Out December 22 from Searchlight Pictures, All of Us Strangers marks Andrew Haigh’s first feature film since 2017’s Lean on Pete. Early reviews are strong for this drama, which merges a burgeoning romance between Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) and the former’s return home, where he mysteriously discovers his long-dead parents alive and well. The film screens next at NYFF. Click here to read Peter Bowen’s 2011 interview with Haigh for his debut feature, Weekend.
After Samm Hodges’ mother died when he was seven, his father moved him and his three siblings to a small cabin in rural Washington with no electricity or running water. “It was off-grid and had no outhouse—a pretty bad situation,” he remembers. “We had been lower-middle class, and then it was just a free fall. We could barely afford to eat. One month, we ate biscuits and beans for every meal. I did my homework by kerosene lamp.” As a teenager, Hodges “got involved in drugs, then got scared” and quit. He went to a Bible college in Chicago before […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]