New Cinema cofounder (and Hollywood screenwriter) Becky Johnston recently described her little-seen featurette Sleepless Nights as “an East Village reinvention of the Otto Preminger movie Laura” that plays “fast and loose with the noir detective genre.” The film was screened at MoMA along with a short discussion between Johnston and Maripol on the making of the film and it's lasting cultural almost 40 years later. photographs by Annabel Graham
Goldbricks In Bloom, a new film by Danny Sangra, is a social satire that explores what it means to be an artist today by interweaving the story of a self-obsessed group of disenchanted young creatives with the mythic rise and fall of a New York painter. It stars Zosia Mamet, Jake Hoffman, Leo Fitzpatrick, Waris Ahluwalia and more. Today, the film is available on demand and there will be limited screenings in Los Angeles.
All that glitters is not gold, but Actually Huizenga's latest film, Heavenly Sin, is one shimmery, heart-art beast. Culture roles and fairytales intertwine for an experience that is lush, queasy and magical. Welcome to a world of arranged marriages, robbed sexuality, strange decadence, polluted religion and what happens when the fable has gone to seed. Heavenly Sin is an otherworldly document boasting the wholly unique thumbprint of Actually Huizenga, one of the most striking artists to have emerged in the arthouse & pop-rock arena in a very long time.
Maïwenn is little known in the United States, but in France, she has made an indelible mark on the world of cinema. Most Americans remember her as the seductive, singing alien, Diva Plavalaguna, in Luc Besson’s cult classic, The Fifth Element. However, her future acting and directing endeavors have indisputably eclipsed this small role she played as a teenager. Her acting career started at a very young age, when she moved to Los Angeles and became a child actor. As a director, she has a remarkably intuitive gift for creating masterful scenes that are powder kegs of emotion – with the fuse often lit during the first frame of the movie. The pacing, the chemistry and the fluidity – there is a preternatural authenticity. Over the past ten years she has directed four feature films and one short. Her most recent films Polisse (2011) and Mon Roi (2016) – the latter of which will be released next week in theaters – have won her critical acclaim and a multitude of highly coveted nominations. These accolades include, but are not limited to, the Palme d’Or, the César for best film, best director, and best screenplay. Her film Polisse won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Click here to read more.
Rene was quite proud to have been cast as a dope dealer in Jake Hoffman’s film “Asthma." The moment he got the script he had plenty of ideas on how to tweak the language to turn his character even more real. This was a world he knew only too well. As far as outfits go, he had already thought it all out, so when the stylists came to the apartment he pulled out a gold embroidered cashmere jacket, mixed it with his usual black jeans, a little Hermes neck scarf, a black t-shirt and wore what he called his money shoes: loafers with big gold embroidered dollar signs. It was perfect. He knew how to look fabulous with just a few things. It was agreed on the spot that he had nailed it. The only thing missing was the bling. "A dope dealer has to have bling," he said., so he went about gathering as much bling as he could. The flashy look was important. "Did you ever see a proper dealer without bling?” he insisted. On the day of the shoot he called me a number of times, "You have to come down to the set. It’s so much fun, such nice people." When I got there, a loft in SoHo, Rene was having such a ball, flashing his jewels, showing the white convertible Rolls Royce with red leather seats parked on the sidewalk, telling funny stories and making the actors and crew laugh. And then there were the toy guns, which of course he had to play with, so Jake got to be "arrested" by Rene. Text and photographs by Rita Barros. Rene Ricard was an art critic, poet, artist and legend in New York. He wrote the first major article on Jean-Michel Basquiat, entitled "The Radiant Child." Shortly before his passing in 2014, Ricard played an extravagantly over-the-top drug dealer named Juan in Jake Hoffman's directorial debut Asthma, which is available to watch on Netflix and Amazon. This Saturday, July 23, 2016 would have been Ricard's 70th birthday.
Jan Švankmajer is making his final film, 'Insects'. To help raise funds for 'Insects', Jan is offering a premium rental of his classic 'Little Otik'. You can also watch 'Little Otik' for free by using the promo code LITTLEOTIK or by clicking here. If you want to contribute more to 'Insects', back the film on Indiegogo. A dark and comical deconstruction of our society based on an old Czech folktale, Little Otik is a story of a young couple desperate to have a baby. After a visit to a doctor that deems the classic methods of procreation impossible, the despairing protagonists switch focus to a child-resembling tree stump found in the garden. The monstrosity comes to life and its insatiable appetite gradually increases to the point where porridge and breast milk just won't do.
Watching one of Galen Pehrson’s films, like his most recent, The Caged Pillows, starring the likes of Jena Malone and James Franco, is like stepping into a psychedelic cartoon where you can’t help feeling a tinge of déjà vu – you’re not sure if it was a dream, a childhood memory, or an omen. It’s as though a mixture of real life memories and old movie scenes were plucked from your brain and rearranged into a brilliant new narrative. They’re the renderings of a world that most of us have inhabited for all our lives, but for Galen, who spent the first 12 years of his life in rural Nevada City, without access to cable TV or any other means of consuming pop culture, this world can be seen from a slightly outside perspective. Click here to read more.
