By Ali Moosavi. The Ukranian gem U Are the Universe is a prime example of a film where with little budget but bags of creativity and ingenuity a filmmaker can succeed where many mega-budget Hollywood movies have failed.” Though Toronto International Film Festival was only founded in 1976, it has […]
La Bête Humaine – Robert Singer on Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. It is my wish that Beyond Realism would inspire active dialogue and research with other disciplinary practices, academics, and film lovers. I would enjoy hearing a geneticist discuss the child serial killer in pigtails and speculative heredity in Mervyn Le Roy’s The Bad Seed (1956) or a […]
“Rocky Mountain Way”: Selections from the 51st Telluride Film Festival
By Jonathan Monovich. This year marked the 51st iteration of the TFF, featuring diverse minds from around the world, including Americans, Chileans, Germans, and Iranians.” Despite its laidback atmosphere, the Telluride Film Festival (TFF) is very serious for its well-known world premieres, track record for including eventual Oscar nominees in […]
When a Hero Exploits: Sana Na N’Hada’s Nome (2023)
By Yun-hua Chen. A profoundly enlightening film from Angola that delves into the essence of independence, the sacrifices it demands, and the transformative power of cinema.” Selected for the “Rizome” program at IndieLisboa, a section that highlights relevant current issues, Nome, an Angolan film directed by Sana Na N’Hada, is […]
A Warden and Actors: An Interview with Filmmaker Nima Javidi
By Ali Moosavi. I prefer films and novels in which a character who plays a critical part in the story is mainly absent.” With just two feature films and a TV series under his belt, writer-director Nima Javidi has established himself in the upper echelons of Iranian cinema. He got […]
Red Rooms: The Strategic Antipathy and Empathy of Emotional Contagions
By David Ryan. Writer-director Pascal Plante connects the complicated mechanisms of justice, social contagions, and psychological complexity to explore two dominant themes: the film contrasts the courtroom’s brightly lit (and tightly-controlled) semiotics with the digital world’s illicit market economy.” Red Rooms or Les Chambres Rouges (2023) focuses on the questionable […]
Escape from Their Golden Cages: Filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub on Mond (Moon)
By Yun-hua Chen. That’s why I chose MMA fights and combat sports. It’s all about being in a cage. Women’s MMA fights have this expectation that they must look sexy, and it’s about this strange desire of Sarah’s to return to the cage. Meanwhile, the girls in the film want […]
Ten Rules for Doing Documentary Interviews the Right Way
By Roger Nygard. Every documentarian starts out doing interviews wrong. I learned the hard way, by making all these mistakes.” Interviews are the main ingredient in the documentary recipe, so how you conduct them is crucial. Everybody starts out doing interviews wrong. I learned the hard way, by making all […]
The Substance is a Documentary
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. As far as emotional fidelity is concerned, The Substance is a documentary. No other film I have ever seen so perfectly captures my subjective experience of the culturally enforced dissociation that happens en masse when, as a woman, your body starts to age.” I recently turned 50. […]
Rediscovering a Hollywood Luminary: Francis Ford & The Craving
By Jeremy Carr. Ben Model’s Undercrank Productions has once again sifted through the annals of film’s rich origins and, with producer and Ford scholar Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, worked to digitally restore and release a key Francis Ford feature as well as a grouping of shorts….” Before he was known simply as […]