We Learn by Making: A Conversation with Alexandra Cuesta Andrew Northrop October 2022 Interviews The focus of a retrospective during the 2022 edition of the Open City Documentary Festival in London, Alexandra Cuesta’s films use established canons as departure points for more subjective and personal explora...
Love Dog: Conversation with Bianca Lucas Maria Giovanna Vagenas October 2022 Interviews Intimate, sensitive and poetic, Love Dog, Bianca Lucas' surprising first feature film, shot in Natchez, Mississippi, portrays John, a young man mourning the sudden loss of his partner; a personal grief meaningf...
“Resistance is the driving force of the film”: An Interview with Davy Chou Maja Korbecka July 2022 Interviews Cambodian-French writer-director Davy Chou’s third full-length film, Return to Seoul, which premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, focuses on a French Korean adoptee during her recurri...
The Plains: Conversation with David Easteal Maria Giovanna Vagenas July 2022 Interviews In The Plains, David Easteal’s astonishing feature debut, we are invited to virtually take a place in the back seat of the car of the protagonist, a middle-aged lawyer named Andrew Rakowski, a real-life person,...
Human is only human when vulnerable: An Interview With Michel Franco Savina Petkova May 2022 Interviews In less than 20 years, writer-director Michel Franco has carved a niche for himself in the more austere parts of world cinema. The Mexican filmmaker has never shied away from representing thorny issues on scree...
‘I Was Taunting the Western’: An Interview with Alejandra Márquez Abella Silvia Spitta & Gerd Gemünden May 2022 Interviews In February of this year, the third feature by Alejandra Márquez Abella, El norte sobre el vacío (Northern Skies over Empty Space), celebrated its premiere at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival in the beloved Panora...
“The Act of Filming is an Inner and Physical Journey in Itself”: Interview with Helke Misselwitz Victor Paz May 2022 Interviews Play-Doc International Film Festival has been taking place every spring for 18 years in the charming medieval town of Tui (Spain). The event shows only about 30 screenings divided into two venues over five days...
Information as a music video, comedy as a diagram: Beny Wagner & Sasha Litvintseva in conversation Madeleine Collier May 2022 Interviews Beny Wagner and Sasha Litvintseva are fascinated by perception’s role in shaping history. Their last film, A Demonstration (2020), used the bifurcated Latin root monstrare (which is at the root of both the word...
The Creative Leap to Fluid Consciousness: An Encounter with Ashley McKenzie Brigitta Wagner May 2022 Interviews In Corona’s third winter, it was hard to care about cinema as one should. The kind of cinema that requires one’s physical presence in theatres and at festivals. Gathering indoors with strangers has become a cha...
Interview with Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley Nolan Kelly May 2022 Interviews Independent American cinema is defined by the exigencies of its fundraising. In the shadow of the world’s largest entertainment industry – whose success is dependent on broad commercial appeal and consolidative...
An Interview with Danny Lyon Elizabeth Dexter May 2022 Interviews Born in New York in 1942 to German and Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Danny Lyon has always taken photographs. In the late ‘60s, after a life lived in and alongside the Civil Rights movement, detailed in his...
Closing the Gap Between Self and Self: A Conversation with Nina Menkes Paulo B. Menezes May 2022 Interviews Tel Aviv, Israel, 2016. It is hotter than it is supposed to according to the weather bulletin. A taxi ride to Jaffa, the old port part of the city, directions written on a small piece of paper in Arabic. Beauti...
Pom Bunsermvicha interview: “Being part of a family“ Maja Korbecka January 2022 Interviews As a result of institutional support, independent filmmaking in Southeast Asia is flourishing. Thailand has grown into a creative hub – production companies such as Electric Eel Films help realise the ideals of...
Leaning into the Challenge: Interview with Scattered co-creators Logan Mucha and Kate Darrigan Stuart Richards January 2022 Interviews Social media platforms have long been avenues for filmmakers to experiment with form and story. YouTube, Vimeo and Snapchat have had varying amounts of original content from filmmakers. For many, TikTok is a ne...
“The cinema remains alive when it is diverse”: Interview with Jean-Gabriel Périot Daniel Fairfax January 2022 Interviews Having gained attention on the film festival circuit with his essayistic found-footage retelling of the history of West Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in Une jeunesse allemande (A German Youth, 2015, the F...
Do you feel lonely standing here? A conversation with Na Jiazuo Łukasz Mańkowski January 2022 Interviews 2021 was an interesting year for Chinese Cinema. Propaganda celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party dominated mainstream productions,while a few indie filmmakers made their way back ont...
A Joyride through Technological Change: Interview with David Cox Dirk de Bruyn January 2022 Interviews David Cox’s innovative engagement with moving image technology extends over numerous iterations, spanning analogue formats 16mm, 35mm and Super 8 to a creative engagement with gaming to 360 degree immersive pro...
Sunken Film: Bill Morrison Talks The Village Detective: a song cycle Andrew Northrop July 2021 Interviews The cover of the October 2019 issue of FIAF’s Journal of Film Preservation sees Erlendur Sveinsson of the National Film Archive of Iceland standing over a long path of film evenly distributed over newspaper she...
