Filmmaker Magazine
- Karlovy Vary 2025: Promising Young Men and Women July 16, 2025“There are so many promising debut features, then all those filmmakers go on to be jury members.” A new acquaintance was lamenting the dearth of directors under 40 with distinct styles and durable careers; I laughed, but it was a fair synopsis of a grim landscape. Per Wallace Stevens, the imagination may always be at […]Vadim Rizov
- “We Created the Film to Address How Journalism Was Perpetuating Anti-Trans Bias”: Sam Feder on Heightened Scrutiny July 16, 2025As someone who started calling myself “bigendered” decades ago, trans visibility has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s a relief to no longer have to explain being nonbinary to puzzled and often dubious cisgender folks (gay and straight alike). On the other hand, it’s infuriating to watch as one’s […]Lauren Wissot
- “If Every Art is Sacred, That Means the Act of Making Art is Itself a Sacred Thing”: David Malinsky, Back To One, Episode 350 July 15, 2025For the 350th episode of Back To One, I sat down with an actor who brings me great joy when he’s on the screen, the one and only David Malinsky. He wrote the blurb himself for this episode. It follows: Peter has only met David three times in person before. His filmography includes Onur Tukel’s […]Peter Rinaldi
- “The Film Remains a Mystery to Me — Why is That?”: Nicholas Rombes on the Timecodes Series and Walking with Gus Van Sant’s Gerry July 11, 2025As the pandemic rumbled on, in early ’22, and with my annual winter sojourn to the Sundance Film Festival cancelled, I took an online course in boredom. With so many customary diversions having been put on hold, I had reason to be bored, I suppose, but in taking the course I was more interested in […]Scott Macaulay
- Palestinians in Purgatory: Mahdi Fleifel on To A Land Unknown July 10, 2025Midway through To A Land Unknown, Palestinian-Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s narrative feature debut, Palestinian cousins stranded in Athens—sharp Chatila (Mahmood Bakri), his wife and kid back in Lebanon’s camps, and sensitive Reda (Aram Sabbah), working hard to rein in his drug addiction—find themselves wanting to help Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan new to […]Ritesh Mehta
- “A Medieval Period Piece for Under $200,000”: Caroline Golum on FIDMarseille 2025 Premiere Revelations of Divine Love, Prayer and Process July 9, 2025Since watching Revelations of Divine Love—which is making its world premiere at FIDMarseille today—I’ve found myself thinking about its construction, restraint, devotion to form and alarming sincerity. Brimming with the mystery of manifestation, it is a work of sheer will, equal parts spiritual inquiry and cinematic lament. Masterfully lensed by cinematographer Gabe Elder, the light […]Sofia Bohdanowicz
- 25 Years After the “Battle of Seattle,” The Same Tactics Are Seen in LA July 8, 2025We’re the filmmaking team behind the new documentary, WTO/99, a film that examines—purely through archival footage—four days of protests in Seattle during 1999 against the World Trade Organization (WTO). We’ve spent over two years living in the footage of the largest US demonstrations since the Vietnam War captured by protesters on the ground, the Seattle […]Ian Bell, Alex Megaro and Laura Tatham
- “It was Physicalizing the Words That Became the Goal”: Erik Jensen, Back To One, Episode 349 July 8, 2025Erik Jensen is a multipyphenate who, along with his wife and creative partner Jessica Blank have been called “the foremost practitioners of documentary theater in the U.S.” Their genre-defining plays The Exonerated, Aftermath, Coal Country, and The Line were all critically acclaimed. As an actor, Jensen’s credits include The Walking Dead, Mindhunter, Mr. Robot, The […]Peter Rinaldi
- Cinema without Adjectives: Rita Azevedo Gomes on Fuck the Polis July 7, 2025In Rita Azevedo Gomes’ cinematic universe, a characteristic blend of literary adaptation and cinematic innovation creates simultaneously concrete and oneiric landscapes—places where the wandering subject, camera, plot and spectator become absorbed by the unknown, yet strangely familiar, territory before them. With Fuck the Polis, her most bold and daring film to date, the Portuguese filmmaker […]Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal
- “I Had Never Filmed Near the Front Before”: Dmytro Hreshko on Karlovy Vary-Premiering Ukrainian War Documentary Divia July 7, 2025At a time when observation remains the dominant approach among contemporary Ukrainian documentarians and it feels as though every subject suited to a distanced gaze has already been explored, in Divia Dmytro Hreshko approaches nature during wartime with radical, dialogue-free minimalism. Originally from Uzhhorod, a city on the Slovakian border, Hreshko has celebrated Ukraine’s landscape […]Sonya Vseliubska
