Directors
Interviews - Directors
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The Devil, Most Definitely: Christopher Jason Bell on His Ten-Part Archival George W. Bush Docu-Series Miss Me Yet
“When George W Bush becomes president, for the first time, I knew someone dumber than me was president, and the whole fucking thing fell apart. It’s all been a house of cards, it’s all been a shell game, and a mirror illusion, and George W. Bush made it so you could finally see through the mirror, at all the wrong angles.” — Quentin Tarantino. Over the last four presidential administrations, Christopher Jason Bell has produced an estimable body of work, directing more than13 shorts and three features, devoted to creating off-beat, experimental, and challenging microbudget cinema, spanning narrative, documentary and […]
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“Sit Here. Stand Here. Work Here. Slap Her Here”: Lav Diaz and Hazel Orencio on Phantosmia
Since the late 1990s, Lav Diaz’s cinema has explored the Philippines’ troubled history with colonization, authoritarianism, corruption, poverty, macho-feudalism and the tensions that animate and enliven the sociopaths of today. His durational works are simultaneously a test of patience and spirit and assertions that the stories of Filipinos deserve time and space to unfold in all of its complexities. Diaz’s works paint portraits of good men and women whose morals disintegrate along with their minds, poisoned by the pressures of the world, leading them to commit uncharacteristic acts of violence one would think they are too progressive or too intelligent […]
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“Let’s Talk about Glitch Feminism, and What is a Cyber Doula?”: Jazmin Jones on Her Expansive Sundance-Premiering Doc, Seeking Mavis Beacon
Originally published January 20, 2024, timed to the film’s premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, this interview with Seeking Mavis Beacon director Jazmin Jones is now reposted in conjunction with the film’s theatrical release from NEON. — Editor Exuberantly maximalist in approach, Jazmin Jones’s blast of a debut feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon, is a rapid-fire blend of neo-noir road movie, desktop essay film and meta critique of the “searching for” documentary subgenre. The picture follows Jones and cyber doula friend Olivia McKayla Ross — self-described “e-girl detectives” — on their years-long journey to locate Renee L’Espérance, the Haitian-born model […]
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At the Movies with Notorious B.I.G.: dream hampton on It Was All a Dream
Since its inception in 2012, Blackstar Film Festival has become one of my favorites. In a recent interview in Essence, founder Maori Karmel Holmes said, “When I started the festival, I didn’t realize that it was going to be an annual event, and I was mostly interested in seeing films that I knew existed in the world but hadn’t been shown in Philadelphia. I was also interested in a specific kind of film, mostly experimental, largely made by independent filmmakers and wanting to put them together in a way that would put artistic films next to social justice documentaries and […]
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“Be With the Girls, Be Active Listeners, Be in Awe of Their Imagination”: Angela Patton and Natalie Rae on Their Powerful Netflix-Premiering Doc, Daughters
In 2012, Angela Patton delivered a viral TED Talk about her revolutionary Date with Dad prison program—a father-daughter dance between incarcerated dads and their daughters, giving separated families a unique chance to connect and reunite without any physical barriers. The CEO of Girls for a Change—a youth development nonprofit with a mission to empower Black girls in Central Virginia—Patton then found a partner in Natalie Rae, who reached out to collaborate on a film together. The result of their nearly a decade-in-the-making work is Daughters, a heartrending documentary that premiered in Sundance in January 2024, where it was bought by […]
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“America is Desperate for a Narrative”: Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez on Invention
Following a decade of work in experimental and documentary cinema, director Courtney Stephens steps into fiction for the first time with Invention, a remarkably resourceful microbudget drama that nonetheless resists strict categorization. Starring and co-conceived by Callie Hernandez, the film draws upon the actress’s real-life relationship with her late father, a medical doctor turned small-time huckster who made a name for himself on local television talk shows and public access programs in the ’90s and 2000s. In this fictionalized telling set in the Berkshires, VHS footage of those TV appearances weave through a story in which Hernandez, playing a version […]
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“We Have Complete Creative Control”: Chuck Russell on Witchboard
The first film directed by Chuck Russell I can remember seeing was the special effects-driven Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask at a multiplex with my family thirty years ago (the summer comedy opened on July 29th, 1994 in over 2,300 North American theaters). However, it was his work in the horror genre with co-writer Frank Darabont that really hooked me. Both 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors—released when the filmmaker was only 28—and 1988’s remake of The Blob were gooey and gory, yes, but also competent adventure films, their charm derived from Russell’s nimble craftsmanship and the […]
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“I Wanted to Make a Black, Gay Paris, Texas“: Shatara Michelle Ford on Their BlackStar-Premiering Sophomore Feature Dreams in Nightmares
Three cross-coastal best friends reunite for a spontaneous road trip across the American underbelly in Dreams in Nightmares, the sophomore feature from writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford. Though a significant pivot in theme and scope from their lean yet intense debut feature Test Pattern, Ford’s latest continues to plainly indicts the oppression that finds Black, femme, queer bodies at a stark institutional disadvantage. After being laid off from their respective jobs in academia and finance, Z (Denée Benton) and Tasha (Sasha Compère) hop on the phone to reschedule a planned trip to the Dominican Republic. Instead of lounging in paradise, Tasha […]
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“I Can’t Run a Control Experiment with No Cameras”: Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber on War Game
On January 6th, 2023 in Washington, DC, the advocacy group Vet Voice stage an elaborate mass role-playing scenario inspired by the attempted insurrection in the Capitol two years before. The loser of a presidential election declares the result illegitimate and encourages the public to rise up, and an extremist militia group with sleepers inside the National Guard does just that. Within the simulation, one side roleplayed the incumbent presidential administration (with former Montana governor Steve Bullock portraying the president), while the other was the terrorist “Red Cell” attempting to stop Congress from certifying the election results. If the Red Cell […]
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“We’ve All Gone a Bit Broke Making It”: Lucy Walker on Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa
Nearly twenty years ago, Lucy Walker was making a film on the slopes of Everest following a group of blind teenage Tibetan climbers. While on the mountain, she heard of an incident that had taken place when a male guide attacked his wife and climbing partner, a Nepalese woman named Lhakpa Sherpa. Lhakpa’s cursed expedition was the focus of a damning book published a couple of years later, as well as a feature in Outside Magazine. At that point Lhakpa had summited Everest seven times but was living in a cramped apartment in Connecticut as an illiterate single mother, still […]
