Cristóbal León (b. 1980) and Joaquín Cociña (b. 1980) are Chilean visual artists and filmmakers best known for their 2018 film The Wolf House (aka La Casa Lobo), one of the best and most haunting animated films of the 21st century. Since then, the two have created numerous short films, features, and music videos that have extended beyond animation: The Bones (2021) draws on the early cinema of Georges Méliès, The Hyperboreans (2024) is a highly meta film featuring puppetry, and their newest feature, the playful Donkey Princess (2026), is inspired by the music videos they loved as teenagers, from artists like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Chris Cunningham. Donkey Princess premiered at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, and Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with León and Cociña shortly before its premiere on August 4th, 2026 via Zoom. They discussed formative childhood experiences, their love for early cinema and amateurism, and how MTV inspired Donkey Princess.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know both of you met at university when you were making your first short film, Lucía (2007). I’m curious how you two became interested in art. Were there any formative experiences you had in your childhood with music or film or visual art?

Joaquín Cociña: We were both born in 1980 in the middle of a dictatorship. In my case, it didn’t affect me directly, at least in the sense that nobody in my family was murdered, but my father and mother are left wing so it wasn’t the easiest time for them. My first nine years were a happy nine years, but it was a little grey given this context. My first political memories are of going to a manifestación [protest], and this is because 1988 was a turning point—there were elections to get rid of the dictatorship.

Cristóbal León: I think Joshua was asking about artistic experiences.

Joaquín Cociña: I know, but I wanted to start by saying this.

Cristóbal León: Ah, so you see Pinochet as an artist (laughter). For me, my family spent a lot of time working with their hands. My father would always paint or draw or build wooden furniture. He’d carve sculptures. My older brother was seven years older than me and he was my role model. I wanted to imitate everything he was doing, and he was drawing all the time. During my childhood and teenage years, I read a lot of comics. I was mostly reading Chilean comics—there was this Tintin-esque comic I loved called Mampato and Ogú, and it was an early aesthetic experience that really blew my mind. I remember thinking it was so intense and that I needed more of it.

When I was a teenager, I was reading US comics—I was into the darker stuff like Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Swamp Thing, The Sandman. I’m still a fan of Neil Gaiman and the whole Sandman series. It was a lot harder to get comics back then; there were only two comic book stores in Santiago, and Santiago’s a big city. I would get anything and read it. My family was not particularly artistic in the sense of belonging to the art world. Joaquín’s father, though, is a poet who is part of Chile’s literary world, but I didn’t have any connection to these scenes. I was drawing and making crafts, though, and this was always part of my environment.

Joaquín Cociña: My father was a poet and, in the 1980s, the avant-garde poetry and avant-garde visual arts scenes were really connected. Less so in the 1990s, but it was still there. Because of this, I had some idea of visual arts and poetry, and I wanted to be a poet and a painter when I was a teenager. I became a painter when I was 14 or 15, and it sounds ridiculous, but I was painting more then than I do now. I was painting with acrylic paints and making expressionist paintings of my girlfriend naked—the sort of things that painters do when they’re 80 years old (laughter).

So I already felt like an artist before I went to art school. Art school hit me in the opposite way—for two years I was really confused, though my brain eventually got organized. Before that, literature was a huge thing for me. It’s funny because when I was a kid, the process of learning to read and write was difficult because I was immature, but everything changed when I became a teenager. I was reading Henry Miller novels, Baudelaire, Bukowski. I was really into the real-life diary thing. Simone de Beauvoir. Later I discovered Marcel Proust, and it was a huge thing for me. I remember taking my time to read through the seven books [of In Search of Lost Time] because I knew it’d end at some point. He was so funny.

In the 1980s, the local production of art was really low because of the dictatorship, and the country wasn’t really open to the world. The 1990s is when everything came in from the United States: cartoons and comic books and records. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of hours watching cartoons on TV. It was a lot of Japanese anime, as well as some North American stuff. Also as a teenager, I started going to these two specific cinemas in Santiago, one of which is still around. I was just in love with David Lynch, Bergman, Tarkovsky. I became an arty film guy. I think our new movie, Donkey Princess (2026), is about our connection to music videos and cinema from those years.

Was there a point at which you made the decision to be an artist?

Joaquín Cociña: I spent the last two years of high school just waiting for that shit to be over (laughter). I knew I just wanted to go to art school, and I knew that it’d be my life. I’d like to think that if I were young now, I’d just quit school and pursue art, but at the time it seemed impossible, like you’d die if you tried that.

Cristóbal León: I knew that my life had to be about art when I was a teenager, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I didn’t have connections with galleries, I didn’t know anyone who studied art, and my parents never took me to museums. I didn’t have any references for how to do this—it was so abstract and obscure. Architecture was the closest thing I had in my life. I ended up studying design and while doing this, I discovered the art school that was on the same campus. I ended up studying the two things at the same time. When I finished, I started working at an animation studio that focused on motion graphics. That was when I really decided to do this. There was something inside of me that needed to be out in the world. I knew I couldn’t have a boss, that this couldn’t be my life, and I knew if I didn’t do this that I would die. I applied for a scholarship to study in Europe.

Joaquín Cociña: This was around the time we started working together. You were really energetic about it. This reminds me of a story, and I’m sorry because it’s a little bit personal, but I remember that my father took me to a gallery in Santiago. This was in a rich area of the city. There was this small art show of Francis Bacon’s works. It was mostly prints but there were one or two paintings. I was a teenager then, and I remember getting a really strong erection. We went back in the car with my father and my hands were shaking—I was really impacted by it. So yeah, I felt it’d be important to have more erections like that in my life.

Erections?

Joaquín Cociña: Yes, erections. Like my penis (laughter). It was a funny afternoon.

Do you guys remember the first—

Joaquín Cociña: Erection? (laughter).

The first impression that you guys had of each other when you met in the late 2000s.

Joaquín Cociña: Well, it wasn’t what I just said (laughter).

Cristóbal León: We kind of knew each other because we had some friends in common. I wouldn’t say that it’s very different from the impression I have now.

Joaquín Cociña: At the time, I was a good example of an art student in the most boring sense. I would swallow whatever visual art was presented to me and I would talk like a visual artist, which in Santiago meant that you’d sound smart but weren’t actually smart (laughter). That’s the sort of guy I was for two years before I worked with Cristóbal, and I remember that he was different—he had a different perspective. He was like a lone rider in the way he thought about art. And that’s why we worked together—it felt fresh. Cristóbal knew more about animation than me. For me, it was like discovering a completely new field. I remember after work one day, I met my girlfriend and told her that I had no fucking clue what we were doing and that it felt great. She saw the first cut of Lucía and said, “Oh, you’re going to be famous.”

Cristóbal León: I knew Joaquín’s work from art school. I saw them at exhibitions and I liked them, and I had this strong intuition that we could make something good together. I don’t know why it didn’t happen with other artists, but I felt a strong connection with his drawings and felt we could do something good. I approached him and asked to make an animation together, and I wasn’t surprised that it worked out well. Joaquín is right, though, that we didn’t know what we were doing. It was very confusing when we were producing the first works—we felt dizzy, like we were inhabiting an abyss. It was a good feeling though, and I sometimes miss it. There was a sense of artistic risk, of being in the wild.

Since you two have been working for a couple decades now, do you feel like there are things that you’re able to bring into your projects that the other person can’t, and vice versa? Are you generally fulfilling different roles, or filling in certain gaps?

Cristóbal León: I don’t feel like I can bring something into this world that Joaquín can’t. Not in any deep sense.

Joaquín Cociña: There’s some technical stuff that Cristóbal can do that I can’t.

Cristóbal León: And the other way around, especially with drawing. But I wouldn’t say it’s essential. Our collaboration is more about the chemistry we have and the way we push boundaries.

Joaquín Cociña: We had an art show in Santiago a few months ago and it featured drawings from our sketchbooks. Most of the drawings were in separate notebooks since we lead these separate lives, and for both of us, our sketchbooks aren’t sacred. Even in that situation, it’s funny that we didn’t sign every single drawing. We’re working on a new project right now called Hansel or Gretel and because of some daily life issues, I made most of the drawings for the storyboard. But that doesn’t mean those drawings are mine—they’re our drawings. And it’s the same when Cristóbal draws stuff too. So it’s not about two artists working together anymore. It’s more like a theater company.

With The Hyperboreans (2024), there was a deliberate decision to not make another full animated feature like The Wolf House (2018). I’m curious how you guys make decisions on, for example, the screenplay or in directing actors or in the puppetry that appears in The Hyperboreans. What does that look like?

Cristóbal León: We talk a lot. We’ll have discussions and, in general, we’ll spend a lot of time just defining things. There will be a set of rules or specific aesthetic visual frames, and then we play within those borders. This is something that’s become increasingly true over the years. We don’t control each other; we invite each other and others to play in this field, letting things happen within the rules we define. It’s more or less like that now. I remember when we started animating The Wolf House, we had this really stupid rule that the two of us had to be present for the animation process, so we couldn’t animate separately. Both of us had to be on set. We quickly removed that rule because we realized that we work much better when we’re not watching each other. In the moment you might think that what the other person is doing is wrong, but then they’ll finish and it’ll turn out even better than you expected. It was a learning process to give people space.

Joaquín Cociña: I don’t feel like negotiating with Cristóbal. If that’s happening, then we’re not on the right path. When Cristóbal comes to me with something I don’t understand, I try to understand it. If I still don’t understand, we just quit the idea. And the same is true the other way around. But generally, we give space to try things. For Donkey Princess, we tried to put a limit on what we could use for the backgrounds because it was getting really confusing. At one point we said that it would only be small-scale stuff, so it could be a drawing or shots of a detail of a garden. And that rule made everything clear. We try to understand the aesthetics of the film in both abstract and concrete ways. And as Cristóbal pointed out, we’re just playing.

Cristóbal León: If I don’t feel like I have this sense of play, whether we’re writing or using After Effects, then I’m not happy with the process.

With Donkey Princess, what were you trying to do to make sure you had this sense of play? This is a really playful film—even the fairy tale framing helps with that. There’s a point in the movie where they go to the video store too and there’s the Ghostbusters (1984) sequence. There’s an obvious love for movies here that feels childlike. What sort of things were you doing concretely on set to make sure it felt like play?

Cristóbal León: We had about five weeks of shooting but a long pre-production and a long post-production. During those pre- and post-production times, we played a lot, experimenting with things—drawings, models, miniatures, animation techniques. The most difficult period to allow for play is the actual shooting. For this film it was the most proper shoot we’ve ever had—50 or 60 people, really organized departments—and that was really difficult for me. The production designer or the art director wouldn’t like that we’d go and make things with our own hands. It’s like you enter this military organization and you’re not allowed to enter the other departments (laughter), and it’s really difficult for me because we’ve made a career of doing everything ourselves.

Joaquín Cociña: And in the wrong way!

Cristóbal León: And then we’re suddenly exiled from these other departments.

