Issues
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Meat is Murder: Julia Ducournau On Her Wildly Creative Female Cannibal Film, Raw
Julia Ducournau’s debut feature film Raw is an earnest, sincere work with a clean pop sensibility that also happens to be about cannibalism. When mild-mannered vegetarian college freshman Justine (Garance Marillier) joins her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) at veterinary school, she discovers an appetite for human flesh that she didn’t know she had. Raw is first and foremost their story, and the plot hinges entirely on whether or not their relationship is tearing itself apart or stitching itself back together. Like all siblings, they understand each other better than anyone else, simultaneously totally devoted and flippantly cruel. Marillier and Rumpf’s […]
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A Talk with Manchester by the Sea Editor Jennifer Lame
Jennifer Lame is the editor of Manchester by the Sea. She’s best known for having edited all of Noah Baumbach’s narrative films since Frances Ha and is currently in postproduction on his next film, Yeh Din Ka Kissa. At what point did you join the project? I had been following it for a while, since I am a big fan of Kenny’s work. Between my agent and others, I got sent two or three drafts of the script and read them all, but I couldn’t seem to get an interview, I think because they were looking for someone with a bit […]
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Inside Looking Out: Barry Jenkins on Moonlight
Occasionally a movie has the look and feel of something totally original, immediately allowing one to see the protean leap its maker has taken from novice to master. Someday, when the American movie landscape is no more, simply the purview of art historians who live on Mars or on ocean front property in what we used to call Indiana, people will still regard Barry Jenkins’s startlingly effective Moonlight as a unique and supple flower, the kind of heartrending experience that gives rise to the notion that motion pictures can be a lasting, emotionally resonant art form. Drawn from MacArthur “genius” […]
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In Character
Before we hit the halfway mark in German filmmaker Maren Ade’s masterful Toni Erdmann, Winfried suddenly confronts his adult daughter Ines: “Are you even a human?” He’s been abandoned for hours in Bucharest’s largest shopping mall as she chaperoned the wealthy wife of her employer. For Winfried, it’s a moment of unexpected gravity that temporarily disrupts his shaggy-dog, prankster-father persona. Visibly wounded by the attack, Ines swiftly resumes her role as the sleek, self-controlled daughter, and fires back, “Of course you’d think that.” It’s painful and uneasy to watch, and, as with most of the scenes between Winfried (Peter Simonischek) […]
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Pilot Checkride: How To Break Into Television Writing, Part Two
In the summer issue of this magazine, I wrote about how television is written and some of the ways that a screenwriter might break into writing for television — starting as an assistant in the writers’ room, fellowship programs, being hired directly to staff and selling a pitch or a pilot. As I noted in conclusion, whichever route you take, it all starts with a great pilot — that’s the sample that your agents will use to put you up for staffing, that’s the usual application piece for fellowships, and that’s even what assistants submit for consideration. So what exactly […]
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Happiness is Overrated: A New Book Examines the Arthouse Sub-genre, “the Feel-Bad Film”
This summer I have brutalized myself with one challenging theater drama after another, and I have been utterly enriched by the truthful and uncompromising bleakness of these experiences. Stephen Karam’s Tony-award winning The Humans is a play about a family that comes together in a crummy New York City apartment to share secrets of infidelity, sickness, aging, unemployment and just overall sadness. It ends not with a resounding “chin up” march into sunlight but with a cinematic, dialogue-free, horrific sequence that plunges us even deeper into the dark than when it started. Watching the play in a crowded theater is […]
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Memories of the Revolution
Lizzie Borden is back. The pioneering writer-director of punk sci-fi feminist classic Born In Flames (1983) and its Sundance-prized follow-up Working Girls (1986) has been enjoying a long-overdue return to the spotlight this year, with revivals of her pioneering provocations on both sides of the Atlantic. “The free, ardent, spontaneous creativity of Born In Flames,” proclaimed Richard Brody in the New Yorker, “emerges as an indispensable mode of radical change — one that many contemporary filmmakers with political intentions have yet to assimilate.” Born Linda Elizabeth Borden in Detroit, Borden opted at the age of 11 to honor Massachusetts’ most […]
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Playing the Long Game: Producers on Sustaining a Career in Independent Film
When legendary producer and studio executive Robert Evans penned his autobiography — later adapted into a documentary — he picked a telling title: The Kid Stays in the Picture. You would think that after producing films like Chinatown and Urban Cowboy, Evans could happily rest on his laurels, but his book’s title, with its defiant use of the present tense, speaks to the ambitions and anxieties affecting every filmmaker with producer DNA. These, of course, are issues of continuing relevance and professional durability — or, to use the independent film parlance of the moment, sustainability. Contrary to the imagination of […]
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Fatal Journey: Gianfranco Rosi on Fire at Sea
With his last film, 2013’s Sacro GRA, Italian Gianfranco Rosi became the first documentarian to win the Golden Lion at Venice. He was also the first doc director to win the Golden Bear at Berlin with Fire At Sea, a disciplined, urgent look at the migrant crisis anchored on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, whose proximity to the African coast has made it a target destination for those fleeing their countries. It takes a while before the migrants appear onscreen: initially, Rosi divides his attention among various islanders, including a radio DJ whose tunes are heard all over the island […]
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Parting Shot: Johnny Ma
“I didn’t want to make a poverty porn,” says Shanghai-born, Vancouver-residing filmmaker Johnny Ma about his first feature, Old Stone, released this fall by Zeitgeist. “I felt if I can’t bring myself to really understand what it is like to live in this town and environment, then I don’t deserve to make this film.” That extra degree of empathy and social insight was especially needed for Old Stone, which thrusts viewers into a contemporary China where motorists are faced with a stunning dilemma. Drivers who strike pedestrians are forced to shoulder these pedestrians’ related lifetime medical expenses. If the pedestrian […]
