By Gary M. Kramer. When you talk about the military and troops, you see them as a large group of people who go together as one thing to do something. And in this film, we try to focus on the individual.” Director Shariff Korver’s quietly powerful Do Not Hesitate, had […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Suzanne Lindon on Spring Blossom
By Anna Weinstein. Everyone thinks the teenage years are going to be so cool and wonderful, but it’s complicated… So I took this as an opportunity to write my film, and that helped me get through that time.” Suzanne Lindon’s coming-of-age film Spring Blossom (2020) is an intimate story about […]
An Honest Window: An Interview with Haifaa Al-Mansour
By Ali Moosavi. Attitudes do not change easily, so part of the goal of my film is to start a dialog about the core values that are at the heart of these issues.” Haifaa Al-Mansour, the award winning director and the first Saudi female filmmaker, has a new film, The […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Bettina Oberli on My Wonderful Wanda
By Anna Weinstein. I’m really interested in the psychology of my children, and that has shown me that we are fragile and strong creatures. I’m really exploring and elaborating this subject. It’s always about family and relationships – that’s what all my movies are about.” Leading Swiss director Bettina Oberli has directed one television mini-series and six […]
Embodying Coming of Age: An Interview with Jessie Barr on Sophie Jones
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 […]