Joaquín Cociña: This image just came to mind that might help us with the next shoot. When we’re in pre- or post-production, we can imagine that we’re kids playing soccer or basketball and having fun. And when we’re shooting, it’s like we’re rich spoiled kids, like, (in a whiny, demanding voice) “I need this puppet now!” And then someone comes and you say, “And move that here!” (laughter). But yeah, it’s hard. I agree with Cristóbal because our pre-production design was so strange that the production was really specific—all the technical stuff was really weird. It was really hard to do reverse shots because we had the screen backwards, and instead of moving the camera, you had to move the world we made, all the lights, change the background. And that decision was really strange—it was a pre-production design decision we made, and that changed a lot during shooting. But yeah, we were playing the game we designed.

For The Wolf House you had these workshops that you set up and you wanted to frame the creation of the film in that way. And there were workshops for The Hyperboreans too. How did it compare with this new film and the more typical professional process?

Cristóbal León: We do two things. We open the process up and exhibit that, and then we do workshops with students who are asked to build the scenography. We realized that we’re more interested in processes than the final result. Our first short film is about sculptural and drawing processes, and The Wolf House is also partly a document of the making and destruction of sculptures and paintings. To focus on the process is the most important thing, and the most exaggerated version of that is making an art show about making a film. Ever since we started making short films, we thought that the set we had could be more interesting than the final result. And at some point we really decided to do that—to show it as an art piece. But also, the other benefit I can see is that it provides a sort of relief. If the film doesn’t exist or it’s a very bad film, we at least still had a really good show (laughter). There’s less of a burden that way; maybe the film isn’t going to be significant, but at least there was something.

Joaquín, you mentioned earlier that you were inspired by music videos you watched when you were younger. And you two have made music videos yourselves for artists like PJ Harvey, The Smile, and Camila Moreno. What music videos were you guys drawn to?

Joaquín Cociña: First off, I’ll say it was all of Michel Gondry’s work in the ’90s. Actually, the one world that Diana discovers in the film is maybe too close to Gondry, and we were worried about that but decided to just stick with it. I also liked Spike Jonze. And then Radiohead’s music videos. I remember watching the one for “Paranoid Android” and having no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t really like Radiohead before that—I didn’t like Pablo Honey (1993)—but the animation in that clip was exciting.

Cristóbal León: This was a time when MTV came to Chile, y’know? Everyone had it in their homes in the late ’90s and early 2000s. That interzone between animation and live action and early VFX with people like Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry was very influential to our artistic education. With Gondry, I feel like his music videos are still underrated. Obviously they’re recognized and recognizable but they’re so important and influential. For me, the video for Björk’s “Bachelorette” is a masterpiece. It was so influential for The Hyperboreans and this film. He’s a great artist, and I think the fact he was doing commissions means that he’s not given the attention he deserves; he’s one of the biggest artists of our time.

What do you think you specifically learned from these music videos?

Joaquín Cociña: Gondry is a machine of ideas. He doesn’t really have a style, which is really weird. Most artists have a particular style. They paint with specific colors, they use certain materials. But with Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, it felt like every music video was a new idea. It’s really amazing. And I felt that approach was really similar to Méliès, actually, and other early cinema. I remember watching MTV and thinking that people were transforming the rules of how we watched things, and I felt the same way about the other programming too.

Can you talk to me about your interest in early cinema? It’s really obvious when you watch The Bones (2021), but I’m curious if you could speak to how it specifically impacted Donkey Princess.

Cristóbal León: I’ll start with the most obvious thing, which is that it’s really theatrical. The fact we were shooting with a projected background made everything look more theatrical. When we realized that we’d shoot it in that way, we thought it’d be reminiscent of that era of cinema. Until the end of the film, when we land in the real world, the camera is almost always on a tripod. It’s still.

Joaquín Cociña: During COVID, I was teaching at an art school. I was the teacher for the first year of a workshop, and it was a really confusing time to teach. I invited Niles Atallah, a filmmaker with whom we made the first three short films [Lucía, Nocturno de Chile (2008), and Luis (2008)]. I invited him to teach a class on montage, and he decided to make a presentation on early cinema and montage. The presentation was amazing. At the end of that lecture I thought, I just shouldn’t film anymore (laughter). Like, these guys were making such good stuff a century ago. And there’s something that happens when you have access to this new technique… there are so many ideas and dreams and solutions. Like, the first 3D renders that existed in the 1970s are amazing; all those early animations were great. So for me, what’s really inspiring is what’s happening at the beginning of a turning point. Later, there are standards and people know what they’re doing.

Cristóbal León: Maybe the most important thing about the inspiration we take from these filmmakers is what Joaquín is saying. Film grammar wasn’t really developed yet. We come from the contemporary art world and neither of us studied film, so we don’t actually know the rules. We’re learning them now, sadly (laughter). And we have to invent rules for every film we make. It’s like an alien vision towards cinema. I think it’s something we really love. And we’re doing it now for the new film we’re making, Hansel or Gretel. To create a new grammar for every film is maybe the thing we enjoy most. I think it’s so boring to simply adopt preexisting languages. And in a way, I feel what we’re doing is a bit anticolonial. We’re not making films in Hollywood; we’re digesting these films and giving back something that’s distorted.

Joaquín Cociña: I like a lot of North American productions and cinema. Here in South America, a lot of people in film speak against all that, but it’s not the case for us. Donkey Princess is about North American films; we’re trying to be honest about our film education. Like, I love some European films, but my roots are really in North American films. With that said, I get really tired of watching, for example, Netflix. It feels like I’m watching the same film every time. They all look the same, even the actors look the same. Something I like about mainstream Korean films, for example, is that at least the acting is different—they’re over the top. But yeah, because of our lack of education, we’re trying to play with the rules. There are still some rules that are really strange for me. People would say we would have to do certain things while shooting because it’d be a problem otherwise, but for me it’s like, I don’t care (laughter). I do understand things more now, sadly, as Cristóbal said.

You’re talking about learning things, but I’m curious if there are things you’ve had to unlearn over the course of your careers to make sure you’re still following this ethos.

Joaquín Cociña: We were shooting this film as if we were in the ’40s. We had all these stages set up and it was absurd. When we moved to shooting in the real world and in apartments, it felt so easy. The walls were already there! The art department arrives the day before and everything would be ready. The trees are real so we didn’t have to create that.

Cristóbal León: For the next film, I think we’re going to fight for more of our own standards, both with the artistic side of things and the production side. This guy who used to coach the national football team in Chile used to talk a lot about amateurism. He would praise the amateur quality of players, and I miss that sometimes in the crew, you know? I hate professionals (laughter). I hate to feel that people are just there to do their job. This sounds ridiculous because it is, but making art is sacred and deep and meaningful. I don’t care if people do things wrong, but I don’t like it when people just do their jobs as if it’s another day in the office. It doesn’t affect the final result, but it changes the process.

The next film is called Hansel or Gretel and not Hansel and Gretel?

Joaquín Cociña: Yeah, it’s based on Hansel and Gretel but Cristóbal pointed out that it’d be a Google nightmare to call it that (laughter). I think it’s funny to call it that, and right now the film is about the fluidity of identities, about the confusion of the self. It’s a coming-of-age film.

When I interview multiple artists at the same time, I end my interview with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about the other person?

Cristóbal León: There are many things. Joaquín is like a brother. If I had to say one thing, it’s his connection to drawing and materials in general. It’s something I’m continuously surprised by. There’s something magical about how he can be completely in the present when he’s drawing. It’s really special.

Joaquín Cociña: I’ll say that it’s also hard to choose one thing. I like Cristóbal’s tendency to push the boundaries of what we do. He makes sure that we’re not lazy, that we’re not stuck with one technique or approach. He always wants to try things out, and in our studio it feels like the rule is “let’s try it,” and that’s something that he’s really pushing for. It’s a really experimental approach. And it’s good that he’s a bit of a workaholic because that means there’s always something to do.

Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña’s newest feature film, Donkey Princess, premiered at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. More information about the directors can be found at their website.

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Ana Vaz (b. 1986) is a Brazilian artist whose films and installations explore the complex relationships between environments, territories, and hybrid histories. Over the course of two decades, she’s crafted numerous short films that question documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, prodding at cinema as an art of the invisible. Sacris Pulso (2008) draws on her family’s art and Clarice Lispector’s Brasília, Occidente (2015) explores the hidden colonial histories of Lisbon, There is Land! (2016) draws from Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto, and Apiyemiyekî? (2020) incorporates drawings from the Waimiri-Atroari. Vaz’s newest film is the feature-length Hanabi, a loose adaptation of Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain. Created over 10 years, this film premieres at this year’s edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Ana Vaz on Friday, August 7th via Zoom to discuss ferality and motherhood, the collaborative nature of Hanabi, and how the contained self is the malaise of modernity.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I contacted you about three years ago for an interview, but somebody told me you were on maternity leave.

Ana Vaz: This must have been for It is Night in America (2022). I was pregnant when that film was released, and then I was quite pregnant afterwards and had to lay low for a while (laughter). And now Noa is already 3 and a half.

Given that your first short film, Sacris Pulso (2008), saw you grappling with your relationship to your parents, what reflections have you had since becoming one yourself? [Editor’s Note: Sacris Pulso is rooted in the 1986 experimental short film Brasiliários, which stars Vaz’s mother, Cláudia Pereira, and has a soundtrack by her father, Guilherme Vaz].

This is a great place to start. I’ve been reflecting a lot on this idea of lineage. Lineage is never really a repetition, even though there’s this construction around the idea of repetition. I’m more fond of the idea that every repetition is a form of dissonance, carrying in itself both a form of continuity and rupture, of betrayal. Similarly, the life of a newborn is never just the life of a newborn—it’s the different entanglements that come with life.

The arrival of new life into this world is always wonderfully troubling—it confronts us with the limitations and potentialities of life. In that sense, it was already very complex to have a child, to bear new life in a world where the possibilities of life are becoming increasingly asphyxiated. To bear new life during the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and as other regions are also affected by our world system’s necropolitical dimensions… to care for new life when we feel the hostility, the barbarity, the insistence on violence and destruction… and I’m bearing life in Europe, a continent that has been so heavily involved in the dispossession of lives in some many territories, including my own, which we could better name Pindorama or Abya Yala. All of these layers were there with me. At the same time, there was a furious desire to affirm life, to care for life at large.

Do you think these reflections and experiences have affected how you approach cinema?

There’s something very mysterious about cinema and this idea of transmission. I finished It is Night in America just as Noa was coming into the world, and it’s a very dark film about the impending extinction of life in the region I come from, but it’s also about this search for refuge in the most unthinkable places. It is Night in America has this affirmation of immanence, of affirming a desire to stay in instead of transcend. And ever since Noa was born into this mad, hostile world, that craving has been more affirmed. There’s something feral that comes with maternity, and this is something questioned in society. It’s not a coincidence that women are said to go mad, that women are said to be too instinctual, too furious, but in many ways I think that this is the ferality that allows for the care and affirmation of life.

This ferality also has to do with how I deal with cinema. I desire something that can escape the enclosures of how we are, of how we are to maintain order. So in a very roundabout way, with the arrival of new life there is this new ferality, and a great desire to transmit something of what came before Noa, before us. Then suddenly this timeline extends beyond my immediate parents, too. Guilherme is no longer with us, Cláudia thankfully still is, and through them I learned a lot about honoring what came before us and what will come after. There’s a radical humbling in the whole experience, which is undeniably represented in the way I practice cinema.

