Diva Directors Around the Globe: Spotlight on Anne Fontaine

By Anna Weinstein. French filmmaker Anne Fontaine has written and directed fourteen films since her debut in 1993. Her films, Dry Cleaning (1997), How I Killed My Father (2001), and Coco Before Chanel (2009) brought her international attention as a writer-director, and her film Nathalie (2003) was adapted into Atom […]

Society’s Ailment(s): Sanna Lenken on My Skinny Sister

By Amir Ganjavie. Filmmaker Sanna Lenken’s debut feature, My Skinny Sister, concentrates on the societal problem of the eating disorder anorexia by investigating the love-hate relationship between two sisters. The winner of the Crystal Bear at Berlinale as well as an audience award at the Goteborg Film Festival, My Skinny […]

Emptying Myself: Doona Bae on Performance and A Girl At My Door

By Paul Risker. The art of film performance offers an actor the chance to explore identity in an intimate medium. But there are those characters that resonate powerfully with an actor as she undertakes the journey of lifting her role off the page. For Korean actress Doona Bae, A Girl At My Door represented such an encounter. […]

Nordic Cat-and-Mouse: on the Series Øyevitne (Eyewitness)

By Paul Risker. The latest Nordic series Øyevitne (Eyewitness, 2014) adds to the UK audience’s seemingly insatiable demand for foreign language crime drama, particularly from the Nordic sphere. With yet another strong female character whose strength emerges through less her physical prowess and more her cerebral and spirited personality, Øyevitne’s […]

Coixet in the Dark: A Conversation on Another Me

By Paul Risker. The Catalonian filmmaker Isabel Coixet has moved beyond her native tongue to work in various languages that crisscross lingual borders to create both single and bilingual narratives. But for Coixet these dialects are simply part of a larger language that combines them all. As she explains: “I […]

Ben Kingsley and Company on Learning to Drive

By Jude Warne. “The ferryman takes you from one bank of the river in his little craft, his boat, to the other bank of the river,” says Sir Ben Kingsley on this variety of the taxi-passenger experience. “You get off his boat and feel that your molecules have somehow been […]