Issues
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Writing Between Worlds: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich on The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
“For the pattern of unfulfilled desires has trapped the Antilles and America. From the time of the arrival of the conquistadors and the rise of their technical know-how (beginning with firearms), the lands from across the Atlantic have changed, not only in facial appearance but in fear. “So, far from contradicting, diminishing or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.”—Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage I recently had the opportunity to (virtually) sit down with my friend and fellow artist-filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehlrich to discuss […]
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Learning By Doing: Producing My First Feature
At nearly 6:00 a.m. on a Wednesday in late March, the sun began to rise in Tampa, Florida, and Stephen Musumeci called cut on The Big Game’s martini shot. The crew clapped and hugged, and Musumeci, who wrote and directed the feature, gave a short, dizzy speech that was interrupted by a producer pouring a large bucket of water (for lack of Gatorade) on his head. When I joined the film as a producer 14 months earlier, I firmly envisioned reaching this point, even though I had never produced a feature before. After reading the script, I’d immediately fallen in […]
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Transformer Model: AI in Film Schools
“You can love it, you can hate it, you just can’t ignore it,” says artist and UCLA lecturer Bill Barminski about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in filmmaking. Barminski’s sentiment is echoed by other film school faculty, staff and students, who all recognize this divisive technology is here to stay and that it would be foolish for students not to engage with—or at least understand—it. AI is a wide-reaching term, encompassing text-based services like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, which many film students say they use for ideation or to help with loglines, script notes, grant writing and pitch-deck creation. AI […]
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The Gotham Pages: Brian Tyree Henry is Reclaiming His Name
Brian Tyree Henry has made a career of playing men under pressure—haunted, hardened and often held back by systems much bigger than they are. “Hopefully, I’ll be in a love story sooner or later,” he jokes, “because, boy, am I tired of running for my life.” Henry drops that line near the end of our conversation. It’s funny, yes—but also revealing of his nearly two decades in the business. It isn’t always easy to live with the effects of what it’s like to embody these complex men, I guess. “No,” he replies, his voice dropping a couple octaves into a […]
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Moments of Flight: Lili Taylor and Amalia Ulman Go Birding
I was listening to the radio when Lili Taylor came on the air to talk about her first book, Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing. I immediately got excited: I have loved Lili’s work (Dogfight, Arizona Dream, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, The Addiction, I Shot Andy Warhol, Things I Never Told You, Pecker) for the longest time, so learning that she was a birder only added to her immensely cool aura. Until now, my relationship to birding had been via New York’s most famous bird, Flaco the owl. He took a fancy to one of the water tanks […]
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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: Four New Innovative Independent Film Distributors
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 […]
