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Angalis Field
Set in New York City’s Chinatown, Bust follows plainclothes police officer Flora (Lux Pascal), who has been given the assignment of incriminating a ketamine dealer, Ruby (Nicky DeMarie). While the arrest goes off without a hitch, what fills Angalis Field’s film with tension is that the customer and dealer are both trans women. Ruby, who has lost a friend to a recent overdose and is selling to raise the necessary funds for a future medical procedure, shares with Flora her personal woes. Listening to these struggles, Flora appears close to succumbing to crippling internalized guilt. Is Flora a sellout for […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Masha Ko
Masha Ko had many jobs in the Los Angeles film industry—reality TV story PA, producer, production designer, music video casting director—before she decided to get a master’s degree at USC. But she didn’t study film, obtaining instead a M.S. in applied psychology, a program “where you study consumer and organizational psychology, which you can then apply to any discipline.” The discipline Ko chose was, naturally, film, and as part of her course work she did “a big study on horror film consumers from a psychological lens. I feel like I truly got a deep insight into what fear is. When […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk
This year is the 40th anniversary of William Gibson’s classic novel Neuromancer. It’s a work of singular brilliance that arrived as part of a new vanguard. Back in 1984, in the Washington Post, author and editor Gardner Dozois identified Gibson as part of an emerging trend: new science fiction authors who had eschewed formulaic space operas for “bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff.” Dozois called these authors the “cyberpunks,” and the label caught on. Key works of cyberpunk like Neuromancer were produced in the ’80s alongside the boom in personal computers, and again in the ’90s as subscriptions to online services and […]
by Joanne McNeil on Sep 18, 2024 -
25 New Faces of Independent Film 2024
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 18, 2024 -
Annie Ning
Recently, Annie Ning has been digging through photos and videos from her childhood, which was split between her birthplace of Illinois and her parents’ native China. “I have absolutely no memory of this, but there were two years where I guess I really wanted to be a filmmaker,” she says. “I can hear myself on camera yelling ‘action!’ to my friends and explaining how to frame a shot.” About to begin production on a short inspired by her experience at a Chinese international school circa 2008, she’s been using this personal archive as a major reference point. Set “right on […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Philip Rabalais
“I’m haunted by this question of, ‘Is my work experimental, or is it narrative?’” says Philip Rabalais. “But I also find a lot of energy in this.” Take his latest short, Moonroof, which begins as though a more sedate Beavis and Butthead were transplanted into a seat-POV-restricted variation on James Benning’s Ten Skies. Two heard but not seen male voices look out while asking each other a series of tenuous A-or-B questions (“Would you rather be a car or a very deep hole?”), their gaze restricted to the titular portal. For the lysergic finale, that moonroof unexpectedly detaches itself from […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
The Monster You Become: Coralie Fargeat on The Substance
Even for the most callous horror-heads, Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, Revenge (2017), stunned with its gruesome rape-revenge plot and blunt-force style, announcing the French director as a genre talent on the rise, capable of invoking her cinematic inspirations while departing from them on her own frenzied, feminist terms. The Substance, which won the award for Best Screenplay when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, somehow cranks up the madness even further, unfolding a dark Hollywood fairytale about aging and feminine beauty standards that stands among the most adventurous in the body horror genre. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Sep 18, 2024 -
Play by Play: The Making of Hoop Dreams
In 1986, two recent college graduates in film from Southern Illinois University, Steve James and Fred (later Frederick) Marx, walked in the door. To them, Kartemquin was mecca. At the new, student-run Big Muddy Film Festival, Jerry Blumenthal had been an early presenter and judge alongside experimental filmmaker James Benning and Jim Jarmusch. He had shown Taylor Chain II and The Last Pullman Car. “I remember watching The Last Pullman Car and feeling, ‘Wow, this is really good!’” recalled James. “It lodged in my mind that Kartemquin was really interesting. And Jerry was very impressive—classic Jerry, thoughtful and funny and […]
by Patricia Aufderheide on Sep 18, 2024 -
History Repeats the Old Conceits: Johan Grimonprez on Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, by Belgian artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, is an essay film of many dimensions: the high tensions of the Cold War, the activism of the Black Civil Rights movement in America and its solidarity with the independence movements that were sweeping across Africa, the power grab between the East and West for control over minerals and resources in the Congo and the relentless espionage attempts to undermine those efforts, including the CIA sending jazz ambassadors to covertly gain intelligence. Plunging viewers into the historical events surrounding Congolese National Movement leader Patrice Lumumba’s leadership and assassination […]
by Christina Zachariades on Sep 18, 2024 -
Streaming 3D on the Apple Vision Pro
In the first week of January, I received an email from a programming manager at MUBI—arguably, the leading global streaming platform for arthouse and independent cinema—telling me that the company was working on a new project that would allow it to present stereoscopic (3D) films on its service in the immediate future and asking about the availability of my films’ materials and SVOD rights. Intrigued and perplexed, I verified that I had the rights to all of my solo projects and told MUBI it could include whatever it wanted. A week later, MUBI licensed non-exclusive U.S. and Canadian streaming rights […]
by Blake Williams on Sep 18, 2024
