By Yun-hua Chen. I think we are always coming of age.” Sophie Jones is a sincere piece of coming-of age stemming from grief experiences of the director Jessie Barr and her cousin Jessica Barr, who plays the eponymous heroine. The film portrays a 16-year-old girl who suffers from the loss […]
On Location, Post-Lockdown: Roger Spottiswoode on Either Side of Midnight
By Matthew Sorrento. Finding the right locations was even more important than usual on this film, because the city life within each location would have to tell the story as much as would the dialogue.” Roger Spottiswoode has had a journeyman’s career. After editing for Sam Peckinpah and others, Spottiswoode […]
Selling the Digital Revolution: Casey Suchan and Tim Cawley on makeSHIFT
By Gary M. Kramer. As a consumer, advertising is intrusive. As an industry, we want to do better. This film and its participants are hopefully an example of that.” makeSHIFT is Casey Suchan and Tim Cawley’s nifty, zippy documentary about how the advertising industry has adapted to technological advances and […]
Animation from Lockdown: An Interview with Matteo Bernardini
By Alex Ramon. I had to invent a style of my own mostly because I am both a director and an illustrator but not an animator…. this is what drew me to think out of the box, becoming aware of both my limits and my strengths.” The recipient of the […]
A Half Century of Social Critique: An Interview with Documentarian Anand Patwardhan
By Devapriya Sanyal. One shouldn’t underestimate the power of factual documentary cinema in a world where facts are so often distorted or hidden.” Many have called him the Michael Moore of India, even if his career precedes the American filmmaker’s by decades. Anand Patwardhan has won both national and international […]
Bloodsuckers: A Marxist Vampire Comedy at Berlinale 2021 – An Interview with Julian Radlmaier
By Yun-hua Chen. Marx wrote [Capital] in the 19th century, a high time of Gothic novels…. It made me think, why not just to do a real Marxist film and use the same metaphors as Marx?” Selected by the Berlinale’s Encounters section, Bloodsuckers is the German-French director Julian Radlmaier’s second […]
Terror for an Influencer: Jennifer Harrington on Shook
By Yun-hua Chen. Where I really drew inspiration was from the older classic films like Scream by Wes Craven, and like Halloween by John Carpenter. My hope was to really take those real classic ideas and melt them with these newer things like SAW and Unfriended….” Shook, which is streaming […]
Trusting the Process: Oscar Contender Maria Sødahl on Hope
By Robin Gregory. Hope is also about blended family, the modern family, the structures and mechanics of that. For example, how you love differently or the same, stepchildren versus biological children. All of these things can have taboos around them (that) I wanted to explore.” Cancer is not for the faint […]
An Iranian-American Director Takes on Feminist Horror: Natasha Kermani on Lucky
Star and Screenwriter Brea Grant By Ali Moosavi. It is feminist in the sense that it is about a woman’s experience and the whole movie is a deep dive into that experience.” Natasha Kermani is a young Iranian-American film director, working in independent cinema. She has three feature films under […]
Expanding the Dialog on National Cinemas: an Interview with MK Raghavendra
Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground, Pakistan, 2007) By Devapriya Sanyal. MK Raghavendra, a film critic and leading scholar of Indian cinema, has authored eight books with leading publishers to date. He offers fresh and invaluable insights into the world of Indian cinema not only restricted to studies of Hindi or Bollywood (as […]