Interviews
Interviews
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“I Aimed to Capture the Subtle Cruelties of Social Isolation”: Yana Alliata On Her Herzog-EP’d SXSW Drama, Reeling
Shorts filmmaker Yana Alliata, who has worked in various film industry jobs (Fox Searchlight, FX Networks and Film Finances) makes her feature debut in Reeling, a dark Hawaii-set drama that’s executive produced by Werner Herzog and deals with trauma, memory and the implicit horror of family gatherings. The movie begins with a long, gliding steadicam shot of Ryan (Ryan Wuestewald) entering his family’s ranch-style Hawaii home, where the clan is gathered for a Lu-au that’s also something of a memorial for the their late patriarch. The family is welcoming, but Ryan, beneath the forced smiles, signals fight-or-flight mode, a mental […]
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“Miami is the City of Hustle”: Jing Ai Ng on SXSW 2025 Premiere Forge
Common associations audiences might have with Miami: cruise lines, café con leche, beach parties, plastic surgery, Art Basel, Dexter, Scarface, a diverse and predominantly Latino and Caribbean population. AFI Conservatory graduate Jing Ai Ng wants to turn some of those tropes around with her debut feature Forge, premiering in the Narrative Spotlight section of SXSW 2025. The Malaysian-born filmmaker grew up shuttling between Southeast Asia and Miami and wanted to honor the Florida city she knew—that of first and second gen Asian subcultures, rare dim sum restaurants and a particular vein of white collar crime: art forgery. After first exploring […]
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“Women Like Gail are Often Vilified in the Media as Cold-Blooded Killers and Even Monsters”: Jessica Earnshaw on her SXSW-Debuting Baby Doe
Baby Doe is the latest from Jessica Earnshaw, whose Jacinta won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at Tribeca 2020. While that film followed a mother-daughter relationship bound up in drugs, incarceration and generational trauma, Baby Doe stars a happily married mother and grandmother who likely never even smoked a cigarette or garnered a speeding ticket. Indeed, Gail Ritchey was an unassuming conservative Christian living in rural Ohio until the magic of DNA matched the fifty-something to “Geauga’s Child,” a newborn left abandoned in the woods three decades ago. Which soon led to an arrest for murder (though […]
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“… The Visual Approach of the Documentary is Deeply Influenced by Amish and Mennonite Norms”: Elaine Epstein on her SXSW-Premiering Arrest the Midwife
As its nonsensical title might imply, Elaine Epstein’s Arrest the Midwife centers on the plight of three certified professional midwives who, after the death of a newborn (ironically, at a hospital one of the midwives rushed her client to the minute she noticed complications), find themselves in the crosshairs of their local authorities in upstate New York, one of only 11 states where midwifery is either illegal or highly restricted. (NYC midwives might consider moving to progressive Alabama.) And while the tale is quite harrowing, it’s also unexpectedly empowering. For what the (male) police and prosecutors didn’t quite bargain for […]
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“I’ve Been Trying to Coin the Phrase ‘Hangout Horror'”: Alexander Ullom on SXSW 2025 Premiere It Ends
In the last decade, a growing number of films and TV shows have iterated the time loop: Russian Doll‘s nested doll approach, Inception‘s infinitely spinning top. Alexander Ullom’s feature debut It Ends subverts those genre expectations at every turn—or rather, at every absence of a turn. Premiering in SXSW 2025’s Narrative Feature Competition, the film might superficially be grouped alongside similar-sounding genre titles like It, It Comes at Night and How It Ends. But as Ullom explained to me, his intentions were both more playful and somber. In a sense, this story about four zoomers who get into a car […]
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“It Took 31 Years”: Zeinabu irene Davis on Compensation
Because I had loved so deeply, Because I had loved so long, God in His great compassion Gave me the gift of song. Because I have loved so vainly, And sung with such faltering breath, The Master in infinite mercy Offers the boon of Death. — “Compensation” (1906) by Paul Laurence Dunbar Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) tells dual stories of pairs of lovers (both played by Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks) at the beginning and end of the 20th century. The film is uniquely attuned to deaf culture, American prejudice and two distinct pandemics. Creative in her […]
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“The Link Between Exploration and Exploitation”: Eleanor Mortimer on How Deep Is Your Love
Barbie Pig, Gummy Squirrel, Psychedelic Elvis Worm. These are not quirky colloquialisms for party drugs or Trolli candies, but rather taxonomic shorthand for deep sea creatures. For her debut documentary feature, director Eleanor Mortimer boarded a research vessel for an extended two-month expedition in the deep Pacific and encountered these alluring and alien animals firsthand. How Deep Is Your Love chronicles the work undertaken by taxonomists, who are slowly trying to identify the estimated 1.75 million undiscovered ocean species. Already a herculean task, the looming likelihood of rampant commercial deep sea mining—which intends to extract precious minerals like cobalt, nickel […]
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“I Put 30 Years of My Life Into 80 Minutes”: Myrid Carten on Her True/False Documentary, A Want in Her
Interweaving home movies, intimate phone calls, previous art school projects and deeply moving footage shot over an intense seven-month timeframe, A Want in Her documents increasing tumult within the filmmaker’s immediate family. The documentary may be the feature debut of moving-image artist Myrid Carten, but the inclusion of charming mini-DV footage shot by the director in her youth proves that, in many ways, she’s been a personal storyteller her whole life. (Even if the early ‘00s footage is more interested in parodying America’s Next Top Model than capturing the cracks already materializing in her family’s foundation). The film opens by […]
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“I Feel Like the World is Literally on Fire”: Lemohang Mosese on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Ancestral Visions of the Future
Following its premiere in Venice’s 2019 Biennale College Cinema section and North American launch at Sundance 2020, Lemohang Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection became a noteworthy arthouse success, scoring wide international distribution and eventually gaining a place in the Criterion Collection. Now six years later, Mosese has premiered his follow-up feature Ancestral Visions of the Future, shifting to a poetic, hybrid documentary form while retaining his previous work’s expressive tempo and eye-searingly colourful outdoor cinematography. Whilst Burial was concerned with the maintenance of longterm dynastic communities in Lesotho, the landlocked country of his birth fully enclosed […]
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“Maybe an Individual is Only as Interesting as the Energy Surrounding Them”: Angelo Madsen on His True/False-debuting A Body to Live In
Angelo Madsen’s A Body to Live In is a doc as unconventional in form as its leading man. Comprised of various formats (16mm, VHS, archival, 2K) overlaid with underground voices (Annie Sprinkle and Ron Athey are probably the best known), the film takes us on a winding journey through the life and philosophy of photographer-performance artist-ritualist Fakir Musafar, one of the founders of the modern primitive movement. With the archival Musafar (born Roland Loomis in 1930) as our guide we’re introduced to an unheralded slice of LGBTQ+ history that includes gay BDSM parties, the first piercing shop, body modification as […]
