Interviews
Interviews
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“People Think the Audience is Stupid”: Sophia Al-Maria on Little Birds, Anaïs Nin and Screenplay Development
Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and (screen)writer, probably most well-known for co-coining the term “Gulf Futurism” and authoring the memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth (2012). Since then, Al-Maria has directed gallery films and worked on numerous unrealized film and TV projects. Al-Maria’s exhibition “Virgin With A Memory” (2014) was a response to Beretta, a self-authored script meant to be her directorial debut. Her short film Beast Type Song (2019) is both an extension of an unmade post-colonial SF project about “solar war” and a hang-out film with a slow, deliberate anger. Al-Maria created and wrote the majority of Little Birds, a six-episode […]
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“What is Our Duty Today as Viewers?”: Abdallah Al-Khatib on Cannes (ACID program)-Selected Documentary Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege)
A movie could be made out of the making of Abdallah Al-Khatib’s heartbreakingly poetic Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege), screening in the ACID program at this year’s Cannes. The film’s title refers to Yarmouk, a district in Damascus that served as the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 until its destruction in 2018. In 2013 the Al-Assad regime set up a siege, depriving Yarmouk’s residents of food, medicine and electricity while haphazardly dropping barrel bombs on what it deemed a rebel stronghold. An accidental filmmaker, Al-Khatib—born and bred in Yarmouk until ISIS expelled him in 2015—was a […]
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Battle Cry: Beth B and Lydia Lunch on Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over
Beth B’s films take you deep into the darkness of the human psyche. With a body of work that includes shorts, features, video installations and episodic television, she creates from a place of pure opposition and resistance, standing up against oppressive systems of control and calling them out with the knowledge that discomfort and provocation are what creates dialogue and generates positive change. B’s films are not easy. B’s new documentary film, Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, may be her most compelling and powerful film yet, as it looks at musician, writer and provocateur Lydia Lunch’s 45-year career […]
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Pregnant Pauses: Matías Piñeiro on Isabella
Matías Piñeiro’s sixth feature and seventh Shakespeare-related film, Isabella, begins with purely abstract images whose use here is new in his work: four different shades on the blue spectrum, alternately lighter and darker in smaller and smaller concentric rectangles. The smallest, central rectangle fades to purple before three different shades of that color pulsate outward to the largest rectangle. The rectangles then dissolve into one unified purple that fills the rectangular frame containing the film itself, which starts gently pulsating in different shades under silent opening titles. These abstract color studies (whose resemblance to the work of James Turrell was […]
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“Faces Take Five Minutes to Light, Backgrounds Take Five Hours”: Cinematographer Matt Wise on his Lighting Philosophy and the Horror Comedy Werewolves Within
Trapped in an isolated mountain community by a snowstorm, a forest ranger (Sam Richardson) and a postal worker (Milana Vayntrub) must discern which of their neighbors is the culprit behind a lycanthropic killing spree. Though based on the Ubisoft VR whodunit, the film version of Werewolves Within owes an equal debt to the various genre favorites of director Josh Ruben, from horror comedies (The Monster Squad, Arachnophobia) to small town satires (Fargo, Hot Fuzz) to murder mysteries (Clue, Knives Out). The challenge of converging those disparate inspirations into one cohesive whole fell to cinematographer Matt Wise, a veteran of low […]
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“Digital Cinematography is Mostly Mired in a Sort of Default Realism”: Brandon Colvin on A Dim Valley
Fifteen minutes into Brandon Colvin’s third feature, A Dim Valley, Albert (Whitmer Thomas) presents Ian (Zach Weintraub) with a generously packed bowl of marijuana, which the two proceed to light up. Shortly thereafter, they witness a surreal vision in the forest near the field research camp where they’re spending the summer, but to call this a drug-induced departure from realism would be inaccurate. From the very beginning of this whimsical backwoods tone poem, Colvin establishes something like a stoner ambiance: pacing is lethargic, odd bits of behavior are lingered on, glassy-eyed stares into the middle distance proliferate. There’s a sense […]
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Love and Memories: Director Phil Lord Interviews Director Heidi Ewing About Her Debut Narrative Feature, I Carry You With Me
This article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 2021 edition. It is being posted today online in conjunction with I Carry You With Me‘s release in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. Arriving amidst a number of recent pictures exploring notions of hybridity—mostly documentaries that incorporate narrative or meta elements—nonfiction filmmaker Heidi Ewing’s feature dramatic debut, I Carry You With Me, deploys its formal invention in movingly unexpected ways. Taking the recounted memories of an undocumented Mexican couple living in New York, Ewing tells a swooning, deeply romantic period love story. And it’s one that achieves an arresting sobriety with contemporary […]
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“You Can Do Anything with Film, Just Like You Can Do Anything with Writing”: At MoMA, the Experimental Cinema of Neelon Crawford
Working primarily with a hand-wound 16mm Bolex, Neelon Crawford made a series of experimental films from 1968 through 1980. Shot in the US, the United Kingdom, and South America, the films explored light and movement in a variety of landscapes. Crawford manipulated the image through film stocks, filters, frame rates, double- and triple-exposures, animation, editing, and printing, at times adding soundtracks to imagery that ranged from observational to abstract. Crawford’s films were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Cineprobe series in the 1970s and were distributed by Canyon Cinema, among others. After For the Spider Woman in 1980, he […]
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“The Whole Impetus for Queer Comics is to Make our Lives Visible”: Vivian Kleiman on Tribeca World-Premiering No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics
Directed and produced by Vivian Kleiman, Tribeca premiere No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics provides a glimpse into the lives and works of comic artists Alison Bechdel, Rupert Kinnard, Mary Wings, Howard Cruse, and Jennifer Camper, who were integral to the development of the first queer comics in the underground comic scene. Kleiman does a phenomenal job in placing the vibrant energies of the pioneering artists in dialogue with younger artists while framing their comic works within the larger context of intersectional identities and the history of the LGBT community. When asked about the creative influences that […]
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Allowing Room for Shifts to Happen: Noah Hutton on the Decade-Long Making of His Brain Science Doc In Silico
Since releasing his first documentary in 2009, Noah Hutton has kept busy. That film Crude Independence and its follow-up Deep Time (2015) were both about the consequences of oil extraction in North Dakota, and he followed them with a multi-platform installation at Times Square in 2015 and the science-fiction film Lapis, which he wrote and directed, in 2020. His new film In Silico was in production throughout the entire time that Hutton was working on those other projects. It’s a longitudinal chronicle that Hutton began in response to a TED talk by Israeli scientist Henry Markram in 2009, where he announced that his team […]
