Interviews
Interviews
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Five Questions with Stand Clear of the Closing Doors Director Sam Fleischner
One of the buzz titles at the Tribeca Film Festival this year is director Sam Fleischner’s sophomore feature, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors. The film has a compelling premise, as it deals with Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez), an autistic 13-year-old boy from Brooklyn’s Rockaway Beach, who runs away from home and spends days on end traveling around on the New York subway system as his mother (Andrea Suarez) and sister (Azul Zorrilla) do their best to find him. Fleischner’s movie also garnered a modicum of attention as it was shot partly during Hurricane Sandy, and ultimately incorporated the storm into […]
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Five Questions with Bluebird Director Lance Edmands
Bluebird, Lance Edmands’s quietly disquieting directorial debut, follows a cast of characters in rural Maine, where every good intention is rendered fruitless in the face of a tragic accident. Lesley (Amy Morton), the local school bus driver, passes over a sleeping student at the end of her shift, leaving him to freeze into a coma overnight. The boy’s drifting, negligent young mother, Marla (Louisa Krause), seeks solace in the possibility of a lawsuit, and distraction in a dalliance with her co-worker, while her own mother monitors the child’s health in the hospital. Lesley’s husband, Richard (John Slattery), is an inch […]
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Five Questions with Sunlight Jr. Director Laurie Collyer
While the lives of the working class are not the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of, they are at the heart of Laurie Collyer’s new film, Sunlight Jr. Starring Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon as a couple dealing with an unexpected pregnancy while trying to survive on minimum wage jobs, Sunlight Jr. premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend where it is sure to stir up a conversation about what it means to be numbered among the working poor in American society today. Filmmaker: Although income inequality and poverty is one of the biggest issues facing America right now, […]
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Five Questions with Cutie and the Boxer Director Zachary Heinzerling
Zachary Heinzerling’s debut film, Cutie and the Boxer, has been one of the documentary hits of the festival circuit this year following its world premiere at Sundance, where Heinzerling won a directing award. A narrative study of the relationship between famed boxing painter Ushio Shinohara and his artist wife, Noriko, the film explores their creatively exorbitant marriage and all of the intimacies therein – from their quirky flirtations to the darkness of Ushio’s alcoholic past. Heinzerling’s background in philosophy and his five years working on documentaries for HBO have made the director equally focused on honesty and quiet questioning as photographic beauty, attributes […]
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Five Questions with Hide Your Smiling Faces Director Daniel Patrick Carbone
In Daniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces, two young brothers wrestle with the meaning of mortality following the mysterious death of a friend. Paying little mind to the root of the accident, Carbone readily positions the death as a catalyst, allowing its existential domino effect to reverberate across the conscience of Eric, Tommy, and their equally curious cohorts. The lush and expansive woodland landscape where most of the narrative unfolds belies the intimacy of the film, as the viewer is able to peer inside a series of identity shaping interactions that function more like memories than plot points. In […]
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Five Questions with Lily Director Matt Creed
The heroine of director Matt Creed’s Lily — premiering today at the Tribeca Film Festival — is the in last throes of successful breast cancer treatment, and finding that life after illness is supposed to pick back up right where it left off. We follow her as she grapples with life’s minutiae, sometimes victorious and sometimes not, in a bravely authentic portrait of an aspect of cancer survivor’s lives seldom portrayed on screen. Filmmaker asked Creed about tackling such a personal subject in his first feature film. Filmmaker: The film is semi-autobiographical, based on your co-writer Amy Grantham’s experience with breast […]
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Five Questions with The Kill Team Director Dan Krauss
The Kill Team is a new blistering offering in the ever increasing pantheon of indictments of military conduct unbecoming. It follows the trial of specialist Adam Winfield, whose platoon in Afghanistan started intentionally murdering civilians, branding themselves The Kill Team. In an ironic twist of fate, though a horrified Winfield sought to alert the military via his family and found his exhortations fell on deaf ears, Winfield was immediately indicted with premeditated murder upon his return to the U.S., along with four others in his platoon. Director Dan Krauss’s film, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival today, documents the […]
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Five Questions with Oxyana Director Sean Dunne
Between 2008 and 2011, Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Sean Dunne built a burgeoning reputation for himself with a series of short films that demonstrated both his strong visual sense and his ability to skilfully capture the world of his subjects. The standout films from this period were The Archive, a portrait of the largest collection of vinyl records in the U.S. and its owner, and American Juggalo, which featured devoted Insane Clown Posse fans at the annual Gathering of the Juggalos. Now Dunne has broadened his focus and made his debut feature, Oxyana, which zeroes in on the town of Oceana, […]
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Five Questions with Let The Fire Burn Director Jason Osder
Founded in 1972, the Philadelphia-founded black liberation group MOVE Organization (the capitals break down into an acronym) preached a return to nature, annoying their neighbors by having bullhorns broadcast their beliefs all night and letting garbage fester in their yard. On May 13, 1985, Wilson Goode — the city’s first black mayor — approved dropping a bomb on their house as part of an eviction effort. 11 MOVE members died, including 5 children, and destroyed 61 houses. Jason Osder’s documentary feature debut Let The Fire Burn resurrects the incident almost exclusively through archival footage of TV broadcasts, home movies and […]
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“You Think I Should Die?”: François Ozon on In the House
When François Ozon first started making features some 15 years ago, with films like Sitcom, Criminal Lovers and the Fassbinder adaptation Water Drops on Burning Rocks, he showed himself to be a raw, edgy and insistent talent. His ambition and style were at the fore in those early efforts, but over the years as he has continued to make movies — at the breakneck pace of almost one per year — he has visibly matured as a filmmaker. During his career he has done everything from colorful, large-scale retro musicals (8 Women) to bleak, formally rigorous relationship dramas (5×2) to lavish […]