Can you expand on how it’s been humbling and how that manifests in the way you make art? What do you notice is different between how you made films prior to Noa’s birth and afterwards?

Time, duration, and fragmentation. I think this is something that any mother can relate to: time becomes fragmented. It’s no longer possible to spend hours on end on one idea. At first there’s a maddening effect of (gasps), “How am I going to reorganize my thinking, my body, my impulses, and my life if interruption is my new reality?” This is the reality of caring for another—you no longer have mastery over your time. There was already fragmentation in my previous films, and it was related to memory and lineages being broken. In post-colonial territories, we know that the erasure of one’s lineage and past is part of the devouring machine of colonialism.

The child also confronts you with the present. And it’s not a denial of the past, but there’s something really of the present—even the future seems really abstract. It’s interesting that for so many Indigenous societies, the future isn’t something that’s necessarily ahead of us. The present is so primordial—everything is kind of there, even the past is there. So I feel like this idea of fragmentation has increased in my way of writing and editing and composing.

There’s also length and duration. I think this is the big change I’ve noticed starting with It is Night in America: the need for time to be enlarged, for time to slow down. We’re in a society that craves novelty, so time is also fragmented—it’s a fragmentation of one’s attention—and editing Hanabi (2026) was a way for me to say, for the hours in which this child is at school, it’s something precious, it’s something to uphold, care for, and sustain—like a note. There’s something very musical with Hanabi, this idea of sustaining a note or frequency for as long as possible. And sleeping. Sleep deprivation is a real thing, and I’ve always edited my films sleeping and dreaming, but even more so now. Editing allows me to dream, to sleep, to drowse. And this is all part of its tapestry.

How do you think your films would be edited differently if you didn’t invite this notion of dreaming and sleeping into your practice? You brought up music, and so many experimental musicians talk about trance-like states in the creation of durational works. How do these things all connect for you, and how did that come into play with Hanabi?

This work is a mad synthesis of them all. I don’t know if I have the distance yet, but it’s what my intuition tells me. It seems very different, but all the obsessions and furies and trance-like states of perception and awareness—it’s all there. When I first learned how to use an analog camera, I realized that because of its limitations and the weight of the equipment on my body, all of it invited me into an entranced state of perception. When I start filming, I’m already kind of editing, and there’s an enlarged mode of attention that’s there.

Hanabi is a 10-year film made from 2016 to 2026, and I was pregnant when I filmed the last rolls in Japan. Because of maternity and the transformation of the world around me, it was an interesting change. For example, I didn’t edit alone. This was a duet between me and Chaghig Arzoumanian, who is a very fine editor with an incredible sense of musicality, time, and rhythm. We spent a few days talking—there were no images, just talking. We were talking about desires, hesitations, the political complexities of the film, the notion of clandestinity, of camouflage, of maternity, of an atomized understanding of the body. It came to a point where she said, “Great, now you can leave.” (laughter). I looked at her and said, “What? I can leave?” “Yes, come back in 10 days.”

Noa at the time was only 6 months old so I needed to pay attention to him. This was the first time that this trust was really reassuring. I left, and when I came back after 10 days, I was astounded by what she pieced together. I looked at her and said, “Chaghig, how could you look inside my mind?” Her answer was very wonderful and sphinx-like. “Don’t you trust your images?” She then said, “Everything you shot was already expressing a clear intention and desire, so I’m just listening to your images.”

She showed me what she edited and it was great, but I felt it was too structured, so I brought some disorder, or an accentuation of rhythms. That’s how we advanced with this complex monster that is Hanabi—it was a tapestry of materials, intuitions, concepts, and ideas that emerged in a polyphonic way. It’s different from my other works—and I think the 10 years were necessary for this tapestry to be made—because more than anything else I’ve done, this was not something I made in any way alone. The other works were made entirely alone, but this one asked for a very particular form of call and response, and that’s why I think the appearance of improvisational music in the film is important. There’s something about the way the film was made that had to do with improvisation—the capacity to listen to another and to respond. And perhaps the response is always partial and incomplete, which means it has to be passed on to further complexify it. That was one of the greatest delights in making this work.

And then of course there were the sonic materials that Nuno Da Luz collected over all these years, and he was so attentive and careful with recording. We also had a kind of duet. I would film and I’d say, “I’m going over there, and I’ll be back.” Synchronicity was never an imperative with Hanabi. We have this word in Portuguese, fareja, when an animal sniffs something out. It’s in the air but you can’t name it, though you sense it from an environment you enter—you can sense that something is expressing itself.

Your older films are made on your own, like you said, but you’re sometimes referencing other artists. With Sacris Pulso you’re interpreting Clarice Lispector, with 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020) you’re calling back to the Wallace Stevens poem, and with this new film you’re adapting Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain. There is a sense of collaboration in this way. What was it like to think about Yoko’s work for Hanabi and how did your handling of that material change throughout the 10 years you were working on it? You can always revisit a text and glean something new, of course.

It’s wonderful to go back to Clarice Lispector because when me and Yoko first met in 2018, shortly after I finished reading her journals for the first time—published by the French publishing house Les Éditions des mondes à faire, which means “The Publications of Worlds to Come”—I told her that her text reminded me of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (1964). For me, it’s one of the most astounding novels written in the last century, in which this woman encounters a cockroach, which is not just a cockroach but something that signifies a complete disintegration of herself. And this is not only due to racial and class issues, but metaphysical questions that permeate Lispector’s oeuvre. What took me to cinema was literature, so what you’re saying is really on point.

Yoko looked at me and laughed. She said very dryly, “Oh, that’s the one where Lispector eats the cockroach at the end.” All of her text is about eating, about injection, about the fear of it, so I thought it was so great that she said that straight away. In her journal, she begins by eating the cockroach. We established this very mysterious connection from the beginning. There was a very significant affinity between the way she considers literature and the way I consider cinema. So from that moment, which appears in the form of emails in the film, I thought it’d be wonderful to make a film based on the places that Yoko traversed.

How did you decide to approach that?

I was thinking of Masao Adachi’s A.K.A. Serial Killer (1975) and the works of James Benning. I was thinking of works made mostly by men in the 20th century who considered places as containers of narratives and histories. I wanted, in a way, to honor and break away from that tradition. I wanted to make space for something more complex than this idea of the fixed land in a fixed space and the camera suddenly providing an understanding from its fixed perspective. There’s something of a “masculine mastery” there, which my cinema has always moved in reaction against. From the beginning she asks that the text is never published in Japanese. So right away, the film had this necessity for opacity.

One thing I thought we could do was walk together through these spaces she traversed. We walked and I didn’t film anything, and we did this in 2018. She took me to certain locations in Central Tokyo. “This is where I walked when the earthquake began, this is where I walked when I was this young mother and child.” I said, “Great, now I’m going to reflect on this.” I thought that this was one of the paths we could take, but it seemed too structural, as if I was trying to honor the text too much. I wouldn’t have taken into consideration one of the most astounding qualities of her work, which is this very intense questioning of our so-called “natural” way of perceiving the world. All of her work is about a certain madness—a madness that is a lucidity. This goes back to the idea of ferality.

Over the course of the journal, she creates this para-character in the film, which I only realize later is the narrator, Madame Zombie, who is not me but either Yoko or no one in particular. This mutating character makes me think of Lispector’s cockroach, like someone that leads us through these different sequences which the film uses to create its mise-en-scène. I started thinking of each journal entry conceptually. What is her state of perception? What is she actually considering? And rather than being direct, I’m always being dissonant. She’s speaking about molecules, so we see bodies and fire. She speaks about Madame Zombie, so we’re seeing a city. There’s a semiotic game that the film is playing, which means there’s an interval between what she says, what we hear, and what we see. It’s never loyal. There’s always three layers of meaning you’re having to engage with, which I think honors the complexity of her work—it’s more faithful because it’s less faithful.

You mentioned this notion of “masculine mastery” and how you push back against that. It’s clear from your works, like There is Land (2016), Amérika: Bay of Arrows (2016), The Age of Stone (2013), and even Apiyemiyekî? (2020) that you’re more interested in a sort of excavation. There may be landscapes and histories present, but you’re inviting the viewer to participate with you in what is being uncovered.

There’s this idea that cinema’s role is to reveal a hidden truth that the filmmaker had access to and the audience didn’t. It’s of the Biblical tradition, where I bring you the testament, you listen, and then you will understand. I’ve been bothered by this since I was very little. In a sense, I prefer to say that I don’t know anything more than you. We are, together, tatear as escuras—we’re using our hands to feel through this very thick mist, in which there are only faint glimpses of understanding. That doesn’t mean that the films come with a truth, either; you don’t come as an oracle. But there’s always a desire to honor a partial, collective, and collaborative way of sensing.

A lot of the things we interface with as a child—parent-child relationships, teacher-student relationships—revolve around an authoritarian figure imparting some knowledge that we do not know and presumably cannot access on our own. Do you recall any early experiences where you appreciated knowledge being transmitted in a different way? Maybe this was through group settings or from simply moving through different spaces.

My education system was marked by reforms made during the civil and military dictatorship, which then transitioned into a democracy during the late 1980s, when I was born. I think my allergy to authority comes from this idea that a student’s point of view didn’t matter—you were there as an empty receptacle. Two things come to mind with this anti-authoritarian feeling. I think I was in 6th or 7th grade when this happened. There’s always going to be a teacher who’s bothered by the fact that her students aren’t inebriated by her wisdom. I organized what I called a “silent protest” against my teacher. It involved convincing all 35 students in the class to turn their desks around so that they’d be facing the wall and we’d have our backs to her. She arrived and knew right away, saying, “Ana, out of the class!” (laughter).

Another thing is that my mother always believed that pedagogy was something you built together. So not only was I not grounded for this, but we had an interesting conversation about authority that day. I had broken a pact with the school—why did that happen? Can we talk about it? Cláudia was always incredible in that sense. Every time I had a question she said, “What do you think?” “I don’t know.” But then she’d say, “There’s something there. What do you think?” And this is something I always say to Noa now, which is, “Trust your intuition. What you thought at first will lead you to what you’re looking for.” The education system is meant to have you doubt that gut instinct, that elemental knowledge we have within us.

You’re a teacher, and teaching is a big part of what I do, but I almost don’t want to call it teaching (laughter). When thinking of people like Paulo Freire or Augusto Boal or Ivan Illich, I think that the only way that we can imagine societal transformation is through questioning it and the authoritarianism around knowledge. I think by shifting, ever so slightly, our modes of transmission, you can create other forms of knowledge, and that’s what I try to do in cinema.

Earlier you mentioned how you came to cinema through literature, and I’m wondering if that’s related to this too.

With literature, something that comes to mind is the idea of reading aloud. One of the most wonderful and important books I read when I was young, because it was part of the curriculum, was João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956). It’s a book about a jagunço, who were these people hired by colonels to work in the colonial backlands. He travels through the Midwest of Brazil, through Minas Gerais, and through listening to how people speak, he annotates their speech in literary form. It’s one of the most astounding novels about orality, on the dictums and modes and forms and sing-songs that people speak in, and it creates this multifaceted portrait of the Brazilian Midwest and all its histories.

