The poster for Sanctuary features a blonde Margaret Qualley whispering to a mysterious Christopher Abbott. Its imagery — a seeming femme fatale, an unknowing male prey and all the imagined chaos in between — evokes the height of the cinematic erotic thriller era. But the strength, elegance and wit of Micah Bloomberg’s (TV series Homecoming) script and Zachary Wigon’s (The Heart Machine) direction is their interest in subverting your (and the characters’s) expectations at every step. In Sanctuary, Abbott plays Hal, a hotel mogul’s son and heir. He has ordered a fancy meal to a decadently opulent hotel suite where […]

It’s 9:00 PM on a Friday night about two weeks back (could have been three, but who keeps time anymore?) when I found myself turning off the TV after two films and sitting at my desk. My brain couldn’t focus on another movie, and I felt inspired — wanting to get some writing done. Normally, I’d put on a coat and pop across the street to The Roost, my coffee/wine spot in New York’s East Village for late night writing. Alas… here we are. I realized how difficult it can be to “switch modes” when we can’t switch spaces. Whether […]

Ever so often you’ll have a film at Sundance that hits at the right time, place and with the right crowd — so that you feel the theater buzz. The last moment of the film, before it cuts to black, rings out over silence (aside from the sniffling of a handful audience members.) For me this year that film was Nine Days on Monday night at the Eccles theater. A feature debut from director Edson Oda, the expansive piece is equal parts grounded sci-fi, drama and a delicate exploration of emotion and existence. Let’s just say you don’t want to […]

Genre filmmaking is arguably one of the most exciting and provocative sectors of cinema right now, with fresh perspectives and elevated messaging challenging the screen and its audiences. Case in point: Jennifer Reeder’s new feature, Knives and Skin. The filmmaker, who has crafted a number of successful short films over the past few years, has a bold aesthetic and isn’t afraid to put complex characters — especially young women — in bizarre and provoking situations. “I love seeing so many women not just like reclaiming, but claiming,” says Reeder about women in horror. Women have often been the subject of so many […]

It’s not until you approach a genre of film from a new perspective, and as filmmaker Emma Tammi puts it, flip “the camera 180 degrees,” that you see how one-sided that genre’s films have been. In her narrative feature debut The Wind, out now in theaters, Tammi brings a unique point-of-view to the 1800s American frontier story and all of its psychological terrors. Combining well-crafted scares with the complexity of Teresa Sutherland’s script, the film takes us on a journey of solitude, loss and the demons that can be dredged up in the Wild West. Lizzy (a wonderful Caitlin Gerard), […]

Saturday night at the 16th annual Oxford Film Festival was prom—not an actual prom, but a sweet sixteen-themed awards ceremony complete with fried chicken and sangria, hosts in ballgowns and an electricity in the air where you felt the nostalgia of your own teenage dance. If you grew up in the south, like I did, your prom may not have felt anywhere as progressive as this one, and it wasn’t until I was standing in the packed auditorium of the awards that I realized I had mostly seen LGBTQ, minority-focused and movies with a female gaze at the festival, which […]

You’re making another short? Why not just make your first feature? You’re already making your feature? Maybe you should make some shorts first. Oh, you’re making a feature? Good luck funding it; good luck casting it; you should be sure it’s genius before embarking on that next three years of your life…. If you suffer from these neuroses-inducing comments, as well as doubts around stamina, sustainability and creativity, you might be a first-time feature filmmaker. Anyone who’s making movies, or trying to, knows there are mountains worth of judgements, opinions and advice that come with the craft. I’ve found a […]

With the epic nature of the #MeToo movement and the independent film community’s goals to program female voices (at Sundance 41% of features and episodic had a woman director, while 52% of shorts did) one would think there’d be progress within the larger film community. But Caryn Coleman, who runs the Future of Film is Female fund and MoMA screening series reminds us, there’s still a need for activism. The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s 4% Challenge shows that there hasn’t been any dramatic changes in the representation of women directors. From 2007-2018, just 4% of the directors of the 1,200 top […]

Of the 250 top-grossing films in 2017, women comprised only 16% of all editors. That makes Debbie Berman, co-editor of Black Panther, a glowing exception. And not only has Berman had a successful career spanning work in her homeland of South Africa, Canada and now LA, she’s made a name for herself in the Marvel sphere. Last year, she co-edited Spider-Man: Homecoming, this year, the ground-breaking Black Panther alongside Michael Shawver (Fruitvale Station) and has the Brie Larson-led Captain Marvel out this year. Filmmaker had a chance to ask Berman some questions about her impressive career and her knack for […]

“I’m just not interested in polite entertainment. I’m just not interested in pleasing the most number of people by checking of a bunch of boxes and being, frankly, highly, highly attuned to some concept of cultural correctness.” Director Karyn Kusama sat down with Filmmaker in New York City ahead of the release of her latest crime thriller Destroyer, written by Kusama’s husband Phil Hay and writing partner Matt Mandfredi. When asked about how we can build audiences for genre and indie films, she was passionate about the importance of carving one’s own path as both a creator and as an […]

