In Juho Kuosmanen’s debut feature The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, a Finnish boxer (and baker) gets a title shot at Helsinki Olympic Stadium against the American featherweight champion. At their joint press conference, the Finnish media is desperate to hear from their distinguished foreign guest: “What do you think of our country?” The real Olli Mäki lost by second-round TKO, but this movie about a small nation jostling for recognition on the world stage took top honors at Un Certain Regard in 2016. Kuosmanen is back at Cannes this year and he’s gone up a class: […]
Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and (screen)writer, probably most well-known for co-coining the term “Gulf Futurism” and authoring the memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth (2012). Since then, Al-Maria has directed gallery films and worked on numerous unrealized film and TV projects. Al-Maria’s exhibition “Virgin With A Memory” (2014) was a response to Beretta, a self-authored script meant to be her directorial debut. Her short film Beast Type Song (2019) is both an extension of an unmade post-colonial SF project about “solar war” and a hang-out film with a slow, deliberate anger. Al-Maria created and wrote the majority of Little Birds, a six-episode […]
Blood’s thicker than the mud in the family affair that is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, a contemporary vampire tale utterly stripped of the genre’s romance. In place of mythic hoohah, writer-director Jonathan Cuartas focuses on the grim, quotidian details of day-to-day caregiving for an extremely pale invalid named Thomas (Owen Campbell), a frail wisp of a young man who is wholly dependent on older siblings Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) for survival, sheltered inside a drab house on the forgotten edge of an anonymous city, its every window blanketed from fatal sunlight. […]
In the early 1980s, as Britain took a rightward turn that mirrored America’s own shift, the country’s bastions of righteousness took aim at the nascent videocassette market. Before home video releases were placed under the purview of the British Board of Film Classification, the job of protecting Britons from gory practical effects fell to the Director of Public Prosecutions. That office ultimately compiled a list of 72 films it believed were in violation of the country’s Obscene Publications Act. Films on the list became known as “video nasties.” Cinematographer Annika Summerson has seen her fair share of them. That’s largely […]
Poignant and with astonishing visual style, No Law, No Heaven is a decades-spanning drama about love and regret set within Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City by University of California, Los Angeles graduate film student Kristi Hoi. It’s one of five winners of the 2020-21 Student Short Film Showcase, a collaborative program from The Gotham, Focus Features, Jet Blue and the Westridge Foundation, currently available for viewing via Focus Features’s YouTube channel as well as in the air, on Jet Blue’s in-flight entertainment system. Consisting of three sequences, No Law, No Heaven features the same character as he ages from being […]
Developed and directed by Barry Jenkins, and adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad takes viewers into the world of slavery in the Deep South prior to the Civil War. Like Whitehead’s novel, the series integrates fantasy and mythological elements with real-life events. The Underground Railroad focuses on Cora Randall (played by Thuso Mbedu), who escapes from a cotton plantation in Georgia and travels through the Carolinas, Tennessee and Indiana to avoid recapture. Other characters include escaped slave Caesar (Aaron Pierre), slave hunter Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) and Homer (Chase Dillon), Ridgeway’s young African-American companion. Cinematographer James Laxton has […]
The following article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2021 edition. Digital technologies, incessantly lurching forward, are the ground we filmmakers stand on. No wonder we’re often unsteady on our feet. The pandemic has only become an accelerant. Although FaceTime and Skype were around awhile before both became verbs, it took the exigencies of the pandemic to flood our lives with Zoom calling, a digital convenience that has reshaped our relationship to proximity, travel and geography. Just ask Joe Biden. Doesn’t every production meeting now take place on Zoom? Production practices with renewed COVID relevance include use of zooms instead […]
NoBudge, the website devoted to ultra-low-budget and truly independent short films, recently launched a major new expansion of the organization’s mission and business: a subscription-based streaming platform that combines films from its collection with new shorts, features and music videos uploaded daily, many of which are exclusive to NoBudge. With Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, iOS and Android apps, NoBudge costs $5.99 a month, and 60% of revenues flow back to filmmakers. One of the most remarkable elements of the NoBudge story is that over its history founder Kentucker Audley — selected for Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces series in […]
On the sad occasion of Monte Hellman’s passing, we’re republishing this interview of the director that originally ran here in March, 2011, by Nick Dawson. Focused on his “comeback” film, Road to Nowhere, the interview also deals with Hellman’s career in general, his philosophy towards filmmaking, and mentions a tantalizing unmade project based on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de Rendezvous. — Editor There’s little better at restoring one’s faith in cinema then when a great director returns from the wilderness. Terrence Malick was MIA for 20 years between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, but Monte Hellman’s time […]
Since 2015, I’ve annually rounded up interviews and features covering the previous year’s U.S. theatrical releases shot on 35mm, an inherently melancholy collation of (increasingly dead) links. (“This is your most quixotic project,” a friend messaged recently.) The 25-ish 35mm releases of 2020 I’ve tallied this time are in line with each previous year’s 30-or-bubbling-under features, a boutique fraction of the larger landscape. Each list builds toward a larger index of minor deaths. My first edition, covering 2014, noted the close of Australia’s last commercial film lab and Bong Joon-ho’s return home to South Korea after Snowpiercer, only to discover […]