An Interview with the late Monte Hellman (1929-2021) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2021 Interviews One of the legendary figures of the American cinema, the late Monte Hellman (1929 – 2021) is best known for directing Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), considered by many to be the definitive “road movie,” but Hellman’...
“I Myself am a Woman”: A Conversation with Han Shuai Maja Korbecka July 2021 Interviews Writer-director Han Shuai’s Summer Blur, the winner of the Grand Prix for Best Film in the Kplus competition at the 2021 Berlinale, is a mesmerising take on film noir. Its codes and conventions are used to expl...
Daydreaming Through Boundaries: A Conversation with Queena Li Łukasz Mańkowski May 2021 Interviews Premiering during the online edition of this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Tiger Competition section, Queena Li’s Bipolar is a seductive debut. It tells the story of a young woman setting ...
Ecofeminism With Marwa Arsanios Madeleine Collier May 2021 Interviews Marwa Arsanios is a Berlin-based artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose work exposes the political dynamics latent in questions of ecology and land administration. Since 2017, Arsanios has been working on a se...
Afro – Nouveau: The Rise of the African New Wave in Cinema Justice Ayowale Whitaker May 2021 Interviews In late 2019 early 2020, Brooklyn based filmmaker and author Justice A. Whitaker reached out to his friend and fellow filmmaker Togbe Gavua, based in Accra Ghana. The two creatives recorded two conversations th...
Surviving You, Always: An Interview with Director Morgan Quaintance Sofie Cato Maas May 2021 Interviews Among the shorts selected for the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition at the much anticipated (partially) online 50th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), now under the new direction of Vanja...
Mobilities Between Place, Sound and Image: An Interview with Ana Vaz Dirk de Bruyn May 2021 Interviews I spoke with Ana Vaz at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2020. I had not seen Ana since watching her first film Sacris Pulso in Australia (2007), which re-configures the film Brasiliários (19...
“Sometimes it is easier to forget.” – A Conversation with Dieudo Hamadi Wilfred Okiche January 2021 Interviews Interview translated from French by Hélène Ballis For six deadly days in June 2000, armed forces from Rwanda and Uganda clashed on the streets of Kisangani, the third largest city in the Democratic Republic ...
The Violence of Privacy: A Conversation with Kazuo Hara Łukasz Mańkowski January 2021 Interviews After riding onto the film festival circuit with the Japanese New Wave, Kazuo Hara has established himself as a key figure in Japanese non-fiction cinema, with Errol Morris calling him “an undiscovered genius o...
A Mirror of the Ever-Changing Cinematic Landscape: the Eclectic Oeuvre of James Scott Sofie Cato Maas January 2021 Interviews When viewed in retrospect, the vast and versatile oeuvre of British director James Scott (b. 1941), the son of the famous abstract painter William Scott and sculptor Mary Scott, may be best described as a body ...
Matthew Victor Pastor – An Interview Fiona Villella January 2021 Interviews Melbourne-based, independent filmmaker Matthew Victor Pastor has been making films for over ten years. His prolific output so far includes four mini-features and four features. His latest film The Neon Across t...
The Living Theatre: An Interview with Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo about their film Slow Machine Michelle Carey October 2020 Interviews Slow Machine is at once elliptical and allusive. It opens up worlds of poetry, downtown theatre and music, yet holds within it a satisfyingly solid narrative. To a point. At a time when contemporary independent...
“A ghost mob”: Interview with Sandra Wollner Alison Taylor October 2020 Interviews In February this year, Sandra Wollner’s contentious film, The Trouble with Being Born (2020) debuted at Berlinale, earning a Special Jury prize. In August, the film was due to have its Australian premiere as pa...
Capitalism and its Discontents: an Interview with Mike Hoolboom Dirk de Bruyn October 2020 Interviews Dirk de Bruyn has been practicing, writing and curating in the area of experimental film and animation for over 35 years. He is currently teaching Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University in Melbourne...
Ghost Town Anthology: An Interview with Denis Côté Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 Interviews The prolific Canadian director Denis Côté has a new film out, entitled (in English; see below for more on this) Ghost Town Anthology (2019), which has been shown on the festival circuit around the world, and is...
The Unbearable Object of Liminality: A Conversation with Zheng Lu Xinyuan Łukasz Mańkowski July 2020 Interviews For the third time in a row, the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) went to a newcomer from China. This year, it was bestowed upon Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s debut, Ta fang jian li de yun ...
“You Cannot Whitewash the Truth”- A Conversation with Arie and Chuko Esiri Wilfred Okiche July 2020 Interviews “Lagos na wa!” Anyone who has ever lived in Lagos has uttered this phrase at one point or other. Loosely translated from Pidgin English as “Lagos is overwhelming”, the phrase attempts to capture the permanen...
Dreamscapes and Masquerades: A Conversation with Abba Makama Wilfred Okiche October 2019 Interviews Abba Makama has taken Toronto twice. The first time the Nigerian director, writer and visual artist was a guest of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), he was part of the country delegation partic...
