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Daniel Garber
Equally adept with fiction and documentary, editor Daniel Garber has worked on films as varied as Sierra Pettengill and Pacho Velez’s all-archival The Reagan Show (2017), Daniel Goldhaber’s thriller Cam (2018) and Lance Oppenheim’s nonfiction Florida retirement community portrait Some Kind of Heaven (2020). Despite the differing modes and materials of each work, Garber’s fleet, frequently rapid-fire cutting is responsive to each individual challenge and informed by an interest in shaping story from production to post. Documentary filmmaking, he notes, is a crucial example of writing in post. In that sense, working on nonfiction isn’t that different from the f/x-heavy […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Sushma Khadepaun
“A decisive woman,” Sushma Khadepaun muses, “poses a big threat to society in some way.” Over the sound of passing cars blaring music outside her Harlem apartment, she continues, “There is a desire to clip her wings before she may fly.” Born and raised in the state of Gujarat on India’s Western coast, Khadepaun had a close connection to her family, and her upbringing was defined by binging Bollywood films. However, like many girls raised within male-dominated nuclear families, she has discovered in retrospect that these memories reveal the existence of a deeply ingrained gender bias. “I grew up in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Rubbing Shoulders with Beauty: After a Pandemic Year, Acts of Looking at the Camden International Film Festival
In La panthère des neiges/The Velvet Queen, a feature directed by Marie Amiguet based on an idea by renowned wildlife photographer Vincent Munier, French writer and traveler Sylvain Tesson accompanies Munier to the Sanjiangyuan nature reserve on the Tibetan plateau, hoping for a glimpse of the elusive snow leopard. “Not everything is made for the human eye,” Tesson says at one point, a sentiment that is both a lesson in filmic observation—searching for the unseen in order to record it—as well as a commentary on the responsibilities inherent in that act. In the beginning of his expedition with Munier, Tesson […]
by Pamela Cohn on Oct 11, 2021 -
“This Film was Just 11 Days”: DP Maz Makhani on The Guilty
When cinematographer Maz Makhani met director Antoine Fuqua on a Lil Wayne/Bruno Mars video a decade ago, the rapport was instant. “It was really clear to both of us that we had a very similar aesthetic,” said Makhani. “We both liked the same compositions, the same type of lighting. Antoine juxtaposes the real and raw and gritty with style and beauty, and that’s also my aesthetic.” That simpatico relationship went from a luxury to a necessity on the new film The Guilty, when COVID forced the pair to shoot the Netflix thriller without ever being on set together. Days before the […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 8, 2021 -
Drugstore Cowboy, Straight Time and Misery: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Gus Van Sant’s 1989 masterpiece Drugstore Cowboy is one of the seminal films of its era, a movie both timeless and completely of its time; like the 1940s noir pictures it echoes and expands upon, it’s a weary reaction to its moment (in this case the age of Reagan and the first Bush) that taps into enduring truths about marginalized and desperate people yet does so with surprising humor and vitality. Matt Dillon gives one of the best performances of his career as the title character, an addict who feeds his habit not by buying or stealing drugs on the […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 8, 2021 -
Replay Again: On Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand’s NYFF Short, 38
She’s just like a sexy girl. You know the type… goth, horror, self-cutting. She’s like J Lo/Nosferatu. Typical. The whole trend. She’s pinup-y but poseur, like wannabe, like big ass. She probably doesn’t really have a big ass but looks like it in the photos — That’s how the protagonist in Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand’s new film 38 drags the woman who slept with her husband. The film’s action takes place post-affair, centering around the scorned wife (played by Curie Choi) online stalking the “other woman” (played by Alicia Novella Vasquez), an obsessive screen-based fixation uncomfortably relatable to probably […]
by Whitney Mallett on Oct 6, 2021 -
San Sebastián International Film Festival 2021: Three Films from the Spanish-Speaking World
Despite the accolade of being an “A category” festival, whatever that may mean, San Sebastián International Film Festival is not necessarily somewhere many major filmmakers choose to launch their film. Though it does host some premieres as well as significant industry activity, the priority is on pleasing a public—who, it should be said, generally seemed very pleased. Following a nervier, much less well-attended in-person edition held last year, almost all screenings sold out, with ticket touts often found flogging price-hiked spares outside of venues, and people seemed very happy to be out and about, seeing highlights from the year’s other […]
by Matt Turner on Oct 5, 2021 -
Wanda: Film from the Future
Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) Anna Backman Rogers 154 pages Punctum Books, 2021 One of the complaints made about feminist films of the 1970s and ’80s was that they were too experimental, too avant-garde, too elitist. They refused the pleasures of pop cinema. They skipped the well-told story and refused the escapism of character identification. And beauty? Forget it! Take Barbara Loden’s Wanda, from 1970: it’s a desolate portrait of what New Yorker critic Paulene Kael dubbed an “ignorant slut” in a film described by Jump Cut’s Chuck Kleinhans as “flat and opaque.” Indeed, Wanda, who is […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 5, 2021 -
“…About That Pivotal Time in a Young Person’s Life When Libido and Ambition Get All Mixed Up”: Director Sarah Adina Smith on her Amazon Dance Drama, Birds of Paradise
The complexities, uncertainties and rivalries of young female friendship are explored in heightened, near-surreal ways in Sarah Adina Smith’s ballet-school drama, Birds of Paradise, now playing on Amazon Prime. Working-class Kate (Diana Silvers) is the awkward newcomer at a somewhat gothic Parisian dance academy, and she’s immediately thrust into competition with Marine (Kristine Froseth), the talented, beautiful and mercurial daughter of the American French ambassador. The two women, placed together as roommates, quickly bond, however, following a competitive dance-off in a psychedelic dance club, a night-long endurance test that Smith cleverly constructs along the lines of the classic game-theory test, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 5, 2021 -
“If We were Doing Inserts, We Could Cut Them In as We Were Shooting”: 2nd Unit DP Ross Emery on Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the Matrix Trilogy
A 2nd unit DP must be a chameleon who can bend their own style to the shape of the main unit cinematographer. For Australian DP Ross Emery, that can mean replicating the regimented classical approach of someone like William Fraker on one picture, then recreating the instinctual fluidity of Dariusz Wolski on the next. For his latest project, Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Emery once again finds himself emulating main unit cinematographer Bill Pope, who he collaborated with on The Matrix trilogy two decades ago. Emery —whose career includes main unit DP credits on The Wolverine […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 5, 2021