At first, I grabbed his book and thought, I can’t read this—I don’t know how to read this. I could only access it when I started reading it aloud. When I did that, I started hearing the dictums, the modes, and the forms I’d heard from a distant relative, or from a stranger at a bus station. When I first showed Hanabi to Yoko Hayasuke—this was in 2022, when it was just a first draft—she said something that I can never forget. “I understand you have a great challenge on your hands. I would ask that you don’t let me speak alone in this film, that you create a dialogue between the literary and oral traditions.” By bridging these two traditions, I’m trying to turn documentary on its head. Documentaries are often based on this fetish of the testimony, like, “Oh, look at these people and what they’re going through.” There is a false empathy that documentary cinema has been engaged with for so long. I want to go against this by saying, “Well, they’re saying this, and someone else is saying that.” You have to complexify what’s being said, and because there’s no sync sound, the idea of truth and veracity is further removed. Yoko’s voice is rendered in this way where you start doubting the narrator’s humanity.

Do you mind talking about working with Nuno Da Luz on the sound? I’m really excited that his work on this film is going to be released by purge.xxx. I’ve been in love with that label for a long time and interviewed the guy behind it, Stanley Schtinter, for The Wire [Issue 450]. How did you two embody everything that you were talking about in your collaboration with Yoko?

To speak about my long-standing collaboration with Nuno is to speak about life: he is my partner and the father of our child. We came together many years ago, working with a collective called COYOTE. It was formed in a dissonant way, with and in friction to a group of studies led by the French philosopher Bruno Latour and his theories about the “Parliament of Things.” It still haunts the works that me and Nuno Da Luz create.

When I began thinking of Hanabi many years ago, I told Nuno that the film was going to involve this challenge of listening. We had to think acoustically about the non-visible, which we doubt because we can’t see its materiality. Straight away he responded with a series of microphones—hydrophones, geophones—that amplified different sounds, be they seismic waves or VLFs (very low frequencies). We’d be together for encounters or interviews or conversations, and then he’d say, “Okay, I need to record sound.” What’s always united Nuno and I is this huge preoccupation with affect and its micropolitical dimensions. And this is not affect in terms of tenderness, but to be affected by something. The macropolitical is there, but if we don’t take the micropolitical dimensions seriously, there’s no way that change can be invited.

The film transformed into something more complicated when we started editing. There was a call and response between all four of us—Chaghig, myself, Nuno, and Olivier Guillaume, who’s the mixer who also worked on It is Night in America. This film also existed as an installation in Palais de Tokyo. We had 10 different speakers and you’d go from the buzzing of bees to the ticking of Geiger counters; you could walk through this space, this environment. It echoed Nuno’s practice, which is about the politics of noise and ecology. And after all these years of dreaming up a common work, Hanabi is a mutated film made of different shorts and installations, and at the core of it is this collaboration with Nuno. Even the album we used for Hanabi, KETU (2022), was because he’d already worked with Pedro Sousa, a wonderful Portuguese saxophonist.

I don’t have any more questions but is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?

Your questions were so great. It was so great to move through these different time periods and films. Since we spoke about purge and Stanley, I think it’s good to note that what will be released on the LP—and this was Nuno’s proposition—is a rendering of the film with all the recordings but without the soundtrack (laughter).

I love that.

This was Nuno’s way of saying, well, this film was made by colliding two forms of music—there’s the improvisational music that accompanies us through the film, and then the recordings. The LP will just be these recordings, with all of their diversities and Nuno’s tape manipulations. It’s interesting to think of the invisible film that’s in this record.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I really doubt the idea of the self. Increasingly, I’m less sure that the self is an entity that holds together as one thing. I believe, rather, that the self is an enmesh of hauntings—an enmesh of different forms of movement. In that sense, a lot of what I do is based on going against the idea of the self. And by doing this, you can have a great deal of love for all of it.

Because there’s a distancing?

Because it’s no longer one thing. If you go into any kind of somatic experience, of trance or hypnosis or meditation, it very quickly feels like the contours of the self dissolve. And when that happens, there’s a radical form of loving that happens—a love for the dispersed self.

What does that look like? And why is it radical?

Radical in terms of its etymology: “root.” I’m not interested in rooting as something pure, as something that has essence; I’m interested in the way it connects in arborescent ways, how it allows for different connections between the space above and the space below, between the earth and the air and the other elements that traverse it. It’s radical because the self is this arborescence—arborescência. And I think it goes back to the first question you posed about ancestry and lineage. What I love about the self is everything that exceeds it. The self is a kind of medium, a passage, a blow of the wind into other arborescences. This idea of the contained self is the malaise of modernity. It’s this idea of a self-contained, self-sufficient heroic figure, which has been insisted upon since Greek antiquity, and it continues to be an empty model for an imaginary West that has never been. To go against this heroic narrative tradition is to think of a more feral, entangled, complex, and humbling way of inhabiting these bodies we call our own.

Ana Vaz’s new feature film, Hanabi, premieres at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa (b. 1955) is a Japanese director who has spent his career crafting beguiling films that both work within the bounds of genre and transcend them. While largely known for making horror films like Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001) and Sweet Home (1989), the latter of which directly inspired the Resident Evil video games, his filmography runs deep. He made a fascinating pink film for his debut feature, Kandagawa Pervert Wars (1983), V-cinema works like the Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself series (1995/1996) and Eyes of the Spider (1998), and has dabbled in science-fiction (2017’s Before We Vanish and Foreboding) and domestic dramas (2008’s Tokyo Sonata). His newest film, The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026), is another reinvention. A jidaigeki film based on the Honobu Yonezawa novel of the same name, the film chronicles a samurai warlord named Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) who rebels against Nobunaga Oda (Shingo Bando) and, after encountering mysterious deaths, ends up forging an alliance with Kanbei Kuroda (Masaki Suda), a war strategist of a rival clan who he imprisons instead of kills. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Kurosawa on August 1st, 2026 via Zoom to discuss growing up in Kobe, what he learned from jidaigeki films of old, and how he directed his actors for The Samurai and the Prisoner. Special thanks to Monika Uchiyama for interpreting.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in Kobe, Japan. What was it like growing up there?

Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Indeed I was born in Kobe. I will say that among Japanese cities, Kobe is one where Western culture came quite early and quite strong. There were many homes built in the Western style with masonry, so that felt quite normal in terms of the architecture I grew up with. When I made my film Wife of a Spy (2020), I actually had to film in Kobe because I needed that specific kind of architecture. So, looking back, it was a very particular kind of environment I grew up in.

Given that Kobe was more exposed to Western culture early on, what sort of art did you engage with when you were younger? Were there films or music or visual art that made an impact on you as a kid?

I wouldn’t say that this is specific to growing up in Kobe, but I remember being excited to go to the movie theater and seeing films like Godzilla, so these very early kaiju films. In my memory, a Godzilla film would’ve had very scary music and you’d watch cities be destroyed and people killed en masse. It’d be a very scary experience for a child to watch. Later on, I realized that the directors and staff who made those films were those who experienced war, and specifically the destruction of their own cities due to firebombings. Looking back, I see them now as educational films. That’s a very impactful early memory for me.

Similar to how these directors made kaiju films as a reflection of their own experiences, do you feel like this is true of your own films at all? Do you think any speak to what you’ve experienced?

I wouldn’t say that there’s a single, total work that reflects my life, but there are certain scenes that are influenced by things I’ve experienced myself. Not all of my films, but some of my films occasionally feature schools. These scenes include teachers and students, and if the protagonist is a student, they’re often isolated. They have shallow relationships with their classmates and they never reveal their true selves. Even their relationship with their teacher is not one where they’re confronting them in any way—they’re actually not even communicating with them at all, and there’s a distant presence. Tokyo Sonata (2008) is one example of that, as the scenes involving schools are definitely influenced by my own experiences.

You’ve said in the past that you’re neither a writer nor artist but more so a craftsman, and are interested in imitating what your predecessors did. The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026) is your first jidaigeki. What sort of things were you trying to imitate from older Japanese filmmakers and what were you doing to keep things fresh?

So yes, this is my first time filming a jidaigeki, but it’s one that is filmed in a castle and mostly involves conversations among the people there. I was trying to reflect on what jidaigeki may have similarly taken place within a castle or mansion and also centered around conversation. I’ve seen a lot of jidaigeki, but this became an opportunity to research more to find inspiration. The films I looked at most closely were Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Kenji Mizoguchi’s The 47 Ronin (1941/1942), though this latter film was not exactly the same time period as the one in The Samurai and the Prisoner.

Classically in the rules among samurai, those who are hierarchically above or in power are standing while those who are hierarchically below must kneel in front of them. There are also rules that you cannot look into the eyes of those who are speaking. Although these types of rules existed, they were disrupted by directors like Kurosawa and Mizoguchi in specific scenes, and you’d see the hierarchy broken—those in the lower class might stand up or look into the eyes of those in the upper class. I found that these disruptions led to the most dramatic scenes, and it was these considerations that most impacted my film.

Can you speak to how you directed the actors about line readings? You’ve talked in the past about how any sort of “authenticity” we see in film finds a balance between how people actually talk in real life and some sort of theatricality. How did you approach that with this film?

It’s really difficult to strike a balance with jidaigeki and period films in general. In a typical contemporary drama, there is dialogue that’s perhaps more realistic, that reflects how people ordinarily talk in our day to day, or there is dialogue that exists in the world of fiction that feels much more constructed. When I’m making films, it’s easier to calculate at which level the dialogue should exist—whether more naturalistic or theatrical. But with jidaigeki, it’s really hard because we have no idea what ordinary speech actually sounded like, so in a sense, the entirety of the dialogue has to be constructed; I have to create what’s considered “normal” in the world of the film. Strangely, as the actors were acting with each other, they started off at different levels of theatricality, but they soon found an equilibrium. I tried to match the tone of the film with what organically emerged.

Can you speak to what it was like working with Masaki Suda again? He was in Cloud (2024) and he plays the prisoner, Kanbei, in this film.

When we work together, I’m struck by what a talented and multifaceted actor he is. He’s able to freely move through different styles of acting. When I received the novel [by Honobu Yonezawa] that this film is based on, I remember immediately thinking that the only person who could play Kanbei Kuroda was Masaki Suda. If I were to describe his abilities, it’s that he’s able to deliver lines as if these are the character’s true feelings, but he can also deliver the same line as if he’s trying to tell a lie. He can also manage to say a line in which we could interpret it either way—is he telling the truth or is he telling a lie? The way he’s able to move through these different modes of delivery is incredibly shocking. He’s not only able to manipulate the character of Murashige, he’s able to manipulate Masahiro, who’s playing him. And he’s also able to manipulate us as a viewer.

I wanted to ask about Murashige in general. You’ve mentioned in the past about the terror of someone staying the same forever, how this essentially embodies death. I’m curious how you approached capturing Murashige as this figure who recognizes that staying the same is bad, but that change is its own form of suffering?

When I’m creating narratives and thinking about the drama of certain films, if there’s a protagonist, they must experience some kind of event where they cannot go back to their previous self. I want the protagonist to experience something so strong that it changes them, and when we watch the film, we know that they can’t go back to how they were when we first encountered them. This event causes them to move towards something new, and this could be happiness or destruction, but it can certainly never be the peace that they had beforehand. That’s a dramatic arc I build a lot of my films around.

