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Claire Read
Shot from the end of 2020 through summer 2023, Penn F-ing Station originated when documentary producer and director Claire Read—raised in lower Manhattan, now a Brooklyn resident, lifelong commuter through the titular transit hub—noticed the structure was starting to be renovated. She wanted to capture it before the changes were finished: “I had some nostalgia and love for this most detested place. Certainly, I’m one of the few people who points a camera at it, because why would you?” The resulting 30-minute vérité documentary depicts Penn Station below ground by documenting the construction and interpolating interview snapshots of average commuters—a […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Ali Vanderkruyk
Beginning with an epigraph from Moby Dick, Ali Vanderkruyk’s experimental short Six Knots takes its title from the nautical speed that (per the guidance of Hawai’i’s Department of Land and Natural Resources) shouldn’t be exceeded within 400 yards of a whale. “Using a metaphor like Moby Dick to ground the project was helpful,” Vanderkruyk says, “not only because it represents an obsession with something you can never reach, but it also is palatable because most people are familiar with the narrative even if you haven’t read the book. By starting with Moby Dick, the audience can understand that it’s about […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
The New You: Aaron Schimberg on A Different Man
Aaron Schimberg has always had a personal interest in facial disfigurement. The New York–based writer-director was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate, along with other medical issues, and has spent the majority of his filmmaking career grappling with people’s perception of him. Much of that has manifested into his bold and sharp-witted filmography, which has considered questions about his place in the world and the ways cinema has shaped prejudice and attitudes toward disfigurement. “I write these films as therapy in some sense,” Schimberg tells Filmmaker. “It’s an ineffective form of therapy because I get done with them […]
by Jake Kring-Schreifels on Sep 18, 2024 -
Swept Off Her Feet: Sean Baker on Anora
“Tonight, this could be the greatest night of our lives/let’s make a new start/The future is ours to find.” The lyrics of Take That’s 2008 hit “Greatest Day” burst from the soundtrack at the start of Sean Baker’s exhilarating, Palme d’Or–winning eighth feature, Anora. Drew Daniels’ camera tracks across a row of strippers and customers at a Manhattan club before cutting to handheld shots in which one dancer, Anora, or Ani (Mikey Madison), moves from guy to guy, hustling time in the VIP room. (“You don’t have cash? Let’s go to the ATM!”) For the guys, their stacks of twenties […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 18, 2024 -
Caitlyn Greene
Born and raised outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, Caitlyn Greene moved to New York City the summer after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill with a degree in photojournalism. Her first job was as an assistant editor on Tomorrow We Disappear, “a totally indie” feature documentary about an artist colony in New Delhi facing eviction. Once she realized that editing made her “very employable,” she began consistently working on nonfiction shorts and branded content. It’s been a professional path that, over a decade, has led to her own debut feature, the environmental-themed documentary The River, currently in “early to mid-production.” Greene’s first […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Alex Ullom
Four zoomers get into a car and hit the road, quickly settling into the familiar rhythms of longtime friends catching, but eventually notice that a promised bend in the road never arrived. When they stop, a screaming, zombie-like horde emerges from the woods, so they hit the gas and keep driving. Night turns to day and hours to weeks as the group struggles to understand what’s happening and why—or, at least, adapt to the uncanny new situation. Similarly, viewers of It Ends (a title that niftily acts as a promise) are taken on a continuously surprising journey that toys with, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 18, 2024 -
Joel Alfonso Vargas
Joel Alfonso Vargas’s breakthrough 2020 short, Target Is Hiring, has as its leads two “showtime” kids who breakdance mid-car while blasting their own music, a familiar NYC subway routine that generally unfolds before indifferent or outright hostile everyday commuters. This year’s Que te vaya bonita, Rico (May It Go Beautifully for You, Rico) similarly first identifies its main character by an occupation specific to the city. Rico (Juan Collado) hawks nutcracker cocktails (a mixture of liquor and fruit juice heavy on the latter) on the beach and lives at home with his mother (Yohanna Florentino) and sister (Nathaly Navarro). The […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Jason Fitzroy Jeffers
Growing up in Barbados in the 1980s, “It was very easy to feel like you were on the outside of everything. Getting access to art from elsewhere was really challenging,” says Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, remembering the bootleg video store in a shipping container full of last year’s Hollywood releases he’d visit, or the marked-up copies of The Source he’d buy to read about Public Enemy, Nas and A Tribe Called Quest. Local history, such as the fact that the Caribbean “was almost a staging ground for the Cold War,” was, for a teenager, even more elusive. “You would hear whispers […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Nolam Plaas
Nolam Plaas was acting in a production of Lydia R. Diamond’s Toni Stone at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, which unfortunately had its opening night scheduled for March 5, 2020. “It was an opening night/closing night kind of thing,” remembers Plaas, who headed back home to New Orleans when COVID shut down the production. “I said to myself, ‘This is a watershed moment. Either I’m going to make something, or I’m always going to be subject to outside forces that I can’t control.’ That’s when I started getting really serious about writing.” More bad luck, however, befell Plaas’s first effort, […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Carin Leong
Director Carin Leong’s narrative short film debut, Ghost Town, “never went anywhere,” she says, “and it’s nowhere online. It was kind of my love letter to Singapore and all the changes I’ve seen there over the years. [Making it] was therapeutic for me. It didn’t do anything for me careerwise, and I didn’t expect it to.” A casual moment on the set of that film, however, planted the seed for Leong’s ambitious and elegantly realized climate-themed documentary short Sandcastles, a Field of Vision production that premiered this year at SXSW. Her producer turned to her one shoot day and said, […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024
