Writer/director Christina Cho and editor David Gutnik met during their time at Columbia University’s MFA Film Program. Gutnik edited Cho’s thesis film, I Am John Wayne, which won the Grand Jury Prize for best short film at Slamdance in 2012. Their new film together, NANCY, is one of three films at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival to star Andrea Riseborough. Below, Gutnik discusses the genre elements of this psychological thriller and how he sought to ensure that “every edit is connected to the central nervous system of the character, and by extension the soul of the film.” Filmmaker: How and why did you […]
The directorial debut of Argentine actress Valeria Bertuccelli, The Queen of Fear holds its world premiere at Sundance 2018 as part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. The film was co-directed by Fabiana Tiscornia and stars Bertuccelli as an actress set to open a one-woman show. Matías Mesa, the film’s cinematographer, has DP’d a number of Spanish-language shorts and features in addition to his camera operator work on Okja, Triple 9 and The Road. Below, Mesa speaks with Filmmaker about lighting a blackout sequence and the visual influences on The Queen of Fear. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of […]
As filmmakers, we sometimes get so concerned with what film festivals can do for us and for our films that we forget about what our films can do for the festivals, and more importantly, for their local audiences. This year more than ever, I’ve seen festivals in communities around the world overcome violence, natural disasters and other communal sources of anxiety to put on amazing celebrations of cinema. They’re helping to spark conversations, rebuild damaged economies and in general just get people celebrating again with their neighbors, friends and visiting filmmakers. I’ve had a first-hand look at some of these […]
Receiving its world premiere at Sundance,The Oslo Diaries is the latest from Israeli filmmakers Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, who last came to Park City with 2015’s Censored Voices, an exploration of Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War through long-buried audiotape interviews with its on-the-ground soldiers. A similar reexamination of history, The Oslo Diaries combines unseen-until-now archival footage with the personal diaries of, and present-day interviews with, the handful of participants in the top secret, backchannel — and ultimately doomed — peacemaking process that took place in Norway in the early ’90s. Filmmaker spoke with the two directors prior to Sundance about […]
Sundance vet Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, Actress) returns to Park City this year with a film quite unlike his previous features, at least in subject matter if not approach. For Bisbee ’17 Greene turns his trademark technique of fusing fiction and nonfiction elements on the story of a sordid anniversary, the 1917 Bisbee Deportation, in which 1,200 immigrant miners in Bisbee, Arizona were rounded up, shipped out of the copper town on cattle cars and left to die in the desert. Through staged recreations developed and performed by local residents — including an actor whose mom was deported to […]
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? Making a cinema vérité-style documentary is inherently chaotic; you are immersing yourself in the lives of others and life never follows a script. You have to give up control to find the story. This film was especially chaotic though. We were following a group of Syrian refugees during their first eight months in America. We met […]
The 1892 murder of Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother has inspired numerous books, TV movies and even stage musicals but few feature films. That changes with the arrival of Lizzie from director Craig William Macneill. His film pairs two of the leading actresses of American independent cinema: Chloë Sevigny as Borden and Kristen Stewart as Bridget, her live-in maid and kindred spirit. Lizzie debuts in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Prior to its premiere, Filmmaker spoke with cinematographer Noah Greenberg (Most Beautiful Island) about the film’s naturalistic (and claustrophobic) visual palette. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being […]
Two things shape my Sundance coverage this year — one purely personal, the other macro. The personal was recently reading Christian Metz’s Film Language, the kind of text normally consumed in undergrad cinema studies (not my major) but belatedly a worthwhile book all the same; I wanted some new tools to think about movies, and this fit the bill. The opening essays are recognizably Barthes-ian contemplations of i.e. what makes the moving image more plausible than a still image and the middle gets mired in a lot of precise definitions of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic, but the finale is a surprisingly fiery, […]
Making its U.S. premiere at Sundance in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, A Woman Captured is the remarkable debut feature doc from Hungarian filmmaker Bernadett Tuza-Ritter, who stumbled upon a horrifying story in her native country hidden in plain sight. Marish is a housekeeper in her early 50s, though her hard-knock life has aged her considerably. She has spent over a decade cooking, cleaning and serving, mostly as a human punching bag, both verbally and physically, to a mystery woman of indeterminate wealth who remains off-screen. That woman, Eta, who we hear but never see, has allowed Tuza-Ritter access to […]
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? I’m a zero-inbox kind of guy. I can’t have widget notifications on my phone, they drive me insane. So, in general, I like to get ahead of things before they get ahead of me. As Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Paige said, “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.” I’ve always attributed that quote to […]