In 2019, I began production on my debut feature Realm of Satan, only for the world to shut down as COVID-19 brought filming to a halt after just a few days. It wasn’t until 2022 that we were able to resume. Despite this catastrophic challenge, two people never wavered in their commitment and belief in me and the film: producer Caitlin Mae Burke and Austrian cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz. Because of them, we were able to resume filming in 2022, and I’m thrilled that Realm of Satan will have its NYC theatrical run next week at Nitehawk. Realm of Satan is […]

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For a film about the end of the world, Mare’s Nest is hardly lugubrious. Then again, you could say the same about Ben Rivers’s entire oeuvre. Few directors who’ve kicked off their careers after the proverbial “end of history” have so assiduously used their cameras to imagine what that might look like; fewer still have pictured the Armageddon as existing somewhere between dystopia and utopia. It can be difficult to tell whether Rivers’s films are post- or pre-apocalyptic, if the solitary figures they often center on—like the old hermit riffing on Darwin’s theories from his dilapidated forest hovel in The […]

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Mary Neely first came to the world’s attention during the pandemic with her viral videos, earning praise from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as being named “Best Theater of 2020” by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Since then, she has been delivering  great work on both sides of the camera, such as the TV pilot Stars Diner which premiered at SXSW this year, Valley Girl, Lyle Lyle Crocodile and Netflix’s Happiness For Beginners. Now, she and Kareem Rahma (“Subway Takes”) co-wrote and co-star in the true New York low-budget indie film Or Something. On […]

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Kate Beecroft found East of Wall’s main character—now one of her closest friends—entirely by chance. She’s retold their origin story in so many interviews that it’s worth quoting her first iteration from the press kit: “Taking a wrong turn on a road in South Dakota led me to the deepest adventure of my life. I pulled up to a rundown ranch and found horse trainer Tabatha Zimiga and a tribe of intimidatingly bold teenage girls thronging out of their trailer, heads half-shaved like warriors, eyeing me up and down. Tabatha welcomed me into her world with one sentence: ‘Want to […]

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Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation is a smartly unconventional look at the 1957 novel that captured a counterculture and continues to resonate with outsiders and inner journey seekers to this very day. Directed by Ebs Burnough (The Capote Tapes), the peripatetic doc includes “never-before-seen material” from the personal archive of Jack Kerouac (born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to French-Canadian immigrants in the small town of Lowell, MA) along with images that provide much-needed context to the sexy author’s postwar milieu. But rather than centering the mythologized man or his alter ego Sal Paradise, Burnough instead takes the inspired […]

The post “The Greatest Gift We Have is Community, Which is Such an Integral Part of the Human Experience”: Ebs Burnough on Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Watching the world premiere of My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow last September in the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival, I knew I was experiencing a milestone in vérité documentary filmmaking.  Not because My Undesirable Friends was filmed using an iPhone per se. Filming with iPhones is a commonplace now, from this summer’s Danny Boyle hit, 28 Years Later, to Aardman’s latest Wallace & Gromit animation. Last April’s NAB show delivered booths full of iPhone cages, gimbals, adapters, and power banks. Apple’s popular “Shot on iPhone” campaign has been running since 2015.  […]

The post In Conversation with Julia Loktev About the Nuts and Bolts of Making Part 1 (5 1/2 hours) of her Monumental Vérité Documentary, My Undesirable Friends — Frederick Wiseman Weighs In, Too first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

This poll was conducted in response to the recent New York Times Best Movies of the 21st Century poll and as a follow up to the Film Comment Best of the Decade list (conducted in 2020). I reached out to international artists, critics, curators, filmmakers scholars, writers, etc. committed to “experimental cinema,” loosely defined. Participants were asked to submit unranked lists of 15 titles. The poll received 109 ballots, featuring 940 films from 550 artists. Given the number of individual submissions, the published results suggest consensus where there is none. My hope is these lists will be a resource for […]

The post The 63 Best Experimental Films of the 21st Century (So Far) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Film at Lincoln Center announced Currents for the 63rd New York Film Festival, taking place from September 26 through October 13 at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city. The Currents slate includes 16 feature films and 24 short films in five programs, representing 28 countries. “In a film landscape that is so often homogeneous by design, this year’s Currents lineup is energizing for being a showcase of the boundless possibilities of cinematic language,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival, in a press release. “Resurrecting old technologies and subverting new ones, the filmmakers and artists here use an ingenious array of styles and forms to investigate the past and illuminate the present, in […]

The post NYFF 2025 Announces Currents Lineup first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Film at Lincoln Center announced today the 34 films that comprise the Main Slate of the 2025 New York Film Festival. The Opening Night film is Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, and Jim Jarmusch’s latest, Father Mother Sider Brother is the Centerpiece. The Closing Night film, Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, is a world premiere, and it joins others including Gavagai by Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56), “an astute drama in which a film adaptation of Medea becomes the center of cross-cultural tensions.” From Sundance there is Khalil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, from Venice Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s […]

The post 63rd New York Film Festival Announces Main Slate, Including Reichardt, Poitras, Denis, Jarmusch and More first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

You can see Ivan Martin’s work in Billions, The Sopranos, Suits, Ozark, Gaslit, What We Do In The Shadows, and much more. Currently, he stars in the exceptional indie film To Kill A Wolf, writer/director Kelsey Taylor’s modern take on Little Red Riding Hood. On this episode, he talks about the circumstances that brought that role his way, the connection he has with the character that made him feel like he could bring him to life, and the environment on set that made it all possible. He explains the roundabout way he got interested in acting when he was young, […]

The post “It Was Some Kind of a Dance That We Had Together That Was a Lot of Fun”To Kill A Wolf Star Ivan Martin, Back To One, Episode 353 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.