Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“In Switzerland, We All Benefit From the Bank”: Andreas Fontana on Azor
Andreas Fontana’s exquisite, quietly dazzling feature Azor answers a question we didn’t know we had: how to make a mystery—a thriller, even—set in the world of private banking. Partly: it’s about the arrival of a Swiss banker, Yvan De Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione), in early 1980s Buenos Aires, when Argentina is still in the grip of dictatorship. De Wiel is there to take on the wealthy (and suspicious) clients of a colleague, Keys, who has disappeared, leaving a flamboyant reputation. Often accompanied by his wife, Inès (Stéphanie Cléau), he’s left to navigate the already murky areas of hush-hush finance under the […]
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“What Would You Do?”: Writer/Director Michael Mohan on Screen Sex, Spying and the Making of His Erotic Thriller, The Voyeurs
The cinema of scopophilia is given a generational, technological and gender-reversing twist in Michael Mohan’s The Voyeurs, opening today on Amazon Prime. Pippa (Sydney Sweeney, of Euphoria and The White Lotus) and Thomas (Generation‘s Justice Smith) are a young couple who move into a gorgeous Montreal loft apartment sporting one ethically dubious perk: clear sightlines into an even more gorgeous pad occupied by an oversexed fashion photographer, Seb (Ben Hardy), and his striking girlfriend Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). For the new couple, the action across the road is initially an aphrodisiac, a kickstart to libidos on the early wane. Soon, […]
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“The History of Your Community Affects Who You End Up Becoming”: Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. on Wild Indian
The effects of trauma brewed and replicated over generations serve as dramatic engine for Wild Indian, a film about the radically diverging paths of two boys from the Ojibwe people after a fatal gun incident. Making his feature debut, director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. tapped into his tribe’s own ancient storytelling and recollections from family members, as well as his own, to carve out the story of Makwa and Teddo in two different storylines. The former character, a victim of parental abuse, grows up to rebuild his stoic identity around career success and material wealth, while the other falls into […]
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“The Cinema Needs Video”: Yuri Ancarani on Venice 2021 Premiere Atlantide
Director and documentarian Yuri Ancarani carries significant reputation and exposure in the art world—he is arguably vaunted there more than in cinema—but his recent Venice premiere Atlantide unexpectedly evokes some unlikely multiplex-oriented fare. As more audiences and critics see this work, will comparisons reign towards Michael Mann’s irrepressible Miami Vice from 2006? What about—of all things—the Fast and the Furious franchise? There are little streets and tarmac in Atlantide’s observation of the Venetian lagoon, so the disaffected local adolescents must channel their energy (and indirectly, their sexuality) into pulsating barchino (speedboat) races—and we all know about the proportionate relationship between motorsports […]
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“I’ll Never, Ever Shoot in 4:3 Again”: Bassam Tariq on Mogul Mowgli
Telling the story of Zed (Riz Ahmed), a British Pakistani rapper on the cusp of success when he begins experiencing a debilitating muscular condition, Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli fills in its narrative with hyper-specific details about the Muslim community and, more specifically, Zed’s resistance to finding his place in it. Others involve the integrity (or lack thereof) involved in the pursuit of fame, as a rival rapper with impersonally cringey lyrics threatens to steal Zed’s upward momentum. Throughout the film, these issues are dissected with surreal flourishes: what on paper might sound like a conventional narrative takes on a visceral, […]
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“I Wanted To Find Real People Who Were Going Through Real Problems in an Unreal Place”: Lance Oppenheim on His Hulu-Screening Doc, Some Kind of Heaven
The recently announced results of the 2021 U.S. census produced a number of headline takeaways: for example, the nation’s white population declined for the first time, Hispanics have become California’s largest ethnic group, and metropolitan areas were the beneficiary of declining population in over half of America’s smaller counties. And among those growing metropolitan areas, one, in Florida, stood out as the most quickly expanding: The Villages. Over the last decade, the over-55 retirement community saw its population increase by nearly 40%; it now encompasses 60,000 homes, with more on the way. Seeing The Villages show up in an official […]
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“I Feel Completely Vindicated Now the Film’s Been Made”: Michael Caton-Jones on Our Ladies’s 20+-Year Journey to the Screen
Things were going well for Scottish filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones at the start of 2020. The director of Scandal (1989), This Boy’s Life (1993) and Rob Roy (1995), among many others, Caton-Jones was preparing for the theatrical release of Our Ladies, a passion project he’d been trying to get made for over 20 years. It had received its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2019, where it “played out of this world”, in his words, to an audience of roughly 800 attendees in its first public screening. Flying relatively under the radar in a stacked program largely […]
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“A Deteriorating Mind Condemned to Hell…”: Sadri Cetinkaya on Fantasia Doc Lost Boys
I first encountered Joonas Neuvonen’s Lost Boys, a sort of “unintended sequel” to 2010’s spectacular look at self-destructive Subutex addicts in rural Finland, Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland – which was co-written and edited by Lost Boys co-director Sadri Cetinkaya – at this year’s virtual CPH:DOX. At the time I tried but failed to take notes while watching. The film just got under my skin in a way that froze me to my laptop screen. Atmospherically, Neuvonen’s decade-later doc brought to mind the sensation of being trapped inside a Nine Inch Nails video. Memorably narrated by Pekka Strang (Tom of Finland), Lost Boys picks up where Reindeerspotting left off: After […]
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“News Would Disappear Off Social Media”: Nanfu Wang on COVID Documentary In the Same Breath
Given the amount of turmoil, despair, anger, and loss we’ve experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s fair to say that the past two years have been the longest 20 years of our lives. As breaking news changed rapidly and information was uncovered, the severity of the virus came into focus. As dangerous as COVID-19 was (and, given the acceleration of mutated variants, how dangerous it continues to be), just as damaging was the misinformation being spread by various government-sanctioned media and harebrained conspiracy theorists. Nanfu Wang’s latest documentary, In the Same Breath, covers the entire gamut and, per her signature style, […]
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“We Edited the Film in a Sort of Circle – Without the Credits It Could Even Be Played in a Loop”: Tea Lukač on Her Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Debut Roots
Premiering in the East of the West Competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (August 20-28), Roots is an unexpected documentary gem from filmmaker and video artist Tea Lukač. Through striking cinematography and the simplest of concepts the Serbian director takes us on a journey to present-day Dvor, the Croatian town that Lukač and her family fled when war came and she was just six years old. Intriguingly, we get to know the rural locale not through travelogue but through the back seat of a moving car, where seven distinct stories unfold via passengers of ascending age. Costumed […]
