Interviews
"The script is very spare. I guess that would be the resonance with my poetry. There is not a lot of dialogue, of course. The lines are short lines. It is only 60 pages. I wrote more than what ended up being in the final script. I embrace brevity."
I wanted to make a film about this town, but I wanted to make it about what I have learned as a white person, the organizing I did in the 1960s, and the prejudice I have witnessed. There’s a kind of emptiness in the film.
Something that I struggle with continually in the process of the artist bio, or how to make my work legible to the public, is, do I really have to keep putting that I’m an undocumented immigrant and that it informs my film practice? Is it possible to just say I’m a filmmaker?
This is not a film that was meant for competition or anything. It is a very personal film. It was shot during COVID and very conditioned by that period; you could almost say that it was shot with a kind of wartime economy.
Her dense sound mix and editing patterns prioritize the exploration of space over the conveyance of narrative information. That interpretive freedom takes root even amid a cornucopia of symbolically charged motifs.
At once repugnant and entrancing, it turns the body into the ultimate frontier, an alien landscape teeming with surreal visions, less a decaying vessel than an undiscovered planet.
Beau Is Afraid is inherently contradictory: confident, muscular cinema about emotional atrophy and living with profound insecurity. I sat down with Ari in a bustling East Village cafe, where, over the sounds of clanging coffee filters and hissing steamers, we discussed his latest film, beloved inspirations, and the terror of putting things out in the world.
It was like being back in art school, back to an earlier day in filmmaking where I was just like, “I’ll do this pan because how much am I going to screw it up?” It was just very freeing in making those shorts. I really loved it.
Lynn is a female character that we rarely see: however beautiful, she is uncharismatic, taciturn, and professionally unambitious. In Stonewalling, her decision to sell her eggs on the black market (for the equivalent of 2800 U.S. dollars) leads to the discovery that she is one-month pregnant.
I like to think of the camera as something that helps me capture things I would not normally see. So when I see filmmakers watching their own images on the combo in real time, as they shoot, I cannot help but think of it as a tautology. Because they are assimilating the potentiality of the human eye.
There is this weird sense of grief for someone who is still alive, technically, but you also understand that you can live through opposite things at the same moment. Grief and sadness. Rebirth and happiness. All at the same time.
2nd Chance presents another story from the annals of capitalist pathology, but this time, what we see is almost too wild to be true. Entrepreneur and inventor Richard Davis has had the distinction of shooting himself more than 100 times.
I wanted to show footage that felt brand new, that required a real watching and seeing and thinking and evaluating of what is in front of you. If you are gonna make a film about 1968, it better be something reevaluative.
Her film and live performance Terra Femme tries to identify the female gaze... By weaving together archival amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, Stephens gives us insight as to what they attempted to capture along their journeys.