“A Desperate Search For a Reason to Wake Up”: Alexandre Koberidze on Dry Leaf
Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze’s second feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), was a sprawling city symphony-like romantic fantasy; at 186 minutes, his third feature Dry Leaf runs a half-hour longer, but doesn’t extended the labyrinthine storytelling techniques of his breakthrough film so much as consolidate its strengths and streamline its magical-realist sensibility. Employing a hybrid approach familiar to his award-winning, similarly lengthy debut, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), Koberdize brings the more meditative and conversational qualities of that film to bear on a strikingly straightforward road trip tale that, rather than traffic […]
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Her face obscured in shadow, a woman, the poet, Eva HD, takes a photograph. Cut to words on the screen, a quote from another poet, Toni Morrison: “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.” The paradox created by the juxtaposition of those words and that image animates How to Shoot a Ghost, Charlie Kaufman’s new Venice-premiering short film, written by HD, that sensuously and melancholically tangles with ideas around history, memory, cities and where consciousness goes when the body dies. Set in Athens, Greece, […]
In Nobody, a government assassin turned middle-aged family man (Bob Odenkirk) breaks out of his humdrum suburban existence by instigating an escalating feud with the Russian mob. In the film’s sequel, out in theaters, a burnt-out Odenkirk now needs a break from his return to espionage. So, he packs up the family and heads to Plummerville, a run-down water park where he spent one of his happiest childhood summers. Action maestro Timo Tjahjanto (The Night Comes for Us) takes the directorial reigns for the follow-up, with New Zealand cinematographer Callan Green behind the camera. Green spoke to Filmmaker about the […]
It’s well known that George Lucas approached David Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), and that Lynch (thankfully) demurred, instead pursuing Blue Velvet (1985). Less well-known is the fact that the two films share an editor—Duwayne Dunham, an unlikely hyperspace lane between two otherwise distant cinematic galaxies. As a director himself, Dunham has a body of work that poses yet another wrinkle in space-time: since making his feature debut with Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), he has specialized in tales of misfit youngsters, predominantly for the Disney Channel. The announcement that his new film, the long-gestating Legend […]
The Gotham Film and Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the programming for the 2025 Gotham Week Expo, taking place during Gotham Week Monday, September 29th – Friday, October 3, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Declares the organization in a press release, “The fourth-annual Expo, featuring enhanced design-thinking sessions, will bring together partners from The Gotham’s Expanding Communities initiative to provide community and thought leadership on topics pertinent to film and media creators as well as resources for nonprofit media organizations. “ After years at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, The Gotham will return to the DUMBO neighborhood for its Brooklyn events. […]
A new friend came up to me after a screening and Q&A recently for my first short as a director, Side Hustle. “I realized that you’re completely honest, in a way that must be deeply painful to you.” My brain immediately went to an answer I had just given to an audience question. A young woman asked, “Did you always want to direct or did casting work inspire you to direct?” My response was immediate: “I always knew I wanted to direct but my self-worth was in the gutter. So, I had to work on that most of all.” She […]
John Carroll Lynch has delivered so many performances, on so many sets, for both the big and small screen, that it is almost ridiculous. Just a few highlights of his hundreds of credits include: The Drew Carey Show, Fargo, Zodiac, Big Sky, American Horror Story, The Trial of The Chicago 7, and his latest, Sorry Baby. On this episode, he gives us a deep dive into his approach to the work, and how it has evolved over the years. He explains the benefits of highlighting the text based on lexical categories, how directing his first feature Lucky (with Harry Dean […]
The first time we see retail worker Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), it’s through the eyes of his new friend Oliver (Archie Madekwe), as the up-and-coming popstar films him with a camcorder. It’s an arresting opening image, given how much the rest of Lurker finds Matthew gazing at Oliver in adoration instead. “I need a real person,” the fickle musician says, soon after their chance encounter. He’s talking about seeking the honest opinion of a regular person on his music, not the blind adoration of a fan. Little does he know just how meticulously crafted Matthew’s personality really is. Having secured a […]
Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’s Nova ’78 centers around the Nova Convention, a late ’70s avant-garde extravaganza that took place at NYC’s now defunct Entermedia Theater (Second Avenue and 12th Street) in honor of William S. Burroughs’s return to the U.S. after living more than 20 years abroad. It was also a great excuse to gather a who’s who roster of counterculture icons to perform in the presence of the postmodern wordsmith who’d profoundly impacted them all. That would include Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Merce […]
A few black-and-white photos of Locarno’s first editions hung from the walls of the hotel that hosted me there for five days this month. Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town—none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater—the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they’re watching Giacomo Gentilomo’s My Sun—a crowd-pleaser with which the festival, just relocated from Lugano, opened the first edition in the city it’d be renamed […]