"I’m making The Misandrists with limited resources because I feel it’s important to push my work forward as a filmmaker regardless of budgetary constraints or the prior censorship that certain kinds of more conventional financing may entail. Working with modest budgets has always allowed me the freedom to make challenging and provocative films that would otherwise be very difficult or impossible to finance. The film itself is about characters with radical leftists beliefs that question authority and the dominant ideology, so it seems very fitting that we are asking for broad-based, community support for the movie, a project to which everyone can feel they have contributed and had a part in making." Click here to learn more.
Inspired by the Los Angeles riots, a power hungry nine-year-old tries his hand at filmmaking.
Nina Ljeti is prolific. She is a writer, filmmaker, actress, and musician. Just a few of her many projects include: starring in films directed by and alongside James Franco; co-writing and co-directing the feature length film Memoria with Vladmir de Fontenay (which is out in theaters now); performing in her band, Nani; and shooting a biopic about Jerry Garcia. She has the creative output young artists have wet dreams about. But Nina Ljeti is prolific in another sense of the word. She is the daughter of Bosnian immigrants (who came to Canada at the start of the Bosnian Revolution) and a high school punk stoner; a film buff who loves Titanic and Coppola alike. Her richness isn't just in practice; it's in spirit and history as well. We got to ask Ljeti about memory, filmmaking, ghosts, and getting to play Patti Smith. Read it here.
Eat Me is a short film by Remy (yes, granddaughter of Tony) Bennett and Broadly writer Anna del Gaizo as part of their recent installation at the SPRING/BREAK art show. The film and subsequent installation are not without themes: desensitization, violence, anonymity, and social isolation among them. But Bennett, who gained indie film notoriety for her Lynchian romance ‘Buttercup Bill’ has been a horror obsessive her entire life, and really just wanted to make a gruesome and gory film. She found her story when she learned of her high school friend del Gaizo’s real life exploits in being a web cam girl. Del Gaizo gets to fictionalize her own experience in her performance in the film, and Bennett gets to create the horror scenario that she has dreamed of since childhood. Click here to read more.
Click here to read the interview.
Girls Going Wild is a short film directed by Yulia Zinshtein in Miami during Art Basel. For those of us that grew up on early reality TV - shows like The Real World and Road Rules, which were usually punctuated by late-night infomercials for Girls Gone Wild – this portrait of young adults looking for the ultimate party in Miami is at once familiar, but all too honest and a sad and strange reflection of our times. Zinshtein says, "Girls Going Wild is about searching for the best party. This video aims to show how awkward that search can be...and that the very process becomes the best party you could ever find." Click here to read our short interview with Yulia Zinshtein.
This month marks the 22nd anniversary of the great poet of the street Charles Bukowski's death. To mark this occasion, Autre exclusively presents the premiere of Nana, a short film by Nana Ghana that brings to life Bukowski's poem Nana from his 1978 novel Women. The book focuses on the constant carousel of women with whom Henri Chinaski, an alter ego of Bukowski's, only finds temporary fulfillment.
Julieta is an upcoming 2016 Spanish film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar based on stories by Alice Munro. The film stars Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte, who play older and younger versions of the film's protagonist, Julieta. The film marks Almodóvar's 20th feature film. It will be released on 8 April 2016 in Spain; international dates are to follow.
Dana Boulos is the talented director behind a new short film, entitled Cam Girl, that Autre has premiered exclusively online. Written by Jesy Odio, Cam Girl explores the vague border between our private lives and our proposed private lives. With the rise of adult webcam sites, where people can disrobe for a select viewing public in exchange for tips, Cam Girl is a prescient look at a humanity’s bifurcated persona; the erotic online persona and the persona of the girl who calls you up to tell you she just got her period, or the girl who calls you up to hang out. Cam Girl also reconnoiters our need to constantly communicate and digitally catalogue our lives. Autre caught up with Dana Boulos at home in Hollywood to ask a few questions about her inspirations, her love of film, her involvement in Petra Collins' all girl art collective Ardorous, and CAM GIRL, which can be viewed here. Click here to read the full interview and see more photos by Kevin Hayeland.
Click here to listen to 10 of Ennio Morricone's most notable film scores.
CAMGIRL explores what goes on in front of a computer screen and how it differs from what goes on in our bedroom IRL. The way we type with strangers online is not exactly the same way we talk with our friends when we go out. Navy, although alone in her bedroom never takes a break from being in touch with others, and neither do we. With constant digital cataloging does it really matter who we are online? CAMGIRL is directed by Dana Boulos and written by Jesy Odio, with Karina Fontes starring as CAMGIRL, and director of photography Obe Augard. Click here to read our interview with Dana Boulos.
Adan Jodorowsky and Xavi Polycarpe release a smoky new music video for the track "Heartbeat" off their upcoming album. Click here to preorder.
