Amalia Ulman
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Small Talk is Optional: Jim Jarmusch and Amalia Ulman Discuss “Father Mother Sister Brother”
Across his 45-year career, independent auteur Jim Jarmusch has continually returned to a particular type of film in which feature-length narrative is broken into a series of short, discrete episodes united by place (Mystery Train), time (Night on Earth) or activity (Coffee and Cigarettes). Through their internal correspondences and connections, and perhaps because of their fractured nature, these films, liberated from traditional three-act structure, produce sly epiphanies and unexpected pleasures. Jarmusch’s attraction to filmic miniatures continues with Father Mother Sister Brother, in which the connective tissue is, yes, the family. (In a clever bit of calendaring by MUBI, the film […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 22, 2025 -
“There’s So Much Evil Done Because People Are Just Doing their Job”: Writer/Director Amalia Ulman On Her Satirical Comedy/Drama, Magic Farm
Clueless and a bit pathetic, the American video crew in Magic Farm, writer-director Amalia Ulman’s new satirical comedy, embody the vices of Western media companies that exoticize, exploit and sanitize the stories of the developing world for views. Set in small-town Argentina, the film, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, mostly follows the crew — Edna (Chloë Sevigny), Jeff (Alex Wolff), Justin (Joe Apollonio) — as they try to fabricate the story of a non-existent music act by enlisting the locals’ help. Meanwhile, the more pressing narrative of how the use of glyphosate, sprayed overhead by crop-dusting planes, […]
by Carlos Aguilar on May 16, 2025 -
Hits and Misses, Pandemic Edition 2.0: Anthony Kaufman Breaks Down Six Sundance 2020 Films’ Theatrical Releases
According to Box Office Mojo, our contemporary plague ended on June 14, 2021—the last day the label “COVID-19 Pandemic” was included on its daily box office reporting. But don’t tell that to anyone trying to release a film in the second half of 2021, as viral variants spread widely across America, plunging the hopes of many filmmakers and distributors. Welcome to Pandemic: Year 2. The merciless persistence of the coronavirus and its wide-ranging impact on theatrical moviegoing and home viewing habits became more entrenched over the past several months—with indies on the losing end of the stick. Struggling to gain […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2022 -
Overdraft Protection: Chloë Sevigny Talks to Amalia Ulman About her Feature Debut, El Planeta
Starting in 2012, the saga of mother/daughter scammers Justina and Ana Belén was low-key Spanish news fodder. Their scheme followed a buy-first, pay-never model, using a variety of excuses to dodge their bills. They came to legal attention when they attempted to dodge a hotel bill in Gijón, Spain, by threatening to accuse the proprietor of sexual harassment; a year later, in 2013, they were again arrested in the same city for racking up thousands of euros in unpaid dinners. In 2017, Argentinian-born artist Amalia Ulman received a photo of the Beléns from her mother, Ale, who still lives in […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2021 -
Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3 (Abby Sun): El Planeta, Try Harder!, At the Ready
The mother-daughter duo in Amalia Ulman’s debut feature-length film El Planeta don’t live in the shabby glamour or reclusive dependency of Grey Gardens’ Beales, but they’re no less compelling in their affection for each other and occasional squabbles. I do find it strange my mind went to Grey Gardens, given this film represents almost its complete opposite. It’s pretty clearly fictional and scripted, though Ulman plays the main character, Leonor (or Leo for short), her real life mother Ale Ulman takes on the role of María, Leonor’s mother, and Leo has to cope with the same physical injury Ulman and […]
by Abby Sun on Feb 1, 2021 -
Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3 (Vadim Rizov): El Planeta, Luzzu, Taming the Garden
I generally strive to be a well-informed viewer; in the case of Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta, however, I was perhaps better served by going in uncharacteristically ignorant. I didn’t really know anything about Ulman besides the fact that she’s a performance/video/web-artist, so I wasn’t picking up on any of her debut feature’s connections to the personas developed on Instagram, galleries et al.. Instead, Ulman’s debut feature, shot in the town of Gijón, where she grew up, registered as exactly the type of movie I like, a droll comedy formally descended from Éric Rohmer. Rohmer’s legacy doesn’t just lie in delicately shaded […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 31, 2021 -
“I Promised I Wouldn’t Cut My Hair”: Director Amalia Ulman | El Planeta
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? In October 2019 Chen Zhou came over to Gijón to act but also help me shoot El Planeta. Back then I promised I wouldn’t cut my hair until I visited Shanghai again, because I was supposed to spend a month in China during March 2020. Of course, all those plans got cancelled. Now my hair is much longer than I expected and I truly miss my friend and collaborator Chen Zhou. But I also […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“Post-Production in a Post-Apocalyptic New York”: Amalia Ulman on Distance, Hard Drives and an Invisible Threat
In April, as we began to put together the Summer, 2020 issue of Filmmaker, we asked directors, cinematographers, editors and other film workers to send us their thoughts on the quarantine and their own creative lives. The responses printed here were collected from April through mid-June — personal statements that speak variously to individual filmmaking practices, films halted mid-production, politics, art and life. Read all the responses here. — Editor Now, I find myself in the middle of post-production in a post-apocalyptic New York. I lift my eyes to the calendar behind my computer and sigh at the sight of the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 8, 2020
