Michael Tucker
-
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker on Their Noir-ish Stasi Doc, Karl Marx City
Now playing in New York at Film Forum, Karl Marx City, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s follow-up to 2013’s The Flag. An entirely different meditation on national identity, in Karl Marx City Epperlein — who emigrated to the States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall — travels back to her East German homeland, and the film follows her as she attempts to discover the reason for her father’s suicide in 1999. Evidence that he may have been a Stasi informant deepens the urgency of her journey, with a visit to the Stasi archives revealing thousands of hours of footage, somewhere in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2017 -
Going Reverse Oedipal Outside the Margins: Eight Tribeca 2016 Short Films
The wide-ranging 15th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival feels more screen-agnostic than ever, with films, television, VR, and interactive projects expanding across two weeks of downtown-centric programming. While resisting the urge to identify an all-encompassing theme that sloppily groups all these works into a State of the Union address, the shorts I viewed provided an appropriately hefty sampling of independent cinema comfortably outside the margins. Famous faces, small budgets, issue-driven calls-to-action, oddball foreign comedies, intriguing student work, and throwbacks to pop cinema were all accounted for. Given the scope and depth of the films being offered then, take the following as […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 19, 2016 -
Michael Tucker on His and Petra Epperlein’s How to Fold a Flag
With their latest film, How to Fold a Flag, documentary filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein have come full circle. Their first feature was 2004’s Gunner Palace, which told the story of soldiers in the Army’s 2/3 Field Artillery as they patroled the streets of Baghdad in late 2003 and early 2004. Told in a gritty style that threw viewers right into the midst of conflict, the film resisted an overt political agenda, focusing instead on the daily lives of the troops. The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair followed, a chillingly Kafkaesque story of an Iraqi […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 6, 2009
