Interviews
Interviews
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“Everybody Involved in This Was a Total Loser”: Alex Ross Perry on His Exhaustive Essay Doc Videoheaven
Part eulogy for a bygone commercial space, part rigorous investigation of its origins and subsequent representation in popular culture, Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven leaves virtually no stone unturned during its nearly three hour runtime. Composed entirely of clips that take place in or otherwise center video stores—from Body Double to Seinfeld to Stranger Things—the essayistic documentary features droll narration from Maya Hawke (who stars in the latter) waxing poetic about their rise and fall, both physically and on screen, in six chapters. The role of pornography, corporate chains and the front-facing employees within these spaces is exhaustively charted; notably, Perry […]
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“It’s Really Sharp on the Neurotic Relationships that Americans Have with Money”: Robin Schavoir and Paul Felten Discuss The Jag
The titular sports car of Robin Schavoir’s The Jag is parked in an imaginary space off-stage at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, where the play is currently running in a production directed by Paul Felten. The existence of this symbolic object structures the matrix of resentment, envy and desire searchingly embodied by The Jag‘s on-stage trio: struggling screenwriter Tyler (Gilles Geary), rich guy art collector Brian (Mickey Solis), and nursing student Cori (Giovanna Drummond). (A fourth character, the renter of the Catskills home the three converge at, and voiced by a “downtown icon,” is only heard via recited emails […]
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“I Wanted to Write a Trans Woman Who Had Really Bad Politics”: Filmmaker Louise Weard on the Abject Tragicomedy of Her DIY Epic Castration Movie
Louise Weard is obsessed with castration. The idea for her five-part DIY epic Castration Movie came when she was reviewing footage for a supercut of onscreen “dick destruction” subtitled Texas Birth Control—and, she notes with amusement, eating little phallic pickles. Weard has an infectious laugh, and the things she finds funny tend to reflect her unique form of good-natured miserablism. Her characters are marginalized people who get the shit beaten out of them, physically and emotionally. Some are marginalized in ways that attract sympathy from her audience. Others, like the incel who’s the protagonist of the film’s first chapter, are […]
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“Freedom Could Stem From the Experience”: Nicole Chi on Her Student Short Film Showcase Winner Los Mosquitos
In the absence of their mothers, two foster siblings slowly fortify a sisterhood in Los Mosquitos, Nicole Chi’s lushly atmospheric short. Made as part of her graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the film centers on women within the local Honduran community—which Chi has closely worked with in the past—and is largely composed of a cast of non-professional actors. This includes protagonists Abby (Abigail Hernandez), a rebellious 15-year-old, and Nata (Natalia Rodríguez), her younger cousin who’s freshly arrived in the US. As the girls navigate this stark change in their living situation, tensions naturally arise: Abby begins […]
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“The Version of My Homeland That I Was Robbed of”: Reem Jubran on Her Student Short Film Showcase Winner Don’t Be Long, Little Bird
While on a tense mother-daughter trip, a young woman (Banna Bazzarie) contends with her desire to broaden her horizons while also recognizing the importance of her heritage in Reem Jubran’s UCLA thesis film Don’t Be Long, Little Bird. Seeking some much-needed space from her mother (and a sneaky smoke), the young woman stumbles upon a secluded swimming hole. After taking a dip, she emerges in a different time and place altogether: Ramallah, Palestine circa 1936, a dozen years before the Nakba that would displace civilians and destroy their villages in order to create the state of Israel. Unsure of how […]
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“Someone on the Verge of Screaming Back at the World” Sujin Jung on Her Student Short Film Showcase Winner Cocoon
Three generations of women clash during a Korean holiday in writer-director Sujin Jung’s Cocoon. Made as her MFA thesis film during her studies at Loyola Marymount University, the film centers on Jisoo (Alexes Josephine Lee), a young girl who experiences anxiety-induced selective mutism. This becomes a point of contention between Jisoo’s mother, Hyunsook (Taehee Kim) and her mother-in-law (Joy Kim), who express their respective frustration with the girl’s condition in vastly different ways. When the family matriarch harshly punishes Jisoo due to her inability to speak, Hyunsook decides to stand up for her daughter, subverting traditional expectations in the process. […]
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“Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Nor Bad But What You Bring To It”: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency
In the first two films in their trilogy of environmental-themed documentaries, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle married — literally — their loving spirit of “ecosexuality” with urgent debates around the preservation of our natural resources. In 2014’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain — An Ecosexual Love Story, Stephens returned to her West Virginia home with Sprinkle only to find the eponymous ridges she remembered from her youth undergoing the environmentally-destructive coal-mining process of mountaintop removal. In the film, as Wren Awry wrote for Filmmaker, Stephens says, “Sometimes I feel like fighting [mountaintop removal] is a losing battle. Then I imagine that some […]
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“The Movie Stays the Same, Yet the Interpretation Is Often Very Different”: David Secter on the 60 Year Legacy of Winter Kept Us Warm
“Winter kept us warm,” reads an early line in T.S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land, “covering Earth in forgetful snow.” This season, often associated with loneliness and despair, heralds quite the opposite both in Eliot’s masterwork and in Canadian filmmaker David Secter’s. The latter’s 1965 feature debut, Winter Kept Us Warm, centers on the blossoming relationship between Doug (John Labow) and Peter (Henry Tarvainen), two University of Toronto college students. An upperclassman, the popular Doug spends more time socializing with his fraternity brothers than studying; conversely, freshman Peter feels awkward in his new surroundings, and as such greatly prefers […]
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“Crying and Editing at the Same Time”: Karla Murthy on Her Sheffield World Premiere The Gas Station Attendant
For much of her life, Karla Murthy listened as her father regaled her with tales of his troubled upbringing and eventual journey to America. Raised in poverty in India, Shantha Murthy spent years of his childhood destitute and working for meager wages at a restaurant, his only respite arriving in the form of an American couple who eventually sponsored his visa to the U.S. The rest follows a fairly simple pattern: he met a girl in his new home state of Texas, got hitched and started a family of his own. This, he claimed, was his true life’s goal; but […]
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Duty of Care: Sarah Friedland on Familiar Touch
Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch follows Ruth, an octogenarian woman experiencing memory loss as she transitions into assisted living. Played with luminous restraint by Kathleen Chalfant, Ruth is not someone we observe from a distance—we move with her. Told entirely from her perspective, the film unfolds through a sensory experience of time and memory. Through light, texture, sound and gesture, we come to understand what it means to live inside a body—and a mind—that is transforming. Ruth is looked after by Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a personal support worker, and Brian (Andy McQueen), the home’s doctor. Over time, she begins to […]
