Interviews
Interviews
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“A Nihilist Western”: Athina Rachel Tsangari on Harvest
It’s been nearly a decade since Athina Rachel Tsangari, the idiosyncratic Greek filmmaker who’s never one to repeat herself, has graced us with a new film. Tsangari is always looking for a new challenge: from the improvisational, genre-bending desolateness of The Slow Business of Going (2000), to her Greek Weird-Wave breakout Attenberg (2010) and game of hypermasculinity, Chevalier (2015), each new project takes on a whole different formal imagination. What links them together? Beyond their ostensible differences is Tsangari’s affinity for betweenness—that feeling of not belonging. This feeling is reflected in the films as much as in Tsangari’s life, bouncing […]
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“This Film is Done by YouTubers”: Benjamin Ree on The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
In 2020’s The Painter and the Thief, Norwegian director Benjamin Ree told the story of the unlikely friendship between artist Barbora Kysilkova and heroin addict Karl-Bertil Nordland through overlapping, sometimes contradictory points of view. He has used this approach again for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a telling—and repeated retelling—of the short life of Mats Steen, a young, disabled Norwegian gamer who died in 2014 from the rare degenerative disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy. While his loving family was devoted to giving Steen the best life he could have, in the immediate aftermath of his death they grieved the fact that […]
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“A Deep Dive Into My Trauma”: Shiori Ito on Black Box Diaries
Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries is a film the Japanese journalist should never have had to make. Based on her international bestseller, the Sundance-premiering doc is a dogged investigation into a rape perpetrated by another Japanese journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a longtime friend of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose biography the offender penned as well. It’s also a somewhat surreal journey, given that the brave survivor in the purposely stalled case is Ito herself. Through an engaging mix of secret recordings, vérité shooting and confessional video, we’re invited along on an increasingly maddening odyssey through the shockingly antiquated Japanese […]
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“When I’m a Director, I’m a Painter”: Titus Kaphar on Exhibiting Forgiveness
Titus Kaphar’s artwork can be found across the nation at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University and the Mississippi Museum of Art; his painting Yet Another Fight for Remembrance might be his most recognizable, as it was commissioned by TIME Magazine as a response to the Ferguson unrest following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer. The MacArthur Fellowship recipient continues to examine contemporary Black life in his feature film debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness. Actor André Holland stars as Terrell, an acclaimed painter living with his singer-songwriter wife Aisha (Andra Day) and young son […]
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“Nostalgia for When Things were Terrible”: Conner O’Malley, Danny Scharar and Jack Bensinger on Rap World
There’s an honesty to Rap World, the feature debut of co-directors Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar, beyond its vérité stylings. With Scharar playing the director, Ben, Rap World is a mockumentary following three friends—Matt (O’Malley), Casey (Jack Bensinger) and Jason (Eric Rahill)—from Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, as they trudge through one long night in a quixotic attempt to make a rap album. It is January 11th, 2009: a month earlier The Dark Knight was released on home video, in nine days George W. Bush will leave office, the Great Recession looms and America feels like it is on the cusp of some […]
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“I Knew Exactly How to Bring It to the Screen”: Marco Calvani on High Tide
Italian playwright Marco Calvani makes his feature film debut as a writer-director with High Tide, a Provincetown-set indie drama that centers on the need for communal tenderness after a heartbreak. Lourenço (Marco Pigossi, now Calvani’s husband) considers P-town a paradise. Having left his native Brazil years ago in order to live life as an out gay man (a fact he still conceals from his mother), the queer enclave provides ample community and connection for the handsome young man. However, recent events have made the locale feel more oppressive than he expected: his long-term boyfriend up and left without warning, visa […]
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“A Throwback to Nancy Drew and Columbo”: Alice Maio Mackay on Carnage for Christmas
For her fifth feature, 20-year-old Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay gifts us Carnage for Christmas. A renegade force in the no-budget genre realm, her previous work has explored demonic cults, ancient parasites, vigilante vampires and Stephen King filtered through a uniquely queer lens. Maio Mackay’s latest features a supernatural, bloodlusting Santa Claus that small town residents have adopted as part of their folklore. The return of young adults for the holiday season awakens this mythologized entity, though it seems particularly drawn to Lola (newcomer Jeremy Moineau), a true crime podcast host who hates making the annual trek to her hometown. […]
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“I’ve Got My Finger on the Zeitgeist”: Matt Farley on Local Legends: Bloodbath
Several years ago on my birthday, I woke to a text from a friend: a link to “The Emily Poop Song”. For a minute and twenty-one seconds, I listened to what the album title described as “The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop” repeat my name over and over, often punctuated with the word “poop.” There were fifty songs on the album, all about different people and feces, but that turned out to be only a tiny portion of the odd man’s output—across several Spotify profiles, Matt Farley has written over 25,000 songs. While some are about our smelly bodily […]
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“There Is a Bombardment of Violent Images in Our Lives”: Director Pascal Plante on His High-Tech Serial Killer Drama Red Rooms
Real world inspirations and dark web folklore converge in Red Rooms, the third feature from Quebecois filmmaker Pascal Plante that has conjured much buzz since its U.S. theatrical release last month. Named after the fabled sinister backdrop of covertly circulated online snuff videos, the film dissects our culture’s obsession with gorey details. As the first day of a shocking murder trial unfolds in a Montreal courthouse, the devilishly striking Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is first in line to snag one of a handful of seats available to the public. The man on trial, bald and lanky Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), is […]
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“Day Car Work on Stage is Really Tough”: DP Larkin Seiple on Wolfs
It seems strange to call a $100-plus million dollar Brad Pitt and George Clooney movie a return to a director’s roots, but in a way that’s exactly what Wolfs is for Jon Watts. Like his breakthrough feature Cop Car—a spartan and sinewy 2015 neo-noir made for $800,000 that impressed Marvel enough to land Watts a trio of entertaining Spider-Man movies—Wolfs is a lean, propulsive story that unfolds in a single day with no use for superfluous exposition. Clooney and Pitt star as lone wolf fixers who reluctantly team up when a tough-on-crime district attorney (Amy Ryan) ends up with a […]
