Issues
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K. Austin Collins Salutes Frederick Wiseman
I think of the work of Frederick Wiseman, and my mind is drawn, immediately, to the faces. The blank stare of a monkey whose head, stem still attached, has been painstakingly severed from its body, for the sake of science, in Primate (1974). Young Black and Latino students in Harlem parsing the immediate ramifications of the Rodney King beating in High School II (1994). The sinewed despair that confronts us as the working-class people of Titicut Follies (1967), Hospital (1970), Welfare (1975), Public Housing (1997), In Jackson Heights (2015), and so many other of Wiseman’s films navigate the life-and-death intricacies […]
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Dreams Deferred: How Iranian Filmmakers Pursue Liberation Under Unbearable Constraints
The people of Iran find themselves suspended in a historical moment of great uncertainty. On December 28, 2025, in the midst of a major economic crisis exacerbated in part by U.S. sanctions, shopkeepers and vendors in several commercial centers throughout the country went on strike. The protests grew larger in number, culminating in early January as Iran’s largest uprising since the 1979 Revolution. The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) responded by imposing an internet blackout to facilitate the indiscriminate murder of protesters and civilians alike. Thousands were killed in the largest massacre in the nation’s history, and the periodic protests […]
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Facing the Music: David Lowery and Chloé Zhao Dig Into Mother Mary
David Lowery and Chloé Zhao have been friends and collaborators since January 2012, when they met as fellows in the annual Sundance Screenwriters Lab. In the years since, both directors have found artistic and commercial success. Much as Zhao has alternated between Nomadland and Hamnet on one hand and The Eternals on the other, Lowery has given us deeply personal films like The Green Knight as well as mainstream fare like Peter Pan & Wendy. In fact, it’s the delta between those two approaches to filmmaking, and the identity questions that arose while switching between them, that inspired his latest […]
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Perfect Eleven: Harry Shearer Remembers Rob Reiner
I first became aware of Rob Reiner as a member of The Committee, an improv group that began in the early 1960s in San Francisco and then, as some members moved south where the showbiz work was, opened a branch in Los Angeles. Of course, I became more aware of him, like most of America did, as a character derisively known as “Meathead” in the ground-breaking sitcom All in the Family. But he started making an impact on me personally when he’d show up to see his friend David L. Lander (later TV’s Squiggy) as part of the comedy group I […]
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Silver Linings Playbook: Meet the New Indie Distributors
Has there ever been a good time to launch an independent film distribution company? Maybe not, admits Danielle DiGiacomo, former executive at Utopia and The Orchard, and one of the partners at a new distribution outfit launched at Sundance called Subtext. “We’ve always been operating under the shadow of giants, and it’s always been an uphill battle,” she says. “But we think the market has been correcting itself over the last few years,” says Subtext co-head Brian Levy. “And that we are now on the precipice of fertile ground for new opportunities.” Subtext is not alone. In the past several […]
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Talk Is Cheap: Radu Jude on Kontinental ’25
From Pearl White’s Perils of Pauline to Antonioni’s aimless, quasi-somnambulant heroines, the wandering woman has a venerable history in cinema. The figure has given filmmakers a vehicle for formal experimentation and narrative risk and stories organized less around destination than duration, encounter, and drift. With Kontinental ’25, Radu Jude continues his exploration of wandering women, this time through Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a bailiff reeling after the suicide of her most recent evictee—a former athlete turned squatter living in abandoned buildings in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. Guilt or shame? Humiliation or distress? Jude doesn’t delineate Orsolya’s feelings so much as […]
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What I Saw, Heard, and Felt as Sundance Bid Farewell to Park City—and Robert Redford
“What I’m saying is, if you want to go, I won’t stop you.” At the final Park City edition of Sundance last week, my 14th consecutive one, I contemplated this line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid daily. That’s because a gorgeous, Western-style artwork painted on plywood by local artist Ryan Williams stood not far from The Library Theater, displaying the dearly departed Sundance Kid Robert Redford (who passed away last September at age 89) next to these famous words spoken by his character. The quote felt like a homegrown farewell steeped in bittersweet resignation, an ingenious marking of […]
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Learning From Amos Poe
The following essay about Amos Poe appears in Filmmaker’s Winter, 2026 print edition in a section, Reflections, that looks back on 33 years of American independent film and Filmmaker Magazine. Upon the sad news of Amos’s passing on Christmas Day, 2025, we are posting it and sending condolences to Amos’s family and friends. — Editor Back when I was editing Filmmaker’s precursor, The Off-Hollywood Report, I’d attend the IFP’s Independent Feature Film Market. Filmmakers—some wearing sandwich boards or costumes—were hawking acquisition titles outside New York’s Angelika theater that were screening past the escalators inside, and the event always had an […]
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Back to Zero: 25 Fragments on Yong Soon Min, Film Theory and Genocide
Producer, director and screenwriter James Schamus has been an invaluable presence at Filmmaker from its earliest days. He wrote the introduction to our very first cover story—a dialogue between Simple Men’s Hal Hartley and Laws of Gravity’s Nick Gomez—and has contributed many articles since, including a remembrance of Raúl Ruiz, a 2017 conversation with mathematician Cathy O’Neil about how algorithms are reshaping society, his debate with Ted Hope about whether independent film is alive or dead, introductions to the work of Elia Suleiman and cultural theorist Franco Moretti and 2015’s critical manifesto of sorts: “23 Fragments on the Future of […]
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The Gotham Pages: Tessa Thompson on the Pleasures of Playing the Villain
Tessa Thompson has a predilection for playing fiercely ambitious women. Against all odds, her characters stand firmly in their politics, like Sam in Justin Simien’s Dear White People (2014). Other times, they persevere despite cycles of poverty and nefarious circumstances, like Ollie in Nia DaCosta’s directorial debut, Little Woods (2018). These are women who tend to get what they want. But in DaCosta’s latest film, Hedda (2025), Thompson reveals the more sinister faces of human desire. The period film, which reimagines Henrik Ibsen’s play, Hedda Gabler (1891), is set in 1950s England and follows newlywed Hedda Tesman (Thompson), the mixed-race […]
