Screenwriters
Interviews - Screenwriters
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Memories of Yugoslavia: Iva Radivojević on When the Phone Rang
Iva Radivojević has established a reputation for crafting precise yet elliptical filmic enigmas that use voiceover and reconstruction to reduce narrative to its most essential components. Her latest feature, When the Phone Rang, which premiered at Locarno last year, reimagines the director’s own childhood during the breakup of Yugoslavia through the lens of Lana, a doppelganger living with her sister and parents in an unnamed but familiar town and country. The film’s title refers to a moment which serves as the basis for everything that follows, and to which we keep returning as the narrative progresses. Tight, vivid close-ups shot […]
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“I Love 16mm”: Deniz Eroglu on The Shipwrecked Triptych
When I emailed gallery artist and filmmaker Deniz Eroglu to set up an interview about what I thought was his first feature film, The Shipwrecked Triptych, I asked what past work I should familiarize myself with to prepare. “I made another triptych in 2013,” he wrote back. “Maybe that will suffice?” 2013’s The Bedridden Triptych does indeed contain the embryonic seeds of Eroglu’s first formal feature film: three episodes in a darkly humorous vein, all shot on different formats, offering a kind of cross-section of Denmark, where the filmmaker was then based. The Shipwrecked Triptych turns Eroglu’s attention to Germany—first […]
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“I Always Make What I Can and Not What I Want”: Bruno Dumont on The Empire
With The Empire, French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s career is now evenly split between two modes. His first seven films operated within an identifiably Bressonian tradition, while the five films and two mini-series following operate in a more comic, slapstick register. Conversations surrounding the starkness of this pivot—which began in 2014 with miniseries L’il Quinquin—are understandable yet potentially overstated, as there is strong connective tissue through all of his work. The two hapless detectives in L’il Quinquin and Coincoin and the Extra-humans (who reprise their roles in The Empire) drive their cop car on two wheels; a dune buggy wreck into […]
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“This is Part of Where Our Title Came From — the Amount That Women are Censored”: Annapurna Sriram On Her SXSW-Premiering Fucktoys
While sitting on a raft in the middle of a Southern swamp, AP (Annapurna Sriram) learns that her recent string of bad luck, missing tooth included, is caused by a curse. A psychic (played by New Orleans-based rapper Big Freedia) reveals that the only way for AP to free herself from the spiritual bind is to sacrifice an innocent lamb in an ancient ritual. The needed ceremony will cost AP $1,000, which she promises to raise in just a few days. This sets the plot of Fucktoys in motion, which finds AP traversing her pastel yet putrid birthplace of Trashtown […]
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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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“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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“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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“Now the Main Person Talking about Lilly is Joe Rogan”: Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens on John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office
John Lilly’s very Californian trajectory from Cold War scientist to New Age visionary, aided by prodigious consumption of LSD and ketamine, feels quaint from today’s vantage. The Silicon Valley inventors and tech pioneers who could be considered his present-day counterparts mostly went the opposite route—first taking psychedelics and proclaiming lofty ideals, then turning to ever more terrifyingly real fantasies of world domination. Such comparisons account for the wistful experience of watching John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s documentary portrait of Lilly, which premiered at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. That’s not to say […]
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Mirror Mirror: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Berlinale 2025 Premiere The Ice Tower
We didn’t have to wait too long after Earwig (2021) for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic new offering, The Ice Tower. The whistling sounds of mountain winds announce the arrival of the Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), both to the set of a film she’s leading in 1970s France and in the life of 16-year-old runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” the script—co-written by Hadžihalilović together with Geoff Cox—explores the subterranean tensions of loneliness and womanhood in various shapes and forms. While it may as well be considered the most “legible” Hadžihalilović film […]
