Summer 2021
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The Music Inside: Siân Heder on Her Oscar-Winning CODA
Filmmaker’s interview with Coda director Siân Heder originally appeared in our Summer, 2021 print edition, and is being reposted today following the film’s winning Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) belongs to a family whose business is selling their ground-fishing catch off the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) all rely on the 17-year-old high school student to help negotiate the daily pricing of their catch so that the family isn’t taken advantage […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 28, 2022 -
Everybody Is a Star: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on Making His Oscar-Winning Doc, Summer of Soul
This interview with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson about his Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) appeared on the cover of our Summer, 2021 print edition and is being reposted following the film’s winning Best Documentary at last night’s 2022 Academy Awards. — Editor On June 29, 1969, Sly and the Family Stone delivered an electrifying performance at Mount Morris Park in Harlem, New York. Fusing the revolutionary fervor of the Black Freedom movement with the collectivist spirit of West Coast counterculture, the iconic band wowed the audience with rousing renditions of “Everyday People,” “Sing a Simple Song” “You Can Make It […]
by Claudrena Harold on Mar 28, 2022 -
Environmental Storytelling
In August 2021, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new report on the global state of the environment, highlighting the shrinkage of glaciers, warming of oceans, massive forest loss, extreme heat, devastating drought and more. While the report is crushing, it is also fuel for action. Indeed, the BBC’s climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, suggested that 2021 could be the year for finally making climate change a top priority, citing the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in early November as just one landmark event that could help consolidate action. For filmmakers teaching in universities, the […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 11, 2021 -
After the Goldrush: NFTS, the Blockchain and Independent Film
“One week, I didn’t know what an NFT was,” says producer and director Adam Benzine. “Seven days later, I had the first film out as an NFT, and seven days after that, CNN wanted me on as an expert on NFTs.” Benzine is referring to a time just a few months ago—March 2021—when his documentary, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, a 2015 short about the maker of the classic Holocaust documentary Shoah, was announced as the “first Academy Award nominee to be released as an NFT.” Issued on the Rarible NFT trading site, Benzine’s NFTs (they were released in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 12, 2021 -
Editor’s Letter
Often when I sit down to write this letter each quarter, I’ll scan through our InDesign file and take note of themes or subject matters that flow from article to article across the issue. Sometimes, a business issue will be represented in multiple stories, or several directors will unexpectedly share the same creative inspiration or working method. This time, as I flipped through the pages of this summer 2021 edition, one thing jumped out: There’s no article tied to the COVID-19 pandemic. A year ago, the digital pages I flicked through remained that way. For the first and only time […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 12, 2021 -
Dial-up Connections: All About Lily Chou-Chou at 20
Twenty years after the release of All About Lily Chou-Chou, I can’t think of a film that better depicts what first drew people to the internet, and certainly none that matches its expressive use of content-type header errors. Director Shunji Iwai evokes the gaps and hesitancy in early internet communication through the depiction of character encoding across the screen. Posts on an online forum devoted to Lily Chou-Chou, a mysterious pop singer, first appear in a mojibake jumble of accented Latin characters. We can hear the clack of an old keyboard and another tap to refresh. The BBS code is […]
by Joanne McNeil on Jul 12, 2021 -
Knowledge Can Be Scary
No North American city is more synonymous with Bronx-born George Romero than Pittsburgh. A trip to the nearby Monroeville Mall (the setting of Romero’s 1978 satirical screed on mass consumerism, Dawn of the Dead) brings you face-to-face with the horror director himself—a bronze bust of Romero’s head greets shoppers outside Dick’s Sporting Goods. When the filmmaker unexpectedly passed away in 2017, he was at work on his newest sequel, Road of the Dead, in Toronto. News of his death from lung cancer prompted online tributes from the film community, not that Romero would have encouraged any public-facing praise: “I had […]
by Erik Luers on Jul 12, 2021 -
The Longhand Film
For the past six years, I sought out amateur travel films made by women in the first half of the 20th century, which I collected in an all-archival essay film, Terra Femme. In the process, I watched dozens of hours of footage of everything under the sun: biblical gardens, women doing laundry, ice fields, a tapir, mounds in a cemetery. Occasionally, there is a handwritten intertitle. “Crossing the Equator” reads one, and the filmmaker has added little serif marks to the letters in “Equator.” What follows is footage shot onboard a boat during a line-crossing ceremony, in which Poseidon and […]
by Courtney Stephens on Jul 12, 2021 -
Across Time: Filmmakers Reflect on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror
The year after I graduated college, I’d go to Andrei Tarkovsky double bills a lot. In the New York of the mid-1980s, there would be a Tarkovsky retrospective every few months at Film Forum and now-shuttered spots like the Thalia and Metro Twin. The Russian director’s 1975 Mirror would always be the second film on the program—Andrei Rublev and Mirror, Stalker and Mirror, Solaris and Mirror—so, I wound up seeing Mirror many times. This was partly due to fatigue. My day job was writing grants for a nonprofit. I’d see these movies after work and would invariably drift off during […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 12, 2021 -
Battle Cry: Beth B and Lydia Lunch on Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over
Beth B’s films take you deep into the darkness of the human psyche. With a body of work that includes shorts, features, video installations and episodic television, she creates from a place of pure opposition and resistance, standing up against oppressive systems of control and calling them out with the knowledge that discomfort and provocation are what creates dialogue and generates positive change. B’s films are not easy. B’s new documentary film, Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, may be her most compelling and powerful film yet, as it looks at musician, writer and provocateur Lydia Lunch’s 45-year career […]
by Michelle Handelman on Jul 12, 2021
