The shattered illusions of childhood innocence are comedically contrasted with a run-down Seoul porn theater in Jun Hee Han’s short film Uncle. A graduate from UCLA’s MFA program in film directing, Han had an unlikely catalyst for his filmmaking career. After studying philosophy as an undergraduate at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Han was tapped for mandatory military conscription in his birthplace of South Korea. Feeling disconnected from his heritage while growing up in the U.S., his time in the army ignited a passion to tell stories connected to his home country—an artistic pursuit that directly resulted in Uncle, which […]

When it came time for A.B. Shawky to make Yomeddine, a road movie about a leper trekking across Egypt in search of lost relatives, he turned to his NYU Tisch School of the Arts colleagues and faculty for advice. After all, the movie is both his first feature as well his NYU thesis film. Unlike many film schools, “NYU encourages you to do features for your thesis project,” Shawky told Filmmaker’s Tiffany Pritchard, explaining that the school granted him an extra year on top of the two normally allowed to complete the arduous production. The school also granted him key […]

The issue of diversity in the film canon — the movies celebrated and studied at film schools across the country — has come under hot debate in the past couple of years, with students starting conversations about the larger consequences of curricular omissions. “When I look at a syllabus and there’s no one from my perspective on there, I wonder if my ideas will be taken seriously by Hollywood or by any producer,” admits Zsaknor Powe, a junior studying film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “It really affects the artistic self-esteem of the students,” explains Powe, […]

Billy Woodberry was a graduate student in UCLA’s film program when he started work on Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), a gauzy black-and-white portrait of a married couple in Watts as their responsibilities to one another are tested by the burdens of underemployment. Day-to-day gigging against a background of vanishing local industry, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) embarks on an affair, while his exhausted wife Andais (Kaycee Hardman) works double-time, commuting to her own job while also looking after their home and children. Chafing against the confines of roles that no longer seem to fit, their affections are suffocated by limits […]

How’s this for the elements of an amazing education: an internship at the studio of David Byrne, independent study with experimental filmmaker Jem Cohen and a thesis project dedicated to assessing and organizing all of the videos documenting the live shows of the band Fugazi? The education then results in a freelance gig organizing Sonic Youth’s archive, which eventually leads to a position as a media conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, where, on any given day, you might be reviewing the museum’s video collection or prepping for an expansive survey of the incredible work of Bruce Conner. This […]