By Jonathan Monovich. When I do commentaries now, I find myself examining films on a more forensic level, responding to individual scenes and shots and taking them apart. My rule with commentaries is that I need to learn something, and I need to know more coming out than I did […]
Starring in His Own Nightmare: Joe Begos on Jimmy and Stiggs
By Anela Henley. I never thought I’d be starring in a movie that I made, but just by nature of the circumstances I had to. I think that elevated me as a filmmaker….” Writer-director Joe Begos broke into the indie film scene in 2019 with his third feature Bliss, incorporating doom […]
Windows to Survival: Veljko Vidak and Emmanuelle Felce on Cinéma Laika
By Jonathan Monovich. I used to spend a lot of time behind windows looking at a nearby river and the people walking by. Little by little, the windows became my screen. At this time, the only way I was able to survive Karkkila was to spend as much time as […]
Embracing Revolution: Daniel Vidal Toche on The Anatomy of the Horses (KVIFF)
By Yun-hua Chen. I began to feel that this revolution is still happening. The possibility of revolution, or the reasons why revolutions begin, are still present. And if that’s the case, then time is not as we try to understand it in Western society.” —Daniel Vidal Toche Walking from the […]
Cinema as Memory: Olivier Assayas on Suspended Time
By Jonathan Monovich. I wanted to bring a cinema crew within this very intimate space, which is something that movies hardly do. I thought it was a way of exposing myself.” —Olivier Assayas Like other filmmakers who began at Cahiers du Cinéma, Olivier Assayas approaches his films with sophistication. Assayas’ […]
Scenes of Integrity: An Interview with Reza Akhlaghirad
By Ali Moosavi. The road I have travelled on has been a tumultuous one. Some things that I could only dream about in my day-to-day life, I could experience in the lives of the characters that I played. Those feelings of rage and anger, that if you display them in […]
Where Criticism’s Headed: An Interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum
By Jonathan Monovich. Where we’re headed is a nightmare…. our language is so corrupted on so many different levels that we basically can’t even have film criticism now…. The language that we use is largely under the control of the industry.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum Born into a family of movie theater […]
So You Think You’ve Seen Weird Docs?: Gary D. Rhodes on the Weirdumentary
By Roger Nygard. We yearn to know the secrets of our mind, whether its power can lead to telekinesis or precognition. We yearn to know what lies beyond, from the world of ghosts to the world of alien life forms….” –Gary D. Rhodes I remember how Hammer Film’s Five Million […]
Coming Out of the Soundtrack: Alexandros Voulgaris on They Come Out of Margo
By Yun-hua Chen. It started when I went to a concert by an artist who was quite similar to the one portrayed in the film. The whole experience of watching her on stage was very intense. So I began writing something based on that, and over these 11 years, the […]
Reading Between the Lines: An Interview with Biographer Carl Rollyson
By William Blick. I do not ask myself what information is available about a figure or would they cooperate. Rather, I ask myself, what is in my own experience or what do I think I know about this figure? What qualifies me to write about this person? That is what […]