Interviews
Interviews
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“People Can Choose to Create the Collective, Social Experience”: Billy Woodberry on Bless Their Little Hearts
Billy Woodberry was a graduate student in UCLA’s film program when he started work on Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), a gauzy black-and-white portrait of a married couple in Watts as their responsibilities to one another are tested by the burdens of underemployment. Day-to-day gigging against a background of vanishing local industry, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) embarks on an affair, while his exhausted wife Andais (Kaycee Hardman) works double-time, commuting to her own job while also looking after their home and children. Chafing against the confines of roles that no longer seem to fit, their affections are suffocated by limits […]
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Violet: How They Achieved This Stunning 4:3 Film’s Most Stunning Shots
Floating in an ocean of equals parts uncertainty and obscurity after winning the Grand Prix of the Generation 14plus International Jury in 2014, Bas Devos’s feature debut Violet didn’t reach American shores, beyond a handful of festivals, until new distributor Altered Innocence took a chance and set a theatrical date and announced a subsequent physical release. Saved from being forgotten, the film is one of the most striking and pure cinematic works to arrive stateside this year, and exemplifies the importance of betting on unorthodox voices that aim to challenge the medium’s formal conventions. Shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio […]
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Jon Nguyen on David Lynch: The Art Life, How Twin Peaks Delayed Production and the Downside of Kickstarter
While David Lynch fans eagerly await the premiere of the new Twin Peaks on Sunday, a documentary that peers deep into the iconic director’s life is currently making its way around theaters across the U.S. After premiering last year in Venice to rave reviews, we caught David Lynch: The Art Life at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland toward the end of its festival circuit. The film will play local dates this summer before being sent out to the film’s thousand-plus Kickstarter backers who have been waiting on the documentary since its 2012 campaign. The film’s young director, Jon Nguyen, […]
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“There Was Baby Powder in the VHS Tapes Themselves”: Erin Lee Carr on Mommy Dead and Dearest
Sometimes the only way to escape an overprotective household is to resort to extreme measures. Erin Lee Carr’s latest documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, about a young girl raised from birth by her mother to believe she was physically incapable of surviving on her own, is impressive in the way it caresses its true crime story into being a film about redemption through murder as the only means out. A victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, Gypsy Rose Blanchard spent much of her adolescent life in hospitals as a walking test tube, a medical experiment shopped around by a possessive mother desperate […]
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“The Film Gives Viewers Plenty to be Angry About”: Steve James on Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Steve James’ documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, is at once a heartfelt portrait of a close-knit family facing overwhelming adversity and an infuriating indictment of our U.S. justice system gone seriously awry. The film follows the Chinese immigrant Sung family, founding owners and operators of the Abacus Federal Savings Bank down in NYC’s Chinatown, who in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis found themselves locked in a half-decade battle with spotlight-loving Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. Though the bank had one of the lowest default rates in the country (with only nine out of 3,000 loans defaulting!), the […]
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Turning 13 Installation Screens of Cate Blanchett Into One Single-Screen Feature: Julian Rosefeldt on Manifesto
A conservative mother leads her family in a lunchtime prayer on pop art. A tattooed punk screams about stridentism at a roomful of drugged-out partiers. A teacher stifles her students’ creativity with the harsh dictates of the Dogme 95 movement. Cate Blanchett, the preternatural shape-shifter who can slink into Bob Dylan or Katherine Hepburn with equal ease, embodies these and nine other souls in Manifesto, the art installation turned feature film from Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto premiered in 2015 as a 13-screen sensory wonder at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The installation asks viewers to move from screen to […]
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with The Last Goodbye Co-director Ari Palitz
Perhaps the most powerful piece at this year’s Storyscapes, the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual survey of the biggest and best in new virtual reality work, was The Last Goodbye. The pieces’s concept is both simple and ambitious: to have a Holocaust survivor guide the viewer in a tour of the concentration camp where he was interned over seven decades ago. Pinchas Gutter, who as an eleven-year-old boy lost his entire family at the Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland, fills this role admirably. Locations include the camp grounds, cells, and an incinerator, but despite the breathtaking technical achievement of the footage — in […]
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with No Man’s Land Director David Byars
Documentary filmmaker David Byars had either the luck or the foresight that every first-time director envies. He had been following the patriot movement — a loose collection of rural conservatives who resent the federal government’s authority over issues like public lands — for years, focusing on emerging leaders of Cliven Bundy and his sons Ammon and Ryan and trying to piece together a story that would make a compelling film. So when the younger Bundys led an armed group of demonstrators to occupy the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon last year, Byars was prepared: he had the […]
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions with Rainbow Crow Producer Maureen Fan
One of my favorite virtual reality pieces at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival was the animated Invasion! from San Francisco-based Baobab Studios. The short film, directed by Baobab co-founder Eric Darnell, was reportedly downloaded over one million times (including in my household, where my kids loved its Google Cardboard version), making it the most-downloaded virtual reality piece yet, and in September a feature film adaptation was announced. Baobab thus had a high bar for their next project, so they launched two: Asteroids!, which premiered at Sundance in January, and now Rainbow Crow, which premiered this year at Tribeca. Following in the kid-friendly tradition of Darnell’s […]
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Tribeca 2017: Erik Nelson on A Gray State
Originating as a concept trailer tapping into an increasingly burgeoning pocket of anti-police-state paranoia, David Crowley’s A Gray State was a film that warned of big government (FEMA = bad) taking over its innocent citizens to enslave and execute them. Like The Purge but with more guillotines and public massacres, Crowley’s footage depicted a low-budget world of state-led slaughter in the streets taking place to control those it sought to protect. A rebellion would be imminent, the story implies, and its tagline, “by consent or conquest,” sounds as much like generic action movie marketing as it does a patriotic call-to-arms. To doubters, the film would […]
