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 […]
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 […]