Against the darkening skies of an imminent hurricane in Atlantic Beach, Florida, disparate characters become unmoored in No Sleep Till, the feature debut from French-American filmmaker Alexandra Simpson. Shot in the coastal enclave where she partially grew up with her father, Simpson’s film casts a “European gaze” (she was largely raised in Paris and attended film school in Geneva) tinted by a palpable nostalgia for a place she never truly knew and that she believes could one day disappear as a result of a natural disaster.  There’s a laconic quality to No Sleep Till, but the absence of narrative-driving dialogue […]

The post “I Finalized the Script Two Weeks Before the Crew Arrived”: Alexandra Simpson on No Sleep Till first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“There are so many promising debut features, then all those filmmakers go on to be jury members.” A new acquaintance was lamenting the dearth of directors under 40 with distinct styles and durable careers; I laughed, but it was a fair synopsis of a grim landscape. Per Wallace Stevens, the imagination may always be at the end of an era, but at this particular moment imagination and reality seem truly as one. Still, I’m in my unlikely second act as an (aspirational) optimist seeking reasons to be cheerful, and film festivals can help keep me in that headspace—at least we […]

The post Karlovy Vary 2025: Promising Young Men and Women first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

As someone who started calling myself “bigendered” decades ago, trans visibility has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s a relief to no longer have to explain being nonbinary to puzzled and often dubious cisgender folks (gay and straight alike). On the other hand, it’s infuriating to watch as one’s existence is then abruptly erased and turned into an “ideology” by right-wing transphobes. And it’s downright demeaning to have one’s identity suddenly hijacked and transformed into a hip “cause” by cisgender liberals. (The dehumanization inevitably leading to dangers like the NYTimes breathless bothsidesism reporting on […]

The post “We Created the Film to Address How Journalism Was Perpetuating Anti-Trans Bias”: Sam Feder on Heightened Scrutiny first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

For the 350th episode of Back To One, I sat down with an actor who brings me great joy when he’s on the screen, the one and only David Malinsky. He wrote the blurb himself for this episode. It follows: Peter has only met David three times in person before. His filmography includes Onur Tukel’s Abbey Singer/Songwriter, Black Magic for White Boys, Poundcake, Theodore Collatos’ Tormenting the Hen, MG Cinecraft’s A Moderate Folly and more. Dave has also done standup comedy, cabaret singing, and YouTube Video Essays. But Dave thinks it’s vital to situate acting within art and human history, […]

The post “If Every Art is Sacred, That Means the Act of Making Art is Itself a Sacred Thing”: David Malinsky, Back To One, Episode 350 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

As the pandemic rumbled on, in early ’22, and with my annual winter sojourn to the Sundance Film Festival cancelled, I took an online course in boredom. With so many customary diversions having been put on hold, I had reason to be bored, I suppose, but in taking the course I was more interested in boredom as an intellectual topic. You see, I have vivid memories of being bored as a kid — the books at the library I wanted to read were checked out, my elementary school’s summer activities were lame, there was not much on TV — but, […]

The post “The Film Remains a Mystery to Me — Why is That?”: Nicholas Rombes on the Timecodes Series and Walking with Gus Van Sant’s Gerry first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Midway through To A Land Unknown, Palestinian-Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s narrative feature debut, Palestinian cousins stranded in Athens—sharp Chatila (Mahmood Bakri), his wife and kid back in Lebanon’s camps, and sensitive Reda (Aram Sabbah), working hard to rein in his drug addiction—find themselves wanting to help Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan new to Athenian streets, get to his undocumented refugee aunt in Italy. The duo’s passage to Germany—to Europe, to freedom, to the autonomy of running their own cafe in some Arab enclave of Berlin, to everything neither Palestine nor Lebanon can offer them in the world’s current […]

The post Palestinians in Purgatory: Mahdi Fleifel on To A Land Unknown first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Since watching Revelations of Divine Love—which is making its world premiere at FIDMarseille today—I’ve found myself thinking about its construction, restraint, devotion to form and alarming sincerity. Brimming with the mystery of manifestation, it is a work of sheer will, equal parts spiritual inquiry and cinematic lament. Masterfully lensed by cinematographer Gabe Elder, the light surrounding our heroine, Julian of Norwich (Tessa Strain), is diffused and precise, its textures tangible. I reached out to Caroline Golum because I found myself curious: not just about the film itself, but about her process, commitment, and rigor that shaped it. The film draws […]

The post “A Medieval Period Piece for Under $200,000”: Caroline Golum on FIDMarseille 2025 Premiere Revelations of Divine Love, Prayer and Process  first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

We’re the filmmaking team behind the new documentary, WTO/99, a film that examines—purely through archival footage—four days of protests in Seattle during 1999 against the World Trade Organization (WTO). We’ve spent over two years living in the footage of the largest US demonstrations since the Vietnam War captured by protesters on the ground, the Seattle Police Department and local and national new crews. We’ve reviewed roughly one thousand hours of footage that followed protesters, police and governmental officials as they participated in what would later become known as the “Battle of Seattle”—the week in 1999 when over 40,000 people took […]

The post 25 Years After the “Battle of Seattle,” The Same Tactics Are Seen in LA first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Erik Jensen is a multipyphenate who, along with his wife and creative partner Jessica Blank have been called “the foremost practitioners of documentary theater in the U.S.” Their genre-defining plays The Exonerated, Aftermath, Coal Country, and The Line were all critically acclaimed. As an actor, Jensen’s credits include The Walking Dead, Mindhunter, Mr. Robot, The Americans, not to mention his praised portrayal of legendary NY Yankee Thurman Munson in The Bronx is Burning. On this episode he details his approach toward playing that beloved figure, and finding out that “almost the entire body of that character was an emotional word-gesture.” […]

The post “It was Physicalizing the Words That Became the Goal”: Erik Jensen, Back To One, Episode 349 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In Rita Azevedo Gomes’ cinematic universe, a characteristic blend of literary adaptation and cinematic innovation creates simultaneously concrete and oneiric landscapes—places where the wandering subject, camera, plot and spectator become absorbed by the unknown, yet strangely familiar, territory before them. With Fuck the Polis, her most bold and daring film to date, the Portuguese filmmaker continues her cinematographic explorations of word, image, time and human emotions. Making its world premiere at FIDMarseille 2025, Polis follows Irma, who around twenty years ago, believing herself condemned, traveled to Greece. She now retraces that journey, moving from island to island in what becomes […]

The post Cinema without Adjectives: Rita Azevedo Gomes on Fuck the Polis first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.