Crystal Moselle
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“The Chaos Grew into Something So Beautiful”: Director Crystal Moselle | The Skate Kitchen
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? A year ago I was just trying to find the money to shoot this film. I had no script but a great idea. I knew the film had to be shot ASAP because my subjects were quickly growing up and that magical age from 17-19 was about to be lost. I was so determined to make […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 27, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 5: Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., Skate Kitchen
During its many years of gestation, the only thing known about Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. was that it was a beyond-troubled production. In 2012, director Steve Loveridge wrote that he’d “rather die” than finish the profile of the musician/his friend since college; as of last March, M.I.A.’s official position was that she hadn’t spoken to Loveridge — a friend of hers since art school — “in years” and had no idea what, if anything, was happening with the film. Whatever was going on in the background of those statements, a finished film has emerged, both director and subject were there for its premiere, and the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 23, 2018 -
A Band Apart: Crystal Moselle on The Wolfpack
It’s a stretch of the Lower East Side like any other, with public housing towers looming unostentatiously overhead. One of these is the home of the Angulo brothers — six siblings confined for years (save sporadic supervised walks) to their apartment by their father, Oscar. Crystal Moselle’s first feature The Wolfpack — winner of the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — is the result of an accidental street meeting between the documentarian and her future subjects just as they were starting to regularly go outside in defiance of their dad. There are obvious questions of […]
by Amanda Wilder on Apr 28, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 3: The Wolfpack, Western and Dreamcatcher
I stopped taking notes after a while during The Wolfpack; I was feeling a bit too disturbed to keep at it and it seemed somewhat besides the point. Crystal Moselle’s first feature follows the Angulo brothers: six siblings, born to father Oscar, who for something like 15 years never left their LES apartment, save sporadic supervised summer walks. Oscar named them all Hare Krishna style — Govinda, Bhagavan, etc. — and amassed a collection of some 5,000 films, their sole meaningful connection to the outside world. They were homeschooled and lived in a state of fear — Oscar’s past/present (?) […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2015 -
Five Questions for Director Crystal Moselle of the Sundance Doc Competition Premiere, The Wolfpack
We all grow up with our own peculiar “kid logic,” a warped worldview shaped by the limits of our childhoods. We think our parents are normal. We think everyone is like us. But we know there are things beyond our own experience — countries we’ve never visited, people we’ve never met — and we build images of those places in our minds. Then, we grow up, and if we’re lucky, we get to go somewhere. We visit those countries, and meet those people. Gradually, the reality of new experience replaces the pictures we had painted with our imagination. We learn […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jan 25, 2015