With The Samurai and the Prisoner, it’s not a single event that changes the protagonist but a succession of small incidents that change Murashige. He can no longer return to a prior form of stability, and he’s headed towards something unknown—that’s the structure of the film. I’m not sure if it was that extreme in the novel, but when I wrote this character, I highlighted this drastic change in the character, so much so that throughout filming, Masahiro would say things like, “Is it okay for me to change so much?” Even as an actor, he felt hesitant because he didn’t know where he was headed. I told him, “This is the right way to work. You’re headed towards something unknown, so if you knew what was going to happen or what to do, that’d be wrong.” I was encouraging him to embrace the unknown.

Speaking about change, do you feel like you’ve learned something about yourself in having made this film? You talked about who you were as a schoolchild just a bit ago, and I’m curious if you feel like you’ve changed as a result of this film.

I want to believe that there has been a change in me, but I myself can’t change in the world in the same way that people change in the world of fiction, so it’s really hard to say. I will say, though, that I learned about the possibilities within the genre of jidaigeki. Even though it’s a period film, it can also represent and reflect contemporary themes and contemporary realities. The fact that these things can coexist in a period piece is something I’ve learned. I hope that other directors challenge themselves to make jidaigeki films in the same manner; it’s not something I could’ve known unless I tried it myself.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

What do I like about myself? This is a cruel question (laughter). In thinking about what I like about myself, I have to think about what I don’t like about myself. For instance, as a filmmaker, I pride myself in being very punctual. I can work very efficiently and things are always on time and I’m really good at that, but it’s also the only way I know how to work. That’s a great quality to have when you have a limited budget and limited timeframes, so I do think that’s a good quality, but it’s also one of my greatest weaknesses. In a way, I’m only able to work in this very compact and impoverished manner (laughter). When I have a budget or the ability to work in extravagant ways, I can’t seem to indulge in that.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026) is in theaters now. Find more information at the film’s website here.

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Thank you for reading the 68th issue of Film Show. Cruel.

If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Film Show is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Film Show will be able to publish issues more frequently.

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Bruce Wood (b. 1951) is a Massachusetts-based filmmaker and painter who became interested in avant-garde film while studying at MassArt. Even though he went to school for painting, seeing Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Mothlight (1963) led to him moving out of state for grad school, intent on studying under Brakhage at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, he’d find a way to translate his interest in abstract expressionist painting into film, utilizing his Bolex camera to craft striking monochromatic works dealing with the basic elements of the medium: light and rhythm. He’d make multiple shorts on 16mm before abandoning filmmaking for several years, eventually returning in the 2000s to craft one digital piece and a single narrative feature titled The Door (2005). Wood has started making new films again this year, invigorated by a renewed interest in his work as evidenced by a retrospective of his films at Spectacle in New York. This three-program retro screens today, July 18th. Tone Glow will also present a selection of his works in two cities: in Pittsburgh on August 2nd, in collaboration with Pittsburgh Sound + Image, and in Chicago on August 12th. More details can be found here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Wood on July 16th, 2026 to discuss his childhood memories, his feelings of alienation while at SAIC, and the sexual energy of his films.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Were you born in Massachusetts?

Bruce Wood: Born and raised in Boston. For college I went to MassArt to begin with, then I moved to Chicago when I saw that Stan Brakhage was teaching there.

What are some of the earliest memories you have of growing up in Boston? What was Boston like in the 1950s?

Well, it wasn’t Leave It to Beaver land (laughter). My neighborhood was Hyde Park and it was all houses with yards, but not many single families—lots of two-flats and three-flats. The interesting thing is that my neighborhood was jammed with people my age. It was often like an episode of The Little Rascals, as a lot of it was just us running around and trying to get into trouble. We had puppet shows in barns—some of these houses had barns, and my house had a big one behind it. There were skits and shows and stuff like that. Usually a parent decided to teach us how to put on a play, and my mother did a bunch of that. The kid across the street owned a movie projector at the time and he showed 8mm films in his garage, and that was cool. I remember he showed Laurel and Hardy.

Were there any particular plays or shows that stood out to you as a kid? Any adventures you went on that were impactful?

We’d pack up our bologna sandwiches and go to the Fairmount Theatre in downtown Hyde Park. We’d see 13 Ghosts (1960) and Three Stooges movies and other comedies. Oh, and before all that, I lived right down the street from the high school and they had these minstrel shows. We’d go once a year, and these were absolutely politically incorrect, but the parts I remember, the most memorable parts, were when these girls wore big fluorescent dresses and spun around in the blacklight. And people would wear white gloves and you’d see these disembodied hands moving around on the stage. Later on, when I saw Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928), my memories of that came rushing back.

Did you make art yourself at all when you were younger?

That only came up later. My mother wanted to make sure I was well-rounded. I played clarinet in the band and learned how to paint when I was in 4th grade. I remember being in class and painting the house across the street that I could see through the window. That was good, but I had no intention to follow through on that.

What did you study at MassArt?

I ended up going to MassArt for painting. Here’s the thing: in order for me to get out of Hyde Park in the summer, when all these kids would be getting into trouble, my parents started bringing us to Gloucester, which is up north on Cape Ann. We’d go there to camp and my father would commute to work from there. We stayed in an art colony, and it was mostly artists from Canada and New York. All the dads were painters, and in the morning they’d go out in their station wagons, and then they’d come back in the afternoon with station wagons full of paintings. I thought it was magic. Every month or so they’d show off their works in the pine grove that was right there. This was at a time when I was thinking that I needed to make money, but I didn’t know what I could do. I asked one of my friend’s fathers—because my parents were not artists—if he could teach me to paint. He gave me a list and said, “If you can save money and buy all these art supplies, I can take you out.” I don’t think he ever thought I’d do it, but I did. I learned how to plein air paint and went from there.

When I went to MassArt for painting, I thought it’d be realism. I had no idea what contemporary art was going on. I didn’t even know Pollock’s name or what he did, so I got exposed to a lot, but I felt that painting had died. It’d come to a dead end and nobody could do anything else that would be exciting. And then discovered film. It was like, yes, this is what’s missing. I was doing abstraction expressionist stuff but I wanted them to move—the time element wasn’t there. Suddenly, I realized I could do something with film. I graduated in the first film class at MassArt; they started the film department while I was there, so it was a very interesting time.

Do you remember the first films you saw that made you realize all this?

I remember the first one, but unfortunately I don’t even know if it has a name. It was an accidental projection. A guy who was running the film class was projecting an image of a single dancer—I think it was a dancer in white against a black background—and he was projecting it on the wall while the room had the lights on. Again, it felt like magic. This woman was moving across the wall and it was like, “Oh shit, this is interesting.” I had no idea how to get there, but that was probably the first or second week of class.

The college film program brought in works by Brakhage—Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Mothlight (1963)—and with those films, I saw how to string images together in a way I might like. I didn’t know exactly how to do it, and my instructor was more interested in teaching us how to film motocross races (laughter), but I went through with it. I started making abstract work, though not as abstract as the works I made later on, but it was a start—I was throwing stuff together that didn’t have a narrative. I didn’t know that Window Water Baby Moving was a narrative. I never understood that Brakhage worked in narrative until I got to Chicago. I thought he was a totally abstract imagemaker, and I thought he was a painter, but he wasn’t.

So were those Brakhage films the only abstract works you saw at MassArt?

Actually yeah, that was it. Some Warhol films came up and that was interesting. Warhol was like a hero to me. There was Lonesome Cowboys (1968) and Empire (1965), which I didn’t get whatsoever, but it was fine. There was nobody in the film department that was interested in abstract art. It was only like a dozen students and none of them liked abstraction—they thought I was nuts. The instructor insisted that I make a print of my first film, and I hadn’t titled it—I just thought it was an untitled collage. He titled it Hellzapoppin’ (laughter). It’s like, okay fine, yeah just send it to the lab with this title. This was 1972.

So you finished school in Massachusetts and decided to go to school in Chicago right after?

It was the only place I applied to, and I was really sure of myself at the time. I got in, and I didn’t realize that the master’s program at the Art Institute was only 10 people as well, but Brakhage was there, so I had great expectations. Those expectations were dashed when I discovered he wasn’t actually teaching or critiquing film; he was just teaching film history. I didn’t realize how valuable that was until I got more into it, when I got on his wavelength. When he stopped talking about the films he was showing, he would start rambling, and I liked that—that was valuable. One of the first classes that I really remember is him introducing us to the idea of numen, or the spirits of places and how recognizing numen in life was important. It was about going with the flow, pretty much. He just started talking in a language I could understand. A lot of students would rehash his ideas afterwards—some of them were really into it, some of them weren’t.

There were all these stories he’d share about the filmmakers and why he thought they made certain choices. I think he showed a Buñuel film once and said, “Buñuel probably made this choice because he actually saw that in life, and then he recreated it on the screen.” But still, I realized that I felt so out of water in that place because I was the only one in the department who came to film from painting, or with a painter’s ideas and aesthetics. Everyone else was waxing poetic over Michael Snow, and it was very different. Jean Cocteau’s films were really influential to me, almost overly influential at one point, but I realized that he wasn’t an artist either. I mean, he is but he’s also not—he’s a poet. And Brakhage was a poet. That kind of firmed it up, that my idea was not that of a poet.

Early on, a few weird things happened with my films where they came back from the lab and weren’t exactly what I thought I was shooting. There were visual glitches happening, and some of it was because I was using a malfunctioning camera. Things weren’t constant, and there would be little surprises, and with Brakhage talking about numen, something hit home. I thought, oh, I shouldn’t throw that footage away. Like, this is giving me a visual that relates more to painting than I ever thought. So I went with that, and I was pretty much on my own—nobody encouraged it.

What you’re describing with these “errors” reminds me of your film ACE Number 5 (1974).

Yeah, that was like my second film, and the only one that had something longer than a mild glitch. So that film came back, and I was amazed by it. It has minor variations in the visuals, but they were enough to get my imagination going. And it was black and white. Then I decided to explore color and made a red one, a yellow one, and an orange one. It was the first film I made that other people got excited about. I showed it in class as black and white, and everyone was like, “Well, it looks like your camera’s off.” But when I made the color versions of it, it was like, “Oh, we wanna buy this for the collection [at the Art Institute].” I elevated it a little with the color.

Did Brakhage ever give feedback on your films?

He had this deal where he wouldn’t look at anyone’s films in person. He never went near the film department or anything, but if you wanted him to look at your work, you had to ship it to Colorado with a check to cover return postage [Editor’s Note: Brakhage would travel between Chicago and Colorado while teaching at the School of the Art Institute, often having film(s) shown one week and then arriving the week after for a lecture]. So that’s what I did. I think I sent him Latex Sky (1975). I don’t think he sent a note, I think he actually told me in person, “I looked at it and my kids liked it, but I don’t get what you’re doing.” That was it! That was all of my Brakhage feedback! (laughter).

This further steeled the idea that he was not a visual person, really. He stumbled upon visuals as a way to promote his ideas about poetry and narrative. Even with some of the films I really love that are really abstract, I don’t think he really meant for them to be what they simply are—it was always attached to this idea of seeing in his mind’s eye or reflecting his state in life or whatever. There was always this extra thing attached to them.

