Interviews
Interviews
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Women in the Wilderness: How Nat Geo’s Queens Aims to Close the Gender Gap in Natural History Filmmaking
When National Geographic’s Janet Han Vissering and Wildstar Films’s Vanessa Berlowitz got the idea to make Queens, a six-part natural history series about female animals made by an all-woman production crew, they knew it would be a challenge. Only something like five percent of wildlife filmmakers are women, a number far short of the 20 to 30 percent average across the entertainment industry overall. They didn’t know how hard it would be, though. “On the camera side, before Queens there were probably about five women who’d had the opportunity to get to the ‘premium wildlife’ level of work,” Berlowitz explains. “There […]
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“A Film Can Be a Spark, and What Comes After It Is Where the Magic Is”: Elizabeth Nichols on Her True/False-Debuting Flying Lessons
Debuting at True/False (followed by First Look), Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons is a beautiful ode to a New York City Lower East Side artist as well as to the larger “dying breed” that once roamed the streets of Alphabet City, performing in its now extinct clubs. Importantly, it’s also a call to end rampant gentrification and a love story between director and character all rolled into one. The drama began, rather unhappily, with an eviction notice after NYC real estate owner/convicted fraudster Steve Croman bought the building Nichols was living in as a rent-stabilized tenant. Within months the “Bernie Madoff of landlords” had unleashed […]
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“I Don’t Invest Hope in Celebrity or Leaders Too Much, But I Do Have Hope in People”: Mitch McCabe on Their True/False Premiere 23 Mile
While the pandemic spurred many (white collar) Americans to flee the big cities and retreat to the safety and comfort of living room Zooming, Detroit native Mitch McCabe returned home to the big city and instead roamed the often chaotic streets, eventually journeying throughout Michigan, camera in tow. What the veteran filmmaker-educator (and Flaherty Seminar and MacDowell fellow) witnessed was what we all primarily saw in that “unprecedented” election year: anger. At lockdowns, at those attending protests unmasked. And masked. At the murder of George Floyd, at the BLM movement, at Trump. At Democrat elites like Governor Gretchen Whitmer and […]
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“I Want All The Lesbian Experiences I Can See On Film”: Tricia Cooke on Drive-Away Dolls
Directed by and co-written with collaborator and husband, Ethan Coen, filmmaker and editor Tricia Cooke’ Drive Away Dolls (or Dykes, per the end credits) finds her doing sapphic donuts around classic movies like Kiss Me Deadly and even a little North By Northwest. As Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) decide to take a trip to Tallahassee, they’re dogged by inept criminals seeking a package and suitcase in the back trunk of the car the pair have rented. If the road trip movie and film noir have long been exercises to explore the American psyche and the landscape’s possible […]
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“We Always Sought Out Photos with Movement”: Klára Tasovská on Her “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” Doc I’m Not Everything I Want to Be
”The only way to survive is to take photos,” declares Libuše Jarcovjáková, the iconoclastic star/narrator/guide of Klára Tasovská’s visually arresting (and eye-catching titled) I’m Not Everything I Want to Be. Nominated for the Teddy Documentary Award at this year’s Berlinale, the all-archival film is a globetrotting, black and white trip back in time (primarily to the 80s and 90s) viewed entirely through the rebelliously inquisitive eyes of this “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” (in the words of curator Sam Stourdzé). And words. For not only did Jarcovjáková obsessively collect images of both her defiantly unglamorous self and her decidedly adventurous life, […]
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“That Kid Running from the Fire”: Director Reinaldo Marcus Green on Destiny, Devotion and Bob Marley: One Love
On your way up. Take me up. On your way down. I won’t let you down. — Robert Nesta Marley As a form, the biopic and even more specifically the musical biopic, is an often fraught endeavor, one whose pursuit brings its makers along well-worn paths of pitfalls and dead ends. With his fourth feature, Bob Marley: One Love, Reinaldo Marcus Green meets this challenge head on, capturing a vision of Marley in a time of great upheaval. In the 1970s, Jamaica was embroiled in turmoil — a result of staggering levels of poverty and political rivalries. In ‘76, through gang […]
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Revisiting Silk Stalkings: Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn on IFFR 2024 Premiere Dream Team
Dream Team, the third feature by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, is another in the writer-director duo’s run of genre pastiches that double as sociopolitical parables. Here, the influence of ’90s basic cable TV thrillers is channeled into an episodic story about a pair of Interpol agents (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) who travel to Mexico to investigate the mysterious death of a corral smuggler. Shot by Horn in characteristically textured 16mm, the film unfolds between a variety of West Coast locales stretching from Baja California to Vancouver. As the body count rises and rumors of a physic coral […]
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“A Cinema of Deconstructed Painting”: Antoinetta Angelidi and Rea Walldén on the Rotterdam-Premiering Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality
Little known in the Anglophone film world (although a recent book in Edinburgh University Press’s ReFocus series might suggest an impending course correction), Antoinetta Angelidi is one of the most creative and distinct directors of the last half-century. Raised in and around Athens, Angelidi found solace in art in her adolescence after a traumatic childhood rape left her speechless. Though she initially took to painting, she was an avid moviegoer and, later, after a dream in which a Magritte-styled work exhibited a tiny movement, she turned to cinema. A student activist, she fled Greece for Paris with just the clothes […]
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112 Days in Iceland: DP Florian Hoffmeister on True Detective: Night Country
The diversity of cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister’s output makes it difficult to typecast him. The German DP won an Emmy for his work on a BBC version of Great Expectations and followed with the Rowan Atkinson spy spoof Johnny English Strikes Again. Then, in succession, he lensed the Scott Cooper horror flick Antlers, the Apple prestige drama Pachinko and Todd Field’s Tár, picking up an Oscar nomination for the latter. But with True Detective: Night Country, Hoffmeister returns to a previous specialty–unsettling subzero horror. Hoffmeister’s work on AMC’s The Terror followed an ill-fated 19th century artic expedition. He’s back to frigid […]
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“I Come From the One-Woman-Band Show of Visual Journalism…”: Emily Kassie on Producing Sugarcane
Tackling a timely but under-discussed contemporary issue in both the United States and Canada, journalists Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie investigate a string of abuses and missing persons cases at an indigenous residential school in Sugarcane. Below, Kassie, who in addition to directing the film with NoiseCat produced it alongside Kellen Quinn. Below, she recounts her debut experience as a producer and how she made a transition from the world of visual journalism. Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path that led you to produce this film, your first? What jobs within and outside of the film industry did […]
