Director Interviews
By Damon Smith
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
Not many first-time independent filmmakers land a coveted spot in the Sunday arts section of The New York Times and an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show. But 33-year-old Lixin Fan, a Chinese-born Canadian immigrant who splits his time between Montreal and Beijing, has generated a lot of interest among editors at major dailies and business publications alike for his documentary Last Train Home, a film about the annual New Year’s pilgrimage of 130 million migrant workers from Guangzhou province to their homes and seldom-seen families in the rural provinces. China’s status as an economic powerhouse regularly makes front-page news, along with stories about the country’s ongoing struggles to manage crises that seem to grow directly out of frustrations among its most disenfranchised. Recent docs have explored the heady, often devastating changes wrought in China by warp-speed industrialization and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam (the largest civil-engineering… Read the rest
By Brandon Harris
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
For Claudia Llosa, director of the Berlinale-winning and Academy Award-nominated Peruvian film The Milk of Sorrow, magical realism isn’t a literary genre or filmic device, it’s an element of national identity and consciousness. Her film, easily the most critically-lauded film to emerge from Peru, is set in the rough-hewn mountain settlements on the outskirts of Lima. It concerns a young Peruvian woman (the captivating Magaly Solier) who, having contracted a mysterious disease that is passed on via breast milk to the daughters of rape victims taken by soliders serving Peru’s deposed terrorist regime, sets out to bury her newly deceased mother. Her uncle, with whom she lives, is about to marry off his rather bone-headed, carefree daughter and wants no part of paying for a burial. He suggests she simply bury her mother in his backyard. Aware of her mysterious disease, he accepts it matter of factly. In one… Read the rest
By Brandon Harris
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
Like his stunning short films Netherland Dwarf and Crossbow, David Michod’s terrific and terrifying feature debut, the 2010 Sundance World Dramatic Competition winner Animal Kingdom, is a smoothly photographed, moodily scored tale of a trapped, dim and docile young man who suffers at the hands of a careless and, in this case, criminal family. As in his previous work, Michod relies on an insistent voiceover to provide biting interiority while the unrelentingly grim working-class Melbourne milieu is strikingly depicted in slow-motion shots and even slower push-ins. James Frecheville is stoic and sullen as the lead, who we first glimpse as he’s watching a rancid television gameshow next to an unconscious woman who turns out to be his just recently heroin OD’d mother. Brought into the fold of his criminal clan of uncles by his complicit grandmother, he quickly becomes their errand boy and accomplice in the brutal revenge murder… Read the rest
By Damon Smith
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
When officials at the state-controlled Film Bureau levelled a five-year filmmaking ban on Chinese writer-director Lou Ye (Purple Butterfly) in 2006—a harsh reprimand for unveiling his politically charged drama Summer Palace at Cannes that year without their approval—he did what any determined artist would under the circumstances: he went home and made another feature, right under the nose of the censors. It was a brave and headstrong move, considering Lou’s previous encounters with the bureau. His debut feature, Weekend Lover (1995), was banned for two years, and Suzhou River (2000), a moody, Shanghai-set twist on Vertigo that won top honors at the Rotterdam Film Festival, still cannot be shown in mainland China. But Summer Palace was a bigger act of defiance, as it violated China’s sensitivity to depictions of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which are expressly forbidden, telling the 15-year story of a female provincial who leaves home… Read the rest
By Brandon Harris
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
A young woman works at the shoe counter at a Pensacola, Florida bowling alley. Having abandoned the ambitions of her youth, she takes care of her ailing father, who painfully struggles with cancer. With the return of a rival from high school into her long standing social circle, the stillness that has taken over her existence breaks, leaving her to consider the possibility of a new direction, one which seems tantalizingly close and yet ever illusive. This is subject matter than may be right within American Independent Cinema’s wheelhouse, but in thoughtful hands, even the most seemingly pedestrian yarns can contain multitudes. A mid season candidate for low budget wonderkind of the year, Brett Haley’s The New Year is a quietly riveting, old fashioned AmerIndie, a character driven slice of Florida panhandle life made for four figures that marks the coming out party for Triste Kelly Dunn, who turns in a… Read the rest
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Category Director Interviews | Tags: ashley judd, Brett Haley, LAFF, Lauren Ambrose, Nashville, Ruby in Paradise, Sarasota, Sundance, Swimming, SXSW, The New Year, Triste Kelly Dunn,
By Damon Smith
