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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
Splice Here A Projected Odyssey: An Interview with Rob Murphy Tara Judah January 2023 Interviews A lifelong cinephile, professional film projectionist (35mm and 70mm), and independent filmmaker, Rob Murphy is an optimistic anomaly within the industry. He, and his docu-quest through big and widescreen forma...
Piaffe: Interview with Ann Oren Maria Giovanna Vagenas January 2023 Interviews Piaffe, Ann Oren's astonishing first feature film presented in competition at Locarno Film Festival 2022, bestows us with that same enchantment that early cinema viewers must have experienced going to the movie...
Flesh Memories: Yeo Siew Hua’s Expanded Cinema in The Once and Future Toby Wu January 2023 Interviews Yeo Siew Hua does not shy away from the entangling messiness of Anthropence-era fear. The world as we know it is ending, and yet we know more ways to end it than save it. In The Once and Future, Yeo contemplate...
In Search of Lost Time: An Interview with Christophe Honoré David A. Gerstner January 2023 Interviews “It is not enough for a painter like Cézanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create or express an idea,” writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The artist and philosopher, he continues, “must also awaken the experience...
Slow Fireworks: The Films of Amy Halpern Arindam Sen January 2023 Interviews Over a career that spanned nearly five decades, Amy Halpern made non-narrative films of all kinds – formal, poetic, playful, joyous, political and personal. The films can be identified as first person cinema, a...
About Time: Interview with Cyril Schäublin Hamed Sarrafi January 2023 Interviews In his latest film, Unrest (2022), Swiss director Cyril Schäublin has created something new and unique. Together with his feature debut, Those Who Are Fine (2017), he has developed his own aesthetic style and n...
Enys Men: An Interview With Mark Jenkin Tara Judah January 2023 Interviews My first encounter with Mark Jenkin’s work was by recommendation from a Cornish friend. He’d been hand-processing 16mm and Super8 short films in Cornwall for years before I jumped on the fan bandwagon. It was ...
“West Germany Was Stolen from Us”: Dominik Graf on the Role of German Unification in His Films Marco Abel January 2023 Interviews Dominik Graf is one of Germany’s most important – and prolific – filmmakers of the last half century. Since his debut, the short film Carlas Briefe (Carla’s Letters, 1975), and his first feature, Der kostbare G...
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 Gerd Gemünden & Silvia Spitta 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...
