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Dwayne LeBlanc
After a few years away, Booker (Barrington Darius) makes a low-key return to his old South Central Los Angeles neighborhood—ducking relatives, reuniting with an old friend on a nondescript residential block, giving a ride to a middle-aged stranger waiting for a bus and running into a friend he hasn’t seen in a while, a possibly romantically charged encounter that closes the film. Throughout Dwayne LeBlanc’s Civic (currently streaming on the Criterion Channel), the camera’s rigorously locked-down gaze is almost exclusively confined to the interior of Booker’s car as he floats down the blocks that were once his home. The area […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Sue Ding & Sarah Garrahan
When Sue Ding and Sarah Garrahan began shooting Passersby in March 2019, they were both relatively recent Los Angeles transplants who wanted to explore the city. A nonfiction city portrait without an imposed narrative arc, the film charts its course by the daily lives of its characters, with the camera branching off from one proximate encounter to another. “If this is all based on chance encounters, we shouldn’t be the ones that decide where it starts,” Garrahan explains of the duo’s thinking at the time—so, they outsourced the decision to a geographic coordinate randomizer and ended up downtown, where they […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Rashad Frett
A first-generation Caribbean American whose family traveled back and forth from Connecticut to the Virgin Islands during his childhood, Brooklyn-based Rashad Frett grew up “aspiring to be creative” and explored different possible outlets, such as drawing and acting. He wound up joining the military instead, where he was a combat medic for his unit during 9/11—an experience that began an introspective period during which he explored different career avenues, including business school, until he enrolled in the communications department at Central Connecticut State University. There, the experience of studying filmmaking with director and professor Jeffrey Teitler was catalyzing, and to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Center of Gravity: Justine Triet on Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall begins with no image, just sound: the click of a recording device being turned on and Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) asking, “What do you want to know?” Starting from this clearly symbolic opening line, the ensuing brief exchange foreshadows much. Sandra is an autofiction author whose work has generated controversy (her family objected to her first book, an event she dramatized in her second), so volunteering herself for interrogation by earnest graduate student Zoé (Camille Rutherford) isn’t merely an opportunity to provide biographical context but a risky invitation for moral scrutiny. Their conversation turns […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Invisible on the Interstate: Joanne McNeil on Amy Reid’s Long Haulers
“Everything in your house has, at one time, been moved on a truck,” says one of the truckers featured in Long Haulers. Amy Reid’s film subtly demystifies what can be a uniquely alienating form of labor, and the film itself has recently emerged from relative invisibility. The titular vehicles are typically driven by men. Reid’s debut documentary follows the lives of three women who are among the nearly seven percent of long haul truckers working in the United States. Completed in 2020, Long Haulers might have then seemed incredibly timely given the global supply chain crisis, which was among the […]
by Joanne McNeil on Sep 20, 2023 -
Aurora Brachman
During the summer of 2015, documentary director and producer Aurora Brachman—then a 19-year-old psychology major at Pomona College in southern California—took a solo trip to the Pacific island of Kiribati. She had received a filmmaking grant from the Pacific Basin Institute, and this particular locale drew her because, she says, it’s “projected to be the first country submerged due to rising sea levels.” “I had never made a film or touched a camera before,” she continues. “Frankly, I had no business doing this. But it completely changed my life.” Upon returning, Brachman continued on the psychology track but still finished […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the fall 2023 edition of Filmmaker—our 31st anniversary issue containing the 26th edition of our 25 New Faces of Film list. Or perhaps I should say, “Welcome to the fall 2023 edition of Filmmaker Magazine” and actually use that final descriptor, one which I often edit out of interview copy when people say it. As I wrote in this space a year ago in a longer-than-usual editor’s letter tied to our silver anniversary, I picked the name “Filmmaker” after being inspired by a magazine called Musician that ran for nearly 25 years in the latter part of the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 20, 2023 -
Daniel Chein
The hybrid documentary Time Hunter will present creative technologist Mark Mushiva in two complementary contexts, and a striking 15-minute work sample provides a sense of how the strands will interweave. In the first, Mushiva is documented in his daily life, including his delivery of a presentation on his theory of Afro-acceleration. “Because Black people were seen as nonhuman and whiteness was seen as human, maybe the role of Blackness is to accelerate away from what is human,” he explains. That means actively embracing technology: “Get the chips, cyberonify, whatever it is.” The second strand envisions how Mushiva’s theory might look […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
The Man Machine: On the NPC Streaming Phenomenon
On a hot July afternoon, a friend sent a video, a TikTok livestream, to a group chat, followed by a question: “What is this genre called?” A young man in a Spider-Man suit and hoodie was rhythmically swaying back and forth in a parking garage as he stared into the camera. He frequently broke his silence when he received a “gift” sent by one of the stream’s 2,000 viewers. Depending on the gift type, he repeated one of a few phrases, each with the same delivery: “Hey, thanks for the rose”; “Too much ice cream makes me cold”; “Nothing like […]
by Deniz Tortum on Sep 20, 2023 -
Paradigm Shift: The Current State of Development Labs
When the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) announced in spring 2020 that they would shutter, many in the independent film community were shocked. For 17 years, TFI had supported hundreds of filmmakers and projects, including underrepresented artists, through its Tribeca All Access program, as well as Latin American filmmakers and VR visionaries. At the time, TFI’s closure appeared to be the result of a unique case of pandemic skittishness combined with its parent organization’s increasingly for-profit ambitions. Rather than an outlier, it may have been a sign of things to come. Given the lingering effects of the COVID era and the […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Sep 20, 2023
