By Anna Weinstein. Irish writer-director Kirsten Sheridan has directed three features and five shorts since 2001. Her screenplay for In America (2002), which she co-wrote with her sister Naomi Sheridan and her father Jim Sheridan, was nominated for a WGA award and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Her film August Rush (2007), starring Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Freddie Highmore, and the late […]
Sean Mewshaw and Desi Van Til’s Tumbledown: A Tribeca Interview
May 5, 2015
By Gary M. Kramer. Tumbledown, directed and written, respectively, by the husband and wife team of Sean Mewshaw and Desi Van Til, premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. The film has Hannah (Rebecca Hall) meeting cute with Andrew (Jason Sudeikis) who wants to write a book about the former’s […]
A Place in Myth: Portia Doubleday on After the Ball (2015)
May 2, 2015
By Paul Risker. From Pascal Chind’s short film Extrême Pinocchio (2014) to a contemporary retelling of Cinderella in After the Ball (2015), if as wisdom suggests there are only a limited number of archetypal stories to be told, then these two films frame storytelling as being comparable to the game […]
Steve Hoover and Danny Yourd on Crocodile Gennadiy: A Tribeca Interview
By Gary M. Kramer. Crocodile Gennadiy is Steve Hoover’s compelling documentary—executive produced by Terrence Malick—about the charismatic Gennadiy Mokhnenko, a Ukrainian pastor who rescues drug-addicted kids off the streets and places them in his rehab center, Pilgrim Republic. A combination prison/hospital and police station, the center is a place for […]
Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth: A Tribeca Interview
April 25, 2015
By Gary M. Kramer. Necktie Youth is a gorgeous black and white drama writing and directed by Sibs Shongwe-La Mer. Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, the film opens with Emily (Kelly Bates) live streaming her suicide. The effect this action has on a handful of characters plays out throughout the […]
Imprisoned by the Absurd: Filmmaker Patricio Henriquez on Uyghurs
April 25, 2015
By Amir Ganjavie. Montreal-based, Chilean-born filmmaker Patricio Henríquez has previously made two documentaries examining the issues surrounding abuse at the Guantánamo Bay prison. The first was Under the Hood: A Voyage into the World of Torture (2008), which centers on the treatment of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in […]
Programmer Magali Simard on the 2015 Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival
By Amir Ganjavie. Between March 26 and April 2, TIFF presented the 12th series of Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which featured eight movies: The One That Got Away, The Look of Silence, Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd, Beats of the Antonov, The Salt of the Earth, Burden of Peace, The Wanted 18, and Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story. As the […]
She Goes for It: Cortney Palm on Zombeavers (2014)
By Matthew Sorrento. When Patricia Arquette debuted in the hit A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), few could have imagined the major artist she’d become. Granted, she soon shined in vehicles with room for her talent, as an innocent yet subversively sexual ‘50s nurse – the gal who […]
Moved by Faith: Krzysztof Zanussi on Foreign Body (2014)
By Amir Ganjavie and Shadi Javadi. Although Krzysztof Zanussi’s films received less global exposure over the past couple of decades and were not commercially successful, he is one of the most commonly seen Polish directors on the international festival circuit. Zanussi is very productive, having made almost fifty features with an average […]
Seed Money: Capturing a Pivotal Era of Gay Porn
April 4, 2015
By Mark James. The gains of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s rode the back of a gay culture that, in part, came together watching porn. Though erotic images of men have sold as long as pictures were for sale, court cases allowing images to be sent through […]