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Playing Politics: Developing the Best-Selling Board Game Shasn
I have made two feature documentaries in my home country of India. The second, While We Watched, came out on the same day as “Barbenheimer” and just finished a month-long run at the IFC Center in New York. The first one, An Insignificant Man, which I co-directed with Khushboo Ranka, ran in theaters across India for nine weeks. However, my most commercially successful project isn’t either of these—it’s a board game, Shasn (“Governance,” created by Zain Memon), that was born out of An Insignificant Man’s impact campaign and has been sold in more than 75 countries across the world today, […]
by Vinay Shukla on Sep 20, 2023 -
Faye Tsakas
Before the pandemic, Faye Tsakas worked for the distributor FilmRise and then the production company Passage Pictures. “I had a lot of loans coming out of school,” she explains of her pragmatically motivated choice to work in development, acquisitions and packaging. “I had a great time working on steady jobs that allowed me to learn about how the industry worked and to interact with filmmakers. I spent many years paying off loans and saving money and was sent to festivals in my acquisitions job—almost like a paid film school.” After she lost her job during the pandemic, Tsakas moved in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Maegan Houang
“Everything I do is based in my personal experience, but I prefer viewing it through allegories,” Maegan Houang says of her general filmmaking ethos. “But hey, you’re talking to someone who’s watched The Godfather hundreds of times.” Houang watched that film and The Godfather Part II “every single day” growing up, but ultimately “only thought of film as an innocuous pastime.” So, when choosing a major at Wesleyan, Houang gravitated toward hard sciences and only considered studying film at her mother’s suggestion. Houang graduated in 2010 with degrees in Mathematical Economics and Film, then immediately enrolled in Wesleyan’s Film Studies […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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
