Fall 2022
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Reckonings: Margaret Brown on Her Netflix Documentary, Descendant
Filmmaker Margaret Brown’s second feature documentary, 2008’s The Order of Myths, about segregated Mardi Gras ceremonies in Mobile, Ala., is structured around a historical trauma with present-day resonance. The ancestors of Black Mardi Gras queen Stefannie Lucas were brought to Alabama on the Clotilda, the last known ship to land on U.S. shores with enslaved Africans (well after the practice had been outlawed); the white queen, Helen Meaher, was descended from the Alabama family that owned the boat. As the community and historians undertook a mission to locate the remains of the Clotilda, which they successfully found in 2019, it […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2022 -
An Interesting Question
When Penelope Green, an obituary writer for The New York Times, called to speak with me about Benita Raphan in April 2021, I was still in a place between sadness and disbelief. Benita, who was one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Indie Film” in 1998, had made more than a dozen films across her career (and was in the process of creating a new one), when she died by suicide three months earlier on January 10, 2021. Benita’s decades-long struggle with depression and anxiety, magnified by the isolation and solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic—combined with the loss of her […]
by Alan Berliner on Oct 11, 2022 -
A Tangent: Director Treva Wurmfeld Talks with Sam Shepard
A decade ago, director Treva Wurmfeld appeared in our 25 New Faces while her feature debut, Shepard & Dark, was in post-production. The film is an intimate capturing of an often epistolary friendship between Sam Shepard and his friend, archivist and writer Johnny Dark, that is also a surprisingly wide-ranging and personal portrait of the celebrated playwright himself. Now, five years after Shepard’s passing, Wurmfeld has revisited her film’s outtakes and published the results in Tangents: From the Making of Shepard & Dark, forthcoming this fall from Oscilloscope Laboratories. As she writes in the book’s introduction, “In these dialogues, […]
by Treva Wurmfeld on Oct 11, 2022 -
Field Trip
Technically, Sara Velas is not an educator, nor does she work for a film school. She doesn’t fret about curricula, teaching styles or shifts in filmmaking technology. Instead, she operates the wondrous Velaslavasay Panorama in the West Adams area of Los Angeles, where, semester after semester, I take groups of students on a field trip to experience old-school immersive media and think about ways in which media forms shift and change over time. Ninety feet in circumference, Shengjing Panorama—the panorama currently on view—features a painting of the Chinese city of Shenyang between the years of 1910 and 1930. Created in […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 11, 2022 -
Wayward Spirits: Nia DaCosta Interviews Nanny Writer/Director Nikyatu Jusu
Nanny, the feature debut from writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, evokes a truly rebellious spirit, channeling West African folklore as a liberatory chaos agent to confront the xenophobia, racism and misogyny that regularly besets immigrants working as domestic laborers in the United States. Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese woman living in New York City, is initially ecstatic when she lands a gig as a live-in nanny for a wealthy family in Manhattan. Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector) appear to be well-intentioned employers, and their daughter Rose (Rose Decker) instantly connects with Aisha. However, she quickly realizes that the family’s swanky […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2022 -
Within Memory: Writer/Director Charlotte Wells on Aftersun
Charlotte Wells has been saying that her first feature, which she calls “emotionally autobiographical,” was inspired by leafing through a family album and realizing how young her father was when she was born. A bittersweet aura permeates Aftersun, in which Sophie, just turned 11, spends a week before the start of term with her father, 30-going-on-31 Calum, on vacation at a Turkish hotel, just across the road from the all-inclusive resort where they sneak food from the buffet. Like Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) in Sofia Coppola’s similarly liminal and hotel-set Somewhere, Calum’s arm is initially in a cast—the presumed vestige […]
by Mark Asch on Oct 11, 2022 -
Engineers, Artists, Both? Joanne McNeil on Bell Lab’s Pioneering Ken Knowlton
“Animated movies are usually made by a slow and complex process involving the coordinated efforts of many artists, draftsmen, photographers and other specialists,” begins a curious instructional film Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. released in 1964. After asserting that with an “electronic computer,” an animator could bypass “tedious” labor, the opening scroll concludes, “this very film was produced entirely by the process which is about to be described.” What follows is a concise and visually fascinating demonstration of BEFLIX (“Bell Flix”), one of the earliest computer animation techniques. Images in the demo—created with a “mosaic” grid of squares, each programmed to […]
by Joanne McNeil on Oct 11, 2022 -
Editor’s Letter
When Irwin Young, longtime chairman of DuArt Film Laboratories, died earlier this year at the age of 94, there was an outpouring of tributes, remembrances and praise for a businessman and technical innovator who was “foundational to the indie film movement,” as David Leitner wrote on our website. “Irwin not only simplified and streamlined postproduction, he stepped to the plate to help ‘impecunious’ (his word) indie filmmakers too many times to count, cutting deals, OK’ing delayed payments, sometimes even investing in the films themselves. As a consequence, iconic filmmakers working today—too many to list here—got a leg up when they […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 11, 2022 -
Images & Action: Director Laura Poitras on Her Nan Goldin Documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Perhaps the simplest way to describe Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is as a conversation between two artists who are committed to the truth potential of lens-based mediums. The film, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and will be released in theaters this fall by NEON, is Poitras’s portrait of Nan Goldin, one of the most celebrated photographers of her generation. What may be less known is that Goldin is also an organizer of campaigns for social justice to which she brings as much fiercely dedicated energy as she does to her photography. […]
by Amy Taubin on Oct 11, 2022 -
Self-Service Distribution: Director Lisa Hurwitz on Distributing Her Documentary, The Automat
Back in the fall of 2021, still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had come to terms with the apparent fate of my film, The Automat, about the Horn & Hardart automats that operated in the United States from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries. The Automat had been accepted to the 2020 edition of the Telluride Film Festival—which was, of course, canceled. But I was alive, and none of my friends and family had perished of COVID. And, while a couple of other festivals I had been invited to chose to not program the film in […]
by Lisa Hurwitz on Oct 11, 2022
