Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I Knew Exactly How to Bring It to the Screen”: Marco Calvani on High Tide
Italian playwright Marco Calvani makes his feature film debut as a writer-director with High Tide, a Provincetown-set indie drama that centers on the need for communal tenderness after a heartbreak. Lourenço (Marco Pigossi, now Calvani’s husband) considers P-town a paradise. Having left his native Brazil years ago in order to live life as an out gay man (a fact he still conceals from his mother), the queer enclave provides ample community and connection for the handsome young man. However, recent events have made the locale feel more oppressive than he expected: his long-term boyfriend up and left without warning, visa […]
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“A Throwback to Nancy Drew and Columbo”: Alice Maio Mackay on Carnage for Christmas
For her fifth feature, 20-year-old Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay gifts us Carnage for Christmas. A renegade force in the no-budget genre realm, her previous work has explored demonic cults, ancient parasites, vigilante vampires and Stephen King filtered through a uniquely queer lens. Maio Mackay’s latest features a supernatural, bloodlusting Santa Claus that small town residents have adopted as part of their folklore. The return of young adults for the holiday season awakens this mythologized entity, though it seems particularly drawn to Lola (newcomer Jeremy Moineau), a true crime podcast host who hates making the annual trek to her hometown. […]
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“I’ve Got My Finger on the Zeitgeist”: Matt Farley on Local Legends: Bloodbath
Several years ago on my birthday, I woke to a text from a friend: a link to “The Emily Poop Song”. For a minute and twenty-one seconds, I listened to what the album title described as “The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop” repeat my name over and over, often punctuated with the word “poop.” There were fifty songs on the album, all about different people and feces, but that turned out to be only a tiny portion of the odd man’s output—across several Spotify profiles, Matt Farley has written over 25,000 songs. While some are about our smelly bodily […]
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“North Dakota is Trump Country Today”: John Hanson and Rob Nilsson on the 4K Restoration of Northern Lights
It would be easy to call 1979 a red letter Cannes for New Hollywood: Apocalypse Now got Francis Ford Coppola his second Palme d’Or (split with Volker Schlöndorff for The Tin Drum), Terrence Malick received Best Director for Days of Heaven. Outside of the spotlight of official competition, another American film playing in the International Critics’ Week walked away with the second ever Camera d’Or for best first feature. Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, Northern Lights returned the pair to their North Dakota roots by documenting 94 year-old Henry Martinson, a socialist organizer instrumental in the victory of […]
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Cap’n Crunch and the Serial Killer: John McNaughton on His Career
Currently underway at the the Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park, “Portraits of Wild Things: The Films of John McNaughton” is a long overdue retrospective of the Chicago-based filmmaker of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), I’ve always felt that the most exploitative aspect of McNaughton’s film was its title—it sounds like something you shouldn’t take joy in watching even if you’re even depraved enough to seek it out in the first place. Critically praised upon its (much delayed) release, Henry provided McNaughton with a path to mainstream success, even as the filmmaker […]
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The Gotham Pages: Lulu Wang on Creating Storytelling Ecosystems Abroad
Writer/Director Lulu Wang has been shooting film and TV overseas since her debut feature Posthumous (2014). The American-German co-production tells the story of a Berlin-based artist who finally finds his audience when the media mistakenly reports him dead. Wang then shot her sophomore hit, The Farewell (2019), between New York and Changchun. The themes and plot of that film—in which the obstinate individualism of a Chinese-American writer (Awkwafina) abrades her family’s collective sense of responsibility when she reunites with them in northern China—is reflected in the film’s co-production model, for which an American and Chinese cast and crew converged. These […]
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“Making the Invisible Visible”: Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias on Pepe
There’s nothing quite like happening into a film committed to not playing by the rules; that real-time realization, in the darkness of a movie theater, that the story you’re watching isn’t concerned with sticking to well-worn formulas so much as challenging your expectations around what cinema can do and be. Pepe is that kind of film. The first, per its subtitle, in a series of “studies of the imagination,” Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s fourth feature is a cinematic UFO perched somewhere between hard facts and dreams. It is a work that celebrates imagination as the ultimate means to […]
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“I Really Wanted to Push Back Against This Illusion of Japanese-ness”: Neo Sora on Happyend
“Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up. The topic Sora could talk about forever and to which we devote the last few minutes of our allotted time is music, a connection that long predates his first feature-length foray into fiction. An eclectic audiovisual artist, Sora’s a member of […]
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“I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia
In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]
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“The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]
