Interviews
Interviews
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Apocalypse School: John Huddles on After the Dark
Titled The Philosophers in Europe, John Huddles’ most recent film After the Dark is a sneakily beautiful, remarkably thoughtful rumination on the final day of school for a portion of Abercrombie & Fitch photo shoot-ready philosophy students at an international school in Indonesia who engage in a thought experiment with their equally fetching professor (James D’Arcy). The experiment? Were the world to be nearly destroyed that very day by nuclear war, who amongst the group would be chosen to take shelter in a bunker, one too small for all of them, during the atomic holocaust and be charged with repopulating the world? Feelings are hurt, suppositions about […]
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“I Jumped on a Running Train:” Interim Artistic Director Mart Dominicus on Rotterdam 2014
The Artistic Director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam since 2008, Rutger Wolfson had begun work on this year’s edition of the festival, the 43rd, when fate interceded. In November, Wolfson was hospitalized with a rare autoimmune disease. (Happily, he is expected to make a full recovery.) With the festival two months away from its starting date, Mart Dominicus — a lecturer at the Netherlands Film Academy, a screenplay and editing coach, and a member of the festival’s Supervisory Board since 2010 — stepped in to become Artistic Director for this year’s festival. At the festival’s end, Filmmaker sat down […]
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Interview with Vic + Flo Saw a Bear Director Denis Côté
Quebecois filmmaker Denis Côté makes an unassuming, unabashedly regional kind of cinema, drawing on the rhythms and landscapes of his native province. It’s taken him a long time to get attention south of the border – I had to travel to the Toronto Film Festival to see his first film, Drifting States. He seemed to have a breakthrough of sorts in the U.S. with Curling, which at least got some attention on the festival circuit and was acquired by New Yorker Films, who never released it. Bestiaire, a semi-documentary shot in a Montreal zoo, got him more attention, and Vic […]
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Winter Requiem: Jessica Oreck on Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
The uncompromising yet lovely vérité doc Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys takes an unadorned, soulful look at a year in the lives of a pair of brothers who are among a collective of reindeer herders in rural Finland. A departure in many ways from the zany Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck’s new film is bloody and ice bound, showcasing a world of rustic north European life rarely glimpsed on screen. The grim slaughter of reindeer and the daily tribulations of running such an operation doesn’t escape the director’s eye; neither does the tenderness and decency of the people doing such work. […]
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Scared Straight: Trevor White on Jamesy Boy
Ostensibly based on a true story, Trevor White’s Jamesy Boy recounts the ascension, demise and redemption of James Burns, a cavalier gang member whose story is an all too American one — he fell into a life of crime on the streets of Baltimore as a 14 year old, did some hard time, and was, somewhat astoundingly given the unrepentantly punitive nature of our disenfranchisement factories known as prisons, the better for it. He’s played by a promising newcomer, Spencer LoFranco, who is joined by an accomplished cast including Ving Rhames, Mary-Louise Parker and James Woods, in a somewhat surprising turn, […]
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Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo on VICE’s Every Woman
More often than not, filmmakers undertake the odd job to get by — not unlike, as Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo argue in their VICE series Every Woman, the storied “second sex.” “We started thinking about the most stigmatized, mysterious and hardest jobs women do,” Roxo narrates in the opening sequence. And so, the Brooklyn filmmaking team trekked across the country to slip inside the well-worn shoes (lucite heels) of a truckstop stripper, as captured in the New Mexico-set pilot of Every Woman. Filmmaker spoke with Leite and Roxo about the series, the dangers of overstepping exploitative bounds and the foibles of simultaneously acting […]
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Rough Riders: Lotfy Nathan on 12 O’Clock Boys
Having started life as a graduate film school project that was mostly financed on Kickstarter, Lotfy Nathan’s multiple Cinema Eye Honors-nominated documentary 12 O’Clock Boys, about a young boy named Pug who is immersed in inner-city dirt-biking culture, is an immediate and searing look at a particularly American coming of age on some of the country’s roughest streets. Pug’s mom, an ex-stripper named Coco, tries to steer him on a path of study and professionalism, urging him to consider training to be a veterinarian, but in this combative, crime-ridden stretch of West Baltimore, becoming an animal doctor is a remote dream. […]
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Balancing the Autobiographical Documentary: Jason DaSilva on When I Walk
I remember the first time I saw Sherman’s March and realized how revealing autobiographical documentary could be. Filmmakers who turn the camera on themselves run a high risk of self-indulgence, but when done right their films can intimately show the resilience of the human spirit, especially when their challenges appear insurmountable, whether in situations as grandiose as in Ernest Shackleton and Frank Hurley’s South or as ostensibly mundane as Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan’s Troublesome Creek. The process of making autobiographical films can even be beneficial for the filmmakers, psychologically or otherwise, provided they place therapy on a backseat to […]
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Girls Interrupted: Juliet Lammers and Lorraine Price on Last Woman Standing
When I met Canadian director Juliet Lammers during the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival – where we served together on a sprawling panel – her film Last Woman Standing, which made the Hot Docs 2013 Netflix Audience Award top five, wasn’t even on my radar. But it certainly should have been. Co-directed by Lammers and Lorraine Price, Last Woman Standing is more than a riveting sports flick (though it’s that as well). Unique in approach, the doc focuses just as much on the relationship rift between Ariane Fortin and Mary Spencer, two of the world’s best boxers, as it does […]
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“These Movies Work Better If You’re Really Stoned:” David Cronenberg on Architecture and His Early Work
TIFF’s acclaimed Evolution exhibition — celebrating the career of hometown boy David Cronenberg — had just closed when OCAD University hosted a free discussion between him and TIFF CEO Piers Handling. For the past five months, the art school has been partnering with Toronto International on The Cronenberg Project, a multimedia exploration of the director of Dead Ringers, Crash and A History of Violence. It’s appropriate that the discussion before an audience of 325 students and VIPs centered on Cronenberg’s student years, early films and architecture. The talk began with excerpts from Stereo (1969) and Crimes of The Future (1970), […]
