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“I’m Constantly Creating Things and Questioning If the World Even Needs More Movies”: Pete Ohs on His Slamdance-Premiering Love and Work
Love and Work
Pete Ohs, a 2013 Filmmaker 25 New Face, describes his Slamdance-premiering comedy/drama Love and Work as "a film about an imaginary past as a way to figure out where we went wrong in the present." A minimalist, slightly absurdist romantic comedy, the picture represents both a continuation of the pared-down production model Ohs described to Filmmaker upon the release of his previous Jethica as well as a dramatic departure. Instead of the Jethica's lo-fi naturalism, Ohs here goes for a clipped rhythms and a more deadpan affect as his two potential workmate lovers who meet in a shoe factory navigate a world where work itself is prohibited. And while various arguments from the left to the right over the past… Read more
“…The Last Summer Before You Leave Home”: Megan Park on Teenage Life, Working with Margot Robbie’s Lucky Chap, and Her Sundance Dramedy, My Old Ass
My Old Ass
After her feature directorial debut The Fallout (2021), a film about a high-school shooting, Megan Park was feeling the weight of its emotional aftermath. “When you make a movie, you live in that world for years,” she tells Filmmaker at Sundance Film Festival. “I wanted an escape, and I wanted to be nostalgic.” So she went back home to Canada and started thinking about what became the genesis of My Old Ass, a bittersweet coming-of-age comedy, and, gradually, a reflective tearjerker that left Sundance audiences sobbing. “It was this idea of the last time your whole family sleeps under one roof, before one person moves away and starts a new season of life. And if you could go back and… Read more
Sundance 2024: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Nocturnes
Nocturnes, courtesy of Sundance Institute.
Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s first feature, 1997’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, intertwined news footage of plane hijackings with voiceover readings of passages from Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Mao II—he’s no stranger to rendering sweeping diagnoses within unorthodox historical frameworks. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat re-examines the assassination of Patrice Lumumba; the Soundtrack portion of the title points to the film’s other main strand, the political roles of American jazz musicians during the period, ranging from unwittingly complicit—Louis Armstrong performed a show in the Congo unaware that he was providing cover for CIA actions—to actively dissident, with the film bookended by vocalist Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach crashing the UN to protest Lumumba’s murder. A rich swath of different genres of… Read more
Sundance 2024: A Different Man, Realm of Satan
Adam Pearson and Aaron Schimber on the set of A Different Man (Photo by Matt Infante, courtesy of A24 Films)
There’s a story about a Soviet commissar who, upon seeing Solaris, proved that he both completely understood the movie and didn’t understand it at all by indignantly demanding to know what the point is of humanity going from one end of the universe to the other if they bring all their emotional shit with them. That’s not far from the moral of Aaron Schimberg’s third feature A Different Man, the story of a man who gets radical plastic surgery only to find out he still has to live with himself. Containing elements of Seconds (plastic surgery with unintended consequences) and The Tenant (the terrors of isolated apartment living), A Different Man stars Sebastian Stan — in the film's first half… Read more
“Is There a Difference Between Theater Improv and Doing a Psychic Reading?”: Lana Wilson On Her Sundance-Premiering Look Into My Eyes
Look Into My Eyes
It was 2016, the day after the presidential election, when filmmaker Lana Wilson (Miss Americana, After Tiller, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields) was filming an omnibus film about the election night in Atlantic City, NJ. To her, the night was like living in a horror movie. It was when she was waiting for her ride back to New York that she noticed a sign that said, $5 Psychic Readings. “I was feeling depressed, sad, confused and really frightened of the future,” Wilson tells Filmmaker recently, before the Sundance premiere of her latest film, Look Into My Eyes. “Without even thinking, I just walked in.” Until then, Wilson had never been to a psychic before. But the session she had in her most… Read more
