A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
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Back to One, Episode Four: Sheila Vand Talks Knowing a Character, Dark and Light Roles, and Operating in Tandem with One’s Spiritual Journey
In this hour, Sheila Vand gifts us with a glimpse into the inner life of an incredibly talented young actor who, role after role, is harnessing her art and reaching new heights. She first captured our attention in Ana Lily Amirpour’s noir vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and in the small but pivotal role of Sahar, the Iranian housekeeper, in Argo. Co-starring stints on NBC’s State of Affairs and FOX’s 24 Legacy followed, and by the end of this episode she’ll make you anxious to see two of her upcoming projects, Jeremiah Zagar’s festival hit We […]
by Peter Rinaldi on May 8, 2018 -
The Story Women Have Been Trying to Tell for Years Now
Recently, I had to correct a friend of mine who referred to Thelma & Louise as an independent film. “Actually,” I said, “Thelma & Louise was 100% Hollywood, incredible as that may seem today.” It is not surprising that the Callie Khouri-penned story of two women escaping the law after killing a man for his attempted rape has developed an outlier reputation considering Hollywood’s response to it. Despite its critical and box office success, there were no copycat films made, no new genre emerged, no film movement was sparked. Since then, Hollywood has come nowhere close to producing another such […]
by Jennine Lanouette on Nov 15, 2017 -
Watch: “Capturing the Moment: In Search of Adequate Images”
A bit of a rant, Stephen Murphy’s video essay “Capturing the Moment: In Search of Adequate Images” springboards off a diatribe against the epidemic of smartphones at concerts to riff off of Werner Herzog’s long-ago warning that we as a society need to find adequate images. What are these adequate images, and how do we define them? Murphy has some thoughts, and some high praise for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as well.
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 22, 2015 -
2014: The Year in 11 Film Festivals
The start of the Sundance Film Festival is when film festivals traditionally reboot. A new wave of films comes in with the new year and festival films that have been trotting around the globe throughout 2014, especially the last three months of the year, will fall by the wayside. The changing modes of distribution of recent years, and the increased number of films being released, has meant that frequently the only time to catch certain films – often the best of the year – is at film festivals. A few years ago, some were questioning whether film festivals were still relevant, […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Jan 13, 2015 -
No One Knows About Persian Cats
The oft-heard label “Iranian vampire western,” which highlights the pop, postmodern, and cross-generic character of Ana Lily Amirpour’s fresh and potent A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, inflates its self-proclaimed hype and to-date majority critical evaluation. By these measures, its salient quality is hipness. A minority of writers have taken a more sociological tack. From a PC vantage point, the director is the first-generation daughter of Iranian immigrants. In addition, vampire films scream tooth-and-nail for ideological deconstruction. You need only scrape the veneer of a film that is largely surface to uncover its denunciations of generalized misogyny, social stratification, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Nov 21, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Here’s a high recommendation: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the debut feature from 2014 25 New Face Ana Lily Amirpour. “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an astonishing debut feature that contains the dark beauty of old-school vampire films, the cool rigor of the Iranian New Wave, and the culturally aware wit of someone with killer taste in music and movies,” is what I wrote in my profile of Amirpour this summer. Now, the film is set for release next month via VICE and Kino Lorber. And Amirpour has been nominated for the 2014 IFP Gotham […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 27, 2014 -
Kumiko, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Warpaint Highlight Sundance Next Festival
It’s rare that I can recommend nearly every program at a film festival, but that’s the case with this weekend’s Sundance Next Festival in Los Angeles. With events taking place tonight at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and then this weekend at the theater at the Ace Hotel, the Next Festival is intimate, very cool and with a strong multidisciplinary bent. Alongside several artistic feature highlights from this year’s Sundance Film Festival are shorts, panels and bands, making each program something of an event. Check out the complete line-up at the festival’s site, and here are a few picks of mine: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2014 -
Memories of Underdevelopment
With a few exceptions, independent movies are rarely developed like studio-produced ones. Certainly for ultra-low and micro-budget independents, the process is much less formal and far less cash-infused. Multiple paid rewrites until a script shines; thinking through all the creative and logistical problems with top-line producers before firing up the camera; packaging the right combination of talent and money that works best for the material at hand — studios and larger production companies have salaried executives responsible for this undeniably crucial work. But in the independent world, when overtaxed producers perform these tasks, it can be unreliable in its timeline […]
by Kishori Rajan on Jul 17, 2014 -
The Limits of Supernatural Subversions: Under The Skin and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
The following essay contains spoilers. As far as premises go, Under The Skin’s most alluring intimation of Scarlett Johansson rolling around the slick Glasgow streets, seducing men left and right, is actually not as titillating as it sounds – unless you’re one for inverted gender plays (not for nothing is she perched behind the wheel of a predatorial white van). Each would-be sex scene instead succumbs to alien interpretation. As smoothly as she rolls down the car window, inquiring after irrelevant directions, Johansson’s Laura takes the man in question not to bed, but to another dimension. She moves backward on […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 3, 2014 -
Interview with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night Director Ana Lily Amirpour
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Amirpour: Because I’m lonely, romantic, and love to dance. Filmmaker: How much of your crew was female? Was hiring women a consideration for you? Amirpour: Just our costume and makeup departments. The rest were a glorious and talented group of boys. Filmmaker: How did you go about raising funding for it? (I ask this because most female filmmakers says that being female makes it harder to raise funds, so thought your story could be inspiring — I know this topic can be touchy feely, so answer it in the way that […]
by Danielle Lurie on Jan 19, 2014
