I and II, as opposed to a smaller, independent production. Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story, Drive My Car is Hamaguchi’s current “commercial” project, while the smaller-scale Berlinale 2021 premiere Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is his smaller, independent film. (When not in production on these films, Hamaguchi, along with director Kōji Fukada and two of his Happy Hour producers, helped spearhead a […]
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“We Spent a Lot of Time Choosing Lenses”: Keith Thomas on The Vigil and His Forthcoming Firestarter Adaptation
Unfolding over the course of one evening in the Hasidic community of Boro Park, Brooklyn, Keith Thomas’s debut feature, The Vigil, gets more unsettling the darker the night gets. Dave Davis plays Yakov, a young man experiencing difficulty living a newly secular life. As securing a job has proved difficult, he agrees to a friend’s impromptu request to serve as a shomer, watching over the cold body of a local man, Rubin Litvak, before the deceased is laid to rest. Anticipating an easy few hours of surfing the web on his smartphone, Yakov settles in for his watchman duties. Unfortunately […]
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Wuhan, Different Everyday: Shengze Zhu on Berlinale 2021 Premiere A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
Despite relocating to Chicago in 2015, Shengze Zhu has focused on her hometown of Wuhan throughout her career. Her first feature, Out of Focus (2014), is a creative portrait of the school-life of children from low-income families and the troubles they face. Her second, Another Year (2016), uses long takes to document the mealtimes of migrant worker families. Both are set in Wuhan but were made after she first left China in 2010 to study filmmaking in Columbia, Missouri. For Present.Perfect (2019), she widened her lens, creating a montage of live-streamers living across China entirely from desktop recordings of their broadcasts. […]
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Phase Zero: Felipe Cazals on His 1979 Gabriel García Márquez Collaboration, El año de la peste (Year of the Plague)
It has been a good day for everyone, even for God. No sign of rain. No evidence of disease or blood. — Henry Miller, quoted at the beginning of El año de la peste Around this time a year ago, many of us were suddenly sent home and forced to become film programmers. I asked people: after Contagion or, from a far distance, Outbreak, what was the ultimate Coronavirus movie? The Last Days of Planet Earth? Prophecies of Nostradamus? 28 Weeks Later? The Host? Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole? The South Korean apocalypse thriller The Flu? Logan’s Run? The Seed of Man? Soylent Green? 12 Monkeys? Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus? […]
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“… Once a Person’s Voice is Captured, They are Expendable”: Director George C. Wolfe on the Musical Histories of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Black music. White privilege. Chicago. 1927. What could possibly go wrong? Indeed, nearly everything, and it’s chronicled with artful intensity in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the second in a cycle of ten plays that compassionately detail the 20th-century experiences of African Americans. Ma Rainey’s was brought to the screen this season in a stellar production directed by George Wolfe that stars Viola Davis in the title role and, in his final role, Chadwick Boseman as the upstart young trumpeter and rake in her band. Wolfe, a Tony Award-winning theater director and writer, is gradually building a formidable resume […]
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“I Had to Use Nine Credit Cards”: Shatara Michelle Ford on Test Pattern
Shatara Michelle Ford’s debut feature Test Pattern addresses sensitive material with clinically painstaking detail. The narrative begins in 2017 at an Austin bar as Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) meets Evan (Will Brill), a thirtysomething white guy whose liquid courage prompts him to ask for Renesha’s phone number. Somewhat surprisingly, the two hit it off and grow to become a loving couple.One evening, Renesha begrudgingly (she has work in the morning) meets up with a friend for drinks at a local bar, where they meet two flirtatious men who proceed to drug them. Nearing unconsciousness, Renesha is taken to an unfamiliar location […]