When I got to Latex Sky and the films that came after it, I started expanding the vocabulary: camera shakes, film manipulation, light manipulation. I pushed it to the point where I realized that what I was doing was extending the legacy of abstract expressionist painting. People would say, “Why don’t you add sound to it?” It bugged the hell out of me. The people I went to school with all edited to the sound. I would watch their works and think, nope, I don’t want to do that. I wanted to create a visual rhythm that was purely cinema. So that’s what I did. I started putting together these collages of stuff that came out of my camera. Three seconds of this, thirty seconds of that, splicing them together, and creating a rhythm. While looking at the film, my mind would hear a sort of rhythm.

I’m kind of surprised Brakhage didn’t get what you were doing. The reason his films work so well is because they’re silent, and that he trusts in the rhythm inherent to the images. Do you mind talking about how you made these early films like Latex Sky and River of Stars (1975). Where are you shooting these films? How are you making them?

In the beginning, I was getting these almost accidental camera movements and thought, oh, this creates a really interesting blur. I’d think about what I did and how I got there, and then I’d push the camera and shake it around. Then I discovered high-contrast negative film, which pushed things further. And as time went on, I realized I could rewind the camera and double expose, triple expose, and have four exposures. In shooting with my Bolex, I could shoot one frame at a time and adjust the exposure of those frames. That led to creating lines by moving the camera while pressing a single frame.

So a lot of the frames were done one at a time. I’d say, okay well this line I’m making is going left to right, then I’d rewind the camera and do some right to left, then rewind the camera and do some that were vertical. I’d then see what came back from the lab and I eventually ended up having control of what I was doing. And there was also a lot of going with the flow of water, with the camera steadily capturing it, but then I’d rewind and do another view of the water from a slightly different angle.

Were you doing this at Lake Michigan?

Yeah, I had an apartment that was right across the street from it. I lived north of Fullerton and south of Diversey.

So at the beginning, it was more of a trial-and-error thing before you really got a handle on things?

Yeah, it took a few films before I really got control of it, and I think you really see it when you watch them consecutively.

Was there a film where you felt you finally knew what you were doing?

Edge Forces (1976) and Silver Traces (1976). I considered my works to be collages, and because I wanted to increase my visual vocabulary, there were ones like Molten Shadow (1976) that were mostly blobs. I had blobs there and lines in a different film and I just kind of went with it. With the velocity of lines, they start pushing out on the edges of the film frame when projected, and that’s why it’s called Edge Forces—it’s all the bombardment on the edge of the screen with these images. My hero Franz Kline was probably rolling over in his grave to pay attention to that (laughter). So that was very satisfying. With Silver Traces I wanted things to be delicate, so I chose different light forms. All the images are just different manipulations of light on the film plane through exposure and whatever else.

It looks like there’s hair in that film in particular.

It wasn’t hair. I didn’t film stuff that was literal. There are curtains in one of them that flow, and that’s a reference to my late husband’s paintings. William Janosco. He and I both worked in black and white, and it was very interesting that we were the only ones at the Art Institute who did that. I liked some of his compositions and tried to make them move. We didn’t collaborate, though, his works were just a reference.

Did you meet him when you went to Chicago?

Yeah, he sold me a ticket to a movie (laughter). It was my first year there. He had this student job selling tickets at the Film Center screenings at night. A little flirtation went a long way, and we were together 50 years—how about that? He was a really talented painter. And this goes back to the numen aspect of things. When I decided to go to the Art Institute, they sent a little packet of information about the place, and it was reproductions of artwork made by students to get us excited about going there. He had made a colorful painting of bowties flying, and it just struck my imagination. I really liked that one a lot. And then there he was—he was the one. He was doing brightly colored things at the time, but then eventually went to black and white.

Do you feel your interactions with William informed the way you thought about your work beyond that homage with the curtains?

No. He wouldn’t critique my films. He’d just remain silent and watched. The best compliment he ever gave to me was when I overheard him talking to someone else. They asked, “What’s Bruce’s films like?” “They’re what I wish my paintings would do.” But outside of that, no response. Even when I made The Door (2005), which he has a cameo appearance in, he never read the screenplay or talked about the movie. He came to a lot of showings but never said a damn thing about them. He was supportive, but it was one of those things where he just wanted me to do what I wanted to do.

How did you end up making Frozen Flight (1977) and The Bridge of Heaven (1977)? These are longer works, around half an hour each, and I’m curious how you approached those works given the longer runtime. It’s clear that there’s more of a consideration for structure in these pieces—you have the “X” symbol appear on the screen at times.

Like trying to find different images to make—the blobs, the lines—I realized that I had no stillness. I also realized that some of the films would leave strong afterimages if there was a black area afterwards. But it was like, okay, how do I make a still image and put them in with all these moving ones that aren’t representational? I just started making lines, and sometimes the “X” would appear to float and have a movement, even though the camera’s not moving. It was like catching your breath.

Some of those lines I borrowed from William (laughs). With some of his paintings, he’d put white lines through them and they were geometric—he was into architectural form. I thought, well, I could make something simple: a square, or a fan shape. The “X” turned out to be best. But that’s what it was: “Okay, let’s take a breath.” People would look at my other films and not realize the collage aspect—it’s such a continuum happening on the screen that you don’t get different scene cuts as in a drama, so this was a way to say, “That section is over, here’s a new one.” The husband of one of my friends at the time was a computer programmer. He said, “Well, you’re creating associative systems. Any math guy is gonna know that.” And I thought, associative systems—that’s what it’s all about.

When I first saw the “X” I thought of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971). But based on what you said earlier, it seems like you weren’t a fan of his works?

No, I hated them. If I ever want to be bored I’ll watch his films (laughter).

What other experimental filmmakers did you like? Or did you just feel removed from this community in general?

I mostly related to films from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s: Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye. I don’t think I borrowed anything from them, but I realized, these are my people. They’re painters who went into film, and that’s what I related to. You know who else? Pat O’Neill.

I just showed four of his works on Tuesday.

I love Saugus Series (1974). It’s pretty different from what I do but it’s enriching to see it. The control and matting is something I admire a lot. I also felt like his personality was right there.

Do you feel like your personality comes through in your work?

I guess it does (laughs). I was showing my films in London—I think it was the International Avant-Garde Film Festival in 1979—and right before the show, I met some filmmakers and we were yakking away. Afterwards, a woman came up to me and said, “Talking to you beforehand, I thought these films would be really boring, but they’re not, they’re really sexual!” She really got it. I put my bedroom energy into those films. It’s a reflection of sexual energy 100%, whereas in my day-to-day life I’m perceived as being grounded and slow.

I used to get a lot of flak for being aggressive in marketing. It was not cool to be making postcards or posters about your stuff. One woman said to me, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you took all that energy and did something else with it?” (laughter). After that she goes, “Well, you can tell me to fuck off if you want.” “Yeah, fuck off.” (laughter). She was just full of herself.

Do you mind talking about the sexual energy that appears in your works, especially given that they’re abstract? Usually when I think of that with experimental film I think of someone like James Broughton, but his work is so literal.

It’s more the feeling. The rhythms I create in the films—the crescendo of emotion—the images reflect that to me. I think the way my brain works means that a lot of the world is abstract to me. With images, I can create that longing or the frenetic pace of interacting with someone. And, you know, that energy kept me up at night, and I poured it into these films.

Did you pretty much film all these in your home or at Lake Michigan?

Yeah, in my apartment and Lake Michigan. Sometimes I’d bring my camera with me. Island Design (1976) has a little bit of that. Some of that might’ve been filmed at Saint Croix. That was during a time when my style wasn’t totally gelled and I was poking around, trying to find it.

You already told me that people at SAIC were focusing on sound in a way you didn’t relate to. I’m curious if you also felt alienated in the film world because of your sexuality.

Yeah. My sexuality mattered a lot. I wasn’t totally out as gay when I started there. I was bisexual when I started but when I met William it was like, yeah, that’s it. When I first met him I had asked if he had met my girlfriend, who was also a film student. That sent his wheels spinning in the wrong direction (laughter). I had to explain later that I liked everyone, and I asked if we could get together. But yeah, it was definitely alienating. When I started going out with William, it was obvious to everyone what was going on. But as much as I didn’t relate to documentary, they didn’t relate to my sexual energy. But some did, especially the women.

Meeting William and being exposed to his paintings made me think, “I’ve finally found someone who likes abstraction.” And that gave me free rein to move ahead making abstract painting but with film. Before that, I was caught up with emulating Maya Deren. My girlfriend was a great filmmaker, her name was Diana Barrie. She worked in Super 8 and made this one great film, The Annunciation (1974). With her, I was reading poetry and getting confused about my painterly direction since it wasn’t being appreciated. Like, okay I understand James Broughton, and the poetry you’re having me read, and I understand this idea of “visual poetry,” so I tried a little bit of that, but within six months I was going out with William and thought, ah, I like this painted stuff better. I felt like I was more a part of this painting scene.

What did these Maya Deren-like works look like?

Not good (laughter). I started pulling images of people into the films, structuring things according to what I thought was a supernatural or spiritual story. It was student stuff—they can rot in the can (laughter).

Why did you decide to stop making films in the ’70s?

I had like 100 one-person shows in the space of a year in Europe and the United States, going around to colleges. I was getting a really good response in Europe and I thought that if I kept building up my resume and getting my work out there, someone would eventually give me a job teaching. That didn’t happen. I’d go out and they’d give me $100 to go to Berlin to do my shtick and it barely paid the hotel bill, and then I’d come back with like no money. And then I’d want to make another film and have to put in hundreds of dollars for that, and it eventually got to me: I can’t continue doing this. I couldn’t make money.

Being mercantile with my methods, I decided that I’d make paintings again and that people would maybe buy them. I made paintings of my film images, and lots of them. I found the most interesting film stills and airbrushed black and white on paper. Nobody related to it at all. I made photographs of the stills and nobody related to that at all either. Well, I shouldn’t say that. There was one gallery in Chicago that showed them but nobody bought any works. And the French National Library bought several of the photos, and that was good. I mean, it’s a good collection there in Paris, but nobody ever sees them. So that’s why I stopped—I needed money to pay rent.

What’d you do to make money?

I went on unemployment (laughter). I made those paintings while I was on unemployment. Also, the Art Institute canned me. I was working for the school’s art history department. At the time they had a slide library and I was in charge of the people working in that department, making slides for the art history professors and cataloging them. The school encouraged me to go on these trips and promote the school, but one time I came back and they said, “We don’t really need you anymore, here’s your two weeks’ notice.” I ended up getting an apprenticeship as a photo retoucher. I opened my own retouching studio, and I did work on color transparencies, which is very difficult by hand—this was before Photoshop. I worked on Keebler and Quaker Oats and Helene Curtis packaging, making sure the lady’s hair matched what it was supposed to look like. The advertising agencies paid me well to do that, and it kept me going. I didn’t see any reason to make another film.

You made New Kisses (2004) as a digital iteration of your older work. How did that come about?

The guy who was in charge of Chicago Filmmakers at the time.

Allen Ross?

