The Cathedral
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Catch the Paris Theater Screening Series “Venice Film Festival Presents: Next Generation” in NYC This Week
La Biennale di Venezia, Netflix and The Gotham (Filmmaker‘s publisher) have partnered on “Venice Film Festival Presents: Next Generation,” a screening series hosted at the Paris Theater in New York City. Comprised of six films from the past decade that are products of the Venice Biennale College Cinema program, which develops and produces bold features budgeted at €200,000 or less, the series will include moderated Q&As alongside one-time screenings of each title. “Next Generation” opens tonight with a 7pm screening of Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil, featuring a Q&A moderated by Nanny writer-director Nikyatu Jusu. The series concludes on […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 20, 2023 -
“Originally I Had a 200-Page Script”: Ricky D’Ambrose on The Cathedral
Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature, The Cathedral, begins in the mid-’80s, with a narrator outlining the history of the Damrosch family: father Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), mother Lydia (Monica Barbaro) and son Jesse (Hudson McGuire as an adolescent, Robert Levey II as a pre-teen, William Bednar-Carter as a teenager). The film begins shortly before the latter’s birth and continues into the mid-aughts, outlining an often difficult Long Island upbringing. Richard casts a dark shadow over Jesse’s upbringing. The years’ passing is concretized datewise by a plethora of broadcast news footage—a new element for D’Ambrose’s work in a feature full of them. I […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2022 -
“Perhaps It’s a Miracle to Make Films” | Ricky D’Ambrose, The Cathedral
The last two years have prompted much contemplation and reconsideration of the reasons why we make our films as well as the ways in which we make them. What aspect of your filmmaking—whether in your creative process, the way you finance your films, your production methodology or the way you relate to your audience—did you have to reinvent in order to make and complete the film you are bringing to the festival this year? Filmmaking has always been, since my earliest childhood experiments with a camera, a circumscribed activity—typically thankless, fueled by begrudging favors and cut-rate fees, a marginal and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2022 -
“I Wanted to Restrict Lighting That Didn’t Feel Naturally Motivated”: DP Barton Cortright on The Cathedral
With The Cathedral, an unseen narrator relates the life of Jesse Damrosh, beginning with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage and highlighting other hallmarks of middle-class American existence. D’Ambrose lingers not on the big life events, however, but the more quotidian and quieter moments and objects that leave indelible marks on one’s memory. Cinematographer Barton Cortright explains why natural light was the correct approach for the film, and how he amplified the natural look to avoid a shallow depth of field. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral
Following its premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival, The Cathedral, the sophomore feature by Ricky D’Ambrose (a 25 New Face of Film in 2017), makes its US premiere at this year’s Sundance. We’re pleased to share the first trailer for the film, an assured, highly compressed yet emotionally impactful portrait of a young man’s upbringing from early ‘80s childhood to late ‘10s college. D’Ambrose’s coming-of-age story boasts David Lowery as an executive producer. The film’s Sundance page is here, and D’Ambrose’s essay about acting as his own graphic designer is here.
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2022 -
Venice Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Parallel Mothers, Il Buco and The Cathedral
In a tender moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, the opener of this year’s Venice Film Festival, the older of the eponymous mothers teaches the other how to peel potatoes while wearing a t-shirt that says “We Should All Be Feminists.” Since Janis (Penélope Cruz) is at the cusp of middle age, whereas Ana (Milena Smit) has only just turned 18, there’s a suggestion of baton-passing in this Jeanne Dielman reference. One wonders, then, what Chantal Akerman might have thought of the scene in which Ana relates, with a casualness pitched ambiguously between PTSD and nonchalance, that her pregnancy was […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Sep 5, 2021
