Summer 2025
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Media in the Middle: The Emerging Media Arts Program at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Asked about the fundamental goals of the program of which she is founding director, Megan Elliott is expansive and enthusiastic. “We have a very strong interest in the myriad places our students can go as storytellers, makers, artists, entrepreneurs and innovators, not just within the film industry, but far beyond it,” she explains. She acknowledges that these ambitious goals also pose challenges. “There is always a tension that exists within any design, architecture, arts or media program about how you teach both technical and creative skills that are rigorous and experimental, and how to hold space for all of that.” […]
by Holly Willis on Jun 18, 2025 -
Hollywood Underground: Joanne McNeil on EZTV’s Inventive Body of Work
In 1986, ia Kamandalu showed up at the EZTV space in West Hollywood for a screening of video art by Doris Chase. People recognized her, even though it had been a few years since she was a dancer in music videos like “Super Freak” by Rick James and on variety shows like Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, performing at the time under the name Kim McKillip. Michael Masucci, an artist and longtime participant in the EZTV community of video-makers, started talking to her. They kept up over the phone and made plans to work together. Kamandalu, who was living Phoenix at […]
by Joanne McNeil on Jun 18, 2025 -
Duty of Care: Sarah Friedland on Familiar Touch
Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch follows Ruth, an octogenarian woman experiencing memory loss as she transitions into assisted living. Played with luminous restraint by Kathleen Chalfant, Ruth is not someone we observe from a distance—we move with her. Told entirely from her perspective, the film unfolds through a sensory experience of time and memory. Through light, texture, sound and gesture, we come to understand what it means to live inside a body—and a mind—that is transforming. Ruth is looked after by Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a personal support worker, and Brian (Andy McQueen), the home’s doctor. Over time, she begins to […]
by Sofia Bohdanowicz on Jun 18, 2025 -
Order of Operations: Wes Anderson on The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson has retroactively described the over-schedule and over-budget making of his fourth feature, 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as the kind of production that would never be allowed to happen now. That’s partly because of shifting Hollywood windows of financing possibility, but that’s likely also in part because the writer-director wouldn’t let it happen again. On 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson made sure to work in a more sustainable and flexible way. As Jason Schwartzman told Richard Brody in 2009, “Wes not only pitched a rough idea for a movie, he also pitched a rough idea of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 18, 2025 -
Writing Between Worlds: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich on The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
“For the pattern of unfulfilled desires has trapped the Antilles and America. From the time of the arrival of the conquistadors and the rise of their technical know-how (beginning with firearms), the lands from across the Atlantic have changed, not only in facial appearance but in fear. “So, far from contradicting, diminishing or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.”—Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage I recently had the opportunity to (virtually) sit down with my friend and fellow artist-filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehlrich to discuss […]
by Ephraim Asili on Jun 18, 2025 -
Learning By Doing: Producing My First Feature
At nearly 6:00 a.m. on a Wednesday in late March, the sun began to rise in Tampa, Florida, and Stephen Musumeci called cut on The Big Game’s martini shot. The crew clapped and hugged, and Musumeci, who wrote and directed the feature, gave a short, dizzy speech that was interrupted by a producer pouring a large bucket of water (for lack of Gatorade) on his head. When I joined the film as a producer 14 months earlier, I firmly envisioned reaching this point, even though I had never produced a feature before. After reading the script, I’d immediately fallen in […]
by Max Cea on Jun 18, 2025 -
Transformer Model: AI in Film Schools
“You can love it, you can hate it, you just can’t ignore it,” says artist and UCLA lecturer Bill Barminski about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in filmmaking. Barminski’s sentiment is echoed by other film school faculty, staff and students, who all recognize this divisive technology is here to stay and that it would be foolish for students not to engage with—or at least understand—it. AI is a wide-reaching term, encompassing text-based services like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, which many film students say they use for ideation or to help with loglines, script notes, grant writing and pitch-deck creation. AI […]
by Caleb Hammond on Jun 18, 2025 -
The Gotham Pages: Brian Tyree Henry is Reclaiming His Name
Brian Tyree Henry has made a career of playing men under pressure—haunted, hardened and often held back by systems much bigger than they are. “Hopefully, I’ll be in a love story sooner or later,” he jokes, “because, boy, am I tired of running for my life.” Henry drops that line near the end of our conversation. It’s funny, yes—but also revealing of his nearly two decades in the business. It isn’t always easy to live with the effects of what it’s like to embody these complex men, I guess. “No,” he replies, his voice dropping a couple octaves into a […]
by Beandrea July on Jun 18, 2025 -
Moments of Flight: Lili Taylor and Amalia Ulman Go Birding
I was listening to the radio when Lili Taylor came on the air to talk about her first book, Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing. I immediately got excited: I have loved Lili’s work (Dogfight, Arizona Dream, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, The Addiction, I Shot Andy Warhol, Things I Never Told You, Pecker) for the longest time, so learning that she was a birder only added to her immensely cool aura. Until now, my relationship to birding had been via New York’s most famous bird, Flaco the owl. He took a fancy to one of the water tanks […]
by Amalia Ulman on Jun 18, 2025 -
Open House: Callie Hernandez’s Berskhire Home and Temporary Film Studio
In 2023, Callie Hernandez turned her temporary home into a DIY movie studio. The actress, writer and producer had gone through major professional and personal upheaval when COVID upended her studio acting career and, shortly after, she lost her father. She kept working any way she could by collaborating on microbudget projects, such as Pete Ohs’s 2022 comedic ghost story Jethica, produced for less than $10,000 in a New Mexico Airbnb with just a handful of actors and Ohs taking on every behind-camera role himself. So, when a friend, dancer Brittany Bailey, asked whether Hernandez wanted to share an old […]
by Alex Lei on Jun 18, 2025
