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Chenliang Zhu
Chenliang Zhu grew up in Beijing and was “very good at mathematics.” Because, he says, “education in China encourages you to do what you’re good at, not what you really love,” he ended up studying statistics—completing his undergraduate degree in China, then an MFA at Johns Hopkins—“without knowing what I really wanted to do. After I graduated, I was in a depressed state of mind because I wanted to pursue filmmaking but didn’t have the courage. After finishing my first master’s degree, I took a trip to Amsterdam with my best friends and took mushrooms for the first time. We […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Elizabeth Nichols
In 2010, after living in Boston and San Francisco, Princeton, New Jersey-born Elizabeth Nichols moved to New York’s Lower East Side and immediately felt a sense of liberation. “There was this feeling of being anonymous while also being proximate to so many different human beings,” she says. “I could just watch people all day and hide behind my camera.” Two years later, a notorious New York landlord bought her building and tried to evict her. “It was a poor attempt,” she laughs, “but a very threatening experience.” With her camera, Nichols began attending the meetings of a group of activists, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Ash Goh Hua
“There’s a need for a cultural component of political organizing,” says documentary filmmaker Ash Goh Hua via Zoom while visiting South Korea for a week-long fellowship. “I can come in as a cultural worker, essentially, and create things that support grassroots political movements.” This mentality was the catalyst behind I’m Free Now, You Are Free, Ash’s debut short released by POV in 2020. The film captures the reunion of Mike Africa Jr. and his mother, Debbie Sims Africa, who was arrested in 1978 because of her involvement in the Philly-based political organization MOVE. Africa and eight other members (who became […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Zandashé Brown
Southern Louisiana–based filmmaker Zandashé Brown’s 2018 gothic horror short, Blood Runs Down, opens innocently. The night before a young girl’s birthday, as her mother brushes her hair for the next day’s party, she asks her mother what she’ll be allowed to do once she’s a year older. It’s a sweet moment of bonding—one Brown severs moments later when the child, remaining awake to try on her new dress, suddenly is struck by some form of possession that both enrages her parent and causes her eyes to bleed. Acknowledging the complex and at times contrasting traits of a mother-daughter relationship is […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Ellie Foumbi
Ellie Foumbi attributes much of her cinematic awakening to a formative teacher at the French-American School of New York. Originally from Cameroon, Foumbi’s family moved to the United States when she was five years old, enrolling her in French-language schools to preserve her native tongue. From the ages of 10 to 15, each week she would watch in this teacher’s class, among other French classics, staples from the New Wave, World War II movies and Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants. “Growing up, movies just became the thing that I gravitated toward,” the writer-director says. At the same teacher’s behest, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Gabriela Ortega
Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, Gabriela Ortega remembers attending theater and improv classes during her adolescence and being blown away by the power of stage presence. “There’s this rhythm where people start breathing with you, and you feel like you’re on the edge of your seat,” she says. She moved to the United States for college, attending the University of Southern California to pursue acting. Needing a flexible work-study position that would mesh with theater rehearsals, she landed a job at USC’s Cinematic Arts Library, where there was “so much information at my disposal. It was really cool […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Walter Thompson-Hernández
“Delta, JetBlue, Hawaiian…”: Two young boys look up at the Watts, Calif. skies, identifying the logos of the planes that streak overhead. At night, one of those boys, Lil’ Ant (Anthony Harris, Jr.), imagines himself as a purple Pegasus. Gazing at family photo albums, he wonders whether he’ll be missed if he were to just fly away. And while older teens in the neighborhood engage in eerie, choreographed nighttime rituals, outstretching their arms and marching down their sidewalks like planes taxiing on the tarmac before takeoff, a radio broadcast reports news of toxic jet fuel that’s been dumped on the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Edy Modica
Edy Modica cites not-so-average New Yorkers as her principal creative influence—she often records and transcribes public conversations as they play out in front of her face. “There’s nothing realer than that,” said the Brooklyn-based actor, director and stand-up comedian. “The other day, I recorded this couple standing on the L train platform. The girl had mascara running down her face—very Jersey Shore—and told her boyfriend, ‘I saw you looking at those girls!’ He screamed, ‘What girls, Lisa?!’ I just love crazy, loud people.” Crazy, loud and desperately craving a Dunkin’ Donuts Coolatta, the eponymous Nicole of Modica’s breakthrough 2021 short, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Franklin Ritch
While researching and writing the science fiction screenplay that would become his ingenious debut feature, The Artifice Girl, Franklin Ritch studied the dialogue and body language found in police interrogation tapes. “Detectives have a rhythm to their questioning,” the Jacksonville, Florida–based filmmaker says. “It was especially intriguing to watch these tapes without knowing the context of the crime. It became clear that in order to keep the audience engaged through the heavy exposition of [The Artifice Girl‘s] first act, each page of the script needed to alternate between revealing a secret and setting up a new enticing mystery.” The dialogue […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Xenia Matthews
Before she even had the words for it, Xenia Matthews was making art in her grandmother’s garden in Melbourne Beach, Fla., crushing flower petals beneath her hands and fingerpainting with the resulting paste on the driveway. “She hated that,” Matthews remembers, “but I think back on that experience and realize I was never going to be anything but an artist.” The flowers, vegetables, mango trees and cacti at the site of her first creations—“The things that grow there, grow there wildly”—inspire her use of big, bright, saturated colors in her filmmaking today. At the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022
