Responding to a help-wanted ad, 85-year-old Sergio Chamy agrees to infiltrate a Santiago nursing home as a “mole agent” to find out if a client’s mother is being abused. As a “spy” he uncovers a hidden world of frustration and loneliness. Maite Alberdi’s documentary borrows from film noir before evolving into an unsettling look at the lives of the elderly. It was developed with the help of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and the Tribeca Film Institute. The Mole Agent screened at Sundance, and is available on demand starting September 1. Filmmaker spoke with Alberdi from her office in […]
When one has the opportunity to listen to an actor with the amount of experience as Rosalind Chao has, one must seize it. From the legendary final episode of M.A.S.H to Black-ish, from The Joy Luck Club to Disney’s eagerly anticipated live action Mulan, Chao has seen it all! On this episode, the once “professional guest star” opens up about how she’s happier when working and happiest on a happy set. She talks about why it’s important to get to the fitting early in her process, adding years to her age to get her first job, learning from Peggy Feury, […]
According to various studies, anywhere from 30% to 80% of American small businesses will not survive the pandemic. And would they all receive documentary tributes as lovingly made and artfully constructed as the one Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller have made for shuttered New York record store, Other Music! Opened in 1995 directly across from Tower Records on East 4th Street street in lower Manhattan, Other Music was more than just a record store. It was an invigorating place for cultural discovery, a site of musical education, a community hub. Until its closure in 2016, by which time a new […]
“Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.” — Jim Harrison For anyone — show of hands now — locked in an all too familiar, selfsame cycle of recurrent dread, it’s no great mystery that cinema can (and maybe even should) offer familiar, welcome respite. Allowing a sense of escape while borders are closed, cinema’s palliative possibilities also remind us of our unsteady balance, as we strive to outlast whatever this current period is. In this mode, patience is currency. Yet, confined to our spaces and neighborhoods, we are all prone to a sense of restlessness. In the course of […]
“What kind of future does tourism portend?” wonders a Cuban character rhetorically in Epicentro, the latest work of cinematic nonfiction from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare, We Come as Friends). “None! It is only devouring the future,” the Havana man declares. Indeed, it devours the “past and the culture,” rendering everything “superficial.” But then comes the real multimillion-dollar question, “How much does cinema resemble tourism?” Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at this year’s Sundance, Epicentro — an allusion to the northern Caribbean island’s place at the epicenter of the Americas, both geographically and politically — is […]
The struggles of outer borough working class folks is nothing new to NYC-set dramas. But, in the outsider eyes and busy hands of director/writer/producer/editor/actress Isabel Sandoval, one of the newest auteurs of Filipino cinema—who makes her English-language debut in her adopted city with her third narrative feature Lingua Franca—classic tropes are updated to reflect our current intersectional reality. The Venice International Film Festival 2019-premiering movie follows live-in caregiver Olivia (Sandoval), who, in the course of looking after an elderly Russian resident of Brighton Beach (Lynn Cohen), becomes romantically entwined with the woman’s ne’er-do-well grandson Alex (Eamon Farren), who labors under […]
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker’s parent organization, announced today the virtual public programming for the 42nd IFP Week, taking place virtually Sunday, September 20th to Friday, September 25th. The first four days of the week will be film and TV related programming with the final two days dedicated to audio programming to support creators working in the audio space through the introduction of the first-ever IFP Week Audio Hub. Additional details on audio programming will be shared in the coming weeks. Kicking off Sunday, September 20th, IFP Week will feature a series of panel conversations exploring the future of the […]
The bored and lonely housewife embarking on a life of erotic pleasure has been a porn-movie trope since at least the days of the 8mm-stag film. But the Belle de Jour-style protagonist is never an unhappy Australian mom who goes from planning suicide, to radically reclaiming agency by hiring a male escort, to soaring to international fame as an award-winning feminist pornographer. Until now. Meet Morgana Muses, the unlikely star of Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard’s Fantasia Film Festival-premiering documentary Morgana. Hess, a filmmaker and pornographer, and her co-director Peppard, who is also an animator and visual artist, began collaborating […]
In his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, critic and theorist Mark Fischer differentiates between “the weird” and the supernatural as it appears in both literature and film. For example, the supernatural world of vampires, writes Fischer, “… recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it….” These supernatural stories are contrasted with fictions based around suggestions and byproducts of natural phenomena, such as black holes. “… The bizarre ways in which [a black hole] bends space and time are completely outside our common experience,” Fischer writes, “and yet a black hole belongs to the natural-material cosmos […]
In 2011, I was trying to evolve. To be something no one else was. Define myself, so to speak. First, I trained for something that wasn’t really needed. Something where I would go into conflict zones or hard to reach areas — mountains, jungles, etc. Something that I could do quite easily and trained accordingly, but again “things” evolved. A friend of mine had created VFX plates and had learned something that was already dying out. As a result, I took my game higher, evolving into some risky endeavors. This opened a door that I didn’t know existed. The next few years […]