Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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“I Think the Funniest Things Are Truthful”: Akanksha Cruczynski on Her Student Short Film Showcase Winner Close Ties to Home Country
The downtown digs of a wealthy couple become a source of luxury and languish for a displaced dog sitter in Akanksha Cruczynski’s Close Ties to Home Country. The Columbia College Chicago MFA grad stars as a version of herself in the short, which allows her to reflect on many of her own anxieties about her overarching place in the world. Born in India and raised in Saudi Arabia, the filmmaker has grown accustomed to ignorant remarks ever since relocating to Chicago to pursue higher education. Many of these comments have been repeated and parodied in Close Ties to Home Country, […]
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Read Interviews With The 2021-22 Student Short Film Showcase Winners, a Collaborative Award From The Gotham, JetBlue and Focus Features
The winners of the third annual Student Short Film Showcase, a collaborative award bestowed by The Gotham, JetBlue and Focus Features, are currently available to stream here at Filmmaker, on Focus Features’s YouTube channel and in the air as part of JetBlue’s in-flight entertainment selection. More than 20 graduate film schools submitted works to be considered for the Student Short Film Showcase, and the winners selected for the 2021-22 slate hail from diverse backgrounds and schools across the country. Columbia College Chicago grad Akanksha Cruczynski creates an amusing yet melancholy work of autofiction with Close Ties to Home Country, which […]
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“We Wanted the Film to Feel Like a Memory, a Dream of Childhood…”: Director James Ponsoldt on His Coming-of-Age Neo-Noir, Summering
In Summering, James Ponsoldt‘s return to cinema following several years of episodic television work, four young girls, best friends about to enter different junior high schools, find their final moments of group bonding upended by a shocking discovery: a dead body. Encountered near a secret spot they dub Terabithia (after the YA novel and film Bridge to Terabithia), the gruesome find turns into a challenge. What if rather than calling the police or telling their parents these friends could actually solve the mystery of this deceased middle-aged man’s identity and cause of death? It’d be both a kind of end-of-summer […]
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“It Came Out of Me Almost Fully Born”: Writer/Director Lena Dunham on Her New Feature, Sharp Stick
It’s been 13 years since Lena Dunham emerged: first with 2009’s web series, Delusional Downtown Divas and the feature Creative Nonfiction, then, a year later, with breakthrough Tiny Furniture, an intensely personal, incredibly low-budget film that follows a recent college grad named Aura (Dunham) struggling to find her place in her hometown of New York City post-Oberlin. Supported by a cast of Dunham’s real-life friends and family, Tiny Furniture was a critical success that directly sprouted the quintessential Girls, the HBO series that depicts millennial mania, malaise and, at times, loathsome mediocrity. Five years after Girls’s final season, Dunham’s work is less focused on self-reflection […]
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“There Are Only So Many Ways to Light a Kitchen with a Low Ceiling”: Ellie Foumbi and DP Tinx Chan on Our Father, The Devil
The past haunts Marie, a chef in a retirement home in the small French village of Luchon. An exile from violence in Africa, she has closed herself off to all but a handful of friends. Then, a new arrival forces Marie to confront a world she has tried to forget. Written and directed by Ellie Foumbi, Our Father, The Devil was shot on a 20-day schedule. It was developed in part through Venice’s Biennale College Cinema. The film screened at the Venice Film Festival and recently at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award. […]
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“If the Truth is Completely Elusive, I’m Happy to Live in Uncertainty”: Antonio Campos and Sofia Subercaseaux on the HBO Max Original Series, The Staircase
On their very first date in 2013, Antonio Campos pitched The Staircase to Sofía Subercaseaux. It would be years before the now married team officially began work on the project. In the interim, their collaborations have included Christine (Sundance 2016), written and directed by Campos and edited by Subercaseaux, and Piercing (Sundance 2018), produced by Campos and edited by Subercaseaux. Campos became known for his acclaimed independent work with production company Borderline Films (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Simon Killer, James White). After directing episodes of The Punisher and The Sinner (the latter of which he also executive produced), he makes […]
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Inside Out: Michael Almereyda and David Cronenberg in Conversation on Crimes of the Future
“There is an inner life to a human being that can be as dangerous as any animal in the forest.” So asserts David Cronenberg in his supremely self-aware book-length 1993 interview Cronenberg on Cronenberg, tracking a career that has supplied us with indelible nightmare images: ravenous parasites, murderous mutant children, an exploding head, a slimy gun extracted from a pseudo-vaginal slit in a man’s abdomen—to name a conspicuous few. Recalling the early films, it’s almost easy to forget that the jolting imagery emerges from compelling atmospheres of isolation and estrangement. Cronenberg’s reliable quotient of ghastly mayhem has always roared up […]
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Art School Hangover: Director Martine Syms on The African Desperate
LA-based digital artist and filmmaker Martine Syms makes her feature debut with The African Desperate, a deeply funny and unflinching survey of the embedded racism within what the artist classifies as “elite spaces.” Syms previously made 2017’s Incense, Sweaters & Ice, a 69-minute art installation that depicts three generations of Black women and the nature of their surveillance. With The African Desperate, Syms vies for a more personal angle by centering her film on Palace (frequent collaborator Diamond Stingily), a Black MFA student who’s finishing her degree at Bard College, where the director received her MFA in 2017. While the […]
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The Running Woman: Writer/Director Andrew Semans on His Rebecca Hall-Starring “Resurrection”
Director Andrew Semans’s 2012 debut feature, Nancy, Please, follows Paul (Will Rogers), an unraveling Ph.D. candidate obsessed with reclaiming his dog-eared, notes-filled copy of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit from a spiteful ex-roommate (Eleonore Hendricks). Despite his increasingly desperate attempts, Paul just can’t get Nancy to relinquish the book from their formerly shared apartment. As the ex-roomie continues to live rent-free in Paul’s head, his deteriorating mental state prevents him from completing his thesis. Less interested in why Nancy won’t relinquish the book than why Paul so easily accepts his newfound submissiveness, Nancy, Please is a dark comedy about not being […]
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Homecoming Vibes: Olivia Peace and Jess Zeidman on Tahara
Way back when, during the last in-person Slamdance in the cursed year of 2020, I went to see Tahara, the feature debut of Northwestern University graduates director Olivia Peace and screenwriter Jess Zeidman. The feature focuses on two teenage best friends and Hebrew students, Carrie (Madeline Grey DeFreece) and Hannah (Rachel Sennott), who face a gear shift in their friendship during the funeral of one of their classmates. Carrie is timid and awkward, Hannah is self-obsessed and inconsiderate. When Carrie kisses her Hannah to find out if she’s a good kisser or not, sparkles light up her world. Throughout the day, […]
