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Jordan Lord
Make a film and along with the movie comes, usually, a folder containing all the associated contracts: financing docs and loan agreements, footage releases, location agreements and, especially for documentaries, appearance releases. Together, they constitute a matrix of power relations, a charting of the debts incurred, risks undertaken and obligations owed by all of those participating in the film’s creation. The deconstruction of these relationships is both subject and method in the films of New York–based filmmaker Jordan Lord. In the 2018 short After…. After… (Access), Lord and their producer attempt to secure permission from a hospital to film Lord’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Ramzi Bashour
Ramzi Bashour’s first short, No One Gets Out of Here Alive, premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2016. Five years later, his NYU thesis film, The Trees, brought him back. In between those premieres, Bashour left Beirut, his home since age nine. Shot in 2015 as an influx of refugees poured into Lebanon from the Syrian War, No One is, he says, “my goodbye letter to the city and the country that I’d been living in” and already left once before. Focusing on a migrant laborer’s precarious day-to-day routine, the grimly immersive short shares a quick, often unexpected rhythmic […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Isabel Castro
Born in Mexico in the early 1990s, Isabel Castro moved extensively with her family throughout her childhood. After relocating to Argentina and Brazil, the Castro family arrived in the United States—first, Los Angeles, then a predominantly white neighborhood in Connecticut. Assimilation was paramount, and Castro’s high school experience became a constant push-and-pull between needing to fit in and embracing her Mexican heritage. An early interest in painting and photography gave way to a fascination with the still image, providing Castro with a path to exploring her creativity and, potentially, making a career out of it. Still, the financial implications of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Jason Park
A decade ago, Jason Park had taken a year off from Andrews University, the Michigan Christian college he was attending as an undergraduate, to work as a “missionary/teacher” on the island of Palau. As a freshman he studied theology, but cinema was always a draw. Growing up, his mother, a first-generation Korean American, would often take Park to the theater. But Andrews didn’t have a film department, and, regardless, Park never thought filmmaking could be an actual profession. But, during that missionary year, he saw David Fincher’s The Social Network, “projected off a DVD on a crappy projector. To this […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Bong Joon-ho Interviews Edgar Wright about Wright’s Exhilarating, ’60s-Set Psychological Thriller, Last Night in Soho
“A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever,” J. G. Ballard said in an interview contained within the 1983 reissue of his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. In Ballard’s view, the decade’s political and cultural jolts, coupled with the rise of mass media, produced what he called in another interview “a peculiar psychological climate…” a “landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.” Eloise, the 18-year-old heroine of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 11, 2021 -
Jazmin Jones
Jazmin Jones was eight years old and living in the Bay Area when she first encountered Mavis Beacon, a fictional figure created by the cofounder of MySpace to represent the popular Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software game. “I’m a pupil of Mavis Beacon’s,” Jones says. “I owe this woman so much. When I was learning the game, they have these little Black hands that mimic typing. It was so amazing to see a digitized version of a body like mine on screen at such a foundational age.” But, as Jones grew older she has realized Beacon is a bit of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Anthony Banua-Simon
The commodification and exploitation of the sugar business is a recurring preoccupation of nonfiction director Anthony Banua-Simon, whose debut feature, Cane Fire, premiered at Hot Docs in 2020 and recently played MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. With its primary subject the labor movements and activist strikes that arose from sugar plantation mismanagement and employee abuse, Banua-Simon’s documentary is laser-focused in its interests but expansive and sprawling in mapping out key players and historical ramifications. Dissecting the colonization of Kaua’i, the picturesque Hawaiian island known for its once-thriving sugar production (and the site of several whitewashed Hollywood films), Cane Fire is both a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Jude Chehab
Screened as a half-hour sample cut, Jude Chehab’s forthcoming first feature Q delves into her family’s personal history. Growing up in Beirut from ages 10 to 18, Chehab was, like her mother, part of “the Qubaysiat, the regime-loving Sufis turned cult.” Acting as her own shooter, Chehab mixes family archival with footage of her mother and father coming to terms with their withdrawal from the group. A steadily trained, largely unmoving camera gaze captures backyard family dinners and interviews with her parents and maternal grandmother—sometimes painful confrontations. The result is meditative vérité, with each carefully thought-through cut within and out […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Omnes Films
A bizarre sacrificial rite of passage for a suburban neighborhood’s teen population; an inquisitive woman discovering a portal to the past via her late aunt’s hurdy-gurdy; an awkward businessman entering the wrong hotel room and stepping into the crosshairs of quarreling lovers—these are but three stories in the recent cinematic output of Omnes Films, a Los Angeles-based collective of filmmakers. Making their presence known with the world premiere of Tyler Taormina’s debut feature, Ham on Rye, at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in early 2019 (and its international premiere later that summer at the Locarno Film Festival), Omnes has […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Editor’s Letter
Welcome to Filmmaker’s 29th anniversary edition—and, as has been the case the past several years, the fall edition is also our 25 New Faces issue. Here, you’ll meet 25 filmmakers—or sets of filmmakers or, in one case, a production company—that have impressed, moved or surprised us, and who we are eager to track into the future. We started the list in 1998 and, looking back, it’s fascinating to see the trajectories of its first graduating class. Peter Sarsgaard, of course, is an in-demand actor. Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m a Cheerleader recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, was rereleased in a new […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 11, 2021
