Elizabeth Lo
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The Beautiful Stubborn Loneliness of the Filmmaker-Shooter
Folks who go to artist residencies fall into one of three categories. There are the artists for whom the time and space is more an experiential tool (we’re looking at you, social practitioners), those who strike a healthy balance between socializing and accomplishing an elevated amount of creative work, and those who disappear into an antisocial work bunker, popping up only for communal feedings, knowing upon exiting into the real world they’ll be back in the trenches of freelance gigs, copyediting, teaching work and the reply-all emails that accompany them. I fall into the latter category. Not long ago, I […]
by Mitch McCabe on Jul 7, 2020 -
“It Was Subversive, a Political Act, Giving Screen Time to a Scrappy Stray Dog”: Director Elizabeth Lo on Her Mesmerizing Tribeca Documentary, Stray
About the production philosophy behind Stray, her captivating and immersive documentary about stray dogs in Istanbul, director Elizabeth Lo says that her shooting decisions were “kind of left to the whims of a dog” (specifically, a mutt named Zeytin). Lo is perhaps being a bit modest here — there’s a tremendous amount of human skill, empathy, observational power and narrative shaping in her mesmerizing canine saga. But a giant strength of the film is its sense that it is indeed in sync with the rhythms of a dog, occupying an animal world while also being both smartly aware of and […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 1, 2020 -
Toronto, Camden and Venice
TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 28, 2015 -
Elizabeth Lo
Every night in Silicon Valley, a bus on the 22 line serves as a de facto homeless shelter. Most onboard just want to sleep, but fractiousness is never far away. Elizabeth Lo’s short film Hotel 22 unblinkingly records frayed nerves among those nodding off, a straight-up racist exchange and the abrupt end of the ride, when passengers are forced out into the night. The film never loses its cool, maintaining a rigorously composed, immersively embedded gaze throughout. Born in Hong Kong, Lo moved to the United States when she attended New York University’s film school from 2006 to 2010, where […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015
