“Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up. The topic Sora could talk about forever and to which we devote the last few minutes of our allotted time is music, a connection that long predates his first feature-length foray into fiction. An eclectic audiovisual artist, Sora’s a member of […]

The post “I Really Wanted to Push Back Against This Illusion of Japanese-ness”: Neo Sora on Happyend first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]

The post “I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

His breakout role in Netflix’s Outer Banks catapulted Chase Stokes to fame. In the series, he portrays the charismatic and determined John B, the leader of a group of young outcasts on a treasure hunt in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The show’s blend of adventure, mystery, and coming-of-age drama quickly gained a massive fanbase, establishing Stokes as a rising star. Since then he’s been in Tell Me Your Secrets, this year’s The Uglies, opposite Joey King, and next year’s Valiant One, not to mention Season 4 of Outer Banks, which is dropping in October. On this episode, he […]

The post “You Just Have to Learn to Adapt”: Chase Stokes, Back To One, Episode 310 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The largest genre film festival in North America, Montréal’s ever-growing Fantasia International Film Festival celebrated its 28th edition this summer. This was my seventh year covering for Filmmaker, my ninth in attendance and I arrived with a severe case of FOMO: at an industry party last year, I met a man dressed head-to-toe in a gigantic beaver costume, allegedly to promote a feature he had at the festival. He was charming, so I told him I’d make an effort to see Hundreds of Beavers, but a part of me, taken aback by the man’s zany attire and commitment to self-promotion, knew […]

The post Shudder Speed: Fantasia International Film Festival 2024 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]

The post “The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

High-concept movie formula makers will have a field day with Zach Clark’s The Becomers. Is its tender, yet often violent, saga of star-crossed – and serial human body inhabiting – lovers a hybrid of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (whose lead character is played by eight different actors) or an Invasion of the Body Snatchers updated for an N95-masked America? Or … something else? Clark’s first film since his widely beloved Little Sister (2016) wasn’t one he had in the pipeline. The New York-based writer-director-editor had put a heroic effort into launching a project on […]

The post Make a $100,000 Genre Movie in 12 Days in Chicago: Writer/Director Zach Clark on The Becomers first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

If you’re considering a career in film or television, it’s important to understand that there are many different roles in the field, so there are lots of opportunities where your interests and skills can be a good fit. Perhaps you enjoy directing others to perform a certain way. Maybe you’re a wordsmith who wants to pursue work in scriptwriting. Or you might like to design animated characters.

 Full Sail University offers many different areas of study that could lead to careers in the realm of film and television. While they focus on different aspects, all of Full Sail’s courses are […]

The post Film & Television Areas of Study at Full Sail University (Sponsored Post) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

After the sudden death of her best friend and roommate Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin), Anna (Grace Glowicki) starts to act strange. At first, her odd behavior seems easily attributable to intense grief, but soon she begins to recognize physical abnormalities she can’t quite explain. Granted, she was bitten by her and Izzy’s fluffy, inky-black cat (the eponymous Booger) just before he fled via the fire escape. But Anna begins to suffer from far more than just cat-scratch fever and a gnarly hand wound: coarse, dark hairs begin to sprout, her movements become increasingly delicate yet uncanny, and could that actually be […]

The post “Made by Five People Who Love Cats”: Mary Dauterman on Booger first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Matt and Mara presents a familiar premise—two old friends with an unresolved romantic connection reconnect years after their lives have diverged—but Canadian writer-director Kazik Radwanski turns this potentially contrived narrative into an organic examination of interpersonal dynamics that’s tailored to the strengths of his performers and longtime creative collaborators Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson. When Matt (Johnson) grabs the attention of creative writing professor Mara (Campbell) right before she’s about to start class, it’s clear both are looking to break out of their ruts. Mara is out of sync with her musician husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami) amidst the daily […]

The post “I Always Write for Places Where They Won’t Kick Me Out”: Kazik Radwanski on Matt and Mara first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

I was trying to make sense of my notes on Happyend when I noticed him. Arms akimbo, left hand drumming his gun holster, the cop was patrolling the press room looking equal parts annoyed, bored, and baleful. I glanced away; when I looked up again, another colleague had joined him in inspecting the crowd of journalists typing at their laptops like exam invigilators. For a festival as militarized as Venice, the sight might not be front-page news: Ever since my first trip in 2014, the security corps deployed across the Lido have grown almost exponentially, reaching near-Orwellian levels in 2020, […]

The post  Venice Film Festival 2024: Before the Revolution first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.