During the making of his 2001 film about lesbian and gay Orthodox Jews, Trembling before G-d, documentary filmmaker Sandi DuBowski met one potential subject, rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, a “queer bio-dad” who also founded Lab/Shul, the “everybody-friendly, God-optional” congregation. But, as Dubowski relays below, aside from not really fitting the film’s specific brief, Lau-Levine “was too much of a diva and wanted his own movie.” With his most recent picture, Sabbath Queen, DuBowski has more than obliged, following the dissident rabbi for over 21 years, turning what could have been a straightforward biographical portrait into a rich and complex saga that […]

The post “What Does It Mean to Translate Spirituality into Cinema?”: Sabbath Queen Artist and Filmmaker Danielle Durchslag Interviews Sabbath Queen Director Sandi DuBowski first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy announced today a new award for documentary film — The Henry Awards for Public Interest Documentary —and its first list of 15 semi-finalists. “The Henry Awards recognize nonfiction films that advance public understanding of the critical issues of our time while demonstrating outstanding cinematic achievement,” the Center announced today in a press release. “Guided by the hallmarks of ethical practice, rigorous investigation, and courageous storytelling, the Henry Awards are intended to honor and encourage a documentary filmmaking practice grounded in […]

The post New Henry Awards Announces 15 Inaugural Semi-Finalists for Public Interest Documentary Annual Prize first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Ariella Mastroianni is an actor from New Jersey by way of Ontario, Canada. With director Ryan J. Sloan, she co-wrote and co-produced Gazer, which she also stars in. The film, which the duo shot on weekends over the course of two years, brings the paranoid thriller genre into wildly original new territory. On this episode, Mastroianni tells the story of deciding to shoot on film, using their own money, with no formal support, no connections, just a deep desire to make the film they were both dying to see. She talks about the tools her acting teachers (like Brad Fleischer […]

The post “Don’t Wait for Permission” Gazer star Ariella Mastroianni, Back To One, Episode 334 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Filmmaker: We selected you in 2005 for our 25 New Faces list after you premiered War at Sundance 2004. In that film, you really embraced the micro-budget philosophy you espouse in this book, deciding to shoot not the script but the world and characters around it. When you made that film, did you imagine that you’d be advocating for micro-budget practice years later? In other words, did you see this style of filmmaking as a calling at the time or simply a necessity in the moment? Mahaffy: I never saw budget as a calling. It’s just necessity. Necessity functions like […]

The post An Interview with Jake Mahaffy first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Diciannove, the autofictional debut feature of director Giovanni Tortorici, captures one year in the life of a young Italian man, Leonardo, who decamps from a London business school to study literature in Siena, where he soon becomes obsessed with the study of 17th century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli. Wandering amidst the medieval architecture of this small central Italian city when he’s not holed up at home, reading from among his stacks of books, Leonardo mostly eschews social invitations from attractive female students while, with quickly fading bursts of enthusiasms, engaging in a series of anti-social actions, including a revenge campaign […]

The post “I Really Like to Self-Analyze Myself”: Giovanni Tortorici On His Luca Guadagnino-Produced Debut Feature, Diciannove first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Iva Radivojević has established a reputation for crafting precise yet elliptical filmic enigmas that use voiceover and reconstruction to reduce narrative to its most essential components. Her latest feature, When the Phone Rang, which premiered at Locarno last year, reimagines the director’s own childhood during the breakup of Yugoslavia through the lens of Lana, a doppelganger living with her sister and parents in an unnamed but familiar town and country. The film’s title refers to a moment which serves as the basis for everything that follows, and to which we keep returning as the narrative progresses. Tight, vivid close-ups shot […]

The post Memories of Yugoslavia: Iva Radivojević on When the Phone Rang first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Refusing a single dominant system of values in Lebanon as the secular daughter of a working class Lebanese Jewish father and an Egyptian aristocrat mother provided filmmaker Heiny Srour with what she has called a “wide-angle view of the world,” from which she has felt qualified to critique, without embellishment, failures of the Arab left. Though ultimately disappointed by the revolutionary Middle East organizations of the ‘60s and ‘70s, who lapsed into anti-semitism or sexism while postponing women’s liberation until the end of imperialism, she’s noted the exceptions of the Lebanese Communists (who were, however, too weak to enact a […]

The post “Raise Your Head, We are Making an Honorable Film”: Heiny Srour on the Restored Leila and the Wolves and The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Hu Sanshou’s Resurrection premiered at last year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival; this year, the director was awarded the annual True Vision award at True/False before the first of two showings of this feature. A classically exemplary slab of rigorously conceived Chinese nonfiction, Hu’s fifth feature was executed under the larger auspices of the Folk Memory Project, a group of Chinese films focusing on the Great Famine of 1959-61. Resurrection’s first 15 minutes are giganticist in the vein of Zhao Liang’s Behemoth minus funky distorting lenses, beginning with an extremely gods-eye perspective of a tractor working cliffside, a tinily perceptible human […]

The post True/False Film Fest 2025: Excavation, Therapy, Protest first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Emma Laird is both incandescent and haunted as she limns the before and after of trauma in Alex Burunova’s SXSW-premiering debut feature, Satisfaction. As Lola, a composer and pianist, Laird is charismatic and full of life in the past and painfully muted in the present, a contrast that engineers the film’s central narrative mystery. Through memory-triggered flashbacks and forwards, Satisfaction orbits around a moment of trauma, the film’s editing rhythms and narrative structure mirroring the emotional evasiveness and repression that Lola must deploy during a Greek island vacation with her musician boyfriend, Philip (Fionn Whitehead). But repression as self-preservation can only […]

The post “Telling the Story Non-Linearly Felt Essential Because That’s How Trauma Often Works”: Alex Burunova On Her SXSW-Premiering Relationship Drama, Satisfaction first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Rachel Mason’s Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna makes its point crystal clear from the title: Halyna Hutchins, the talented DP who landed on American Cinematographer’s list of “10 up-and-coming directors of photography who are making their mark” in 2019, will not be upstaged by the celebrity who in 2021 accidentally shot and killed her (and injured director Joel Souza) during the filming of the western Rust. Which makes sense since Mason was a close friend of Hutchins, and was asked by her devastated widower to take on the project. And while the film is rightly a celebration […]

The post “It Felt As If She Were Actually Speaking to Me About This Film”: Rachel Mason on Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.