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“I Needed to Honor Mamie’s Decision To Have the World See What Happened to Her Son”: Chinonye Chukwu on Till
The lynching of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was murdered in 1955 after having an “inappropriate” encounter with a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi—has long served as a testament to the odious racism endemic in American culture. As such, Emmett Till has been posthumously considered an icon of the then-burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, but director and co-writer Chinonye Chukwu’s biopic Till is particularly invested in documenting the aftermath of Till’s murder as experienced by his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (played by Danielle Deadwlyer). In Chukwu’s sophomore film, the audience follows her journey after this life-altering tragedy […]
by Natalia Keogan on Oct 13, 2022 -
Nothing Can Fall Out of an Image: Heinz Emigholz on Slaughterhouses of Modernity
Slaughterhouses of Modernity, the latest film by Heinz Emigholz, has arrived in New York. The filmmaker refers to it in passing as a work of propaganda, which means, he reminds me, that it is a film designed to advance an agenda. To this end, Emigholz has adopted a mode of direct address. With John Erdman, Stefan Kolosko and Arno Brandlhuber acting intermittently as chorus, Slaughterhouses of Modernity castigates the works of art, architecture and philosophy—collected post-hoc under the banner of Modernism—nourished by the conditions of genocidal, colonialist, “Western values.” For Emigholz, the century that seemed to place the individual at […]
by Christian Flemm on Oct 12, 2022 -
“Don’t Shoot Too Many Takes”: Walter Hill on Dead for a Dollar
The closing title card of the new Western Dead for a Dollar includes the dedication “In Memory of Budd Boetticher.” Had director Walter Hill worked during Boetticher’s era, he too may have churned out exceptional, modestly budgeted Westerns at a clip of roughly one a year, like Boetticher did for Columbia Pictures in the 1950s. Instead, Hill has settled for being one of a handful of contemporary repeat practitioners of the Western, a disparate group ranging from Clint Eastwood to the Coen Brothers, Kevin Costner to Quentin Tarantino. Hill’s first Western, The Long Riders—a retelling of the Jesse James story that […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 12, 2022 -
“Extremity in All Forms of Human Experience”: Director David Bruckner on Hellraiser
In director David Bruckner’s Hellraiser reboot, it’s clear that co-writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski were committed to representing a more faithful version of Clive Barker’s original Hellraiser text, The Hellbound Heart, than continuing any storyline already explored within the long-spanning cinematic franchise. This is for good reason: While Barker’s 1987 Hellraiser (which he helmed due to frustrations with other filmmakers failing to capture his work’s essence) is a renegade horror classic, the subsequent nine sequels are widely considered to be tepid, half-baked follow-ups. In this version of the story, a young woman named Riley (Odessa A’zion) struggles with drug […]
by Natalia Keogan on Oct 11, 2022 -
Reckonings: Margaret Brown on Her Netflix Documentary, Descendant
Filmmaker Margaret Brown’s second feature documentary, 2008’s The Order of Myths, about segregated Mardi Gras ceremonies in Mobile, Ala., is structured around a historical trauma with present-day resonance. The ancestors of Black Mardi Gras queen Stefannie Lucas were brought to Alabama on the Clotilda, the last known ship to land on U.S. shores with enslaved Africans (well after the practice had been outlawed); the white queen, Helen Meaher, was descended from the Alabama family that owned the boat. As the community and historians undertook a mission to locate the remains of the Clotilda, which they successfully found in 2019, it […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2022 -
An Interesting Question
When Penelope Green, an obituary writer for The New York Times, called to speak with me about Benita Raphan in April 2021, I was still in a place between sadness and disbelief. Benita, who was one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Indie Film” in 1998, had made more than a dozen films across her career (and was in the process of creating a new one), when she died by suicide three months earlier on January 10, 2021. Benita’s decades-long struggle with depression and anxiety, magnified by the isolation and solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic—combined with the loss of her […]
by Alan Berliner on Oct 11, 2022 -
A Tangent: Director Treva Wurmfeld Talks with Sam Shepard
A decade ago, director Treva Wurmfeld appeared in our 25 New Faces while her feature debut, Shepard & Dark, was in post-production. The film is an intimate capturing of an often epistolary friendship between Sam Shepard and his friend, archivist and writer Johnny Dark, that is also a surprisingly wide-ranging and personal portrait of the celebrated playwright himself. Now, five years after Shepard’s passing, Wurmfeld has revisited her film’s outtakes and published the results in Tangents: From the Making of Shepard & Dark, forthcoming this fall from Oscilloscope Laboratories. As she writes in the book’s introduction, “In these dialogues, […]
by Treva Wurmfeld on Oct 11, 2022 -
Field Trip
Technically, Sara Velas is not an educator, nor does she work for a film school. She doesn’t fret about curricula, teaching styles or shifts in filmmaking technology. Instead, she operates the wondrous Velaslavasay Panorama in the West Adams area of Los Angeles, where, semester after semester, I take groups of students on a field trip to experience old-school immersive media and think about ways in which media forms shift and change over time. Ninety feet in circumference, Shengjing Panorama—the panorama currently on view—features a painting of the Chinese city of Shenyang between the years of 1910 and 1930. Created in […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 11, 2022 -
Wayward Spirits: Nia DaCosta Interviews Nanny Writer/Director Nikyatu Jusu
Nanny, the feature debut from writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, evokes a truly rebellious spirit, channeling West African folklore as a liberatory chaos agent to confront the xenophobia, racism and misogyny that regularly besets immigrants working as domestic laborers in the United States. Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese woman living in New York City, is initially ecstatic when she lands a gig as a live-in nanny for a wealthy family in Manhattan. Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector) appear to be well-intentioned employers, and their daughter Rose (Rose Decker) instantly connects with Aisha. However, she quickly realizes that the family’s swanky […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2022 -
Fall 2022
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022
