Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“No One’s Going to Knock at Your Door and Say ‘I Want to Hire You to Be a Filmmaker'”: Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell on MS Slavic 7
As codirector Sofia Bohdanowicz has delightedly noted, MS Slavic 7 has caused a minor flutter of interest among the Extremely Online Librarian community, amazed that anyone would make a film titled after a call number at Harvard’s Houghton Library. That collection, from the papers of the Nobel-nominated poet Józef Wittlin, includes two dozen-odd letters sent to him by his fellow poet and fellow Polish exile Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, Bohdanowicz’s great-grandmother and namesake. Within the world of MS Slavic 7, though, Bohdanowiczowa is the grandmother of Audrey, the character played by Deragh Campbell. Audrey is a recurring character in what now must […]
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“The Whole Mission of this Film was About Holding Bannon Accountable for His Actions…I Didn’t Ever Want Him to Succeed”: Alison Klayman on The Brink
If there’s one defining trait of Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and White House Chief Strategist to Trump before he was given the boot from both, it’s his ability to disconnect, to casually dismiss inconvenient truths. And director Alison Klayman (Ai Wewei: Never Sorry, The 100 Years Show) captures this aspect right from the start of her compelling globetrotting doc The Brink. Embedding fly-on-the-wall style with Bannon on his unite-the-far-right/self-promotion tour across Europe and through the mid-term elections of 2018, Klayman opens with a scene in which the Soros-demonizing champion of Charlottesville waxes rhapsodic about one […]
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“Doing a Shot List is One Thing, Bringing It Alive is Something Else”: Kent Jones on Diane, Understanding Costume Design and Tax Incentives
Best known as a critic and programmer, Kent Jones has also made documentaries for years, but Diane is his first narrative feature. Written specifically for Mary Kay Place, Diane begins as a seemingly modest, naturalistic, one-day-at-a-time portrait of a woman grounded in her family life. Volunteering gives her days structure, while trying to take care of her drug addict son undermines that structure; walking that fine line is a challenge. The centerpiece of this hard-earned naturalism is a scene with Diane, friends and family in a kitchen—a long exchange that feels intensely lived in. In its last third, Diane goes in a different, […]
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“We Make the Films We Can Make, Not the Ones We Want to Make”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Qumra Masterclass
An initiative of the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an event that connects Qatari and international directors who are receiving different stages of DFI-funded support with industry delegates from across the spectrum of the film world and master filmmakers who meet with emerging talents and engage in public conversations. The 5thedition took place between March 15thand 20th, 2019. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is known best as a horror filmmaker but the prolific director has effortlessly moved between different genres—his latest, To the Ends of the Earth, a drama expected to play Cannes, is about a young woman shooting a travel show in […]
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“I Wanted Men to Engage with the Subject of Sexual Violence….”: Nancy Schwartzman on Roll Red Roll
Since Nancy Schwartzman’s filmography includes the short docs The Line, which explores sexual boundaries and consent, and xoxosms, a love story revolving around teens and tech, it’s obvious that the rape of a teenage girl by members of Ohio’s celebrated Steubenville High School football team back in 2012 would grab this director-producer-media-strategist’s attention. After all, the assault had been documented through Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and even cell phone recordings by the assailants, and it was subsequently brought to the world’s attention by a female crime blogger. Now, nearly seven years after the crime, Schwartzman takes a deeper look, revisiting […]
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“I Had To Tell a Story About Five Guys Working Behind Computer Screens”: Hans Pool on Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World
Hans Pool’s Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World follows the diehard band of brothers (yes, there are no citizen journo sisters featured) behind the online investigative outfit Bellingcat, founded by a shy Brit determined to unmask some of the media’s most notorious blockbuster stories. Whether that be through geo-location mapping, voice analysis, drone imagery, or even fact-checking legacy organizations like the NY Times (one of several outlets to report a staged car bombing as real), the international collective takes tools once the province of law enforcement and other paid “professionals” to separate fact from fiction in a very 21st century way. Filmmaker spoke with the […]
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“I Have an Interest in Women Who Are on a Mission, Who Want to Create Impact”: Marie Skovgaard on Her CPH:DOX Opening Night Film, The Reformist
Marie Skovgaard’s The Reformist follows Sherin Khankan, a feminist revolutionary this American had never heard of, but who is practically a household name in her hometown of Copenhagen. Khankan, Denmark’s first female imam, founded the Mariam Mosque, one of the first in Europe to be led by women. And fortunately, Skovgaard was there to artistically document the mosque’s difficult birth as well as the trials and tribulations (both internally and externally) the uncompromising religious leader faced in its aftermath. Filmmaker spoke with the Danish director prior to the doc’s opening night, CPH:DOX premiere on March 21st. Filmmaker: So how did […]
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“What I Discovered Was a Unique Bond Between Man and Dog…”: Heddy Honigmann on Buddy
For over 30 years the globetrotting Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann has been wowing audiences the world over. Born in Peru to Polish Jewish parents, Honigmann’s been honored with retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and also at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where her latest work of cinematic nonfiction Buddy closed this year’s Doc Fortnight. A heart-soaring tearjerker, the doc is an exquisite portrait of the lives of six guide dogs and their owners. But because it’s a Heddy Honigmann film it inevitably transforms into a philosophical meditation — in this case, an exploration of the love affair […]
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“Giving Yourself Time to Sculpt”: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Qumra Masterclass
An initiative of the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an event that connects Qatari and international directors who are receiving different stages of DFI-funded support with industry delegates from across the spectrum of the film world and master filmmakers who meet with emerging talents and engage in public conversations. The 5th edition took place between March 15th and 20th, 2019. Fresh off the heels of the Oscar campaign for Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski has been enjoying a sustained stay in the international spotlight since his 2015 film Ida became an award-winning critics’ favourite. While tonally distinct from one another, both […]
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“Persistent Paranoia, Anxiety and Fear Does Something to Your Body…”: Five Questions for Tito Writer/Director Grace Glowicki
One of the great independent film discoveries of SXSW 2019 is a picture that is also one of the boldest artistic statements of year, Grace Glowicki’s Tito. The Canadian actor and director is known to Filmmaker readers as the female lead of 2016 25 New Face Ben Petrie’s Her Friend Adam, which I dubbed in these pages “a squirmy treatise on sexual insecurity and relationship oneupmanship.” Glowicki’s character’s response to her partner’s icky jealousy, I wrote, is one of “unrivaled power and blistering sexual humiliation, capped off by a loudly feigned orgasm that will erase in viewers any memory of […]
