“I have no shame saying that on some level, I’ve kind of been making the same film over and over,” writer-director Jennifer Reeder tells me on a recent Zoom call. We’re speaking ahead of the Berlinale premiere of Perpetrator, the anticipated follow-up to her 2019 feature debut Knives and Skin, a horror-tinged teen noir that centers on the disappearance of a high school-aged girl and the reckoning that it brings to a Midwestern town’s inhabitants, particularly the girl’s mother and her teenage friend group. Perpetrator iterates a similar narrative trajectory, this time with a distinct genre sensibility. Precocious 17-year-old Jonny […]
Tina Satter’s Reality opens with a high-angle shot of its eponymous heroine, Reality Winner, her blonde head poking up amongst a stretch of cubicle dividers in a Georgia NSA facility. It’s 2017 and above her on the walls are an array of television monitors, chyrons blaring, all tuned to the latest news about James Comey’s Congressional testimony regarding Russian election interference. The channel is Fox, and you don’t have to be at any particular place on the political spectrum to view this work environment as already an abusive one. Winner works translating Farsi to English, a task that requires sensitivity, […]
You might think of Pacifiction as a feature-length version of the shot of the boat in The Parallax View before it explodes—before you know it might explode, before you know anything for sure. A man in a white suit, De Roller (Benoît Magimel), makes his rounds on the Polynesian islands, presiding more like a benevolent impresario at a Euro nightclub than the nebulous political figure that he is (High Commissioner, it turns out). He hears out local power players, consults with Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau) and other underlings and associates and grows concerned about nuclear machinations by the French government. “It’s not […]
Freddie (Park Ji-min) doesn’t get what she wants, but it’s not quite clear what it is she does want. She’s in Seoul for the first time as an adult, a child of transnational adoption, someone who’s culturally French and trying to find something that feels indescribably correct about her sense of self, place, and time. That’s barely easily said, never mind done. She lashes out, she broods, she pulls in and pushes away new connections without consideration of the consequences. She’s adrift in a place that should be, by everyone else’s accounts, her homeland. Yet she remains unmoored, the camera […]
Pre-natal anxieties and an entity from Mexican mythology are deftly and devastatingly woven together in Huesera: The Bone Woman, the feature debut from director Michelle Garza Cervera. Co-written by Garza Cervera and regular collaborator Abia Castillo, the film centers on Valeria (Natalia Solián), a young woman in Mexico City delighted to learn that she and her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal) are expecting their first child. This giddy sentiment is eclipsed by nerve-shredding terror when Valeria witnesses a neighbor commit suicide from her bedroom window. From that point on, she becomes the target of a strange entity with broken bones and […]
I was lucky to see two films I liked upon arriving for my first IRL International Film Festival Rotterdam: with a limited timeframe of three-and-a-half days, starting strong put me in a desirably pleasant and more-receptive-than-usual mindset, even if my fortunate choices seemed mostly like beginner’s luck. The festival’s extremely public firing last year of most of its senior and longstanding programmers led, whether out of solidarity (either publicly stated or more quietly expressed via networks of mutuals) or lack of enthusiasm about the resulting lineup, to some regular attendees sitting it out. When I arrived a third of the way […]
Today, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York announced the festival lineup for First Look 2023, which will take place from March 15-19. Featuring 38 films (including 19 features) from around the globe, the twelfth edition of the festival will showcase new work from long-renowned directors as well as exciting work from emerging filmmakers. Maid, a short from Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel, will accompany the Dardenne brothers’ Tori and Lokita. We’re also excited to see New Strains, from filmmakers (and 25 New Faces alums) Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, screening at First Look shortly after winning a […]
In “The Body is a Tool,” I talked with DPs and camera operators about the routines they developed to maintain their bodies against taxingly long days on set. When even film workers’ unions provide few resources to prevent bodily harm, crew members create their own devices, so methods of self-preservation tend to vary greatly. This was true of both the four camera people I talked with for the article and many of the set workers I’ve encountered in production. In this environment, a Steadicam operator might recommend a vest for no reason other than it worked for them personally. There are […]
Brandon Harris—an educator, programmer, author, producer, director, executive as well as a longtime contributing editor at Filmmaker—has curated a series at Metrograph in commemoration of Black History Month. Entitled “Strange Fruit,” the series features an impressive slate of titles spanning several decades, from Pierre Chenal’s black and white Argentine drama Native Son to Billy Woodberry’s seminal L.A. Rebellion film Bless Their Little Hearts. The opening night selection, which played on Sunday, February 5, was Elvis Mitchell’s NYFF-premiering essay film Is That Black Enough for You?!? Several special screenings have also been programmed, including Del Lord’s 1927 silent film Topsy and Eva […]
In Laura McGann’s documentary The Deepest Breath, Italian freediver Alessia Zecchini strives to set the new world record in the extreme sport that entails descending to unimaginable oceanic depths without the use of scuba gear. Due to the high risk of blacking out upon ascension, safety divers like Stephen Keenan are vital for ensuring the safety of those who undertake these challenging dives. Forming an intense bond, Alessia and Stephen set their sights on the legendary Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt, an 85-foot-long tunnel that plummets 184 feet below the Red Sea. Editor Julian Hart discusses cutting the film, which […]