Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“There is No Film Safe from Some Version of Exploitation…”: Mo Scarpelli on her DOC NYC Feature El Father Plays Himself
Mo Scarpelli’s El Father Plays Himself, which premiered at Visions du Réel, is now at DOC NYC and will next be hitting IDFA, is one complicated multilayered journey, both logistically and emotionally. It began when Scarpelli (Anbessa, Frame by Frame) decided to train her documentary lens on a narrative feature in the making — specifically her partner Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Fortaleza (which premiered at Rotterdam). La Fortaleza in turn is based on the hard-hitting, hard-drinking life of Jorge Roque Thielen, the director’s father, who stars as himself in his own story. That “el father” remains as wild and unpredictable […]
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“The Hardest Thing to Do is to Pick Up the Dolly Track When the Shot’s Not Right”: Max Winkler on Jungleland
A lot of filmmakers point to the New Hollywood movies of the 1970s as influences, but few directors have internalized and applied the lessons of the era as effectively as Max Winkler, whose new feature Jungleland recalls seminal studies of masculinity in crisis like John Huston’s Fat City and Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail. The movie follows bare-knuckle brawler Lion (Jack O’Connell) and his older brother Stanley (Charlie Hunnam), broke siblings looking for a way out of their desperate circumstances. They think they’ve found it when a local underworld figure offers to clear their debts if they chaperone a young […]
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“Until John Brown Becomes the Messiah of the White Man, Black Lives will Never Matter to White Americans”: Darnell Martin on The Good Lord Bird
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”—John Brown on the morning of his death, December 2nd, 1859 The 1859 public execution of John Brown—the 19th century American abolitionist put to death for taking up arms in an attempt to rid the country of slavery—was attended by men, including Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth, who would go on to make a much larger dent in textbooks. Yet, […]
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“They Live and Breathe Video, So We Just Completely Fit in with the Fixtures”: Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir on her DOC NYC-debuting The Vasulka Effect
As a New Yorker who has long prided my ability to namecheck most of the experimental art pioneers of the 1960s, I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of Steina and Woody Vasulka before watching Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir’s The Vasulka Effect. Sure, I knew of The Kitchen, the legendary performance space the couple founded in 1971. And of course I was familiar with the work of the sound and visual visionaries that the Soho (now West Chelsea) institution provided a platform for — from Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson to Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. I’d just never connected a […]
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“It Feels like this Case was a Warning Sign for the Future”: Ursula Liang on Her DOC NYC Feature, Down a Dark Stairwell
On November 20, 2014, 28-year-old Akai Gurley was killed by an NYPD officer’s bullet in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project. Another unarmed Black man dead at the hands of the police; another surge of street protests and demands for justice. But this one was different: the officer, Peter Liang, was Chinese American. Liang claimed the shooting was entirely accidental. When he was indicted, many wondered if he was being scapegoated for the shortcomings of a justice system that had only recently failed to bring charges against the white policemen who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner. After Liang […]
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“Hey Lori, Do You Mind If We Put a Mic on You Today?”: Steve James on City So Real
When confronted by the press about Chicago’s overwhelming political corruption, city politicians often shrug and curtly concede: “That’s Chicago politics.” The city’s corruption is so native and unyielding that it just “is what it is,” has been and always will be. In Steve James’ five-part docuseries City So Real, a buoyant portrait of Chicago loosely wrapped around the 2019 mayoral election and the murder trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, the city’s denizens justify an array of their problems with that same self-referential and self-enabling sentiment, “That’s just Chicago for you.” But the city’s 2019 mayoral election saw […]
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“The Hardest Path is Always the Best Path”: Oliver Laxe on Fire Will Come
Oliver Laxe’s first two films, You All Are Captains (2010) and Mimosas (2016), take place in his adopted home of Morocco. In this year’s Fire Will Come, however, the writer-director returns to his childhood stomping grounds—not Paris, where he was born and raised, but the mountainous enclaves of rural Galicia, an autonomous region in the northwest corner of Spain. Born to Galician parents, Laxe spent formative summer retreats visiting relatives among the natural splendour of the Serra dos Ancares, parts of which overlap with the religious pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago. Drawing from childhood memories, Laxe exalts the […]
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Crime Family
“We don’t call you ’hun’ or ’sweetheart’ or ’baby,’” says Theresa (Debra Winger) to her daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) late in Miranda July’s new Kajillionaire, the filmmaker’s dreamily eccentric interrogation into the social construct of familial love. “We don’t wrap little birthday presents with ribbons,” she continues, acidly, as Old Dolio looks on in despair. Old Dolio has just brought in $1,575 from an airport luggage scam—the family, which includes dad Robert (Richard Jenkins), makes their living from a succession of convoluted small-time cons that net in the two and three and, only sometimes, four figures—and she’d just […]
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Travel Companions: Steven Soderbergh on Cruise-Ship Shooting, Working with Deborah Eisenberg and Meryl Streep, and Let Them All Talk
In August 2019, when Steven Soderbergh shot Let Them All Talk, COVID-19 was not on his mind, except to the degree that his research on Contagion (2011) had convinced him that a pandemic similar to the one depicted in the film was inevitable. And yet, one of the most compelling aspects of the workaholic director’s latest feature (streaming this Fall on HBO Max) is that the eight-day Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, during which most of the movie is set, now can be read as a metaphor for the necessarily transformational journey from before to after COVID. In […]
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Flipping the Script: Mary Harron Interviews Radha Blank About Her Spirited and Wise New York Comedy, The Forty-Year-Old Version
In Radha Blank’s witty and winning feature debut, The Forty-Year-Old Version, the writer/director adopts a semiautobiographical persona: a hardworking middle-aged playwright and high school teacher who, between hustles to get her latest play produced and after the death of her artist mother, takes to open mic nights as neophyte rapper RadhaMUSprime. Onstage and in the studio with a handsome beats-supplier-turned-paramour, she raps about aging, ambition and life in New York with all the emotional honesty that’s slowly and painfully being drained from her latest play, a Harlem-set gentrification drama mounted by a patronizing white theater producer. Scanning Blank’s own biography—she’s […]
