“Sometimes I’m watching what I’ve shot and I’m like, ‘I could have never written that dialogue.’ People are really good actors in documentary,” said Montreal-based filmmaker Jean-François Lesage about making his doc, A Summer Love. Lesage and four other filmmakers with work screening at the 2015 RIDM Film Festival sat down with The Independent’s Patrick Pearce to talk elements of film style.
Upon the digital restoration and US release of Jane B. by Agnès V. and Kung-Fu Master! the ever-iconic Agnès Varda tells The Independent: “A lot of people love my films but I don’t know if they are commercial. That’s why I always say, ‘I don’t have a career, I just made films.’ I am marginal and I am happy to be marginal because I’m very well known in these marginal circles of cinephiles.”
Director Radu Jude talks to The Independent about how his latest, Aferim!, may seem Shakespearian but actually uses language discovered in archival literary texts and other documents. And if you’re wondering where he’s headed next, it’s into an adaptation of work by novelist Max Blecher, sometimes called Romania’s Kafka.
Films by directors Barbara Kopple, Kristina Sorge, Douglas Sloan, Kent Jones, Jason Hutt, Marc Levin, Stephen Maing, Jimmy Goldblum, and Amy Berg are Kurt Brokaw’s critic’s picks from DOC NYC, the all-documentary festival that runs from November 12-19, 2015.
ITVFest’s executive director Philip Gilpin thinks the peaceful Vermont location adds an invaluable dimension to the festival focused on Internet entertainment. Plus, he said that when execs are shocked by the line-up because “what they’re seeing is better than what they are watching most nights on TV. A lot of these projects are screen ready.”
“The whole process from rehearsing to shooting was really fascinating, enjoyable, challenging and difficult,” Chevalier actor, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, told The Independent at NYFF 2015. They rehearsed on location and brought their own ideas on character and improvisation. “I had a feeling that everything could change at any moment and that added a lot to film,” he said.
“Yes, it’s a portrait,” explains Laszlo Nemes about his debut feature Son of Saul. “It’s a very reduced scope of an image and it actually corresponds to the limitations of a human being: you see very little, you know very little in a concentration camp. And the human experience, with hindsight, is different but the people who were there knew much less. I wanted to convey how limited we could be in this kind of situation.”
In 2001, Athina Rachel Tsangari graced our cover. Fourteen years later, Dana Knight sat down with Tsangari, NYFF’s 2015 Filmmaker In Residence, at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Learn why men ask: “We’re not like that and who are you, a woman, judging us in this way?” about Tsangari’s latest film, Chevalier.
Remember 2008’s spectacular doc-based-on-a-book Man On Wire? Now it’s fictionalized as The Walk and Kurt Brokaw LOVED it. Find out what else our senior critic adored at this year’s New York Film Festival, running September 25-October 11, 2015.