An Interview with Jon Bell Gary M. Kramer May 2024 Interviews Expanded from his 2020 short of the same name, The Moogai is writer/director Jon Bell’s allegorical horror film about the Stolen Generation – the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families betwee...
“I like characters who can’t express themselves sometimes”: An Interview with Kazik Radwanski Susana Bessa May 2024 Interviews Matt and Mara (2024) was my first and last screening at this year’s Berlinale. I can’t remember the last time I saw the same film twice at a film festival. Very little could have prepared me for the beautifully...
An Interview with Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero Gary M. Kramer May 2024 Interviews Fernanda Valadez made a stunning feature directorial debut with Identifying Features (2020). For her sophomore effort, Sujo (2024), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year, where it won the Worl...
Sewn Into the Margins: An Interview with Marie Craven Dirk de Bruyn May 2024 Interviews The following interview with Marie Craven originated from an online interview after a film class viewing of a program of her films as we moved out of Covid. The Zoom transcriptions of that event were trawled an...
“I Did Not Want to Make a Film About Victims”: An Interview with Lola Arias Silvia Spitta & Gerd Gemünden May 2024 Interviews “Yo no quería hacer una pelicula sobre víctimas” – with these words director Lola Arias described to us her approach to making a film about a dozen former inmates of various Buenos Aires women prisons. Reas, wh...
An Interview with Meryam Joobeur Gary M. Kramer May 2024 Interviews Meryam Joobeur earned an Oscar nomination for her 2018 short film, Brotherhood, about a Tunisian family grappling with the unexpected return of their son, Malek (Malek Mechergui). Malek, who has been gone for o...
Spiritual Connections, Analog Exuberance, and the Joys of Presence: An Interview with Nathan Silver Brigitta Wagner May 2024 Interviews The 74th Berlin International Film Festival could not have taken place on a more politicised stage. Not only did the festival reflect, as it typically does, the preoccupations of the world in the films selected...
Susie Dee, Trudy Hellier and Patricia Cornelius talk Shit with interviewer Cerise Howard Cerise Howard May 2024 Interviews Written by Patricia Cornelius, one of Australia’s most celebrated playwrights and a Windham-Campbell prize winner, the micro-budget Melbourne feature Shit began life as a play (2015), with its powerhouse cast o...
A place to live in: An Interview with Leonor Teles Susana Bessa January 2024 Interviews Leonor Teles’s mirror-surfaced, headily constructed Baan opens at a moment of contemplation. Against the backdrop of a lilac-infused blue cityscape of the King Power MahaNakhon, the legendary Bangkok skyscraper...
Crime and Choreography: An Interview with Rodrigo Moreno Hamed Sarrafi January 2024 Interviews Despite Argentina's present socio-political and economic situation being shrouded in uncertainty and instability, its film industry is robust, consistently producing remarkable works. Contemporary Argentine cin...
Gazing into the Abyss: An interview with Wei Shujun Maja Korbecka January 2024 Interviews I first talked with Wei Shujun back in 2020 when his debut film, Yema fenzhong (Striding into the Wind), had its US theatrical release. However, we met in person only three years later in Cannes after the premi...
“The Way We Are Looked at Transforms Us”: An Interview with Catherine Breillat Savina Petkova January 2024 Interviews When Last Summer (2023) premiered at the Cannes Main Competition earlier this year, everyone expected a scandalous film. A massive age gap, incestuous themes, and, boy, does the internet love such discourse! Bu...
An Interview with Martín Rejtman James Vaughan January 2024 Interviews Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought. - Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer The cinema of Martín Rejtman is a cinema...
Interview with Martín Shanly Gary M. Kramer January 2024 Interviews Although he has written and directed only two features, Martín Shanly has developed a distinctive voice in Argentine cinema. His style is low-key, and his character studies showcase troubled heroes. His two fil...
Crossing Borders into Abstraction: an Interview with Paul Winkler Dirk de Bruyn January 2024 Interviews In 2022 the National Film and Sound Archive acquired the hand-made filmmaking material Paul Winkler constructed to make his innovative films from the the 1960’s to the present. Winkler is packing up his practic...
Steve Doughton and Jon Raymond On Earthlings Nolan Kelly January 2024 Interviews In the United States, regional filmmakers rarely get the same attention as their big-city counterparts, at least until they premiere in New York or L.A. This denial of certain geographic perspectives is bound u...
An Interview with Delphine Girard Gary M. Kramer November 2023 Interviews A good short film uses time to support the story. Given the brief running time, a filmmaker must establish a setup, keep viewers in suspense, and deliver a satisfying payoff in, 15 minutes. Short films evoke an...
Writing Like Water: An Interview with Paul Preciado Mike Hoolboom November 2023 Interviews Paul Preciado is an aphorism machine, the David Bowie of contemporary philosophy. Like other contemporary thinkers (what used to be called “public intellectuals” – Andrea Long Chu, Hito Steyerl), he writes in e...
Mapping Global Horror: Academic roundtable Amanda Barbour November 2023 Interviews Mapping Global Horror: Australia, Japan and Beyond brought world-leading scholars and filmmakers to Wurundjeri country for a two-day conference to navigate how the titular genre moves through time, space and cu...
