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Jane M. Wagner
During the winter holiday break in 2015, Jane M. Wagner found herself unable to defeat a difficult boss in Nintendo 64’s Diddy Kong Racing. Viewing YouTube tutorials on how to advance to the next level, Wagner was introduced to the concept of speedrunning—the act of progressing through a video game in record time via advanced techniques or by taking advantage of glitches in the game’s code. A financially lucrative endeavor thanks to Twitch viewers’ support, speedrunning found one of its greatest overachievers in Narcissa Wright, a transwoman known for speedrunning through games in The Legend of Zelda series with unprecedented […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Dustin Waldman
“To be a filmmaker born in the ’90s or later, and to not know how to edit—to me, it’s like you’re just not accepting what filmmaking is,” says editor and writer-director Dustin Waldman. “That’s part and parcel of the thing. On my movies, I work with another editor—I don’t think you should do it alone. But I do think you should have some understanding of what, elementally, that is.” And yet, “editing is a lonely, brutal process, so I have mixed feelings about it.” That ambivalence bubbles under Never Fuggedaboutit, which premiered at this year’s SXSW and is now streaming […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Juliana Barreto Barreto
Juliana Barreto Barreto’s two most recent projects—Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt and Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama—demonstrate the versatility of her work as a production designer. Jackson’s film, an expressionist portrait of Black life in Mississippi, called for Barreto to employ a “macro yet hyper-close frame” when it came to designing the film’s lush visual landscape; for Earth Mama, however, Leaf provided Barreto with “a bible of research” so that she could nail the specificity of Oakland, California, circa 2006. Both films are distinct yet not entirely dissimilar, centering on Black women who navigate tumult while being enriched […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Jess X. Snow
Growing up, Jess X. Snow and their mother frequently moved. “We followed wherever the Chinese diaspora [of my mother’s family] planted roots,” they say, which brought the two everywhere from Alberta, Canada, where Snow was born, to Seattle, Washington, where they immigrated. “None of these places affected my art practice more than the feeling and uncertainty of movement did,” says Snow, now a filmmaker and cinematographer with a prolific background as a muralist, children’s book illustrator and poet. When Kai, the protagonist of their recently finished short film, Roots That Reach Toward the Sky, experiences a panic attack after her […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Bright Moments: St. Clair Bourne’s Formative Years on Black Journal
St. Clair Bourne was a photographer, journalist, publisher of the newsletter Chamba Notes, founder of Black Documentary Collective and BADWest, mentor, teacher, cameraman, producer and pioneering documentary director. Bourne’s filmmaking career includes work for public television, beginning at Black Journal in 1968 through 1999’s Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, as well as films made through Chamba Mediaworks, his production company, focusing on people and subjects from all aspects of Black social and political life, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, John Henrik Clarke, Chicago blues music, Northern Ireland, education and religion, among hundreds of topics. MoMA’s restoration of his 1983 film The Black and the Green, which […]
by St. Clair Bourne on Sep 20, 2023 -
Zachary Epcar
In experimental filmmaker Zachary Epcar’s shorts, performers enact cryptically evocative fragments of obscure melodramas, their truncated lines and gestures radiating an unease captured almost exclusively on 16mm and shot in Epcar’s native Bay Area. It’s a locale whose stretches of residential anonymity the filmmaker often exploits. With his third short, 2014’s Under the Heat Lamp an Opening, Epcar had a breakthrough when he discovered the power of continuity editing after uniting footage he’d shot at an outdoor restaurant in Barcelona—well-heeled diners eating in bright sunlight, grandiosely captured in a mirrored ceiling above—with close-up insert shots, staged a few years later […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Abby Harri
In one of her first professional film jobs after graduating film school at Johns Hopkins University, Minnesota-born Abby Harri was working as a PA in Oklahoma City on a hybrid feature by the Australian director Amiel Courtin-Wilson. “It was a really tiny crew, maybe fewer than seven people, and they threw me into a room and had me do casting,” she remembers. Harri grew up “painfully shy,” so for a moment the job seemed a mismatch. “But, being in a room with total strangers who were speaking about their lives, getting really deep and revealing a lot of personal things […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Nyala Moon
Like many people, Nyala Moon first became enamored with cinema through watching Turner Classic Movies with her family during childhood. A native New Yorker from Harlem, Moon would absorb what she learned from family members’ specific preferences: Grandma adored Hitchcock, granddad loved Westerns and John Wayne (“super problematic,” she laughs). Despite her family being “low-key cinephiles,” Moon initially set out on what she considers a “traditional” educational route that completely excluded the prospect of undergraduate film studies. “My parents and grandparents were like, ‘You’re trans. The last thing that you need to do is something risky!’” Abiding by their advice, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Rachel Walden
Rachel Walden’s 17-minute Lemon Tree, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in May, centers on a young boy (Gordon Rocks) whose innocence crumbles during what should be an idyllic autumnal road trip with his father (Charlie Chaspooley Robinson). After stealing a magician’s white rabbit at a county fair (a scene scored to 311’s rap-rock tune “Down”) and winning a hefty sum from a scratch-off ticket, dad celebrates a rare winning streak by plunging into a drug- and booze-induced bender (preceded by Cake’s ’90s alt-anthem “The Distance”), forcing the son to face his father’s unobscured parental follies. Walden’s sole previous directorial […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Alex Prager
Alex Prager was 20, playing drums in an LA band and having what she calls “a life crisis.” “I thought, ‘This cubicle I’m in, these jobs I have to take on the weekend to pay for my rent and food, aren’t ever going to change. How can I make sure this is not the life I end up with?’” At the Getty Museum, a William Eggleston photograph of dust-covered brown shoes underneath a bed provided an unexpected answer. “I had a physical reaction [to the photograph],” she recalls, “like I had found meaning in my life.” Six months of street […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023