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Since her widely acclaimed first feature Devil’s Playground debuted at Sundance in 2002, London native Lucy Walker (one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film that year) has distinguished herself as a resourceful documentarian with a discerning eye for character detail. A study of Amish adolescents sampling the forbidden fruits of the modern world during “rumspringa,” an elective time spent away from the strictures of their traditional religious community, Playground was an insightful, humanizing portrait of a little-seen, faintly understood social milieu. For her follow-up in 2006, Blindsight, Walker again took on an uncommon challenge, trailing a group of sightless Tibetan teens attempting to scale the treacherous Lhakpa Ri peak of Mount Everest under the more experienced guidance of a blind climber. Even prior to venturing into documentary, and not long after she’d left NYU’s graduate film program, Walker’s talent was already apparent, as she earned two Daytime… Read the rest
By Lauren Wissot
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
Valhalla Rising, which stars Mads Mikkelsen (best known for playing the much more suave devil Le Chiffre in Casino Royale) as a one-eyed, mute, enslaved gladiator who joins a group of Viking Christians on a conquest that turns into an existential journey to hell, is certainly not what one would expect from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. And that’s part of the beauty of the film. Before this latest atmospheric mood piece containing echoes of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Refn helmed the hyperkinetic Bronson, about England’s most dangerous criminal turned cult hero who never seemed at a loss for words or fists. Prior to that Refn made his name crafting stories from the drug-dealing underworld in his Pusher trilogy (which, incidentally, was Mikkelsen’s launching pad into film). Refn it seems is less like his fellow Dane Lars Von Trier and more like American Steven Soderbergh, both directors in… Read the rest
By Damon Smith
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
It’s been eight years since Lisa Cholodenko’s last feature film (six if you count her TV adaptation of Dorothy Allison’s novel Cavedweller), but for the 46-year-old writer-director of 1998’s High Art (winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance) and 2002’s Laurel Canyon (starring Frances McDormand and Christian Bale) the time has, if anything, only sharpened her wits and powers of empathic observation, not to mention her considerable talent for guiding seasoned actors to perform at their finest. Her interest in chronicling the mid-life anxieties and self-doubts of artsy, sexually unorthodox women (Ally Sheedy’s druggy boho photographer in High Art, McDormand’s bisexual record-biz maven in Laurel Canyon) have aligned her in some ways with the lesbian community, but it doesn’t do Cholodenko justice to assign her body of work to any narrow cultural niche. Her films are far too personal, her characters too honest and generous, too universal… Read the rest
By Brandon Harris
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
A curious celebration of cinema and the mix of craft, history and ideology that goes into its making, Angela Ismailos’ Great Directors provides a chance to travel into the minds of ten of the world’s most celebrated film directors. In conversations with Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani, Todd Haynes, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater and John Sayles, Ismailos probes these directors for the secrets of their success while recounting much of the history of post-War world cinema via archival footage, occasionally ponderous black-and-white B-roll of the filmmakers, and mostly insightful voice over commentary. Detailed and revealing, the film’s dissection of the varied and plucky career paths that this odd yet compelling cross section of directing talent has taken makes for fascinating viewing. I mean, where else are you going to hear someone ask David Lynch, “Would you be a different director had you been… Read the rest
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Category Director Interviews | Tags: agnes varda, Angela Ismailos, Bernardo Bertolucci, catherine breillat, david lynch, French New Wave, Great Directors, John Sayles, ken loach, Liliana Cavani, Paladin, richard linklater, self-aggrandizement, Stephen Frears, Todd Haynes,
By Lauren Wissot
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
Most documentary filmmakers attempt to see the world through the lens of the subjects they’re shooting, but few put their lives on the line to do so. That perhaps is what most separates first-time directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington from a few of their colleagues who didn’t take home the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Their award-winning Restrepo is the result of a near yearlong embedment with the Second Platoon, Battle Company in eastern Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal Valley, during which they survived like soldiers wielding cameras in lieu of guns. While the two don’t lack name recognition — writer Junger is the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, and along with prizewinning photojournalist Hetherington, is a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair — they’ve used their critical prestige to shine a light on the identities of the little known. Like “Doc” Restrepo,… Read the rest