Reed Morano has had quite the year. She took home an Emmy this time last year for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for The Handmaid’s Tale. She started working alongside Blake Lively and Paramount Pictures on The Rhythm Section and her second directorial feature, I Think We’re Alone Now, premiered at Sundance, and then in theaters this month. And then a few days after we interviewed her, it was announced that she inked an overall deal with Amazon Studios. Morano’s work, from her start as a DP to her rise as a director, maintains a visual excellency and attention […]

“I will do everything you do.” Filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream) dubs that his motto, his ethos, while on set. And when you watch his simultaneously epic and beautifully specific film We the Animals, it will come as no surprise that Zagar created for his collaborators such a collaborative, safe space for taking risks. Premiering at Sundance Film Festival this year where it won the NEXT Innovator award, it’s the first narrative feature for Zagar. His documentarian’s eye combined with his ability to draw vulnerable and vibrant performances from his cast creates sparkling portrait of three young boys discovering […]

“I think women drill down and they’re not afraid of emotion,” says cinematographer Joan Churchill about females working behind the camera in film. Joined by other lauded DPs Ashley Connor (The Miseducation of Cameron Post), Agnès Godard (35 Shots of Rum) and Natasha Braier (Neon Demon) on a panel as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s The Female Gaze series, the women discussed the breadth of their work. Running currently through August 9th at the Walter Reade Theater in New York City, the series shines light on incredible cinematographers throughout the decades, all of whom are women. Some […]

It was the closing night of the Overlook Film Festival and everyone was gathered at a mansion on the outskirts of town. I was coming out of the bathroom, spooked, because A24 had planted some Hereditary sound effects next to the toilet. Jesus. The film, which comes out today, had closed the festival earlier that night and had left everyone on edge — deliciously so. I grabbed a glass of wine, discussing the experience with a stranger who was leaning against a wall outside next to some friends. Why do we put ourselves through all this? There was a number […]

“Americans love the story of saving people,” filmmaker Stephanie Wang-Breal (Wo ai ni mommy, Tough Love) tells us when discussing her film Blowin’ Up, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Set within the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court, the documentary explores the lives of various women involved with sex work and prostitution, dropping its audience into this complex subject matter and wasting no time explaining what’s going on or introducing its characters. Wang-Breal wants you to feel as emotionally connected to the subjects’ circumstances as possible. Many of them live in the unknown, fearing arrest and/or deportation each […]

Are We Not Cats, Xander Robin’s nearly unclassifiable debut feature — let’s call it a mashup of downtrodden NYC romantic slacker drama and fantastic body horror — premiered at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, made the festival rounds and is now out on streaming platforms via Cleopatra Films. What makes it particularly worth a watch is Robin’s sure storytelling voice and ability to navigate multiple genres in a single picture. It’s also got a plot twist tied to an extraordinary fetish, one you haven’t seen onscreen before: trichophagia. For those of you to lazy to look that up, that’s eating […]

What is producing? I ask myself this question a lot, and the title on my business card literally reads “Producer.” I’m staff at a rad women-run studio in Brooklyn while also producing my own films as well as a handful of others. I say all this to reiterate just how amorphous the craft of producing can be. Because of its fluidity, it can also be a challenge to learn how to be better at it. Plus, producers rarely get interviewed in the industry articles that offer insights into filmmaking process. When they are featured, producing technique can be difficult to […]

Margaret may be one of the best movies you’ve never seen. It’s the second film from writer/director Kenneth Lonergan, whose first, You Can Count On Me, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2000, and third, Manchester by the Sea garnered two Academy Awards for Lead Actor and Original Screenplay. But Margaret suffered a different journey, shooting in 2005 and being released much later in 2011 for a very limited run — and a cut 36 minutes shorter than the one Lonergan preferred. As part of its series, “The Way I See It: Directors’ Cuts,” the Quad in New […]

A24 is having a good year. Again. After last year ushering Moonlight to Oscar gold, they are now poised to do the same with Lady Bird, Good Time, The Disaster Artist and The Florida Project. If they were distributing Call Me By Your Name, they’d have a monopoly on hip films of the season. Indeed, the distributor has a knack for creating pop-culture phenomenon out of independent films that might have been buried by other distributors. I’ve really been enjoying the “Lady Bird for President” posters and seeing pink hair trending. But what happens to the films in their packed […]

Sante Fe has archeological sites that date back 13,000 years. As we drove to my hotel from the Albuquerque airport, almost an hour-long trek at midnight, my driver told me about the history of the city, rooted in Native American culture, that I had no idea dated that far back. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain supposedly said. After spending a weekend at the Sante Fe Independent Film Festival, the thought felt applicable — the lineup of films demonstrated the cynical nature of oppression, struggle and minority battles that indeed continue in familiar patterns. Set on […]