By Paul Risker. There is a certain air of excitement, or rather, anticipation that comes with the arrival of a new detective walking the trail of mystery in the crime genre. This can be attributed to the recent success the genre has found in the Nordic Noir phenomenon and which has […]
Expressive Noise: An Interview with Naoki Kato on Carnival Folklore 2045
December 21, 2015
By David Novak. Carnival Folklore 2045 is perhaps the first true Noise film; its development is driven by the Noise that bursts out of the narrative, dominating the landscape of the film and binding the characters together in a mysterious world of sound. Combining the audacious absurdity of B-movie science-fiction kitsch with the […]
Expression/Supression: Gabe Polsky on Red Army
By Paul Risker. If the world is a stage in its own right then one of the enduring and timeless dramas is that of the division between East and West. It is a division that extends from political and communal ideas of otherness to employ sport, art and culture as […]
From Shakespeare to Superheroes: An Interview with Jordan Galland
December 14, 2015
By Tom Ue. Jordan Galland has directed commercials, music videos and three feature films: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead (2010), Alter Egos (2012), and Ava’s Possessions (2016). As a recording artist, he has released over a dozen albums of his own songs since 1998 and contributed music to films and […]
“A Process of Thinking”: Radu Jude on Aferim!
December 10, 2015
By Paul Risker. Ask the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude how he views the place of his most recent feature AFERIM! within his body of work, and his response will be a modest one. “Well you know, when you say this important expression ‘body of work’, it makes me feel somehow like […]
A Comeback and a New Beginning: Jackie Earle Haley on Criminal Activities
December 9, 2015
By Matthew Sorrento. Like many child actors, Jackie Earle Haley faded from the spotlight as he reached maturity. He was relaxed on camera, which helped him exude cool as a lost youth finding a talent in The Bad News Bears (1976) and a teen making steps to adulthood in Breaking Away (1979). Curtis Hanson’s Losin’ It (1983) offered Haley the […]
Pasolini Revisited, in the Context of Contemporary Turkey: An Interview with Deniz Gamze Erguven
December 7, 2015
By Amir Ganjavie. In her first feature film, Mustang, director Deniz Gamze Erguven beautifully demonstrates how living in a closed totalitarian society impacts young Turkish women since everything is reduced to their sexuality and every act is defined through that filter. Taking place in a remote village in Turkey, the […]
An Artistic “Journey”: Filmmaker Matthew Leutwyler on Uncanny
By Paul Risker. Cinema, or more specifically science fiction, has a long established fascination with the future of human civilisation: the quest as well as the hypothesis of a potential future reality. Director Matthew Leutwyler and writer Shahin Chandrasoma’s passion project Uncanny (2015) continues the storyteller’s and as an extension […]
“Never Say We’re Making It Up”: An Interview with Marc Lahore on The Open
November 24, 2015
By Tom Ue. Marc Lahore grew up between a mountain of VHS and a heap of comics. He became a voluntary projectionist, then a TV editor, pursuing at the same time a university course in English language and culture. He directed a series of quite different, often strange, short films (the […]
Where Nobody Looks Into the Camera: A Conversation with Frederick Wiseman
By John Duncan Talbird. Frederick Wiseman is one of the most important and influential American documentary filmmakers, living or dead. In a career that spans nearly a half-century, he has directed forty documentaries, exploring all manner of human institutions from the mental institution to the welfare office, from a high […]