Interviews
Interviews
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Five Questions with These Birds Walk Directors Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq
Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq are among a handful of directors selected for Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces” in 2012 who are taking their debut features to this year’s SXSW Film Festival (alongside Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye’s Our Nixon, Ornana’s euphonia and Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher). Mullick and Tariq’s These Birds Walk, an alumni of the IFP Documentary Labs, is a moving and lyrical portrait of a home for young runaway boys and street children in Karachi, Pakistan, run by the humanitarian Abdul Sattar Edhi and his Edhi Foundation. The beautifully shot film (lensed by Mullick, a former photographer) was picked up by Oscilloscope prior to its […]
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Su Friedrich on Gut Renovation
“Gentrification is the opposite of the apocalypse. The apocalypse would pause history, level the built world to a pile of trash, and most likely lower rents considerably. Gentrification churns history forward, takes out the trash, carts away rubble, hides the poor, makes you work more and more to manage your rent, and encrypts the past, when you didn’t have to work so many jobs just to fucking live here, behind its glossy surfaces.” – Kristin Dombek, “How to Quit”, n+1 issue 15 Colson Whitehead, in an essay about how his adopted neighborhood of Fort Greene was changing and would continue […]
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Five Questions with Our Nixon Director Penny Lane and Co-Producer Brian L. Frye
While it’s widely known that Richard Nixon was an obsessive self-documenter, what is less well known is that three of his top aides – H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin – were as well. Mad for Super 8, the three men obsessively documented their everyday lives as they toiled away, unaware that their idealistic zeal for a corrupt administration would land them in prison. Directed by Penny Lane and co-produced by Brian Frye, Our Nixon is an all archive documentary that uses this footage to create a complex portrait of one of the most notorious administrations in the […]
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Five Questions with Touba Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Touba was seven years in the making: five of shooting, two of post-production. It grew out of her second documentary — 2008’s Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love — which followed the legendary Senegalese musician before and after 2004’s Egypt album, whose religious themes raised the ire of the country’s religious argument. Her newest film began life on vibrantly grainy 16mm, following an annual Senegal trek undertaken by hundreds to the city of Touba to visit the home of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Mouride Brotherhood. Like her last film, Vasarhelyi’s newest focuses on Islam […]
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Five Questions with The Bounceback Director Bryan Poyser
Bryan Poyser has been a fixture of Austin’s film scene for a decade, even as it’s remained in flux. As a director, he made his feature debut with 2004’s Dear Pillow, in which a teen struggling with sex gets mentored by a fiftysomething ex-porn director. 2010’s follow-up Lovers Of Hate (half shot in Austin) was a perversely comic sexual rondelay in which a demented ex skulks in the mansion where his former partner and her new lover are taking a vacation, spying on both while trying to keep his presence a secret. Poyser’s third feature, The Bounceback, is his first […]
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Five Questions with euphonia Director Danny Madden
When the filmmaking collective Ornana (led by director Danny Madden) was chosen for Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces” last summer, it was their charming and inventive animated short about a robot elephant, (notes on) biology, that first attracted our attention and admiration. However, it was group’s radically different follow-up project, euphonia (then still in rough cut), which assured us of Madden and co.’s genius. The 50-odd minute live-action film, which was first planned as a short, tells the tale of a high schooler (Will Madden, Danny’s younger brother) who buys a digital sound recorder and becomes increasingly fixated with capturing the sounds around […]
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This Is Different: Cristian Mungiu on Beyond the Hills
Cristian Mungiu’s latest feature, Beyond the Hills, confirms suspicions that were aroused by his previous, the Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. What’s been confirmed is that Mungiu is that rare blend of filmmaker who seems destined to produce first-class auteurist art cinema. Mungiu blends two distinct types of filmmaking into one carefully distilled whole: his films address critically pressing social issues that are irrefutably relevant, but they also are formalist aesthetic works that are very much about the nature of cinema itself. There are plenty of serious filmmakers who tackle either one interest or the other, […]
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Directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson on A Place at the Table
If Food, Inc. freaked you out, prepare to be galvanized by A Place at the Table, another hot-button food doc being released by Participant Media and Magnolia Pictures. The film, which boasts the involvement of celebrity advocates Jeff Bridges and chef Tom Colicchio, fixes its curious eye on America’s hunger crisis, whose staggering stats add up to the distressing fact that 50 million folks in this country, many of them kids, don’t know when or how they’re getting their next meal. It’s a monster of a topic, with arms that stretch to the realms of politics, medicine, and agriculture, and […]
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Five Questions with Stoker Director Park Chan-wook
Stoker, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s long-awaited English-language debut, has already proven divisive, its moral murkiness and arguable cynicism as beguiling to some as they are troubling for others. But however one feels when walking away from this Gothic, slow-burning psycho-thriller, which explores the curious workings of its titular family (the surname’s an intended nod to a certain vampire-loving author), it’s hard to deny that it’s the work of a master stylist, whose obsessive attention to detail is intoxicating, and, these days, far too rare. A parade of pristine compositions, technical flourishes, and production design that’s adamantly era-nonspecific, Stoker plays […]
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Five Questions with Hava Nagila (The Movie) Producer Marta Kauffman
She co-created the HBO series Dream On. She launched and executive produced the NBC shows Veronica’s Closet and Jesse. She created Five, a collaborative short film compilation that aired on Lifetime in 2011. And then there was that little series called Friends. A creative force in the world of television for more than 25 years, Marta Kauffman has spent her career bringing some of your favorite small-screen personalities into your living room. Now, in addition to tackling a handful of other projects, including a new pilot and a TV movie she’s set to write and direct, Kauffman is continuing to […]
