Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“I’m Often Filming in Dusty, Dirty or Wet Places, and Changing Lenses Would be Difficult and Risky”: Director/DP Kim Longinotto on Shooting the Mafia
One of the UK’s most acclaimed documentarians, Kim Longinotto has been working steadily since 1976, serving as her own DP the whole time. Unusually for Longinotto, who favors a direct cinema, observational approach, her latest is an archival-based film, examining the life and work of Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia, famed for her work documenting (at great risk) the Sicilian mafia. Via email, Longinotto discussed why she only uses one lens, what her all-time favorite lens is and the challenges of making an archival documentary look like an observational doc. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your […]
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“The Harder Life Was for Us, the Stronger the Images Were:” Director Hassan Fazili on the Perils of His Flight-from-the Taliban Doc, Midnight Traveler
As headlines blare possible peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, and with its intersection of politics and filmmaking, Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveler, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival in World Documentary Competition, is bound to be one of the festival circuit’s most discussed pictures this year. (It travels next month to the Berlin Film Festival.) Midnight Traveler charts the Fazili family’s escape from the Taliban after Fazili became the group’s target due to his controversial documentary Peace. Fazili, with the help of his filmmaker wife Fatima and daughters Nargis and Zahra, filmed the story of […]
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Director/DP Luke Lorentzen on Making Midnight Family as a Solo Shooter (with Two Cameras)
In Mexico City, there are only 45 publicly operated ambulances for a population of nine-million-plus, creating a need filled by private labor. Luke Lorentzen, whose first feature New York Cuts premiered at IDFA in 2015, embedded himself with one privately operated ambulance run as a family business, tagging along night after night. Operating as his own shooter for Midnight Family, Lorentzen’s sophomore feature is a formally controlled, sympathetically embedded portrait of multiple instances of economic inequity (with car chases!). Via email, the director/DP spoke to the challenges of operating two cameras as a solo shooter, depending on Mexico City’s existing nighttime light […]
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“I Make Stories to Chase that Freedom”: Five Questions for Selah and the Spades Director Tayarisha Poe
When we put together our 25 New Faces list for 2015, Tayarisha Poe was one of our most exciting discoveries. Selah and the Spades: an overture was the product of restless days at what Poe describes as a dead-end job at a digital tech firm. The anger she felt at the stultifying work transmuted into the story of a teenage girl — and classic anti-heroine — running a crew at her private school. Four years later, Selah has leapt from the web page to the screen in Poe’s feature debut, premiering today in the NEXT section of Sundance. As Poe […]
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“Must Political Solidarity be Unconditional?”: Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche on Their Sundance Doc, Advocate
Long a lightning rod, Lea Tsemel is an idealistic Jewish lawyer who has spent the past five decades defending political prisoners. Or she’s the terrorist’s go-to barrister, rarely turning down a case no matter how heinous the crime. Like most things in Israel, the perspective depends on which side of the occupation you’re on. Veteran filmmakers Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche understand this reality all too well, having followed Lea Tsemel’s career closely for the past 25 years. And now with their Sundance-premiering Advocate they’ve created an in-the-trenches portrait of this unapologetic firebrand, trailing Tsemel as she juggles high-profile […]
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“Sometimes Restraint and Holding Back Yields a Far More Meaningful Result…”: Luke Lorentzen on Sundance Doc Midnight Family
Poetically composed and effortlessly segueing between graveyard-shift stillness and chaotic rides through the darkened streets of Mexico City, Midnight Family is a unique cinematic gem. Director Luke Lorentzen spent nearly three months embedded night after night in a private ambulance run by the Ochoa family, an all-male team who race to the scenes of accidents hoping both to save lives and get paid by those they aid. Filmmaker caught up with the award-winning director to discuss this rare glimpse into an incongruous underworld characterized by equal parts heroic acts and monotonous labor prior to the doc’s January 27th premiere at […]
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“We Viewed Simply Telling a Young Black Love Story as a Radical Act”: Five Questions for Premature Director Rashaad Ernesto Green
“Possessor of a sneaky sort of charm that hides his utter tenaciousness, Rashaad Ernesto Green, a promising directorial talent from the Bronx, makes movies that get under your skin with what, upon reflection, seems like relative ease.” That’s Brandon Harris from Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2010 writing about writer/director Green in the months before the premiere of his debut feature, Gun Hill Road. That Sundance 2011 pic — a tough and empathetic drama about an ex-con grappling with his son’s transition — more than attested to all the promise we spotted in Green’s early shorts, one of which, 2008’s […]
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“I Have a Naive Conviction That Images Serve a Potentially Positive Purpose”: Beniamino Barrese on The Disappearance of My Mother
Not many filmmakers have a mom who’s an iconic model from the ’60s, photographed by the likes of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, a muse to Warhol and Dali. Far fewer have one that kept that past hidden. Indeed, it wasn’t until director/cinematographer Beniamino Barrese made a youthful discovery — a stash of portfolios containing Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar covers tucked away inside a locked wardrobe — that he got an inkling that Benedetta Barzini was more than just the radical, outspoken, intellectual mother he’d been filming since he got his first camera at seven. And with The Disappearance of […]
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“I Was Watching Midcentury Hollywood Biblical Epics, Anti-Communist Propaganda Films, and 1970s B-Movies about Devil Worshippers”: Penny Lane on Hail Satan?
“Blasphemy is not free speech” reads a protest banner on the Little Rock statehouse lawn in a scene from Hail Satan?, the latest from Sundance vet Penny Lane (Our Nixon, Nuts!). The sign is emblematic of the ludicrous (and too often unchallenged) falsehoods that The Satanic Temple — fighting to place an elaborate statue of goat-headed god Baphomet alongside a local legislator’s equally ostentatious Ten Commandments monument — is up against. Luckily Lane, never one to shy away from provocative subjects, is right there on the ground, providing an intimate look into the group’s wild rise. By seamlessly alternating interviews […]
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“Lights are Your Friends, but Sometimes They Don’t Need to Come Around to the Party”: Cinematographer Robbie Ryan on Shooting Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, two determined women — Rachel Weisz’s refined but ruthless Duchess of Marlborough and Emma Stone’s desperate and cunning chambermaid Abigail — vie for the titular preferential position alongside the ill and melancholy Queen Anne. Anyone expecting a beautifully mounted but stuffy 18th century period piece has not seen a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. Employing the same absurdist sense of humor as Lanthimos’s The Lobster, The Favourite also imposes the director’s preferred set of aesthetic restrictions — namely, wide angle lenses and shooting almost entirely with available light. Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan (American Honey, Fish Tank), who […]
