Interviews
Interviews
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“Everybody Had to Work Barefoot”: P.S. Vinothraj on His Tiger-Award Winning Pebbles
The fields that once sustained Arittapatti village have perished from a long drought. All that’s left is parched desert without trees to screen the land from the sun. Since farm work is virtually non-existent, locals must cross this harsh terrain to jobs in the surrounding towns. P.S. Vinothraj’s Tiger Award-winning Pebbles, follows a barefoot father and son as they travail this desert in rural Tamil Nandu. A day drunk Ganapathy (Karuththadaiyaan) plucks his son (Chellapandi) from class and immediately asks him to choose between himself or his mother. The little boy doesn’t reply, his frenetic father walks off, and the […]
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“This Film is a Call to Solidarity, Self-Organization and Resistance”: Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović on their International Film Festival Rotterdam-debuting Landscapes of Resistance
Filmmaker, video artist and “cultural worker” Marta Popivoda has spent much of her career focusing on philosophies and movements through a decidedly feminist lens. Her first feature, 2013’s Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, premiered at the Berlinale and went on to become part of the permanent collection at MoMA. And now with Landscapes of Resistance, which debuted in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2021, the Berlin-based filmmaker returns to her native Belgrade with her partner, and the film’s co-writer, Ana Vujanović. Together they gently probe and cinematically preserve the memory of Vujanović’s grandmother Sonja, who brings to life an […]
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Echoes From the Past
In recreating in Mank the experiences from 1930 to 1940 that led screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane, David Fincher has said his goal was to make a film that looked and felt of its era. But that fidelity only goes so far: On the visual side, Mank’s black-and-white look is captured in period-anomalous widescreen. Similarly, Mank uses a LCR (left-center-right) sound mix rather than pure mono. “We’re not trying to fool anybody by saying this is a mono mix,” says Fincher’s career-long sound designer Ren Klyce. “The goal was to make the film sound old-fashioned and from […]
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Liberties in the Room
The night after Cassius Clay clobbered Sonny Liston in their first bout at the Miami Beach Convention Center in 1964, the new heavyweight champion, who would later change his name to Muhammad Ali, celebrated his win in a hotel room flush with icons: his friends Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. They stayed in a room at the Hampton House, a known safe haven for Black people during Jim Crow where social gatherings of various Black icons were not uncommon. Regina King’s feature debut, One Night in Miami, adapted from Kemp Powers’s one-act play of the same name, imagines […]
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Last Call: Writer/Director Emerald Fennell on Promising Young Woman
“This movie is a tribute to the many genres I love—thrillers, rom-coms, horror,” says writer/director Emerald Fennell about her searing and fiercely confident debut feature, Promising Young Woman. “It’s a dark satire of those genres.” It’s also, says Fennell, a Western of sorts—a continually surprising movie about a woman on a journey of justice. Self-styled vigilante Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is a medical school dropout determined to teach entitled male predators a life lesson, a calling that honors the life of her best friend Nina, victim to a horrific case of sexual assault years earlier. An actor whose credits include The […]
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A Matter of Balance
Kristan Sprague first heard of Shaka King when they were both in high school, long before either entered the film industry. Though they had friends in common, they only got to know each other when they attended Vassar College and started filmmaking in earnest. Since then, Sprague has edited most of King’s work, from his early shorts to his independent debut Newlyweeds, and now their first studio feature, Judas and the Black Messiah. The film follows the real-life story of car thief William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), who was hired by the FBI to infiltrate the Illinois chapter of the Black […]
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Render Time: Director Penny Lane Talks with A Glitch in the Matrix Director Rodney Ascher about His Reality-Questioning Documentary
In 1977, a characteristically fervid Philip K. Dick arrived to lecture at a science fiction convention and share his experiences from three years earlier, when he became convinced that the world was a simulation, one of many (“there may be 30 or 3,000 of them”) operating simultaneously, glimpses of which he’d seen. Clips from this speech (“If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”) and the Q&A that followed frame Rodney Ascher’s A Glitch in the Matrix. In the five-chapter (plus an epilogue) dive into the world of “simulation theory,” Ascher focuses on five subjects […]
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A Question of Empathy: Viktor Kossakovsky on Gunda
Born in what was then Leningrad, U.S.S.R., Viktor Kossakovsky embarked on his journey to become one of the world’s most celebrated and elemental nonfiction filmmakers with a love of photography and a desire to explore the complexities of Russian history. After taking on various below-the-line roles at the Leningrad Studio of Documentaries, Kossakovsky directed his first feature, Losev, a black-and-white portrait of the elderly Russian philosopher Aleksei Fedorovich Losev. For his next black-and-white film, The Belovs, Kossakovsky turned inward, documenting a spirited but warring brother and his sister living on a farm in a western Russian village he had visited […]
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The Doors of Our Mind: Director Florian Zeller on Memory, Mystery and The Father
The following interview was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2021 print edition. Among the techniques used to remember is one dating back to the Ancient Greeks: the Memory Palace. Facts, people, life events are “placed” within the rooms of a building, preferably a real one the remembering person is very familiar with. To summon the memories, the person mentally strolls from room to room, allowing the individual locations within the building to trigger the images placed inside. The Memory Palace’s ability to associate memories with place is given a devastating twist in French director Florian Zeller’s debut picture, The Father, […]
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The Places Left Behind
Gianfranco Rosi’s nonfiction films are unified by their (often solo shooter) director’s precise framing. With images so strongly composed, the films’ status as vérité documentation has raised, if not controversy, at least questions about judgment, overaestheticization and potentially trivializing endangered subjects. That’s especially true of Rosi’s latest, Notturno, filmed over three years across the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon. From the opening shot, capturing with geometrical precision a group of soldiers running laps, Notturno elides names, battles and geographical precision into a group portrait of grief echoing across territorial demarcations. A site for war-scarred children in therapy, a […]
