Authors — Filmmaker Staff
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Exclusive Clip: A Sibling Showdown in Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
Filmmaker is thrilled to share an exclusive clip of Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), which releases today in New York City via Oscilloscope. The debut feature from Bronx-bred filmmaker Joel Alfonso Vargas—who appeared on our 25 New Faces of Film list in 2024 on the strength of the short film version of the project—takes place during a sweltering summer in the borough, capturing the texture of daily live for its residence with a documentary-adjacent approach. Vargas cast local actors and shot guerilla-style all over the neighborhood, completing approximately 100 scenes in just 16 days. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 17, 2026 -
Northern Exposure: Chandler Levack and Sophy Romvari Chat Mile End Kicks and Blue Heron
Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron make time travel feel possible. Levack retreats into the beer-drenched, laissez-faire vibe of Montreal’s indie rock scene circa 2011; Romvari reflects on her Hungarian immigrant family’s domestic struggles on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. In Mile End Kicks (Sumerian Pictures), 23-year-old Grace (Barbie Ferreira) is an avatar for Levack, a music critic at a Toronto alt-weekly who leaves her bro-dominated publication for a creative summer in Montreal. She’s supposed to write a short book for the 33 ⅓ series about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Instead, Grace loses herself […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 16, 2026 -
Magic Mirror: Guy Maddin Interviews Caroline Golum on Revelations of Divine Love
Revelations of Divine Love, filmmaker Caroline Golum’s 14th century-set chamber piece, recounts the legacy of Julian of Norwich through impressively homespun props, costumes, and miniatures. After a mid-life bout of illness, Norwich (Tessa Strain) was rapt with feverish visions that depicted the crucifixion of Christ. After three long days, she awoke with a newfound devotion to the Catholic church. Julian vowed to spend the rest of her life entombed in a single room, where she could commit herself to the Lord and her book, Revelations of Divine Love, often regarded as the first English-language text written by a woman. Ahead […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 13, 2026 -
Facing the Music: David Lowery and Chloé Zhao Dig Into Mother Mary
David Lowery and Chloé Zhao have been friends and collaborators since January 2012, when they met as fellows in the annual Sundance Screenwriters Lab. In the years since, both directors have found artistic and commercial success. Much as Zhao has alternated between Nomadland and Hamnet on one hand and The Eternals on the other, Lowery has given us deeply personal films like The Green Knight as well as mainstream fare like Peter Pan & Wendy. In fact, it’s the delta between those two approaches to filmmaking, and the identity questions that arose while switching between them, that inspired his latest […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 1, 2026 -
Guy Maddin and David C. Roberts Discuss “Song of My City,” City Symphonies and the “Vivisection” of Cinema
Steam pouring from manhole covers, the neon-lights of 42nd street seen through rain-streaked taxicab windows, phalanxes of cops spied from tenement rooftops as they sweep a city block — David C. Roberts’s Song of My City distills the visual rushes of a score of 1970s and early ’80s New York City-set film classics into a 15-minute city symphony of sorts. Drawing inspiration from 1920s pictures such as Walter Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Roberts has pulled shots from Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Across 110th Street, The Warriors in order to capture not just ’70s New York but the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 8, 2026 -
On Eisenstein, Godard and Welles: Michael Almereyda & Radu Jude in Conversation
This past summer I was privileged to attend the Oxbelly Retreat in Costa Navarino, Greece, and to sit in on an intimate discussion between directors Michael Almereyda (Hamlet, Experimenter, Tesla), and Radu Jude (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25, Dracula). While heading Oxbelly’s screenwriting labs this year, Jude interviewed Almereyda about his influences, which Almereyda distilled to a set of paintings and photographs. In their conversation, a mutual love of the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard was expressed, and I was eager to read them expand on these passions […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 22, 2025 -
The Music Guides the Way: Oliver Laxe and Gaspar Noé Discuss “Sirāt”
When Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt premiered at Cannes this year, it caught both those familiar with his work as well as new viewers off guard; that the film takes an unexpected turn in its second half is only part of its disorienting effect. Where his first three, score-free features defaulted to the quiet and contemplative, Sirāt is nearly an action movie and accordingly nerve-wracking, increasingly suspenseful and—thanks in large part to Kangding Ray’s excellent electronic score—sometimes so deafeningly loud that it’s been known to literally make projection booths shake. With a larger budget and longer schedule than Laxe has had before, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 22, 2025 -
Small Talk is Optional: Jim Jarmusch and Amalia Ulman Discuss “Father Mother Sister Brother”
Across his 45-year career, independent auteur Jim Jarmusch has continually returned to a particular type of film in which feature-length narrative is broken into a series of short, discrete episodes united by place (Mystery Train), time (Night on Earth) or activity (Coffee and Cigarettes). Through their internal correspondences and connections, and perhaps because of their fractured nature, these films, liberated from traditional three-act structure, produce sly epiphanies and unexpected pleasures. Jarmusch’s attraction to filmic miniatures continues with Father Mother Sister Brother, in which the connective tissue is, yes, the family. (In a clever bit of calendaring by MUBI, the film […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 22, 2025 -
On “Filmmaker”‘s First Decade: A Dialogue Between Scott Macaulay, Karol Martesko-Fenster and Holly Willis
Curious as to what it would say, I recently asked ChatGPT for a history of Filmmaker. It returned a biography that incorrectly listed one of our longest-running occasional contributors as a founder, which made me realize how very little of Filmmaker’s origin story is online, available to be scraped by LLMs. To put some of that history officially on the record, and to salute my original co-founding partners, I sat down via Zoom with founding publisher Karol Martesko-Fenster and founding west coast editor Holly Willis to discuss our earliest days, before the internet succeeded in fully disrupting the arts publishing […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 22, 2025 -
Sundance Redford Founder Tribute to Honor Ed Harris, Gyula Gazdag at 2026 Festival
The nonprofit Sundance Institute today announced in a press release details for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s annual fundraiser, Celebrating Sundance Institute: A Tribute to Founder Robert Redford, taking place on Friday, January 23, 2026, at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley in Utah. From the press release: The evening will honor Sundance Institute’s Founder, Robert Redford — his legacy, vision, and enduring mission to support independent storytellers. In paying tribute this year, the inaugural Robert Redford Luminary Award will be established and presented to Ed Harris and Gyula Gazdag, two artists deeply dedicated to the Sundance Institute labs and committed […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 12, 2025
