6580 Results for “production”
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“You Don’t Find Yaks in America”: Joan Chen on Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl
An international movie star on screens both big (Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning The Last Emperor) and small (David Lynch’s mega-hit, Twin Peaks), Joan Chen’s film career went behind the camera with her feature directorial debut, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. Released in the United States on May 7th, 1999 (the day the U.S. and NATO “accidentally” bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade), Chen’s film was adapted from a novella by Geling Yan and tells the story of the title character, a young girl (Li Xiaolu) who lives with her family in Chengdu and is being forced into Mao’s Down to […]
by Erik Luers on Nov 25, 2022 -
“Nonfiction is the Most Successfully Explored Genre in the Dominican Republic”: Victoria Linares on Lo que se hereda (It Runs in the Family)
Working through familial memory is often as complicated as it is difficult. Dominican filmmaker Victoria Linares embarks on this very process in her feature debut Lo que se hereda (It Runs in the Family), about the near-erasure of her cousin Oscar Torres’s existence in their native Dominican Republic. As the film unfolds, Linares learns how similar she is to Torres, despite the two being separated by an entire generation. Lo que se hereda is hinged upon Linares’s personal discovery of her cousin’s unproduced screenplays and film reviews he wrote in the ’50s during Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. From 1930 until his […]
by Michael Piantini on Nov 21, 2022 -
Biscuits, Blackwings and Busby Berkeley: Cinematographer Matthew Libatique on Don’t Worry Darling
When choosing a project, cinematographer Matthew Libatique says, “My first priority is that whatever I’m doing next is different than what I did last.” That guiding principle is how one bounces from Requiem for a Dream to Josie and the Pussycats, Noah to Straight Outta Compton. The two-time Oscar nominee’s quest for variety found him wrapping the Netflix musical The Prom, the Stepford Wives-esque thriller Don’t Worry Darling and the Darren Aronofsky-directed drama The Whale in the span of a calendar year. In Darling, Florence Pugh and Harry Styles star as a young couple that relocates to an almost too […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Nov 18, 2022 -
“The Complexity of a Disorder”: Svetislav Dragomirovic on I’m People, I Am Nobody
Svetislav Dragomirovic’s debut feature I’m People, I Am Nobody is a film I wasn’t prepared to watch. From its coy DOC NYC synopsis, we learn it’s the story of a 60-year-old retired porn performer from Serbia named Stevan who’s found himself stuck, Kafka-style, in a Maltese jail, accused of indecent exposure. What we don’t learn from that brief description is that Stevan is actually Dragomirovic’s father-in-law, and that the filmmaker received a series of “audio-letters” that Stevan had sent from prison, which form the basis of I’m People, I Am Nobody, an experimental collage that takes us on a shocking […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 18, 2022 -
What Do You Do With a Donkey? On Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO
Although the film production process has had to undergo huge changes since the default adoption of digital media, most movies still look like their analog predecessors in both style—directors frequently process digital files to mimic the look of celluloid—and narrative: beginning, middle and end. But, although we are looking down the barrel of the afterlife of cinema, to embrace digital media at this moment only means making movies explicitly about, or attempting to look of, the Internet. It takes a New Wave-adjacent filmmaker to “explode the frame” for us once again with organically reconsidered digital techniques. Billed as a contemporary interpretation […]
by Rebecca Turner on Nov 18, 2022 -
Animal Collective, David Lynch and the Marines: Elegance Bratton on The Inspection
While it’s been 35 years since the release of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s U.S. Marines drama that featured R. Lee Ermey showering young male recruits with derogatory four-letter words, numerous films have sought to further emphasize the dehumanizing nature of military training bootcamps. At first glance, it might appear that The Inspection, writer-director Elegance Bratton’s narrative feature debut, fits comfortably within those expectations. Set in the early 2000s, the film opens as Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) has been kicked out of his mother’s (Gabrielle Union) apartment for being gay and finds himself at a homeless shelter in New Jersey. […]
by Erik Luers on Nov 18, 2022 -
“I Just Don’t Think Nice People Are Interesting”: Kit Zauhar on Actual People
Kit Zauhar, the writer-director-star of her debut feature Actual People, does not want you to refer to her film as “mumblecore.” Set in New York City, the plot revolves around the near-daily indignities suffered by a young woman named Riley during her last week of undergrad at NYU: she runs into a cheating ex, roommate tensions come to a head and her ability to graduate becomes increasingly uncertain. Above all, she’s consumed by a crush she harbors for a fellow Philly native she recently hooked up with, traveling to her hometown in a desperate attempt to seduce him. Predictably, nothing […]
by Natalia Keogan on Nov 17, 2022 -
“Carrots Played an Important Part in the Whole Process”: Jerzy Skolimowski on EO
In a year that saw the passing of Jean-Luc Godard, it’s astonishing to see a sometimes overlooked fixture of golden age European art cinema, Jerzy Skolimowski, directing one of his strongest films now—with a donkey for a star, no less. Boxer, poet, actor, painter: the 84-year-old director has brought a restlessness to his career, often expressed on film through a muscularly lyrical approach to mobile camerawork that remains unique in many ways. His classic Deep End (1970) heaves and wheels and gawps alongside its awkward, sexually frustrated teenage protagonist, Mike, who stalks a facsimile of curdled Swingin’ London shot in […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Nov 17, 2022 -
What It Means to Shoot New Orleans: Location Scout Elston Howard on Causeway
The title of the new film Causeway refers to the 24-mile strip of road that cuts over Lake Pontchartrain to connect the New Orleans suburbs of Mandeville and Metairie, a thoroughfare holding the honor of the world’s longest bridge over water. It’s the site of a formative trauma for James (Brian Tyree Henry), one of two rudderless souls drifting through Lila Neugebauer’s low-key drama; convalescing Afghanistan vet Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) is the other. They tentatively come together for the sort of downbeat healing not uncommon in the American indie, the process’s credibility bolstered by a lucid, precise awareness of the […]
by Charles Bramesco on Nov 16, 2022 -
“Each Second Meant the Difference Between Life or Death”: Rory Kennedy on The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari
Forget social and political issues—in documentaries, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the volcano. There was Sara Dosa’s exquisite Fire of Love (which I fell in love with back at CPH:DOX in March, also screening at DOC NYC), in which a pair of lovestruck vulcanologists are quite literally consumed by their passion. Now we have not one, but two volcano-centric films debuting at this year’s DOC NYC. While I’ve not seen Herzog’s (pre-festival premiering) The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, its title naming Dosa’s aforementioned protagonists, I’m guessing it’s likely the polar opposite of […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 15, 2022
