Interviews
Interviews
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Inner Landscapes: Tenzin Phuntsog on “Next Life”
An image of the Dalai Lama gives diasporic texture to an otherwise anonymous suburban American house; the camera tracks to the next room, where a father, mother, and son sit like statues. A Tibetan doctor arrives, and father Pala (Tsewang Migyur Khangsar) tells him that Western medicine cannot seem to explain the pain he feels in his heart. The doctor takes his pulse, not to know his heart rate, but to listen to something deeper and more intangible hiding in the inner self. The blood rushing through his veins rumbles like a river running beneath the earth, the sound filling […]
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From Mail-Order to Online: Tom Davenport on Founding Folkstreams, the Pioneering Online Streaming Site
When I first discovered the works of Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch—academic anthropologists who opted to make films rather than books about their research subjects—my appreciation of their work was hampered by some lingering questions: “How in the world did they distribute this? Who paid for this? Who was watching this?” Sure, the government pays for them, universities buy them and academics screen them for students, but these filmmakers are also studied and appreciated within cinephile circles in a way that, say, 1940s newsreel directors are not. How did these filmmakers find an audience outside the ivory tower? […]
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Steel Blue World: DP Dan Laustsen on “Frankenstein”
Though Guillermo del Toro’s 1997 American studio debut Mimic was a notoriously unpleasant experience, the silver lining of that giant cockroach creature feature was the filmmaker crossing paths with Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen. It took 18 years for them to work together again, but they’ve made up for lost time since by teaming on Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley—the latter two brining Laustsen Oscar nominations. Their latest collaboration fulfills del Toro’s lifelong ambition to mount a version of Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror masterpiece Frankenstein, with Oscar Isaac as the titular creator and Jacob Elordi as the […]
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“It was Extremely Brutal”: Max Keegan on “The Shepherd and the Bear”
High in the Pyrenees, a centuries-old way of life approaches its twilight amid a controversial rewilding scheme. France’s government has for decades airlifted brown bears from Slovenia to repopulate those hunted out of existence by the region’s hunters. But the bears are apex predators who threaten the flocks of a community of shepherds, whose earth-bound traditions don’t readily coexist with state-mandated policy. Within this context, British filmmaker Max Keegan illuminates richly human connections with stirring observational portraiture in The Shepherd and the Bear, whose Academy Award-qualifying run begins Friday Nov. 21 at New York City’s Cinema Village. Much more about […]
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“You Learn to Let Yourself Go Completely”: June Squibb, Back To One, Episode 367
June Squibb has only been acting for about seven decades, so forgive her if she hasn’t figured this whole acting thing out yet. Luckily she isn’t stopping or even slowing down. In fact, at 96 years old, she is more busy than ever before. Since her Oscar nomination for a supporting role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Squibb has been in high demand. Her first leading role in a film, Thelma, led to another, Eleanor The Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson. And now she’s about to take the stage in the exciting new Broadway production of Marjorie Prime. On this episode, […]
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“We Are an Accumulation of These Encounters”: Lynne Sachs on Her IDFA-Debuting Every Contact Leaves a Trace
Every Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she’s collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into “how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking” (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film). As a collage of words, sounds and images collide it becomes increasingly clear that Sachs’s mission to understand how each of these random contacts has changed her in some profound […]
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“The Ethical Work Hasn’t Stopped Now That the Film has Premiered”: Monica Strømdahl on Her DOC NYC-Premiering Flophouse America
Flophouse America is the unnervingly intimate feature debut of Monica Strømdahl, an internationally award-winning photographer who spent 15 years documenting the impoverished communities that have sprung up in rundown motels throughout the US. Which is how she met Mikal, an energetic, 11-year old boy who’s called home the hotel room he’s shared with his parents since the day he was born. Thus began a three-year cinematic collaboration, shot almost entirely in the aforementioned home, between the Norwegian director and the marginalized trio she captures through her quietly unwavering lens. Which allowed her, and now us, to serve as a silent […]
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Tokyo 2025: Mario Patrocínio on “Maria Vitória”
Mario Patrocínio’s Maria Vitória is the writer-director’s first narrative feature, but it brings the chops of his documentary background to ground the story of the titular young woman (Mariana Cardoso). Under the relentless eye of her controlling father Nacho (Miguel Borges), Maria is subjected to a rigorous soccer training regimen that makes having a social life nearly impossible. When her estranged brother Bruno (Miguel Nunes) unexpectedly returns to their small Portuguese village, the film expands from a father-daughter duo to a fraught triangle. Bruno’s queerness challenges his father’s stereotypical machismo; her brother’s former absence and her father’s constant presence are […]
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“Diving Into the Mess and Chaos of Cinema Doesn’t Have to Exist Apart from Care and Ethics”: Gabrielle Brady on The Wolves Always Come at Night
Gabrielle Brady’s The Wolves Always Come at Night follows Davaa and Zaya, a rural Mongolian couple with four young daughters whose dream to continue the traditional herding way of life they’d always known is upended by a cataclysmic storm; which forces them, like so many of their friends and neighbors before, to finally relocate to the outskirts of the urban capital Ulaanbaatar in search of work. It’s a deceptively simple tale of loss — of both livelihood and identity — poignantly and cinematically captured by the talented Australian filmmaker’s lens. Yet what makes the docufiction drama, crafted with a primarily […]
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“Her Archive Was Kind of a Trail… A Filmmaker’s Trail”: Alan Berliner on his DOC NYC-debuting BENITA
Recipient of DOC NYC 2024’s Lifetime Achievement Award (as well as the 2025 Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at the upcoming Hamptons Doc Fest), the “virtuoso of essayistic documentary” Alan Berliner (Letter to the Editor, First Cousin Once Removed) returns to this year’s fest with BENITA, an unconventional portrait of an even more unconventional artist. Benita Raphan was a NYC filmmaker (and a MacDowell fellow in 2004 and a Guggenheim fellow in 2019) best known for her own short portraits of eccentric artists, from John Nash, to Buckminster Fuller, to Emily Dickinson. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Raphan […]
