Following her vibrant and raucous concert doc, Gogol Bordello Nonstop, Colombia-born, New York-based filmmaker Margarita Jimeno makes her dramatic feature debut with the Cinequest-premiering Grind Reset Shine, another story about an art and artmaking but one that unfolds in a very different way. From the press release: When the worlds of a struggling artist and a nun entangle, how will they break free? Peter is a struggling artist who moves from New York to Berlin to explore his luck and join an art collaborative. Alicia, preparing for nunhood in a remote Polish village, tries to decipher the existence of Satan […]

Where Brett Story’s previous feature, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, interrogated the US’s carceral system in twelve formally and thematically distinct segments, her new film The Hottest August approaches climate change, in its broadest sense, through a freeflowing diaristic chronicle of a summer month. Over August of 2017, Story and her crew traveled to all five boroughs of NYC, capturing a broad polyphony of voices that, pleasingly, refuses to stay strictly on-thematic-task. The film just premiered at True/False before proceeding to SXSW; the first screening there is today. Over FaceTime Audio, I spoke to Story about working with a small crew, redefining […]

The debut feature from writer and director Hu Bo, An Elephant Sitting Still, caused a sensation when it screened at the 2018 Berlinale. Nearly four hours long, the movie unfolds over the course of a day in and around a blue-collar housing development in a third-tier Chinese town. Interlocking narratives follow a bullied high school student, an elderly parent pressured to move into a nursing home, a gangster who must avenge an attack on his brother and a girl’s illicit relationship with a married teacher. The movie’s running time, difficult subject matter and troubled production have left an air of […]

You’re making another short? Why not just make your first feature? You’re already making your feature? Maybe you should make some shorts first. Oh, you’re making a feature? Good luck funding it; good luck casting it; you should be sure it’s genius before embarking on that next three years of your life…. If you suffer from these neuroses-inducing comments, as well as doubts around stamina, sustainability and creativity, you might be a first-time feature filmmaker. Anyone who’s making movies, or trying to, knows there are mountains worth of judgements, opinions and advice that come with the craft. I’ve found a […]

His portrayal of Lola, the drag queen in Kinky Boots, put Chiwetel Ejiofor on the map, then his astonishing performance in 12 Years A Slave made him a household name. Roles in The Martian, Doctor Strange, and the under-appreciated Z for Zachariah followed. Now he has written, directed and stars in The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind, which is in select theaters and on Netflix. He talks about the art of wearing many hats, directing the extremely gifted young Maxwell Simba in his first film role, and the effort he took to not shortchange his own character. Back To One […]

For several years Christopher Doyle has been a fixture at Camerimage, the annual festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland, devoted to cinematography. This past November he was especially busy, hosting two panels called “The Language of Cinema Is Images” with his friend and colleague Ed Lachman. Extending over six hours, these were a chance for Doyle, Lachman, and their guests to share stories, give advice, and question each other about style and technique. The panels were also an opportunity for Doyle to screen some examples of his work. Leslie Cheung dancing to “Perfidia” in Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild. A […]

Since 1895 films have had at least two distinct advantages over live theater: the ability to be reproduced and watched at times and in places where the action did not actually take place, and the ability to direct the audience’s attention to precisely what the filmmakers desired. Conversely, after more than a century of cinema’s evolution, these have become precisely the reason that theater remains vibrant: it’s live and it’s present, and audiences can look wherever they want. Now virtual reality is mixing these experiences in a new way. While still prerecorded and edited (generally), it expands the audience’s range […]

Claire Simon’s The Competition is a sometimes painfully funny documentary about a subject that doesn’t seem humorous at all: the rigorous admission process, heavy on interviews in front of panels, for La Fémis, one of France’s premiere film schools. Its alumni include Claire Denis and Arnaud Desplechin, and its teachers have included Simon herself. One of France’s premiere documentarians, only with The Competition is Simon finally receiving a US release for her work—it’s the first film to be put out by the newly established Metrograph Pictures. Simon follows the process from beginning to end, with students and their interviewing juries speaking in […]

As Barry Alexander Brown toiled on the editing of School Daze, he was convinced that, at any moment, he’d be found out. That someone would inform director Spike Lee he was no longer working in the indie trenches of She’s Gotta Have It. That he was now working under the auspices of Columbia Pictures and could no longer simply hire his buddies to cut his movies. Recalls Brown, “I was sure somebody was going to come into the editing room and say, ‘What are you doing here?’” That never happened and, three decades later, Barry Alexander Brown is still cutting movies […]

I screened the amorphous Madeline’s Madeline twice in preparation for my interview with DP Ashley Connor; on the second go-around, I realized I’d be as nonplussed on a third or forth. I didn’t write any questions because I couldn’t. But perhaps an improvised approach was truer to the spirit of Madeline’s Madeline, which refuses to be pinned down. One of New York’s most prolific working DPs, Connor’s fervent demand for a higher standard of nuance, diversity, and inclusivity in the film industry naturally formed the backbone and throughline of our oscillating conversation which features, amongst other things, Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema, Grand […]