By Ali and Amir Moosavi. One of the issues for young directors is that everything is computer based and [they] are brilliant in creating a short film and doing the CG and the graphics and the editing themselves…like an all-hands-on-deck kind of filmmaker. But what is lost is clarity in […]
Abel and an Eerily Empty Rome: an Interview with Abel Ferrara on Zeros and Ones
By Yun-hua Chen. At the beginning [of the pandemic and lockdown], I wouldn’t have had the nerve to [make a film on it] because I didn’t know what was going on, the amount of tragedy, the amount of suffering going around, and I was trying to just deal with what […]
Corporate Gangsters, Rogue Cops, and Big Heists: Robert Miklitsch on Gangster Noir in Midcentury America
By Theresa Rodewald. In my books on ’50s noir, I was particularly intrigued with how certain ‘structures of feeling’ impact the genre, be it ‘the Bomb’ or the ‘red scare,’ the civil rights movement or the beginning of the end of the classical studio system.” The 1940s and 1950s are […]
“The Selling of a Dream”: Evan Jackson Leong on Snakehead
By Theresa Rodewald. The American Dream is this thing that we sell, that our culture sells. We’ve been selling it for decades now, it’s a propaganda tool, a myth. I wanted to dispel that myth by making sure that our character is not here for the American Dream.” Snakehead is […]
Becoming Cousteau: An Interview with Liz Garbus
By Kate Hearst. It was a combination of being true to the early films that he shot but also my voice as a filmmaker trying to express to a modern audience how unusual and incredibly dynamic these images were.” Two-time Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus is not one to shy […]
Digging Deeper: An Interview with Frida Kempff on Knocking, Women, and Mental Health
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Both my characters in Dear Kid and Knocking are disturbers. Even if people think there are odd, they have that inner strength to interrupt when they feel something is wrong.” Frida Kempff’s Knocking follows Molly (Cecilia Milocco), a woman who has just been released from a mental […]
Two Women’s Poetic Love, on an Island Frozen in Time: Ümit Ünal on Love, Spells and All That
By N. Buket Cengiz. I always despised nostalgia and joked about overly nostalgic people. But lately our whole country is inevitably trapped in a deep nostalgia.” Love, Spells and All That (2019), the latest film of Ümit Ünal, an acclaimed director from Turkey who moved to Glasgow in 2020, has […]
Art and Crime: Alessio Della Valle and Jonathan Rhys Meyers on American Night
By Ali Moosavi. We wanted to make a movie that combined art and crime because to be a good criminal, you have to be a great artist and also be incredibly intelligent: it’s an art form in itself.” –Jonathan Rhys Meyers American Night could perhaps be described as a post-modern […]
Stages of Revenge, New England-Style: John Pollono on Small Engine Repair
By Ali Moosavi. Great theater can be very cerebral, it can be very thematic, it can be very dialogue driven and stirring but it doesn’t necessarily have the same visceral stakes that a movie does. This play has cinematic stakes, so the transfer of it to film was just really […]
Multi-Protagonist Protest in Ghana: Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah on Amansa Tiafi (Locarno FF)
By Yun-hua Chen. I am from the André Bazin’s school of thought about realism. If I could let the camera roll non-stop, without touching it, I would let it run, if what is in front of me interests me….: Debut feature of the Ghanaian born Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah, who writes, directs, […]