Oh no, not Allen. Poor Allen. It was Patrick Friel.

Oh yeah, I talk with him every now and then.

He contacted me and wanted to show a few of my films at Chicago Filmmakers. He introduced me to digital filmmaking. They were giving classes then using Final Cut Pro, and it just got me interested in what I could do. My 16mm camera got stolen, so I didn’t have one, but I had old footage. I took the old images, projected them, and recorded it on a MiniDV camera and put that into Final Cut Pro. I was thinking about color and sound, and I went through three soundtracks and then stuck with the last one, which had these abstracted sounds of bugs outside my window. That was about it.

Did you come back to Chicago, or were you in Chicago this whole time?

I was in Chicago. I went through many occupations while there. The last one involved being a floor trader at the Board of Trade. I traded Treasury bonds and after three years I burned out, and then I opened an art gallery in Michigan. That did really well so then I opened up another gallery in Lincoln Park in Chicago, and then one in Wicker Park. The businesses were going well and I had free time because of that, so I decided to learn digital filmmaking and made New Kisses. William actually got really pissed off, like, “What the hell? New kisses? What’s this about?” He thought I was having an affair (laughter). He was jealous of nothing! (laughter). “Dear, I’m remembering you when it was new, and I put that energy into this movie.” He didn’t believe me.

And then I made [my narrative feature] The Door because my interests had all changed. I wanted drama, I wanted to work with actors. Chicago is really good for this because there are so many talented actors. There was an independent filmmakers group whose screenings I’d go to. I met a couple people—one wanted to be a producer, one wanted to be a scripty. I decided that I could make this film for $10,000. It ended up costing $24,000 but still—pretty good. We had casting calls and we had these actors who took my words and added stuff to them, which added nuance that I didn’t see. The nice thing about that was that there were so many nice locations in Chicago. I went to City Hall, I went to one of the public parks, and at the time I had a house in Michigan and a nice apartment in Chicago—I used both of those locations. I used one of my shops in Michigan too. So it was a full month of shooting scene after scene after scene, and I loved it. I don’t think I’d do it again—there’s a lot of energy involved.

When I started bringing it to film festivals, I realized that I made some huge mistakes in terms of marketability. I shot it on 24p because I liked the flicker effect. At the time, even though it was high-def, distributors wouldn’t take on anything that wasn’t 30p high-def. And the film festivals also wouldn’t take it because I didn’t have any known actors in it. So I went to film festivals like South by Southwest and met people and learned things. It only showed at one film festival in Beloit, Wisconsin. I had a great time, but it didn’t lead to anything.

I made another screenplay and was ready to have another feature going. It was called The Deer Thief. I met a producer who said that they had a pool of investors they could approach. We chose what actors we could choose, these B-list actors from Hollywood who would work for $200,000. We had everything lined up and it was like, “Okay, it’s time to have a party for the investors.” My producer ghosted me. There were no investors; it was just a bunch of bullshit. So that film didn’t happen. And shortly after that, there was a big recession and my galleries closed and I went bankrupt. End of story on that one.

Did you move out of Chicago after that?

No, I stayed for a while. My dad got sick and I was asked to come out and take care of him in Boston, where I live now. I went to the hospital and the doctor said there’d only be a week or two to live, but that he could go home if I took care of him. So I took him home, and he lasted seven years. Talk about good care (laughter). And I’ve been here in Boston since then.

What sort of works were you exhibiting at your galleries?

Well it started with my paintings, William’s paintings, and paintings by people I met at the Art Institute. And then we supplemented that with local Michigan artists. It was pretty good. It was in a second-home community where a lot of people were getting established, setting up new houses, and they needed decorations so they bought from us. There were a lot of paintings and prints, but then the market changed and people stopped buying paintings—that was interesting. I was interested in printmaking so I went out to San Francisco and learned photogravure. I walked by a shop and they had these beautiful rugs. The guy who owned the place came out and one thing led to another. When he found out I had a gallery he said, “Take these 10 rugs with you and you’ll sell them right away.” I took 10 rugs back and sold them in a week. People weren’t buying paintings; they were buying rugs like crazy. So I went back to San Francisco and got even more rugs.

It turns out that this guy and his brother were enormous importers of antiquities from China and India. These were Afghani guys. When they showed me all this furniture they had, I thought it looked great and they said, “Take it. Take five pieces of furniture with you with all the rugs.” And that stuff sold all the way. It turned out that my galleries in Michigan and Chicago ended up being about ethnographic antiques. There was a lot of African stuff I got from people outside of these guys from San Francisco. But those guys gave me a $200,000 loan to get started in Chicago. It was a Middle Eastern loan, and I wrote out twenty $10,000 checks. I’d just write one every month, and luckily I was selling enough to pay that off. Good experience.

Did you start making films again because of the screening you have in New York and this new interest from [film programmers] Andrew Reichel and Forrest Sprague?

Yeah. When I went to New York, I sat and watched some films with them and it felt like the old feelings I had back in the day. There was a community. I had been working the past several years with models—I painted nudes—so with that, and having a digital camera in my phone, I realized that I could do all this. Some of the new films feature models, others don’t because they’re more on the abstract end. Some of them are more narrative, like Bathroom Fuck (2026).

You were talking about the sexual energy in your older films and that’s more obvious in these newer works since you actually see naked bodies. What’s it like making these digital works?

What I’m doing is taking clips of film and putting them in Final Cut Pro and doing the sort of image alterations that I used to do with my camera. I can do multiple exposure, I can put images upside down. It’s been a lot of fun making these collages, and a lot of it is about yearning. It’s still sexual energy, just not as frenetic as when I was younger. My husband died two and a half years ago, and going out now has been a big change. It’s been providing me energy to make films. If I weren’t at this stage in my life, I don’t think I would’ve been making them. Like, I started working with models at a studio in Boston because I needed to get out of the house after my husband died. It’s something I wanted to do. And now I’m more interested in making films; we’ll see where it goes.

Were you using a Steenbeck to edit your films back then?

No. There were no B-rolls, it was all A-rolls. The images you see in my old films are exactly as they came out of my camera. All I did was arrange them into a collage. I’d look at them and think, “Okay, this has lines, this has blobs, this has smooth water. What do I want the rhythm of this film to be?” I never liked seeing a splice in the film, so I made sure that every passage I filed started and ended in black so I could put my splices there. I’d look at my film on my rewinds and it was like, okay here’s the black for the beginning and here’s the black for the ending. Clip, clip. And then I’d decide what to do with it.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I love that I’m still alive.

Bruce Wood’s films play today at Spectacle. His films will also play in Pittsburgh on August 2nd at Harris Theater and in Chicago on August 12th at Elastic Arts. Info for these screenings can be found here. More information about Bruce Wood can be found at his website. Some of his films can be seen on his YouTube channel.

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Described by its makers as “an experimental film about Rhode Island,” Sarah Halpern and Tim Geraghty’s monument (2026, lowercase “m” intentional) spans at least five hundred years in the geologic history of North America. Rooted in the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing controversies around statues, flags, and (yes) monuments out of step with current political sentiment, the movie investigates how and why things came to be the way they are, with special attention paid to place-names and their surprisingly complex backstories. Ultimately it blossoms into a deeply personal reflection on memory, bias, historical erasure, and complicity in genocide. Rather than some musty “history doc,” monument also happens to be a relentlessly fun movie to watch, deploying a wide mix of techniques (interview, green screen, overlaid text, surreal reenactment, and much more) that testify to the filmmakers’ backgrounds in avant-garde cinema, performance art, and handmade collage.

Their formal dedication is matched by the depth of their research, which includes interviews with activist artists, geologists, Native American tribal members, volunteer museum docents, Geraghty’s own mother (recounting a denial-based alliance between the town’s Catholic community and mafioso drug pushers), and their own 11-year-old daughter Evelyn. The film also has a staggering bibliography at the end of its credits, inviting viewers to go down their own research holes and test their own hypotheses. Instantly one of the essential films of the year, monument is currently without distribution—see Halpern’s website for information about the film—so it was a special thrill to sit down with the couple at their home in Ridgewood, Queens, on May 19th ahead of the film’s world-premiere run at Anthology Film Archives.

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Steve Macfarlane: Before I started recording, we were talking about the Indigenous practice of digging a hole in the ground to mark a historic event that took place there.

Sarah Halpern: In the 1624 journal Good Newes from New England, by the pilgrim Edward Winslow, he describes going for this long walk and finding that the Indigenous people he encountered near Pokanoket—now parts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts—have a tradition of marking events in the landscape by digging a hole in the ground and marking it with an absence. So rather than create another object, the idea is to create a space for storytelling, and for memory, as opposed to a building or another physical object. Our hope is for the movie to function in a similar way.

How long were you developing and working on monument (2026)?

Sarah Halpern: Six years, almost exactly. We only really started making this movie once we were fully in lockdown.

Tim Geraghty: We were talking about making something beforehand, but not really making it—we didn’t know what we wanted to make yet. The initial idea was to do a film about the artists’ lofts in Manhattan. In 2013, these trees got cut down which had been planted by George Maciunas at the Fluxus headquarters on 80 Wooster St., in Soho.

Sarah Halpern: The start of the conversation was “trees.”

Tim Geraghty: But this was, maybe, two months before the pandemic. At that time we were living in Providence; I had come down to New York and filmed the spot where the trees had been cut down. I was teaching at RISD, Sarah was teaching at URI, and we started noticing all these old mills being turned into, like… hubs for the creative class. Growing up in Providence, these mills were totally bombed out, you know? Then they became artist spaces, which was great, like the ones in Soho.

So how did you get from lofts in Manhattan to mills in Providence?

Sarah Halpern: It was COVID, a family member had just passed away, and we hadn’t left the apartment for those first several weeks or whatever. We said, “Okay, we’re gonna get in the car and we’re gonna drive somewhere where we can have some space.” We found this bike path on a map, drove to the parking lot for the bike path, went on a nice bike ride, came back, and we’re just playing in the grass with Evelyn, our daughter. Tim is filming and we notice this big, weird building: an old mill. He starts filming it.

Tim Geraghty: Because we had already started talking about the mills. They interested me, like, “Maybe this is a factory too.”

Sarah Halpern: This security guy comes over and says, “Put the camera away and delete the media. Now.” We’re just like, what the…

Tim Geraghty: I pretended to delete the footage but we had no idea what was going on. It turned out this was an opioid production facility for the Sacklers—after they got sued with Purdue Pharma, they created this shadow company, their names buried deep in the paperwork.

Sarah Halpern: We’re thinking, “At last, we can finally get our minds off of all this death and tragedy,” then this thing happens and it’s like… “Well, I guess we’ve found our starting point!” Which led us to Dominic Esposito, the artist who makes silver spoons criticizing the Sacklers for enabling the opioid crisis. And he was our first interview.

Tim Geraghty: And we did shoot and cut stuff for the original idea about the lofts. We did a bunch of interviews and they were all duds, to be honest. That’s one way of finding out what your movie isn’t about.

What makes an interview a “dud”?

Tim Geraghty: I think it’s when the person wants it to be something that it’s not.

Sarah Halpern: We weren’t basing it so much on conversational topics as the person themselves. Do we like talking to them? Are we fascinated by them? Can the conversation go in different directions?

