India Donaldson has been ready to make her narrative feature debut for a while now, with three short films under her belt already. But it was only after the pandemic hit and she moved in with her family for a few months that she found her story around family dynamics in isolation. So she poured that inspiration into Good One, a terrific slow-burn at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (US Dramatic Competition) that follows the 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) on a Catskills camping trip with her dad Chris (James Le Gros) and his longtime friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). As the […]
23-year-old Dakota (Kota Johan) finds herself unmoored in South Brooklyn after her boyfriend returns to Ukraine in order to tend to his ailing father in Tendaberry, the feature debut from writer-director Haley Elizabeth Anderson. As she navigates the city over the course of an entire year, she finds moments of tenderness and trouble, all while wondering when her lover will return to join her on the shores of Brighton Beach. Cinematographer Matthew Ballard discusses how he collaborated with Anderson to capture her vision on 16mm for Tendaberry, also Ballard’s first feature-length project. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer […]
The feature debut of writer-director India Donaldson, Good One follows 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) during a weekend camping trip in the Catskills with her father and his oldest friend. As the two men continuously clash throughout their extended hike, Sam becomes uneasily aware of the frailty of male egos, even amid a landscape that ostensibly shields the group from broader societal pressures. Serving as the film’s editor (as well as a producer), Graham Mason tells Filmmaker about the challenges and rewards of cutting a film that revolves around a pointedly un-chatty central character, as well as his affirmed hunch that […]
A decade after Buffalo Juggalos, which explored the Faygo-spattered milieu of the Juggalo subculture in his native Buffalo, N.Y., Scott Cummings returns with a full-length immersion into another misunderstood community, the Church of Satan. Realm of Satan, which premieres Jan. 21 in the NEXT section of the Sundance Film Festival, is a deeply collaborative endeavor that adapts the philosophy and practices of the church into a rigorous yet playful visual approach that also takes liberties with observational form through inspired use of VFX. Cummings, who began work on the film in 2016 and persisted through the pandemic, spoke with Filmmaker […]
It’s rare to see a comedy immediately get going in its first shot as Between the Temples does—no credits, throat-clearing establishing shots or slow unveiling of protagonists, instead a slow zoom out introducing cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) being cornered at the dinner table by his moms Meira (Caroline Aaron) and Judith (Dolly De Leon). The two mothers lovingly hector him (this movie operates at dizzying levels of Jewishness), saying it’s time to seek out a doctor for his problem: following the death of his alcoholic novelist wife, Ben is a cantor who can’t sing. This gives Temples a surprisingly normal […]
Tackling a timely but under-discussed contemporary issue in both the United States and Canada, journalists Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie investigate a string of abuses and missing persons cases at an indigenous residential school in Sugarcane. The film, naturally, spends a great deal of time with indigenous peoples, and the filmmakers sought to maintain evidence of the deep culture and community of their subjects. Below, editor Nathan Punwar explains how they reconciled that goal with the need to keep the film moving. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up […]
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? When I was writing the movie, I remember saying, “I want Elliott’s home to feel like the type of cottage where you are always hearing a screen door slam in the background.” That was such a familiar and memorable sound from my […]
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required ingenuity, or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically, or creatively? Our film Girls Will Be Girls (World Cinema Dramatic Competition) is a sexual awakening story set in the Indian Himalayan foothills, in an area which is known for its stunning views and an unusually high concentration of boarding schools. As a young girl, […]
The prospect of creating personal AI avatars to comfort loved ones after death is the premise of Eternal You, a film by co-directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. Below, co-editors Anne Juenemann and Lisa Zoe Geretschläger discuss how they divvied up the workload while being based between Berlin and Vienna, with Block and Riesewieck also splitting their time between the two cities. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What […]
Girls Will Be Girls, the feature debut from writer-director Shuchi Talati, follows a teenage girl named Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) as she navigates her sexual awakening while attending boarding school in the Himalayan mountains. Her domineering mother (Kani Kusruti), however, wishes to put a stop to Mira’s exploration of her autonomous desires. Editor Amrita David, who also cut Alice Diop’s excellent 2022 film Saint Omer, discusses how her Indian heritage and editing intuition proved to be enormous boons to the film’s final form. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up […]