Interviews
Interviews
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You Can Never (Maybe?) Break the Chain: Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Hot Milk
Spanish seaside entanglements, a combustive mother-daughter relationship, mysterious, painful malaise, the veiled threat of healing and new currents of love trail Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Nearby, watching her life pass by is Sofia (Emma Mackey), a doctoral student in anthropology and caregiver since she was a young girl to her defiant mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), mostly restricted to a wheelchair. A story of self discovery, queer kindling and medical melancholy among these three fascinating women in a sun-baked setting, Hot Milk, premiering at the 75th Berlinale, is one of the most buzzed new titles in the Competition section. The directorial debut […]
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“1.66 Just Felt Good”: DP Jarin Blaschke on Nosferatu
Over the course of his four feature films, Robert Eggers has gained a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with meticulous period accuracy. After listening to Jarin Blaschke talk about moon size as a mathematical equation, it’s easy to see why Eggers has enjoyed working with the equally meticulous cinematographer for almost two decades. “I’m kind of a stickler about how big a moon is when a CG moon is in frame,” said Blaschke. “It needs to be 1/80th the width of the screen, because the moon is a half a degree wide and our lens takes in 40 degrees. So, […]
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“Genocide Brain”: Christine Haroutounian on Berlinale 2025 Premiere After Dreaming
The title of Christine Haroutounian’s first feature, After Dreaming, suggests a waking state, but the whole film hangs in a region where the divide between facts and hallucinations is never entirely clear. A follow-up to her 2020 short World—a cantankerous, Armenian-set study of end-of-life caretaking centered on a young woman and her dying mother—Dreaming sees the Los Angeles-born filmmaker return to her ancestral turf for a surreal road trip across a country still haunted by ongoing clashes with neighboring Azerbaijan. Dreaming, however, “is not a war film,” Haroutounian told me before her feature travelled to Berlin, where it premiered in […]
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“Meredith Understood That I Needed the Freedom to Create My Own Interpretation of Her Work and Life”: Billy Shebar on his Berlinale-Premiering Meredith Monk Doc, Monk in Pieces
Billy Shebar’s Monk in Pieces stars Meredith Monk, an artist so singular as to be unclassifiable. (A collage of Zoom-interviewed academics who expound on the titular composer-singer-director-choreographer – and creator of new opera, music theater works, films and installations – is like watching proverbial blind men describing an elephant.) A progenitor of what we now call “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk began her career in the downtown NYC art scene of the ’60s and ’70s — a time and place not all that kind to female boundary busters. (Indeed, New York Times reviews ranged from scathing to the […]
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“The Film is Not a Resistance Film”: Juanjo Pereira on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Under the Flags, the Sun
A row of men sit proudly on horses as a white flag drifts languidly in the wind. The beating sun lights the crowd, who applaud dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s ascent to power in 1954, and with it, the promise of “peace, progress and fraternity.” Time slows down as an ominous atmosphere envelopes this scene, foreshadowing what the future holds for Paraguay. Juanjo Pereira’s debut feature film, Under the Flags, the Sun, is a profound exploration of Stroessner’s dictatorship almost entirely made with archival footage, the film crafts a portrait of the open wounds of the 34-year dictatorship. The film premieres tonight […]
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“It Carries the Weight of Improvisation but Also Inevitability”: Liryc Dela Cruz on his Berlinale-premiering Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte)
Liryc Dela Cruz’s Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte) takes the simplest of storylines and renders it infinitely complex. Three Filipino siblings, all domestic workers in Italy who’ve not seen each other for years, reunite at an extravagant villa the elder sister inherited after the death of her longtime employer. They reminisce about childhood over Filipino delicacies the younger sister and brother have brought, and stroll the vast grounds that the new owner meticulously preserves as if she were still a servant and not the lady of the house. But as the languorous day draws to a close […]
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“We Couldn’t Find that Exact Beige — It Was a Real Struggle”: Production Designer Louisa Schabas on Designing Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language
Driving around Montreal on a gray November day with Universal Language writer-director Matthew Rankin, production designer Louisa Schabas noticed an elementary school with a row of stark, monolithic concrete walls facing the playground. The slabs were at an angle, allowing for a series of black metal doors to open into the yard. “This is perfect for the market,” she said. With some painted signs indicating a random assortment of mom-and-pop shops, including a bakery and an office supply store, Shabas would later transform the building facade into a ramshackle Winnipeg mini-mall, with the striking anomaly that all of the signage […]
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“The Film Hits a Person’s Heart”: Colman Domingo on Sing Sing
A24’s Sing Sing follows a group of inmates participating in the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, which offers incarcerated men the chance to produce theatrical productions while in prison. A true story developed by co-writers and producers Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar (who also directed) and RTA alumni Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin and John “Divine G” Whitfield, the film stars Oscar nominees Colman Domingo and Paul Raci alongside an ensemble of formerly incarcerated men who participated in the RTA program, including Maclin, who plays himself along with other RTA alumni. With incredible performances from Domingo (who earned his second consecutive […]
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“It Doesn’t Have to Always Cost $200 Million”: DP Lol Crawley on Shooting The Brutalist (Mostly) in VistaVision
In The Brutalist, a creatively uncompromising Hungarian-Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) immigrates to Pennsylvania after World War II and struggles to complete an ambitious project financed by a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce). Creating a three-hour epic in 34 days for under $10 million doesn’t allow the luxury of boundless obstinance, yet it’s easy to draw parallels between the protagonist’s unyielding artistry and a team of filmmakers that insisted on using the VistaVision format whose heyday ended more than 60 years ago. With the film, which is up for 10 Academy Awards, still in theaters and now also on VOD, Oscar-nominated cinematographer […]
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“I Made Sure My Presence and Camerawork Reflected the Difficult Position They Were Put In”: DP Amy Bench on Shooting The Librarians
With a style influenced by her work with documentary director Albert Maysles as well as shadowing DP Emmanuel Lubezki on The Tree of Life, Amy Bench wanted her work on Kim Snyder’s Sundance-premiering doc The Librarians, about a group of Texas librarians fighting censorship, “to shoot in the way that showed audiences the urgency, alarm, and fear felt by librarians and students in Texas.” Below, Bench, whose previous credits include the 2016 Sundance title Holy Hell and the 2015 Berlinale Silver Bear-winner Bad at Dancing, discusses those influences, anonymizing her subjects, and for what scene she brought in a second […]