Mapping Global Horror: Filmmaker roundtable Amanda Barbour November 2023 Interviews At the intersection of theory and practice, Mapping Global Horror: Australia, Japan and Beyond put horror scholars in dialogue with filmmakers and festival producers. This enabled audiences to understand new di...
Our Body is a Battleground: An Interview with Claire Simon Öykü Sofuoğlu November 2023 Interviews This year's Berlinale was marked by Nicolas Philibert's surprising victory with his modest and intimate documentary about a Parisian psychiatric institution, which prompted us to question the established bounda...
“Irritation Is the Most Important Tool Any Artist Has”: An Interview with Jessica Hausner Jaimey Fisher & Gerd Gemünden November 2023 Interviews In a review of Club Zero, Jessica Hausner’s latest feature, which premiered in Competition at Cannes this year, Charles Bramesco calls the director “Austria’s most fearless button-pusher.” Given that her compat...
Shame on Dry Land: An Interview with Axel Petersén and Joel Spira Gary M. Kramer November 2023 Interviews Shame on Dry Land, by Swedish writer/director Axel Petersén, is a flinty noir set in sunny Malta. The film, which had its World Premiere at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, is as slippery as its protagonist, ...
Groundbreaking Cinephilia: A Conversation with Julien Rejl, Artistic Director of the Directors’ Fortnight Maria Giovanna Vagenas November 2023 Interviews With a gaze that radiates a dreamy but determined freshness, the beautiful Leonor Silveira in Manoel de Oliveira's Abraham's Valley (Vale Abraão, 1993) graces the poster of this 55th edition of the Directors’ F...
“Can You Prefigure Reality?”: A Conversation with Christoph Hochhäusler on his new film, Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night) Marco Abel August 2023 Interviews Christoph Hochhäusler’s noirish Bis ans Ende der Nacht (Till the End of the Night) premiered on the final day of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, capping a Competition that showcased an unusually hi...
The Klezmer Project (Adentro Mío Estoy Bailanado): A Conversation with Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann Maria Giovanna Vagenas August 2023 Interviews In the maze of a major festival event such as the Berlinale, The Klezmer Project, a debut feature by Argentinian filmmakers Paloma Schachmann and Leandro Koch, which premiered in the Encounters section, emerged...
Chunky Shrapnel: A Conversation with John Angus Stewart C.S. Harper August 2023 Interviews Few concert films have stood the test of time in the way that Chunky Shrapnel (John Angus Stewart, 2020) has. Originally set to premiere at the Astor Theatre in Melbourne on 3 April 2020, the film was instead g...
A Cinematic Sojourn to the Land of Awe and Astonishment: Interview with Laura Citarella about El Pampero Cine and Trenque Lauquen Hamed Sarrafi August 2023 Interviews In the enigmatic realm of Trenque Lauquen, Laura Citarella brings to fruition the very essence of El Pampero Cine's bold cinematic vision. This latest opus stands as the epitome of everything the Argentinian pr...
Here: An Interview with Bas Devos Maria Giovanna Vagenas May 2023 Interviews With Here, his fourth feature film and winner of the Encounters and the Fipresci Award at the 73rd Berlinale, the Belgian director Bas Devos creates a luminous, delicate, and subtle film that inspires awe. Thro...
A Different Kind of Love Story: An Interview with Dustin Guy Defa Brigitta Wagner May 2023 Interviews Wolfgang Kohlhaase, a prolific German screenwriter from the former East, once told me that cinematic realism was to him like the view out the kitchen window of one’s childhood home. What struck me at the time w...
Family as a Film Collective: An interview with Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka Maja Korbecka May 2023 Interviews The third full-length collaboration between the filmmaking duo Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka, Stonewalling, had its world premiere at the 2022 Venice Film Festival and from 10th March this year started screening at...
Biting comedy: An Interview with Japanese director Hyûga Fumiari Purple Romero May 2023 Interviews The individual vs. a bigger power: a recurring theme in the documentaries of Japanese filmmaker Hyûga Fumiari. But what is this bigger power? Documentaries, steeped and submerged in some of the rawest crises of...
When in Love, Make a Film: Interview with Alexandre O. Philippe Hamed Sarrafi May 2023 Interviews Over the course of nearly two decades, Alexandre O. Philippe has celebrated and explored the iconic figures of the seventh art, from Lucas and Ford to Hitchcock and Lynch. His unique approach not only reveals n...
“I Needed to See Light”: An Interview with Tatiana Huezo Silvia Spitta & Gerd Gemünden May 2023 Interviews “Quería ver luz” – these are the words director Tatiana Huezo used to describe to us the impetus behind El Eco (The Echo), her latest documentary, which premiered in February at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival. T...
Korean Chinese, Borderland, and Transborder Encounters: A Conversation with Zhang Lu Yanjie Wang May 2023 Interviews Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu, a former writer and academic, ventured into the world of cinema in the early 2000s. His debut short, called 11 sui (Eleven, 2000), was selected for competition at the 58th Veni...
Afterwater: A Conversation with Dane Komljen Maria Giovanna Vagenas March 2023 Interviews Afterwater, conceived, directed and edited by Dane Komljen, is both as limpid as the water of the lakes that appear in it, and as complex as their, often, unfathomable depths. With an inventive, sensitive appro...
