Filmmaker Magazine
- “I Made Sure My Presence and Camerawork Reflected the Difficult Position They Were Put In”: DP Amy Bench on Shooting The Librarians February 11, 2025With a style influenced by her work with documentary director Albert Maysles as well as shadowing DP Emmanuel Lubezki on The Tree of Life, Amy Bench wanted her work on Kim Snyder’s Sundance-premiering doc The Librarians, about a group of Texas librarians fighting censorship, “to shoot in the way that showed audiences the urgency, alarm, […]Filmmaker Staff
- “The Final Film Often Grows From a Process of Letting Go of Preconceived Ideas…” Editor Stephania Dulowski on Bunnylovr February 11, 2025In Katarina Zhu’s Sundance Competition debut, Bunnylovr, a New York City-based Chinese American cam girl (played by the writer/director) navigates a number of fraught personal relationships (her ex, terminally ill father, artist best friend and one boundary-pushing client) while also caring for a white rabbit, a gift from said client. Working with Zhu to hone […]Filmmaker Staff
- “Only Four Weeks for Prep — Including Casting — and 16 Days to Shoot the Entire Film”: Paolo Maria Pedullà on Producing Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) February 10, 2025Director Joel Alfonso Vargas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2024 on the basis of his short film, Mad Bills to Pay, which is now a debut feature selected for both the 2025 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. “A shoestring-budget production” realized by a “minimal team,” Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que […]Filmmaker Staff
- Considerations: The Gascón Press Tour February 7, 2025Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. In October, I told (warned?) a publicist friend that it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw some old-fashioned, Weinstein- and Rudin-style opposition campaigning this Oscar season. Back then, the prominent […]Tyler Coates
- Nine Years of Storytelling: Seth and Pete Scriver on Endless Cookie February 6, 2025Sundance is capable of showing some fairly excruciating and/or formulaic comedy, but one alternative this year was the shaggy DIY delight of Endless Cookie. Tucked away in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, this Canadian animation from half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver (who are white and indigenous, respectively) daisy-chains stories about their family history, from the […]Nicolas Rapold
- “Being Clean with the Words Gave Me More Freedom than Anything”: Margo Martindale, Back To One, Episode 329 February 4, 2025In movies like Million Dollar Baby, August: Osage County, Blow The Man Down, and series like The Americans, Justified, and Sneaky Pete, “esteemed character actress Margo Martindale” loves to play people much different from herself. And she’s been so good at it for so long that she only started to get truly recognized for her […]Peter Rinaldi
- “…How To Put Myself in a Situation Where the Outside Pain Helps Me Reach the Inside Pain…”: Stefan Djordjevic on His IFFR-Premiering Wind, Talk to Me February 2, 2025German philosopher Ernst Bloch was noted for his introspection and study around what he termed the “utopian imagination.” He put forth the concept of simultaneous non-simultaneity: the possibility that people could live in different temporalities while inhabiting the same place at the same time. Moving image work, by its very nature, can illustrate this idea […]Pamela Cohn
- Atropia, Seeds Win Top Prizes at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival January 31, 2025Hailey Gates’s war-training satire Atropia won today the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, about Black farmers in Georgia and their relationship to both the land and U.S. agricultural policy, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. In the international categories, the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: […]Scott Macaulay
- “Compassion Should Rule the Day, Not Punishment”: Director Cole Webley on His Sundance-Premiering Drama, Omaha January 31, 2025A family of four—an unnamed Dad (John Magaro), his children Ella and Charlie (Molly Belle Wright and Wyatt Solis), and their Golden Retriever—hit the road at the start of Omaha, towards Nebraska. We don’t get to know too much about them at first—just that they have an old car that needs a little push, and […]Tomris Laffly
- Clandestine Sexual Development in China: Making 1 Girl Infinite January 31, 2025One night in the summer of 2022, I received a text message from a producer to whom I had sent the script for 1 Girl Infinite, hoping she might help me make the film. Her message read: “I love the script. But I won’t be able to do it because it’s dangerous.” I was not […]Lilly Hu