Ana Lily Amirpour
-
Trailer Watch: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
After its premiere at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, the trailer has finally arrived for Ana Lily Amirpour‘s latest film, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon. This will be the director’s third film after previously helming A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and The Bad Batch. The film stars Kate Hudson and Jun Jong Seo as an unlikely duo that embarks on a supernatural crime spree. Hudson plays the aptly named Bonnie, a stripper and single mother working in New Orleans. The titular Mona Lisa (Seo), on the other hand, is a fugitive who recently escaped from a mental institution. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 24, 2022 -
Hat in Hand
In September 2015, I launched a Kickstarter campaign—a tongue-in-cheek effort to raise $308 to make 12 hats embroidered with the word “movies.” Three years later, I find myself president of Movies Brand, a company that has released more than 30 products emblazoned with the word “movies,” worn by the likes of Mel Brooks, Josh Safdie, Ana Lily Amirpour, Larry Karaszewski and some 2,000 others. So, how did a Kickstarter joke turn into a real business? Well, it depends on what you mean by a real business. Some background may be in order here. My first love wasn’t hats. It was […]
by Kentucker Audley on Sep 17, 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 -
Eight Sundance Veterans with Advice on Eating, Interview Technique and Hot Tubs
As part of our lead-up to the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, yesterday we published producer Mynette Louie’s advice for Sundance newcomers. Today we’re following up with eight suggestions from veterans of the ’14 and ’13 editions. Read on for advice, much of which you should take and some you will hope you don’t have to… — SM Ana Lily Amirpour (director, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night): The day I arrived at Sundance I got terrible news that my production designer Sergio De La Vega passed away in a sudden tragic accident. So that night we were drinking at […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 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 -
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 -
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 -
Five Questions with A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night Director Ana Lily Amirpour
Another vampire flick? For her debut film, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Ana Lily Amirpour shrugged off suggestions that the genre’s been tapped one too many times in crafting a Lynch and Leone mash-up that gets to the root of our fascination with the timeless character. Shot in black and white and set to a distinctive soundtrack, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night unfolds in the depraved (and fictional) Bad City, where a vampiric young woman and loner forge an unlikely love story. Filmmaker spoke with Amirpour about the stylistic influences and flourishes in the film, as well as its […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 19, 2014 -
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night | Director Ana Lily Amirpour
Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? It’s funny because […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2014
