Fall 2023
Features
Center of Gravity: Justine Triet on Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall begins with no image, just sound: the click of a recording device being turned on and Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) asking, “What do you want to know?” Starting from this clearly symbolic opening line, the ensuing brief exchange foreshadows much. Sandra is an autofiction author whose work has generated controversy (her family objected to her first book, an event she dramatized in her second), so volunteering herself for interrogation by earnest graduate student Zoé (Camille Rutherford) isn’t merely an opportunity to provide biographical context but a risky invitation for moral scrutiny. Their conversation turns […]
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Bright Moments: St. Clair Bourne’s Formative Years on Black Journal
St. Clair Bourne was a photographer, journalist, publisher of the newsletter Chamba Notes, founder of Black Documentary Collective and BADWest, mentor, teacher, cameraman, producer and pioneering documentary director. Bourne’s filmmaking career includes work for public television, beginning at Black Journal in 1968 through 1999’s Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, as well as films made through Chamba Mediaworks, his production company, focusing on people and subjects from all aspects of Black social and political life, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, John Henrik Clarke, Chicago blues music, Northern Ireland, education and religion, among hundreds of topics. MoMA’s restoration of his 1983 film The Black and the Green, which […]
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Inhabiting the Role: Todd Haynes on May/December
Todd Haynes’s May December, which premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival and was snatched up by Netflix almost immediately, marks a return to the kind of expressive women’s drama for which the director is arguably most beloved. Think Far from Heaven (2002) or Carol (2015), two films about forbidden romance whose lush, stylized aesthetics both encourage nostalgia and destabilize easy emotional identification. As the title suggests, May December, too, concerns a taboo love affair—one whose throwback elements are anchored to the tabloid frenzies and true-crime obsessions of the 1990s. Written by Samy Burch, a casting director making her […]
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Playing Politics: Developing the Best-Selling Board Game Shasn
I have made two feature documentaries in my home country of India. The second, While We Watched, came out on the same day as “Barbenheimer” and just finished a month-long run at the IFC Center in New York. The first one, An Insignificant Man, which I co-directed with Khushboo Ranka, ran in theaters across India for nine weeks. However, my most commercially successful project isn’t either of these—it’s a board game, Shasn (“Governance,” created by Zain Memon), that was born out of An Insignificant Man’s impact campaign and has been sold in more than 75 countries across the world today, […]
Bright Moments: St. Clair Bourne’s Formative Years on Black Journal
Inhabiting the Role: Todd Haynes on May/December
Playing Politics: Developing the Best-Selling Board Game Shasn
Other articles
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Paradigm Shift: The Current State of Development Labs
When the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) announced in spring 2020 that they would shutter, many in the independent film community were shocked. For 17 years, TFI had supported hundreds of filmmakers and projects, including underrepresented artists, through its Tribeca All Access program, as well as Latin American filmmakers and VR visionaries. At the time, TFI’s closure appeared to be the result of a unique case of pandemic skittishness combined with its parent organization’s increasingly for-profit ambitions. Rather than an outlier, it may have been a sign of things to come. Given the lingering effects of the COVID era and the […]
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Invisible on the Interstate: Joanne McNeil on Amy Reid’s Long Haulers
“Everything in your house has, at one time, been moved on a truck,” says one of the truckers featured in Long Haulers. Amy Reid’s film subtly demystifies what can be a uniquely alienating form of labor, and the film itself has recently emerged from relative invisibility. The titular vehicles are typically driven by men. Reid’s debut documentary follows the lives of three women who are among the nearly seven percent of long haul truckers working in the United States. Completed in 2020, Long Haulers might have then seemed incredibly timely given the global supply chain crisis, which was among the […]
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Holiday Misfits: Alexander Payne on The Holdovers
Before The Holdovers, director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti hadn’t worked together in nearly two decades. After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2004, their Oscar-winning comedy Sideways went on to garner countless awards and generate profitable spinoffs—a Japanese remake, musical theater adaptation, film-branded bottles of pinot noir. During the 19 years since the film’s release, Payne and Giamatti attempted to team up on new projects, but none came to fruition until a screenplay by David Hemingson arrived on Payne’s desk a few years ago. Envisioning the script as something that could be revised and expanded upon […]
Paradigm Shift: The Current State of Development Labs
Invisible on the Interstate: Joanne McNeil on Amy Reid’s Long Haulers
Holiday Misfits: Alexander Payne on The Holdovers
