The particular focus of this year’s Viennale might have been Chile—the main retrospective, dedicated to Raúl Ruiz, was paired with a program exploring the country’s cinema in the half century since the 1973 coup—but its neighbor Argentina was also very well-represented. More than a specific curatorial inclination, this reflected the fact that it’s been a terrific year for Argentine film. Alongside such festival-circuit hits as Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, the Viennale screened more modestly scaled and below-the-radar films, including Martín Shanly’s About Thirty, Martín Rejtman’s The Practice and Puan by […]
Heather Dewey-Hagborg is on a mission to confront the uncomfortable future, especially when it comes to emerging tech. Stranger Visions features portrait sculptures crafted from analyses of genetic material the transdisciplinary artist, educator and filmmaker literally picked up in public places (one person’s discarded cigarette butt is another’s way into a stranger’s DNA). T3511, a collaboration with cinematographer Toshiaki Ozawa (Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog), sees an anonymous saliva sample become fodder for the alchemizing of the perfect romantic partner. Now there’s Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera, perhaps Dewey-Hagborg’s most ambitious work to date. Opening at NYC’s Fridman Gallery on […]
Immersive and poetically expressive, Raven Jackson’s confident debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt chronicles the life of Mack, a Black Mississippi woman portrayed at different ages by four different performers, with a lived-in attentiveness and affection. Throughout Jackson’s non-linear ecosystem of portraits, quiet sequences, dewy visuals and sensual soundscapes, the filmmaker breaks the conventions of storytelling so naturally that you instantly recognize the confidence of someone well-versed enough in her art and craft to make her own set of rules. The seeds of Jackson’s approach and exactness of imagination were already planted in her short film, Nettles (2018), […]
If there’s one thing that indie filmmakers, especially first-timers, can generally agree on, it’s that applying to film festivals can be a mystifying process. What type of films are film programmers looking for? Does running time matter? “Demystifying Film Festivals,” a panel at the recent 20th BendFilm Festival in Bend, Oregon (October 12-15, 2023) attempted to answer some of those questions. Open to the public and held at Somewhere That’s Green, a plant store and community space, the free panel was moderated by Selin Sevinç, director of programming at BendFilm and featured veteran programmers Joanne Feinberg (BendFilm, Big Sky), John […]
Co-winner of the Cannes 2023 Golden Eye, Kaouther Ben Hania’s (Zaineb Hates the Snow, Beauty and the Dogs) Four Daughters is both compellingly crafted and deeply disturbing. The “fictional documentary” looks back on an infamous, winding and tumultuous Tunisian saga involving five women: the titular quartet of older siblings Ghofrane and Rahma and youngest Eya and Tayssir, along with their mother Olfa Hamrouni. The younger daughters appear as themselves, and the film features two actors taking on the roles of the oldest, a necessity since Ghofrane and Rahma can’t “play” themselves, having “disappeared” back in 2015 at the tender ages of […]
Good Condition is an eight-minute meditation on loneliness, technology and new beginnings. It marks the second collaboration between filmmakers Frank Mosley and Hugo De Sousa after their 2022 comedy short film, The Event, in which a filmmaker wakes up his roommate in the middle of the night to ask why he hasn’t watched his short film. This time, they embark on an eerie trip to the suburbs, following a melancholy man named Barry (Hugo De Sousa) trying to complete a transaction with a ghostly figure who keeps evading him. Good Condition premiered at Aspen ShortFest and Fantasia earlier this year, and […]
When thinking of Armenian cinema, the names of Sergei Parajanov and Artavazd Peleshyan come to mind. These two titans are influential not only for Armenian or Soviet cinema but world film heritage. Both introduced unique storytelling methods—one infusing the screen with poetry and collaged images, the second conceiving of the “Distance Montage” technique. But Armenian cinema, which marks its 100th anniversary this year, has other notable filmmakers whose work deserves no less recognition. ArmenFilm (HayFilm), the first and main film production body of Armenia, was established in 1923 as a separate department within the People’s Commissariat of the Soviet Armenia. […]
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. Ethan Tobman describes production design as the art of “visually interpreting the world of a director through emotional architecture.” Below, he and director Mark Mylod discuss their film The Menu and going from reference images on the wall to a fully realized world structured to best absorb the viewer emotionally while furthering the narrative (along with meticulously crafting a last-minute birthday cake […]
Upon the release of her 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, Priscilla Presley sat down with Barbara Walters to explain her objectives in writing the book: “[Elvis] was a human being, that’s the aspect I’m trying to show. That’s all. That was the intent of the whole book: to show a love story, a man, a human. Not the performer, not the image, not the idol.” In many ways, this is also the aim of the average biopic: to pull back the curtain separating public from private, to reveal the “truth” behind legends and complicate accepted narratives. But while these films […]
Vietnamese American filmmaker Linh Tran’s debut feature Waiting for the Light to Change tells the story of five friends in their twenties who head to a beach house for a weeklong winter getaway. At the center of the group are Amy (Jin Park) and Kim (Joyce Ha), whose once-close friendship seems to be running out of fuel—especially now that Kim is dating Amy’s longtime secret crush, Jay (Sam Straley). As past regrets and resentments come to the surface, Amy and Kim wrestle with painful questions about whether their old selves fit into the new lives they’re trying to create for […]