Fall 2025
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Making The Mastermind: A Conversation with Kelly Reichardt Producers Neil Kopp and Anish Savjani
I’ve been working on film sets in New York, and recently Los Angeles, over the past decade, but my personal goal, shared with many friends and colleagues, is to write, direct and produce independent films that are impactful and culturally relevant—and to find financially sustainable ways to do so. Working multiple production jobs (2nd AC, carpenter, truck driver, key PA, line producer) on shorts, TV shows, commercials as well as features—the latter including Michel Franco’s Memory, Olmo Schnabel’s Pet Shop Days, Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante and Sean Baker’s Anora—I’ve tried to soak up as much knowledge as […]
by Angelo Chammah on Oct 17, 2025 -
Lines Begin Here: Independent Animation’s New Generation
Coming up in the animation world in the 2010s, artist Julian Glander identified a clear pipeline for industry success: “An animated short would premiere at a great festival like Sundance, Toronto or Annecy, collect festival laurels for a year, then debut online, get the Vimeo Staff Pick and get covered on a lot of blogs. The happy end to the cycle would be getting the attention of an art director, producer or some powerful person, which could lead to either a commercial animating gig or a job on a TV show. Now, it feels like every single piece of that chain is […]
by Caleb Hammond on Sep 17, 2025 -
The More Things Change: How the Independent Film Business Has Changed Over 33 Years
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” says veteran distribution and marketing executive Ira Deutchman. In the business of independent film “before it even had a name,” Deutchman helped market films such as John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence in 1975, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense in 1984 and Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape in 1989. For Deutchman and others working at the dawn of the American independent film movement, our current era of corporate consolidation, economic uncertainty and urgent need for dogged do-it-yourself showmanship isn’t so different from the past. “With the rare exceptions […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Sep 17, 2025 -
The Burnt Century: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar on Train Dreams
Originally published in 2002, Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams chronicles the life of a logger who slips in and out of the world without a trace. An orphan with no knowledge of his birthplace or family lineage, Robert Grainier doesn’t have a history as much as he merely lives through it. He helps build the railroads that crisscross the country; when physically unable to maintain his arduous, itinerant lifestyle, he performs a series of odd jobs in his adopted home of Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He marries a woman, has a child and just as quickly loses them both in a […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 17, 2025 -
Editor’s Letter
“You buried the lede,” a colleague wrote after reading my June 20, 2025, Filmmaker email newsletter. That’s because in a missive that began by announcing our summer print edition and reminiscing about topics that have recurred many times throughout our history, I ended by announcing that after co-founding this magazine and being its editor-in-chief over its entire run, I’ll be stepping down. As I wrote, “After over three decades, and with the magazine strong and having survived so many adversities befalling print publications over the years, the timing just felt right for me to direct my creative energies in new […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 17, 2025 -
Take Only What You Need: Kelly Reichardt Discusses The Mastermind with Yorgos Lanthimos
In 1972, a thief and two accomplices stole two Gauguins, one Picasso and a Rembrandt from the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. At the time, it was the largest art heist (and the first armed art heist) in American history; the thief, Florian Monday, would have entered the criminal pantheon had he not been swiftly captured after indiscreetly bragging about his crime. As she reveals in her conversation below with director Yorgos Lanthimos, Kelly Reichardt has kept an “art theft” file over the years, with an article on the 50th anniversary of the Worcester crime providing inspiration for her latest […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 17, 2025 -
Analog Treasures: Joanne McNeil on Digitizing VHS
The word nostalgia tends to come up whenever analog media gets discussed. “I’m not against it,” Jessica G.Z., the founder of T.A.P.E. (Teach. Archive. Preserve. Exhibit.), told me. “It’s just not my interest.” What interests G.Z. is the durability and continued potential of formats and technologies that were more widely used in the past. Take home movies, which are at the heart of programs at the Los Angeles–based nonprofit. The organization offers magnetic media digitization services to the public at a sliding scale. Someone might come in with a video tape that has been stored in terrible conditions for decades. […]
by Joanne McNeil on Sep 17, 2025 -
The Space of a Day: Ira Sachs Discusses Peter Hujar’s Day with Azazel Jacobs
With Ira Sachs’s highly recommended Peter Hujar’s Day opening today at New York’s Film Forum from Janus Films, we’re unlocking our paywall on Azazel Jacobs’s interview with Sachs from our Fall, 2025 print issue. (See also my interview with Sachs out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.) Both Sachs and Rebecca Hall will be doing Q&As this opening weekend. — Scott Macaulay The “making of,” in which process is made visible through behind-the-scenes chronicles—documentaries, YouTube tutorials and explainers of all sorts—is its own journalistic genre. These pieces invariably fixate on the facts. When it comes to feature films, for example, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 17, 2025 -
Childhood After Dark: Shih-Ching Tsou on Left-Handed Girl
Taipei first appears in Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl glimpsed indistinctly through a little girl’s kaleidoscope. A vivid, swirling combination of colors and shapes, it’s a fittingly vibrant entrance for Taiwan’s capital, a cultural center that Tsou—making her solo directorial debut more than 20 years after co-writing/-directing 2004’s Take Out with Sean Baker—captures as a layered panorama of neon-lit alleyways and crowded streets. Following a single mother and two daughters who return after several years in the countryside to carve out a new life for themselves in the big city, the film has been described by Tsou as a “neo-melodramatic tapestry,” […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Sep 17, 2025 -
Inherited Histories: Cherien Dabis on All That’s Left of You
Few films arrive with the urgency and necessity of Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, a work that positions itself as both historical epic and intimate confession. Emerging from the long shadow of displacement and erasure, it stands as one of the most vital contributions to Palestinian cinema in recent memory. Told through the voice of Hanan (played with piercing restraint by Dabis herself), the story begins with her son Noor, a teenager shot during a protest in the occupied West Bank, before spiraling outward to a multigenerational saga of exile, endurance and return. While Dabis’s Amreeka (2009) examined […]
by Ruun Nuur on Sep 17, 2025
