“It Pushed Me to the Limits of My Ability and Experience as a Filmmaker”: Matt Wolf on His Emmy-Nominated Pee-wee As Himself
Throughout his career, documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf has excelled at portraits of complicated artists and individuals whose work is both highly idiosyncratic as well as, at least seen in retrospect, emergent from specific cultural, social and political milieus. Early work include two films — a short, Smalltown Boys, and his feature debut, Wild Combination — about, respectively, two seminal downtown New York figures of the ’70s and ’80s, artist David Wojnarowicz and composer Arthur Russell. The 2017 short Bayard and Me looked at the relationship between civil rights leader Bayard Rustin through the lens of his relationship with boyfriend Walter […]
Dispatches, a feature-length vérité documentary I’m currently co-directing alongside Kira Boden-Gologorsky, follows protesters and student journalists covering the fight for free speech on Columbia University’s campus at protests which made international headlines and faced mammoth political backlash. But more than just chronicling those events, Dispatches explores what it means to report from within an institution while it’s in crisis and to film the story when you are already inside it. By the time tents appeared on our campus’ South Lawn in April 2024, I had already filmed dozens of hours of footage and spoken with countless students who had all […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
