Over the course of his four feature films, Robert Eggers has gained a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with meticulous period accuracy. After listening to Jarin Blaschke talk about moon size as a mathematical equation, it’s easy to see why Eggers has enjoyed working with the equally meticulous cinematographer for almost two decades. “I’m kind of a stickler about how big a moon is when a CG moon is in frame,” said Blaschke. “It needs to be 1/80th the width of the screen, because the moon is a half a degree wide and our lens takes in 40 degrees. So, […]

The post “1.66 Just Felt Good”: DP Jarin Blaschke on Nosferatu first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The title of Christine Haroutounian’s first feature, After Dreaming, suggests a waking state, but the whole film hangs in a region where the divide between facts and hallucinations is never entirely clear. A follow-up to her 2020 short World—a cantankerous, Armenian-set study of end-of-life caretaking centered on a young woman and her dying mother—Dreaming sees the Los Angeles-born filmmaker return to her ancestral turf for a surreal road trip across a country still haunted by ongoing clashes with neighboring Azerbaijan.  Dreaming, however, “is not a war film,” Haroutounian told me before her feature travelled to Berlin, where it premiered in […]

The post “Genocide Brain”: Christine Haroutounian on Berlinale 2025 Premiere After Dreaming first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Billy Shebar’s Monk in Pieces stars Meredith Monk, an artist so singular as to be unclassifiable. (A collage of Zoom-interviewed academics who expound on the titular composer-singer-director-choreographer – and creator of new opera, music theater works, films and installations – is like watching proverbial blind men describing an elephant.) A progenitor of what we now call “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk began her career in the downtown NYC art scene of the ’60s and ’70s — a time and place not all that kind to female boundary busters. (Indeed, New York Times reviews ranged from scathing to the […]

The post “Meredith Understood That I Needed the Freedom to Create My Own Interpretation of Her Work and Life”: Billy Shebar on his Berlinale-Premiering Meredith Monk Doc, Monk in Pieces first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Lucy Boynton is known for delivering exceptional performances in films like Sing Street, Bohemian Rhapsody, Chevalier, and The Greatest Hits. Her latest is the BritBox’s limited series A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, about a woman convicted of killing her abusive lover who then became the last woman to be hanged in the UK. On this episode, she talks about why the challenge she faced portraying Ellis “wasn’t an actor issue,” but more about facing the traumas women are still dealing with decades later. She ponders how acting as a child served her into adulthood, explains why over-direction is […]

The post “I Want Everyone to be Jarred by It…Especially the Men on Set”: Lucy Boynton, Back To One, Episode 331 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A row of men sit proudly on horses as a white flag drifts languidly in the wind. The beating sun lights the crowd, who applaud dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s ascent to power in 1954, and with it, the promise of “peace, progress and fraternity.” Time slows down as an ominous atmosphere envelopes this scene, foreshadowing what the future holds for Paraguay. Juanjo Pereira’s debut feature film, Under the Flags, the Sun, is a profound exploration of Stroessner’s dictatorship almost entirely made with archival footage, the film crafts a portrait of the open wounds of the 34-year dictatorship. The film premieres tonight […]

The post “The Film is Not a Resistance Film”: Juanjo Pereira on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Under the Flags, the Sun first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Liryc Dela Cruz’s Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte) takes the simplest of storylines and renders it infinitely complex. Three Filipino siblings, all domestic workers in Italy who’ve not seen each other for years, reunite at an extravagant villa the elder sister inherited after the death of her longtime employer. They reminisce about childhood over Filipino delicacies the younger sister and brother have brought, and stroll the vast grounds that the new owner meticulously preserves as if she were still a servant and not the lady of the house. But as the languorous day draws to a close […]

The post “It Carries the Weight of Improvisation but Also Inevitability”: Liryc Dela Cruz on his Berlinale-premiering Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Rounding, the new film from Alex Thompson, who directed Saint Frances and, with 25 New Face partner Kelly O’Sullivan, Ghostlight, is in theaters today from Doppelgänger Releasing. Below, Thompson discusses five of the cinematic influences upon his darkly anxious hospital-set thriller.  To say that Rounding is an experiment is an understatement. Borne in the backyard in Kentucky during the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rounding was an attempt take the same team and ethos that made Saint Frances and apply it to a different genre and specificity. These are five films that influenced us along the way. Bunny Lake […]

The post Five Films that Influenced Alex Thompson’s Hospital Thriller, Rounding first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Famously and by historical design, the International Film Festival Rotterdam is over-programmed. This is both exciting—look at the number of people exploring cinema’s possibilities against all financial odds!—and counter-productive: many of these movies will surely be mediocre or worse and, even for the most well-informed viewer, largely unknown quantities, so what to prioritize? Flying directly from Salt Lake City to the Netherlands, I couldn’t shake Sundance’s ghost; much of what I watched in IFFR’s first half came from known-to-me American pockets. But I wanted to attend the fest’s entire duration to also do some more far-fetched guesswork viewing while waiting […]

The post IFFR 2025: Bright Futures (and Others) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Driving around Montreal on a gray November day with Universal Language writer-director Matthew Rankin, production designer Louisa Schabas noticed an elementary school with a row of stark, monolithic concrete walls facing the playground. The slabs were at an angle, allowing for a series of black metal doors to open into the yard. “This is perfect for the market,” she said. With some painted signs indicating a random assortment of mom-and-pop shops, including a bakery and an office supply store, Shabas would later transform the building facade into a ramshackle Winnipeg mini-mall, with the striking anomaly that all of the signage […]

The post “We Couldn’t Find that Exact Beige — It Was a Real Struggle”: Production Designer Louisa Schabas on Designing Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and what better way to celebrate than a romance-themed new song from Bon Iver with a video by…John Wilson? The eponymous How To with John Wilson creator, director and star returns with a music video for Bon Iver’s forthcoming comeback album, SABLE, fABLE. In a press release, musician Justin Vernon states that “I knew what kind of record I wanted to make the day we made ‘Everything Is Peaceful Love.’ I always knew that would be the feeling I wanted to share first. I wanted the video to just be people smiling uncontainably. Luckily, Eric Timothy Carlson suggested […]

The post Watch: John Wilson’s Video for Bon Iver’s “Everything is Peaceful Love” first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.