Common associations audiences might have with Miami: ruise lines, café con leche, beach parties, plastic surgery, Art Basel, Dexter, Scarface, a diverse and predominantly Latino and Caribbean population. AFI Conservatory graduate Jing Ai Ng wants to turn some of those tropes around with her debut feature Forge, premiering in the Narrative Spotlight section of SXSW 2025. The Malaysian-born filmmaker grew up shuttling between Southeast Asia and Miami and wanted to honor the Florida city she knew—that of first- and second gen-Asian subcultures, rare dim sum restaurants and a particular vein of white collar crime: art forgery.  After first exploring a […]

The post “Miami is the City of Hustle”: Jing Ai Ng on SXSW 2025 Premiere Forge first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In the last decade, a growing number of films and TV shows have iterated the time loop: Russian Doll‘s nested doll approach, Inception‘s infinitely spinning top. Alexander Ullom’s feature debut It Ends subverts those genre expectations at every turn—or rather, at every absence of a turn. Premiering in SXSW 2025’s Narrative Feature Competition, the film might superficially be grouped alongside similar-sounding genre titles like It, It Comes at Night and How It Ends. But as Ullom explained to me, his intentions were both more playful and somber. In a sense, this story about four zoomers who get into a car […]

The post “I’ve Been Trying to Coin the Phrase ‘Hangout Horror’”: Alexander Ullom on SXSW 2025 Premiere It Ends first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival kicks off today in Austin, TX, and below are 19 films that we at Filmmaker are particularly excited about and recommend you check out. It Ends. The title is a promise in 25 New Face Alexander Ullom’s brain-teasing debut feature, premiering as the director is all of 27 years old. Four zoomers get into a car, start driving, but then the road never ends—are they in a horror film, a puzzle, neither, both? Ambitious and often very funny, It Ends will keep you guessing not just about what’s going on, but what kind of […]

The post 19 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

True False Film Festival, nestled in college town Columbia, MO, is a festival for documentarians and people who love documentaries—which is a lot of people in that part of the world, it turns out. Boosting the intellectual substance is a pre-filmfest conference, “Based on a True Story,” at the renowned journalism school at University of Missouri. Rounding out the cultural experience, buskers come from throughout the Midwest to play before shows, and every business with a corner of space turns into an art gallery. And then there’s a Mardi Gras-style party and parade to complete the community atmosphere. It’s an […]

The post Dreams, Memory, Resistance: True/False 2025 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The celebrated period drama Belle marked the arrival of Gugu Mbatha-Raw and since then she hasn’t stopped impressing audiences in films like Motherless Brooklyn, Misbehaviour and series like Doctor Who, Black Mirror (San Junipero episode), Loki, The Morning Show, and Surface, which is now releasing episodes from its second season. On that Apple TV+ series, Gugu plays Sophie, a woman who has lost her recent memories and must piece them together. She talks about the “liberating” feeling she got playing someone with a missing back story and how it forced her to be present. She explains how she utilizes her […]

The post “To Be Able To Play a Flawed, Complex, Messy Woman Who Os Morally Ambiguous …That To Me Is the Juicy Stuff.” Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Back To One, Episode 332 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Because I had loved so deeply,  Because I had loved so long,  God in His great compassion  Gave me the gift of song.  Because I have loved so vainly,  And sung with such faltering breath,  The Master in infinite mercy  Offers the boon of Death. — “Compensation” (1906) by Paul Laurence Dunbar Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) tells dual stories of pairs of lovers (both played by Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks) at the beginning and end of the 20th century. The film is uniquely attuned to deaf culture, American prejudice and two distinct pandemics. Creative in her […]

The post “It Took 31 Years”: Zeinabu irene Davis on Compensation first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Barbie Pig, Gummy Squirrel, Psychedelic Elvis Worm. These are not quirky colloquialisms for party drugs or Trolli candies, but rather taxonomic shorthand for deep sea creatures. For her debut documentary feature, director Eleanor Mortimer boarded a research vessel for an extended two-month expedition in the deep Pacific and encountered these alluring and alien animals firsthand. How Deep Is Your Love chronicles the work undertaken by taxonomists, who are slowly trying to identify the estimated 1.75 million undiscovered ocean species. Already a herculean task, the looming likelihood of rampant commercial deep sea mining—which intends to extract precious minerals like cobalt, nickel […]

The post “The Link Between Exploration and Exploitation”: Eleanor Mortimer on How Deep Is Your Love first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Interweaving home movies, intimate phone calls, previous art school projects and deeply moving footage shot over an intense seven-month timeframe, A Want in Her documents increasing tumult within the filmmaker’s immediate family. The documentary may be the feature debut of moving-image artist Myrid Carten, but the inclusion of charming mini-DV footage shot by the director in her youth proves that, in many ways, she’s been a personal storyteller her whole life. (Even if the early ‘00s footage is more interested in parodying America’s Next Top Model than capturing the cracks already materializing in her family’s foundation). The film opens by […]

The post “I Put 30 Years of My Life Into 80 Minutes”: Myrid Carten on Her True/False Documentary, A Want in Her first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The forthcoming edition of the annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series, taking place this year at Film at Lincoln Center, will be the 30th anniversary of the series. The lineup this year includes two underrated films from last year’s Cannes, Patricia Mazuy’s Visiting Hours and the late Sophie Fillières’ final film, This Life of Mine. Watch the trailer above for the series, which will take place from March 6 to 16.

The post Trailer Watch: Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Following its premiere in Venice’s 2019 Biennale College Cinema section and North American launch at Sundance 2020, Lemohang Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection became a noteworthy arthouse success, scoring wide international distribution and eventually gaining a place in the Criterion Collection. Now six years later, Mosese has premiered his follow-up feature Ancestral Visions of the Future, shifting to a poetic, hybrid documentary form while retaining his previous work’s expressive tempo and eye-searingly colourful outdoor cinematography.  Whilst Burial was concerned with the maintenance of longterm dynastic communities in Lesotho, the landlocked country of his birth fully enclosed […]

The post “I Feel Like the World is Literally on Fire”: Lemohang Mosese on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Ancestral Visions of the Future first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.