The 2022 edition of New Directors/New Films — the annual showcase of emerging filmmakers co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — concludes this weekend with three screenings of its closing-night film, Martine Syms’ The African Desperate. Syms is an art-world luminary whose work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim, LACMA, MoMA, and the Tate, among others, and her extraordinarily varied and prolific output includes video art, installations, essays and manifestos, and a publishing press. Much of her oeuvre reflects a deep engagement with the moving image, from her […]
After four seasons of financial and familial duplicity, the winding saga of Missouri drug launderers Wendy and Marty Byrde comes to an end tomorrow as Netflix releases the final half of its 14-episode swan song. I have no idea yet whether the karmic scales will finally tilt towards a comeuppance for the couple but am certain that whatever awaits the Byrdes will unfold in the murky depths of low-key interiors and the cool cyan of perpetually overcast exteriors. It’s a well-defined aesthetic that has earned three Emmy nominations for the show’s cinematographers. For the climactic season, a new team of […]
Wunmi Mosaku won a BAFTA award for Damilola, Our Loved Boy. She was only the second Black actress to win one in 62 years. You might know her from her incredible work as Ruby in Lovecraft Country, Rial in His House, or B-15 in the Marvel series Loki. Her latest is We Own This City, from the makers of The Wire, which premiered Monday on HBO Max. On this episode, she talks about her early days of learning the ropes of screen acting, how rehearsal makes a big difference in her process, why connecting to people is so important to […]
Per Wikipedia, “The Martha Mitchell effect refers to the process by which a psychiatrist, psychologist, mental health clinician, or other medical professional labels a patient’s accurate perception of real events as delusional, resulting in misdiagnosis.” Per Sundance, Full Frame, Hot Docs, and ultimately Netflix, The Martha Mitchell Effect is one must-see doc. Running at just under a brisk 40 minutes, Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy’s all-archival short – which recently screened at the virtual Full Frame in the NEW DOCS section and is set to play in the Persister Shorts: Mother’s Day program at the hybrid Hot Docs – spotlights the […]
For a film journo who closely followed last year’s he said (filmmakers)/she said (ISIS “sex slave” subjects) controversy that entangled Hogir Hirori’s Sundance-premiering (followed by film-festival-shunned) Sabaya, the recent CPH:DOX panel “Beyond Courage: Trauma-Informed Storytelling” was simply a must-see. The discussion, expertly moderated by Gavin Rees, Executive Director of Dart Center Europe (a satellite of Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma), was part of the “Claim Your Story!” program, one of three engaging afternoons under CPH:CONFERENCE’s “Business As Unusual” banner. (“Follow the Money!” and “Shaping Success.” were likewise smartly curated by The Catalysts, a multimedia agency that “turns […]
“Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.” So sayeth the titular, straight-talking matriarch at the heart of Laura Herrero Garvín’s La Mami, a gloriously female-centered portrait of the hardworking dancers of Mexico City’s Cabaret Barba Azul. Told entirely from a female POV – with no men in sight to hijack the narrative – the film takes place almost exclusively in the cloakroom/bathroom/dressing room of the legendary nightclub, where Doña Olga (aka “La Mami”) presides. It’s in this safe space that the cabaret world vet, who in the past 45 years has transitioned from party girl […]
Hit the Road, the debut feature from writer/director Panah Panahi, is a 93-minute long goodbye of aptly sweet sorrow. Panah, 38, is the son of Jafar Panahi, one of the undisputed titans of Iranian art-house cinema. Having served as an assistant on his father’s films and edited his most recent feature (3 Faces), Panah emerges with Hit the Road as a filmmaker with a slyly unclassifiable take on the family road movie. Panah has called Hit the Road in many ways “the opposite of Jafar’s cinema,” but the film shares at least one key quality with his father’s work: It’s […]
“The story can’t just change midway through,” exclaims a pretentious adult film director incredulously in X. It certainly can in a Ti West horror film, where one of the joys is often the shift from the methodical pace of the opening to the blood-drenched mania of the finale. Set in 1979, X finds a group of ambitious but inexperienced filmmakers heading to a remote Texas farm with dreams of making the next Debbie Does Dallas. However, the troupe fails to inform their hosts – an elderly couple who rent the crew their bunkhouse – about the purpose of their visit, […]
How and why What started it all was the 2016 election. I was at the Napa Valley Film Festival showing my documentary The Lost City of Cecil B DeMille, and I remember sitting in my hotel room watching the results come in and being devastated. While in Napa it dawned on me that I had worked on many other people’s films and it was almost two decades since I had made a film of my own. I’d spent much of this time trying to get one particular project made and was not successful. It felt like I was running out […]
After an online-only edition in 2020 and a hybrid Golden Jubilee last year, New Directors/New Films is once again “in-person only,” a phrase whose very existence reveals how thoroughly the COVID-19 pandemic has altered industry and audience expectations. If the advisability of our “return to normal” (masks are now optional at both host venues) is questionable, more laudable is the festival’s gender equity: 21 of the 39 directors whose films are included in this year’s slate are women, although the disparity between features and shorts demonstrates the political and social obstacles to feature filmmaking that women continue to face. Most […]