17733 Results for “”
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Nadav Kurtz
In 2006, Nadav Kurtz was 23 years old and working his first full-time film editing gig in Chicago. The movie, a crime thriller mockumentary called Street Thief, was “a fake documentary that followed the everyday life of a burglar in Chicago,” Kurtz recalls. “Even more intriguingly, the two brothers” making the film—director Malik Bader and his producer brother Sam—“hinted that it was based on real experiences of people that they knew.” The first-time fraternal filmmakers were thrilled when Street Thief was selected for competition at that year’s Tribeca Film Festival, but the excitement was quickly extinguished when, five weeks before […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Keisha Rae Witherspoon
T, Keisha Rae Witherspoon’s 13-minute directorial debut, commences with a moment of near silence. First, there is slow-motion revelry, dancers in marvelous homemade ball gowns and hand-painted R.I.P. T-shirts adorned with the faces of their beloveds, a voice crooning, “We’re here to honor our dead.” The silence that follows is transitional. We see drawings of “T”’s myriad incarnations—Trayvon Martin, the Vitruvian Man, the eponymous R.I.P. T-shirt—before a series of documentary-style interviews with the ball’s attendees, which feel astonishingly unscripted. As Witherspoon dreamt up the opulent, memorial T Ball at the heart of the film—a 2019 Sundance Official Selection and the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Joie Estrella Horwitz
Joie Estrella Horwitz finds beauty in falling asleep at the movies. Once, during a screening of Nina Menkes’s Queen of Diamonds, Horwitz dozed off, only to wake during a 22-minute sequence of the main character dealing blackjack—a scene made all the more surreal and impactful, she says, because of the “vulnerability” of having slumbered. “I used to feel so scared of that space and sleeping, but now it’s a pleasure,” she says. “It’s a beautiful thing to be quelled.” This liminality, somewhere between feverish dream and reality, forms the stylistic backbone of Horwitz’s work. Currently finishing her MFA at the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Nikyatu Jusu
Eight years ago Nikyatu Jusu thought her first feature would be shot in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Then Ebola struck, says the Atlanta-born Jusu, a first-generation Sierra Leonean American, “and I had to go back to the drawing board.” She began to think about the diasporic experience in America and how it could inform her screenplay. “I grew up at that intersection of being Black, being American but also being African, which all inform each other,” she explains. While attending NYU graduate film school, Jusu “would see all these Black and Brown women pushing white children in strollers, and I was […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Ephraim Asili
In Ephraim Asili’s first feature, The Inheritance, which premiered at Toronto this year, Julian (Eric Lockley) moves into his late grandmother’s house and initiates an experiment in Black collective living. The influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, evident in the film’s poster onscreen and the house’s boldly painted walls, is mixed with Asili’s personal memories of Philadelphia’s MOVE members (the Philadelphia native first met them as a teenager) and living in a Black Marxist collective. Shot, per Asili’s usual practice, on 16mm, The Inheritance marks a shift from overtly experimental to essentially narrative work. It’s literally colorful, unexpectedly funny in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Jeannie Nguyen
One of Jeannie Nguyen’s earliest memories is metaphysical: In bed one night sucking her thumb, a preschool-aged Nguyen looked up at an acrylic painting her father had recently acquired of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck playing a game of baseball. Suddenly, a black vortex formed in the middle of the frame, producing the head of a translucent green tiger. As quickly as the apparition appeared, it vanished. Apparitions aren’t seen as scary in Vietnamese culture—instead, they’re rather comforting. Such surreal aspects of childhood/adolescent memories and experiences, especially when it comes to navigating biculturalism, have inspired the 33-year-old filmmaker’s spiritual energy […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Julia Mellen
“I really fucking hated Kentucky and decided to get out of there as fast as possible,” says Julia Mellen of her upbringing. She’d never had a TV, let alone regular internet access, until enrolling in a new media class at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), for which she had to buy a computer and quickly became “obsessed with how much internet culture there was I had been completely unaware of.” In 2015, she says, the curriculum focused on “the idea of being able to create your own identity separate from your corporeal form. I had missed that […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Neo Sora
Kei, a young man from Japan, arrives in New York City to help his cousin Hiro and his pregnant wife move to a new apartment in Chinatown. To celebrate, Hiro purchases a live chicken for their evening dinner. Stopping by the new apartment, the two notice an elderly man in excruciating pain lying on the sidewalk below. An ambulance is called, and the man is whisked away, albeit not before he urinates on himself in agony. The event deeply disturbs Hiro, who now wonders whether he can murder the evening’s livestock, after this prompt to reconsider the fragility of life. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Isidore Bethel
Since his second feature credit as an editor on Laurent Bécue-Renard’s 2014 Of Men and War, a study of Iraq veterans in group therapy, Isidore Bethel has carved out a steady line of editorial work in nonfiction, including cutting features by two of this year’s 25 New Faces, Iliana Sosa and Daniel Hymanson. His father was a cartoonist, his mother a multimedium artist trained as a paper maker; based on their dispiriting experiences, both “always discouraged me from being an artist.” Their attitude was that the art life was “a career that really fucked us over. We got sold a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Watch: A Masked and Distanced Kronos Quartet Playing the Requiem for a Dream Theme
The pandemic has upended many film anniversary tribute plans, as well as inspired others. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Darren Aronofsky’s iconic Hubert Selby adaptation, Requiem for a Dream, its soundtrack players, the Kronos Quartet, perform composer Clint Mansell’s now iconic theme. Of course, they’re appropriately distanced and masked. Listen here to a lovely version of a track that’s graced countless indie film mood reels in the two decades since its composition. Lionsgate has released a new 4K Blu-ray edition of the film you can read about here.
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 16, 2020
