Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“A Lot of Movies Right Now are Just Shrugs”: Frederic Da on iPhone-Shot Found Footage film Isaiah’s Phone
Isaiah's Phone
With Isaiah’s Phone, French-American filmmaker Frederic Da caps off an informal trilogy cataloging the contemporary teenage experience by corralling his film students at a private high school in Santa Monica as crew and on-camera as actors. Short “Ava Dates a… Read more
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Writing Between Worlds: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich on The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
“For the pattern of unfulfilled desires has trapped the Antilles and America. From the time of the arrival of the conquistadors and the rise of their technical know-how (beginning with firearms), the lands from across the Atlantic have changed, not only in facial appearance but in fear. “So, far from contradicting, diminishing or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.”—Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage I recently had the opportunity to (virtually) sit down with my friend and fellow artist-filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehlrich to discuss […]
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“The Best is Always Zero Budget”: David Verbeek on Tribeca 2025 Premiere The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard
In a contemporary take on Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard depicts a woman who lives amongst wolves being whisked away and plunged into human society. Director David Verbeek presents this jarring story as a kind of apocalyptic fairytale, in which a feral woman learns what it means to be human while humanity itself is bracing for the end of the world as they know it. Mostly set on a repurposed offshore oil rig, the film explores how the interests of men and nature inevitably clash in the face of impending […]
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“‘History’ with a Capital ‘H'”: Mascha Schilinski on Cannes 2025 Award-Winner Sound of Falling
Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling was so rapturously acclaimed upon its premiere on the first full day of Cannes 2025 that some thought they’d already seen a possible Palme d’Or winner. In the end, her film shared the Jury Prize with another adored Competition title, Sirât, whose end-times death-trip might seem to overshadow the ordinary-sounding logline for Sound of Falling: four generations of girls on a farm in Germany. But this film swiftly establishes itself as an equally virtuosic secret history and sustained experiment in female subjectivity in kaleidoscopic form, drawing on scenes and notes from journals and voices from […]
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“There Was No Going Around Gaza”: Raoul Peck on Cannes 2025 Premiere Orwell: 2+2=5
Raoul Peck’s new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 opens with a credit sequence featuring images of what appear to be microscopic larvae wriggling across the screen. The message seems clear: something nefarious is afoot on this globe, but still in its incipient stages. If we fail to act, it’s going to get much worse. In recent years, the filmmaker has made direct, no-nonsense use of the nonfiction form to address, from various angles, the rot of white supremacy, its historical roots and its unchecked future. Building on I Am Not Your Negro, Silver Dollar Road, the miniseries Exterminate All the Brutes and […]
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“It’s Not Enough to Only Have Narrative”: Hlynur Pálmason on Cannes 2025 Premiere The Love That Remains
Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s epic 2022 film Godland mapped the crisis of faith experienced by a 19th-century Danish priest on a mission to Iceland. A majestic tapestried shot of a horse skeleton lifts viewers from the difficult physical and emotional terrain of the film’s narrative world into a realm that is more formal, ethereal, and symbolic. Similarly, Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes last weekend, is only in some layers a dark comedy about the varied pains experienced by a rural Icelandic family undergoing a separation of parents Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Horses […]
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“I’m Not Interested in Horror Films”: Karan Kandhari on Sister Midnight
It’s a full eight-and-half minutes into Sister Midnight before newlyweds Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) even say a word to each other; conflict immediately ensues. Confined to a cramped, one-room apartment after moving to Mumbai, the spitfire Uma finds herself ill-suited to the rigid traditional roles expected of Indian brides. Her bashful husband, on the other hand, rebuffs her attempts to seduce him with a polite handshake. In this lonely arranged marriage of stifled desires and out-of-sync conversations, even bangles soon begin to feel like shackles. Despite this, Karan Kandhari’s Hindi-language directorial debut unfolds as a domestic drama […]
