In Cutting Through Rocks, directors Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki follow Iranian councilwoman Sarah Shahverdi, who teaches girls to ride motorcycles and uses her position to try to end child marriages. Cutting Through Rocks screens as part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition. Eyni and Khaki, besides directing, also served as the film’s editors. Below, they explain their method for editing in parallel and how they combed through 200 hours of footage. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were […]

The post “We Were the First Audience for Our Editing Work”: Editors Sara Khaki & Mohammadreza Eyni on Cutting Through Rocks first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Heightened Scrutiny documents ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as he fights of transgender rights in the courtroom, as well as the battles waged outside the courtroom by those advocating for their rights. The film is director Sam Feder’s follow-up to 2020’s Disclosure and screens as part of the Sundance Premieres section. Emelie Mahdavian, whose previous credits include Midnight Traveler and Singing in the Wilderness, served as the film’s editor. Below, Mahdavian talks about the challenges of editing a film whose story is unfolding outside the editing room in real time. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind […]

The post “The Story was Unfolding in Real Time”: Editor Emelie Mahdavian on Heightened Scrutiny first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Amber Fares’s Sundance-premiering Coexistence, My Ass! takes its fabulous title from a one-woman show of the same name, a piece developed (at Harvard of all places) by the doc’s star, “activist-comedian” Noam Shuster Eliassi. The daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and a Romanian Jewish father, Shuster Eliassi grew up in “Oasis of Peace” (Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam), a utopian community purposely comprised equally of Jews and Palestinians, where she would become “the literal poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process” and eventually a co-director of the UN’s Interpeace organization by the time she was in her early 20s. But then […]

The post “It Was More Pointedly a Satirical Look at …’The Peace-Building Industry’”: Amber Fares on her Sundance-Premiering Coexistence, My Ass! first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Is it even possible for something designed as entertainment to be a public service?” Predators cinematographer-editor-director David Osit asks this question of ethnographer Mark de Rond about NBC TV show To Catch a Predator and its successors, but it also applies to this project’s of-the-moment anxieties about nonfiction practice. Documentaries seem to have entered a phase of self-reflexive fretting about their own impact; I think one reason No Other Land has become so popular is because it explicitly states this, having its subjects worry about their Facebook click rates and wonder out loud whether the film they’re making can possibly […]

The post Sundance 2024: Predators, André is an Idiot, Marlee Matlin: I’m Not Alone first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? It would be hard to narrow it down to only one moment or day, as Mad Bills was a journey unlike any other. That we got through it was anything short of impressive considering the ambition of our story and our limited time and resources, however much a testament to the skill of the […]

The post “For the First Time, I Could See the Film in Front of Me” | Joel Alfonso Vargas, Mad Bills to Pay first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Director Cooper Raiff returns to Sundance after his prize-winning Cha Cha Real Smooth with the episodic series Hal & Harper, about a pair of codependent siblings and their father. The first four episodes of Hal & Harper will screen as part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Episodics section. Besides directing, Raiff also served as editor on the series. Below, he talks about his approach to editing as a writer-director and why editing the series transformed his understanding of its characters. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your series? What were the factors and attributes that led […]

The post “Connect Images in the Edit Based on an Analysis of Characters”: Editor Cooper Raiff on Hal & Harper first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Hal & Harper charts the development two codependent siblings with a lifetime of inside jokes and their father. The series is directed by Cooper Raiff (Cha Cha Real Smooth), who plays Hal; Lili Reinhart; and Mark Ruffalo. The first four episodes of Hal & Harper will screen as part of Sundance’s Episodics sidebar. Doug Emmett (The Edge of Seventeen, Sorry to Bother You) the series’ cinematographer, describes the show’s naturalistic and raw feel below. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors […]

The post “Something That Felt Unadorned and a Bit Raw”: DP Doug Emmett on Hal & Harper first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? The most memorable day was the day Mark, Lili, Betty, the whole crew—especially the camera operators—and I started laughing and couldn’t stop during a random scene. In the scene my character, Hal, tells everyone he got a job at J. Crew and they all are like “okay,” “interesting decision,” “why?” etc. And it just […]

The post “We Just Kept Bursting Out Laughing” | Cooper Raiff, Hal & Harper first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In Seeds, her feature debut, Brittany Shyne explores the generational legacy of Black farmers in the American south via observational vignettes shot in stunning black and white. Acting as director, producer and cinematographer, Shyne developed authentic connections with the film’s oft-elderly subjects, and she cites the passing of several of these participants as “the most difficult days” of production.  Below, Shyne elaborates on the decision to shoot solo, the visual artists she looked to for inspiration and her natural approach to lighting. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being […]

The post “A One-person Crew”: DP Brittany Shyne on Seeds first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Half-brothers Seth and Peter Scriver investigate their differing identities in Endless Cookie, an “animated hangout film” that chronicles their lives from 1980s Toronto to present-day remote Shamattawa. Peter’s Indigeneity and Seth’s whiteness are contrasted and contextualized, yet their fraternal bond is never scrutinized. Editor Sydney Cowper discusses cutting the project, shedding insight on the film’s lengthy production, how piano lessons helped shape her craft and the “truly validating” feeling of signing onto this project.  See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the […]

The post “This Experience Really Drives Home the Idea of What a Passion Project Really Is”: Editor Sydney Cowper on Endless Cookie first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.