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“You Can’t Tell the Story of America Without a Theft”: Malcolm Washington on The Piano Lesson
John David Washington and Skylar Smith in The Piano Lesson
Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson—the fourth chronological entry in playwright August Wilson’s ten-play Century Cycle—is both a family drama and a ghost story. The titular musical instrument sits in the living room of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), who lives in Pittsburgh's Hill District with his adult niece Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) and her young daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith). As the story opens, Berniece’s brother Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) have arrived at the Charles House from Mississippi, looking to sell a truckload of watermelons they’ve brought from their home state. Once inside the home, Boy Willie, who wants to sell anything he can to purchase the land his family was formerly enslaved… Read more
Will & Harper and the Netflix Effect
Harper Steele and Will Ferrell in Will & Harper
Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. At this year’s 35th annual Producers Guild Awards (which took place on Feb. 25, two weeks before the March 3 Oscars), Netflix’s American Symphony took the prize for best documentary feature. The Matthew Heineman-directed film followed musician Jon Batiste’s meteoric year in which he won five Grammys (including album of the year) and premiered a new composition at Carnegie Hall—all while his wife, journalist and artist Suleika Jaouad, fought a rare form of leukemia. One would have expected the film to win the respective Oscar for documentary feature two weeks later—the PGA Awards are often reliable predictors… Read more
“The Film Is Not About AI, Not About Werner Herzog, and Never Aimed To Embrace AI Technology”: Piotr Winiewicz on His IDFA Opening Night Doc About a Hero
"About a Hero"
Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero is as mindbogglingly complex as its eye-catching logline is simple: “A murder mystery - unwittingly starring Werner Herzog.” More precisely, the Polish filmmaker’s doc is actually an adaptation of a script in which the aforementioned cinematic maverick travels to the fictional Getunkirchenburg to investigate the strange death of a local factory worker named Dorem Clery. Even stranger, that screenplay was written by “Kaspar” (as in Kaspar Hauser), an AI trained on the Herzog oeuvre. With a look inspired by the work of German photographer Thomas Demand, the film, shot mostly across northern Germany, also features “real” sit-down interviews with scientists, philosophers and artists; along with AI-generated visuals and a Herzog voiceover (artificially created by machine learning… Read more
Zendaya to Receive Spotlight Tribute at the 2024 Gotham Awards
Zendaya
The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker's publisher, announced today in a press release that Emmy Award-winner Zendaya will receive the Spotlight Tribute for her performance as Tashi Donaldson in the Luca Guadagnino-directed film Challengers, at the 34th edition of The Gothams, taking place Monday, December 2, 2024 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. From the Gotham: The Spotlight Tribute was created by The Gotham in order to recognize phenomenal efforts by individuals in film and television who captivated global audiences with the biggest projects of the year. With the Spotlight Tribute, The Gotham will honor Zendaya’s remarkable work as leading-actress and producer on the Amazon MGM Studios box-office hit that broke into the cultural zeitgeist, and was celebrated by… Read more
“I Grow as I Make a Film”: Nanfu Wang on Her HBO Documentary, Night Is Not Eternal
Night Is Not Eternal
It’s a bit surprising to think that when I last interviewed Nanfu Wang it was for her six-part HBO docuseries Mind Over Murder, which revisited an infamous case of justice gone haywire in a small town in Nebraska back in the 1980s. Which, in terms of subject matter, is a far cry from this year’s followup (also for HBO). Night Is Not Eternal is a deep character study, a format the acclaimed director has long embraced, that charts the rise of Rosa Maria Paya, daughter of Oswaldo Paya, a five-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominated activist assassinated by the Cuban government in 2012. Over seven years, as Paya takes up her late father’s mantle, eventually becoming a respected freedom fighter in her own… Read more
Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened (Or Why I Still Make Independent Ultra-Low-Budget Films in a Time of Media Oversaturation)
Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened
I’ve been making films for many years now, at the unusual intersection of US independent and East-European cinema, and teaching at a university in New York. When COVID hit, it made me re-evaluate everything I was doing. I stopped the projects I was working on as they seemed superfluous in that reality. To me, the global response to the pandemic demonstrated like nothing before the shocking inability of international and national institutions to cooperate and deal efficiently and equitably with a planetary crisis. And now, it almost seems as if nothing had happened; it’s just “business as usual.” But it’s not. We have arguably reached a point where several global crises are converging, yet a disturbing sense of cognitive dissonance… Read more
Timothée Chalamet and James Mangold Will Receive Gotham Award Visionary Tribute for A Complete Unknown Collaboration
James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown (Photo: Searchlight)
Actor Timothée Chalamet and director James Mangold will receive the Visionary Tribute for their collaboration on A Complete Unknown, the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic from Searchlight Pictures, at the 34th edition of The Gothams, taking place on Monday, December 2, 2024 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. Announced in a press release, the Gotham Visionary Tribute "recognizes groundbreaking collaborations that push the boundaries of storytelling in film." “In A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet and James Mangold have beautifully captured Dylan's emergence in 1960s New York not just as an artistic evolution, but as a meditation on the necessity of change,” said Jeffrey Sharp, Executive Director of The Gotham “Through Chalamet's breathtakingly authentic performance and Mangold's masterful direction, we witness Dylan's… Read more
“If No One Documents It, It Basically Doesn’t Exist”: Emily Mkrtichian on Her DOC NYC-Screening Feature Debut There Was, There Was Not
There Was, There Was Not
When she first started filming in the Republic of Artsakh—a small “breakaway” state where most residents were ethnically Armenian, but lived under the control of Azerbaijan—Emily Mkrtichian was planning to portray the pivotal roles local women play 30 years after experiencing a violent war. But her project was thrust in a completely different direction when the small sovereign state became besieged by sudden conflict once again. Taking its title from the opening line of most Armenian fairy tales, Mkrtichian’s feature debut is fascinated with the preservation of a place that no longer exists. For the first half of the film, we simply follow the daily pursuits, musings and aspirations of four Artsakh women. There’s Sosé, a martial artist who is determined… Read more
