By Ali Moosavi. They believe the world is going to end in a nuclear war and they set up places off the grid that are self-sustaining. We took that idea and it evolved into a story about a man for whom the Armageddon was really a metaphorical Armageddon in which […]
TV Divas and Armani Archfiends: Amanda Kramer on Give Me Pity! (IFFR 2022)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Give Me Pity! is a natural progression to the previous work because it pushes the idea of artificial space further. We’re located on a stage meant to look and feel like a stage. The film is about a consummate performer performing a performance.” Sissy St. Claire is a […]
A Neo-Noir Obsession: An Interview with Paul Solet on Clean
By Yun-hua Chen. Obsession in general is something that’s a sort of a bottomless wealth for me to draw on. I identify with that sort of [neo-noir] obsession about my own work, so it’s easy to tap into that personally.” The second collaboration between Paul Solet and Adrien Brody after […]
Death of a Telemarketer and the Birth of a Career: An Interview with Khaled Ridgeway
By Johnnie Hobbs III. I was acting for a bit and working as a telemarketer in the shitty call centers right near Koreatown. We’d get a number of death threats because people were so annoyed with us calling. It started to become a running joke.” Through cultivating healthy relationships and […]
Producing for Netflix, the Pandemic, and Covid-19 on Set: An Interview on Coyotes
By Anees Aref. When we did the first Covid test, I was positive. So since I had seen everyone, we had to stop for a week, during prep. That was the first case of Covid we had, and then we had five to six cases during shooting.” –Andre Logie, producer […]
Noir and the Current Moment: Eddie Muller on Dark City and Programming
Below is an excerpt from “‘Just How You’re Wired’: Talking Noir with TCM’s Eddie Muller” by Zoe Kurland, which is forthcoming in Issue 19.3 of Film International: Noir 2020 and Beyond, a special issue guest edited by Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon. [Noir is] just as cogent, even […]
When Parker Met A Guru Named Shuroo: Donal Brophy and Emrhys Cooper on The Shuroo Process
By Ali Moosavi. It’s about his whole cancel culture and internet bullying and the weight that it starts to have on people, if they give it too much emphasis. In the retreat Parker finds what her original passion was… really that’s what gets her through the hard times.” –Donal Brophy […]
Questioning Family Ties: An Interview with Tunisian Director Mehdi M. Barsaoui on A Son (Un Fils)
By Matthew Fullerton. A Son deals with a family, and it’s through this lens that I speak out about the society in which I live.” Without a doubt, Tunisia has witnessed a resurgence in filmmaking since the 2011 Jasmine Revolution. Whether it be from the new freedoms of opinion, thought […]
K-Noir, Stateside: The Cast and Filmmaker Discuss Hide and Seek
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 […]