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“We Wanted To Show a Teacher with All His Weaknesses, Who Doesn’t Know Everything, Who Sometimes Makes Big Mistakes…”: Laurent Cantet on The Class
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French director Laurent Cantet, whose films include Human Resources, Heading South, The Workshop and his Palme d'Or-winning The Class, died today at the age of 63. With this sad news we are reposting Brandon Harris's interview with Cantet about The Class from our Spring, 2008 print edition. — Editor Starting with 1999’s Human Resources, Laurent Cantet has quickly built an international reputation as France’s most socially engaged narrative filmmaker, crafting films that highlight the ever lingering issues of race and class in both France and, as in the case of his 2006 film Heading South, its former colony of Haiti. With his new film, The Class, Cantet has attained new levels of acclaim and is primed to reach significant worldwide audiences with… Read more
A Film To Read: Matiás Piñeiro, Tomas Paula Marques and Gabi Saidón on You Burn Me
You Burn Me
New York-based Argentinian director Matiás Piñeiro’s work is without a doubt, a celebration of intertextuality. After continuously exploring the female roles in Shakespeare’s comedies from 2011's Rosalinda up until 2020's Isabella, he was drawn to a text which seemed impenetrable, admitting he had no clue how to film a poetic dialogue. In order to collect the shots for the adaptation-film-collage that would become You Burn Me, the filmmaker traveled between New York and San Sebastian (where he teaches at the EQZE film school, Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola), which gave him the possibility to “develop the material, watch it and think through themes in search of new ones” before he went back to Buenos Aires to shoot in the main actress’s garden.… Read more
“I’m Writing This Because I Want To See This Movie”: Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes on Writing Challengers
Challengers (©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection)
On the surface, Challengers is about a single tennis match between former friends turned rivals Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). But as it flashes back and forth in time to show how their relationships with tennis champion turned coach Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) led them to this competition, it becomes much more than a typical sports drama. Challengers intelligently and entertainingly deals with issues of communication, aging, and how the pursuit of excellence can saddle one with both limitations and opportunities for transcendence. It also does all that while providing the thrills of watching “some good fucking tennis,” to quote Zendaya’s character. Challengers shares this multifaceted quality with its screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes. He has worked successfully in across… Read more
Visions du Réel 2024: The American Way and Other Options
The Dells
Having living abroad for 19 years, music critic Philip Sherburne recently described the culture shock of returning home and trying to navigate an American supermarket: “the self-checkout machine accuses me of stealing and runs back video of me while calling for an employee to come intervene. Every time you turn around, it seems like a corporation is trying to screw you out of yet more money via another hidden fee. It’s no wonder Americans seem pissed off all the time. It’s a fundamentally hostile environment.” For me, some of the fun of attending Visions du Réel, a Swiss festival focused on art-leaning nonfiction, is getting to temporarily cease thinking about parochial American nastiness and instead contemplate the EU's troubles—movies regarding… Read more
“With a Documentary, It’s More Difficult to Find Humor”: Martín Rejtman on Riders
Riders
A decade ago, I interviewed Argentinian filmmaker Martín Rejtman for an hour, walking through the general scope of his career before discussing his then-most-recent feature, Two Shots Fired, which may help flesh out the parts of this interview relating to his first feature, Rapado. Rejtman's new film, Riders, is only his second documentary. As I wrote in my dispatch on Visions du Réel 2024, where the film premiered, Riders kicks off in May 2020, with extended global lockdown fatigue ramping up; after an opening rally of delivery drivers protesting their horrible conditions (“It is inadmissable to normalize the bodies of our comrades lying in the streets”), Rejtman (who I also interviewed about the film) presents a series of locked-off nighttime shots… Read more
“Seeing an Actor Experiencing the Limits of Transcendence is More Interesting than Pretending” Ryan Czerwonko, Back To One, Episode 288
(Photo: Matt Street)
As a working actor, Ryan Czerwonko’s credits include The Endgame, Chicago Med, Chicago Fire, Cherry, Paint, and Watchmen, to name a few. He’s also the artistic director of Adult Film, an exciting Brooklyn theater and film group where he acts, directs, and teaches. His latest project is a year-long exploration of Chekhov’s Sea Gull that will culminate in a limited engagement in Manhattan in May and a documentary on the whole process. On this episode, he explains why Chekhov is so important to him and what he set out to do with this ambitious endeavor. He gives us a deep dive into his very specific preparation process and takes us through the various techniques and approaches he has collected and… Read more
“It’s Not about the Days of the Dead, It’s About the Dead in my Family”: Lourdes Portillo on The Devil Never Sleeps
The Devil Never Sleeps
The following interview with filmmaker Lourdes Portillo by Bérénice Reynaud was originally published in our Spring, 1995 print issue, and it is being reposted today alongside the sad news that Portillo has passed away at the age of 80. — Editor "We’ve been told forever that films should be objective, but we knew that was not going to get us anywhere, because if you don’t have a point of view, you don’t have anything," comments Lourdes Portillo on her approach to Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the 1986 film she co-directed with Susana Munoz. Nearly ten years later, the San Francisco-based filmmaker still holds the same opinion in regard to her latest work, The Devil Never Sleeps. Portillo’s new… Read more
Trailer Watch: 25 New Face Filmmaker John Rosman’s New Life
New Life
Newly released is the first trailer for the thriller, New Life, the directing debut of Emmy-award-winning journalist John Rosman. Rosman was one of Filmmaker's 2023 25 New Faces, selected on the basis of this film, which Erik Luers described thusly: "A tale of two women—one being chased, the other a fixer doing the chasing—New Life is a pandemic-era horror film that rewards its audience with gory twists and a surprisingly heartfelt center." One of the film's two lead characters faces ALS, a subject Rosman covered for PBS while a journalist. Of the journey of his Fantasia-premiering film's characters, Rosman said, "One is facing an apocalypse, and the other is facing a personal apocalypse. One person is OK and affects everyone else around… Read more
