Robert Machoian
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“How Could One Document the Unseen?”: Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck on Their Haunted Cinema Eye Honors-Nominated Short, The Last Days of August
In their latest short film, The Last Days of August, which depicts the slow-motion desolation of a Nebraska town economically denuded by online retail, prolific filmmakers Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck create a haunted visual poetry — a blend of formally arresting, incisively spare images and heightened sound design. The two filmmakers, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2010, began as shorts filmmakers and in recent years have directed arresting character-based, documentary-tinged features (God Bless the Child, When She Runs, and, for Machoian solo, The Killing of Two Lovers and The Integrity of Joseph Chambers). But throughout their […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 22, 2022 -
“None of the Real Preppers I Have Met Would Ever Go on a Reality Show…”: Robert Machoian on His Tribeca-Premiering Survivalist Drama, The Integrity of Joseph Chambers
In Robert Machoian’s The Integrity of Joseph Chambers, insurance salesman Joe (Clayne Crawford) is a kind of oxymoron: a prepper weekend warrior. If most survivalists are steadfastly in it for the long game, larding their basement bunkers with all sorts of durable foodstuffs, solar panel-driven batteries and cartons of Cipro, Joe jumps into the doomer mindset impulsively early one Saturday morning by deciding to hunt a deer. “We need to know how to do this stuff,” he says to his skeptical wife (Jordana Brewster) in their beautiful range-hooded kitchen, before heading out in his jeep, shotgun by his side. Joe’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 9, 2022 -
True/False 2022: Reconvening
One of my favorite memories of attending a decade-plus of True/False is from the 2015 edition of the now-defunct Neither/Nor sidebar, annually dedicated to a small retrospective with accompanying monograph. A selection of unknown-to-me Polish cinema programmed by Ela Bittencourt structured that year’s on-the-ground experience from my first screening, Marcel Łoziński’s 1981 How to Live, as hilarious as promised by its description: “In the 1970s, young Polish couple [sic] attend a government-sponsored summer camp where they learn to become the ideal communist family.” The sidebar produced a number of related beguiling sights, not least the now very senior filmmakers in attendance […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 21, 2022 -
“We Only Had an Official Gaffer for Two Days”: Robert Machoian on The Killing of Two Lovers
Despite the grim promise of its title, Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers is more emotionally brutal than it is violent. Set in a Utah town so small that everyone knows everyone, the film follows David (Clayne Crawford), a depressed everyman who has recently separated from his wife and the mother of his children, Nikki (Sepideh Moafi). Well-intentioned though it may be, their agreement to spend time apart and potentially date other people sends David into a downward spiral, and once he’s made aware of his wife’s new male friend, Derek (Chris Coy), things grow more complicated and conclude […]
by Erik Luers on May 14, 2021 -
Filmmaking in Pairs: The Benefits of Directing Movies with Another Person (or Other People)
Filmmakers don’t get to be moody loners. If you’re a painter or a writer, you have the option to go it alone. Sit in your room, bang out that first draft. Or, lock the door, stretch the canvas and go to it. Film is different: It’s rarely a solo pursuit, especially at the feature level. As filmmakers, we’re forced out of isolation and compelled to rely on others: producers, editors, sound people, lawyers, distributors. We’re team players, whether we like it or not. Paradoxically, though, at the end of the day we have an “auteur-biased” rewards system. With many films […]
by Esther B. Robinson on Oct 20, 2014 -
25 New Faces
Welcome to the 2010 edition of Filmmaker‘s annual survey of new independent film talent. Victoria Mahoney Writer-director Victoria Mahoney began her artistic career as an actress in theater and then film. “Shelly Winters was my teacher,” Mahoney says. “If you touched your hair too many times in her class, she’d come over and cut off your bangs. She taught me the gift of stillness.” After working off-off Broadway, Mahoney went to L.A., did a number of pilots, a few European films, and a season of Seinfeld (she played Gladys Mayo, owner of the clothing store Putumayo). But then there […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 20, 2010
