Issues
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Open House: Callie Hernandez’s Berskhire Home and Temporary Film Studio
In 2023, Callie Hernandez turned her temporary home into a DIY movie studio. The actress, writer and producer had gone through major professional and personal upheaval when COVID upended her studio acting career and, shortly after, she lost her father. She kept working any way she could by collaborating on microbudget projects, such as Pete Ohs’s 2022 comedic ghost story Jethica, produced for less than $10,000 in a New Mexico Airbnb with just a handful of actors and Ohs taking on every behind-camera role himself. So, when a friend, dancer Brittany Bailey, asked whether Hernandez wanted to share an old […]
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Fresh Starts: 2025’s New Microdistributors
The crisis in independent film distribution started in 2007/08, when the global financial crisis hit; acquisitions plummeted and studios shuttered their specialty divisions. Since then, fewer and fewer filmmakers have walked away from festivals and markets with satisfactory distribution deals. This crisis has led to more of them pursuing an independent path to distribution, either by choice or necessity, but it’s also led to newer companies embracing social media and sophisticated psychographic marketing, such as A24, NEON and MUBI. Now in the mix are a fresh crop of smaller distributors, such as the ones profiled here, reinventing the filmmaker/distributor partnership. […]
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Sleep Dealers: Engineering Dreams with AI
Saelyx Finna told me about a dream she had. In it, the filmmaker was trying to alter the dream itself by typing prompts into an AI interface. She wanted to change the dream while she was dreaming it, but it wasn’t working and the dream went dark. When she woke up, she thought about the logic of her dream. “Of course it didn’t work,” she said about the AI intervention. “I was trying to access an external tool to change my internal experience.” Finna’s dream points to something very contemporary: how quickly our inner lives are becoming entangled with changing […]
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the summer 2025 edition of Filmmaker. As that sentence connotes, Filmmaker is a quarterly publication, and our publishing cadence is such that, for our print edition (as opposed to the web), we can step outside the frenetic daily news cycle a bit. Yes, we try to sync up the films we feature to their release cycles, but we were happy to make one of our occasional exceptions for Vadim Rizov’s interview with Wes Anderson about The Phoenician Scheme, which will have been in theaters for a few weeks by the time you read this. We’ve been trying to […]
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Independent Rescue Mission: The Future Film Coalition’s Ecosystem-Saving Activism
Indie Avengers, unite! OK, perhaps the MCU isn’t the best analogy for an all-volunteer group working to keep independent film alive, but as Future Film Coalition producer and board member Sanjay Sharma says, “The streamers have lobbyists, the studios have the MPAA, but there really isn’t a nationwide nonprofit that is looking after this ecosystem, so we need the Avengers of indie film. Nobody else is fighting for us.” Announced during the Sundance Film Festival, the Future Film Coalition was formed to create a bulwark against threats to the field by, as described on the organization’s Substack, the “business practices […]
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Following the Currents: Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao on Caught by the Tides
With Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides sneak previewing in New York via Sideshow/Janus Films, we are unlocking our Spring, 2025 cover story, an interview with the director as well as lead Zhao Tao covering their collaboration on this film as well as across their filmographies. On May 4, 5 and 6, Jia will be doing Q&As at New York’s IFC Center and Film at Lincoln Center. Caught by the Tides opens May 9. — Editor Few major auteurs have successfully used footage from their previous films to create an entirely new one on equal footing with their greatest works, […]
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Out of the Ashes: Life after the Fires
The first few days of 2025, I had been asking myself if this would be the year that Sarah—a film I’ve been making for 12 years, about a girl I met when I was making my second feature, Rich Hill—would finally be finished and whether I should sell my set of vintage lenses to pay for it, an action that meant I would likely not be able to make any more independent films. Sarah would be my swan song, finished in 2025 and then over and out. But on January 8th, our entire block in the Palisades burned, along with […]
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The Gotham Pages: Three Filmmakers Reflect on the Short-to-Feature Pipeline
Farihah Zaman—a writer, director and producer with extensive experience working on both short and feature-length projects—has a story they like to share about “shorts prejudice.” After accepting the Nonfiction Short Film Jury Award for Ghosts of Sugar Land at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, they encountered another filmmaker backstage. “They said, ‘I bet you’ll be back here with a feature one day.’ And I was like, ‘I have already been here with a feature,’” they recount. “It was such an indication of this idea of a hierarchy, that there’s a straight line [from doing shorts to doing features]. I encourage […]
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Escape Routes: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour
At its core the story of a man taking extreme measures to avoid his fiancée, Grand Tour originated when Portuguese director Miguel Gomes read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) just before his marriage to co-screenwriter Maureen Fazendeiro. The cast of their previous collaboration, 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, included the couple, who played variants of themselves in a meta-comedy about trying to direct a movie under COVID lockdown restrictions; Grand Tour is their second, exponentially more ambitious pandemic production. Grand Tour specifically grew from a story told early in Maugham’s Asia travelogue, as the author recounts meeting […]
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Disc Security: How to Care for Physical Media
There has been no shortage of articles recently regarding the premature death of physical media and, most specifically, physical home video. While vinyl LPs have had a well-publicized resurgence in recent years, with much ink spilled about Taylor Swift’s assistance in that area, the opposite could be said for Blu-ray, 4K UHD and DVD, all of which are currently active, disc-based, home video formats vying for consumer shelf space in the studio and the boutique marketplace. Physical media, in general, can feel nebulous; when speaking about it, both positively and negatively, it can be used to cover a swath of […]