I’m seeing this less as a “movie production” and more of this process of research and discovery. So how do you accumulate so much material, then chisel it into recognizable form?

Tim Geraghty: Everything came out of conversations we were having, talking about this stuff constantly. I’ve never forgotten about a 2011 documentary series at Anthology called “Talking Head.” A lot of the films dealt with World War II. There was a wide range of formal styles, but the main thing across all of them was the storytelling: the goal in the film wasn’t always clear all the time, but I was just gripped by the faces onscreen and the stories they were telling.

Sarah Halpern: We didn’t have a scope for the project at all. We weren’t like, “Oh, let’s make a six-part miniseries!” But we did talk a lot about long-form storytelling. I would cite the 1987 PBS docuseries Eyes on the Prize as an influence, as well as Shoah (1985).

Tim Geraghty: Eventually we’re filming, editing, reacting, making decisions about what we’re interested in, then going out and filming again, editing again, and kind of building it in that way. The issue we kept having was: “What is our anchor?” We’re interested in what we’re interested in, but we’re also confused and trying to follow our noses.

I’m not going to name names, but at one of the very worst film Q&As I’ve ever been to—which is really saying something—the director opened by saying, “I made this film because I was searching for something, but I didn’t know what that something was… and I’m not sure I ever found out.” On the other hand, I really like Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea that you have to be in the dark to go through the dark, in order to reach some kind of understanding.

Sarah Halpern: We definitely knew this was not the “right” way to make a movie.

Tim Geraghty: For most projects you write a grant, and that process requires you to tell the grantmakers exactly what you’re going to do before you’ve been able to do it. That’s the opposite of our approach. The anchor became us, searching for these things, trying to think these things through.

There’s a well-trod road of documentarians including themselves onscreen in the quest for knowledge: Ross McElwee, Agnès Varda, Michael Moore. I have to say, your film is unabashedly personal but there’s no navel-gazing or dead space. monument proves you can be honest about that search without wasting the audience’s time.

Tim Geraghty: We’re just some people sitting on the coach, reading books to try and make sense of the world. We’re not putting on a pretense of authority.

Sarah Halpern: We were passing each other books all the time, so we made the decision to include that in the movie, like, reading aloud rather than trying to feign expertise.

What’s the dynamic between the two of you in terms of filmmaking?

Sarah Halpern: Tim really had a lot of direction in terms of what the movie should look like. We sat and worked on it together, but I feel like I was just kind of helping on that front. Tim did all the camerawork and also came up with the graphic texture of it all.

You mean the overlaid texts, the use of Google Earth and Google Maps, the use of historical illustrations, that kind of stuff?

Sarah Halpern: Yeah, I wouldn’t have come up with that.

Tim Geraghty: I tried and abandoned a lot of formal ideas. Outside of this film, I do a lot with stereoscopic imagery, which is great because it can make anything interesting—an otherwise simple 2D image can pop out like it’s 3D. One of my least favorite kinds of painting is landscape painting, but in a way I dislike it so much that I’m almost attracted to it. It’s so simple, and I like thinking about ways to make it more interesting, more fun. And that’s the movie in a nutshell: looking at the land, even or especially if you’ve seen it a million times, and trying to see it in a new way. But the playful visual style is also a means of, hopefully, making it so the film is not a total bummer. And the final layer of the post-production process was simplifying everything, trying to make it clean and clear while remaining dense, without giving up the things we were fascinated by.

Sarah, you’re in the film as a tour guide who helps the audience get acclimated to the movie, at least, until it’s no longer possible to maintain the facade…

Tim Geraghty: Sarah is an amazing, amazing collage artist, and also a performer. I want to specify that she wrote the monologues that serve as framing devices; those came first in the writing process, and they mostly appear as they were written.

Sarah Halpern: That’s some of the earliest stuff we shot—here, because of lockdown.

Tim Geraghty: That’s one way to think about the movie: the green screen, home-bound stuff we shot in isolation versus what we would find when we’d venture outside for air.

Sarah Halpern: So the idea was, if I play a tour guide then I can play around with history, and if I’m playing around with history, I can play with the language that we use to talk about history. The character has all this information to share, and she’s trying to do a good job, but then she’s also having this whole other experience and getting lost between suggestion and reality.

There are a lot of ways to think about American exceptionalism. For me the pinnacle is believing, consciously or otherwise, that you have a privilege or right to be oblivious to the rest of the world, its history as well as the history of this country. Ignorance is one thing, but being proud of your ignorance is deeply American.

Tim Geraghty: One of our visual themes and editing ideas was wanting to remind people of history through very small things, the same way you can still “experience” the British empire at teatime: porcelain from Hong Kong, tea leaves from India, sugar from the Caribbean. Right? If you’re thinking of documentary in an honest, true-to-life way, then it’s a document of what’s happening in our minds.

Sarah Halpern: We started thinking about this term, “semantic satiation.” It’s like when you hear the same word over and over and over again, so much so that it loses all meaning when you say it yourself. At one point we were in the car and Tim was talking about being Irish, and feeling so frustrated by the kind of repressive, puritanical culture of New England, how it’s all bullshit. And I’m like, “Well, maybe you feel this way because you grew up in New England.” And his brain exploded, he’d never thought about being Irish in contrast with an English, or “New English,” culture.

That’s an old wound.

Sarah Halpern: You hear the word “America” as one thing and you don’t think about it too much. We started asking: “Why is this street named the way it is?” “Why is this industrial mill a wedding venue now?”

Tim Geraghty: I don’t even remember how the film started, honestly, but the idea was, “What if we interviewed people for their thoughts about some of these monuments?”

Since this is Tone Glow, I also need to ask about the score by C. Spencer Yeh, as well as the final track accompanied by the drummer Ryan Sawyer. They crushed it.

Tim Geraghty: No surprise there. It wasn’t a conventional “movie score” process and he was up front about making sure we knew he had no interest in that. We sent him scenes and clips, but it wasn’t like, “We need 40 seconds of music for this precise cue.”

Sarah Halpern: More like, “Make a bunch of blankets for us to play around with.” Material to work with, not a fixed thing. And they could be totally elastic.

Did you give him feedback? Was there trial and error? Or was he pretty immediately able to pick up what you were laying down?

Tim Geraghty: He had seen a little bit, we talked about it, he’d give us one batch of material, we’d try stuff out, but if we had a situation where nothing fit a particular scene, we’d get a little more precise in what we were asking for. We never wanted to be telling people how to feel about what’s onscreen; we wanted music that could accommodate a range of different emotions. We also needed something sort of unifying, because the movie has so many different modes. Sometimes he’d go heavier in the direction of grief. After Sarah saw him and Ryan perform live, we called him back and asked if he wanted to do one piece that was timed precisely to our edits, for the long shot that ends the movie. He scored directly to that take, which is several minutes long, and then he had Ryan watch the film, and you can tell they’re both keeping time rhythmically with the motion of that last shot. When the car slows down, the music slows down; when the car speeds up, it’s the only time in the movie there’s this really direct, intentional relationship.

Your daughter Evelyn is in the film early and often. I felt like she was keeping you honest in the questioning process, or if I wanted to get literary, I would say she’s like the film’s “angel of history.” And you see her grow much bigger over the course of the film.

Sarah Halpern: One thing that happens when you have a little kid is, they ask you questions! You start to answer because you think you know the answer, then as soon as you try, you realize you don’t know the answer… and that makes you realize how many assumptions you’re making and how many questions you aren’t asking.

I love the scene at the Plimoth Patuxet Museums where Evelyn is talking to a tour guide, in period garb, who’s roleplaying as a pilgrim and trying to describe what their life is like.

Sarah Halpern: I think documentaries tend to be very literal, and for us that was a situation where you’re not being able to distinguish between the figurative, or the notion of something, versus what’s actually happening. Evelyn’s like: “Oh, you actually live here?”

And Tim, you’re onscreen as well playing William Blackstone, the first white settler in Rhode Island, and your real-life brother Mike plays Roger Williams, the English-born minister who founded the Providence Plantations, which became Rhode Island. I now understand this as, you’re an Irish-American taking the piss out of the British colonialists.

Tim Geraghty: But Roger Williams is complicated. He had all these interesting ideas, like, “The king has no right to give the land away because it belongs to the Indigenous folks, it’s not his to sign away.” But at the same time, Williams was the one who took it upon himself to carve up the land and he got hold of all this land.

You could have called the movie Roger (Williams) & Me. Was monument always the title? Was there a “lightbulb moment”?

Sarah Halpern: We had a bunch of working titles.

Tim Geraghty: Let’s leave it at that. They’ll stay working.

One of my very favorite moments in the film is when you and your brothers, in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts, talk shit with each other about who’s got a better cemetery plot. It’s played for laughs, but it’s also a depiction of interpersonal family dynamics, with a bit of an insular, inbred feeling, a comment on a specific type of New England culture handed down across generations. You’re putting yourself squarely within the crosshairs…

Tim Geraghty: We all grew up together, and we have a very weird sense of humor. When we started improvising, I was shocked at how easy it was to shoot that scene. Each person has their own way of behaving that is very, very particular to them. And that specific Dunkin’ is also a historic site, by the way. You’d have to know where to look to find the placard, but it is.

Sorry if this is a reach, but it reminded me of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), specifically, the moment where the Osage chiefs are gathered and they’re talking about the murders and one of them uses the word “genocide.” At first I thought, damn, this movie takes place in the 1920s, “genocide” wasn’t a term until after the Jewish Holocaust… how did Marty’s fact-checkers miss this? Then I read that he had invited the elders to write their own dialogues, and kept that part as-is.

Tim Geraghty: An amazing scene.

Somehow, his cadence perfectly collapses past and present. He’s talking about the 1920s, the 2020s, the 1820s and earlier. I can’t say the movie worked for me, but that scene did.

Tim Geraghty: With my brothers, it turned into this constant one-upmanship, which is also what the scene is about—a kind of micro class war through ball-busting—but I never conceived of it in terms of class competition until we filmed and edited that scene. And there’s something very regional about this ball-busting.

I’m from the Pacific Northwest. We also have a history of genocide against Native Americans, but on my coast we’re much more passive aggressive about everything.

Tim Geraghty: People talk a lot of shit in New England. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it can turn violent on a dime. They’re mean. When I meet people in New York from a similar background, it clicks into place immediately. But part of the idea was, “What would this same type of person be doing now, 400 years later?” And part of the answer was, real estate.

Which leads to my next question and brings things full-circle. The movie has a bitterly hilarious throughline about refurbished mills, “historic” colonial properties, the way cities change, and the way history is narrativized or co-opted for the purposes of driving property value, with one of your brothers playing the real estate guy, albeit still in a 17th century wig.

Sarah Halpern: We were looking for a new apartment, reading all this stuff, getting very frustrated with the process. At some point it was like, “Should we be thinking about buying a home instead, somehow?” Which, by the way, totally didn’t happen. I was reading these real estate ads on Redfin, finding all this manipulative language, but it was also affecting me, like, “I gotta get my life together. I gotta buy property. I gotta figure this out.” What struck me was that the real estate people pitched these industrial lofts and converted mills as the opposite of what they were before and, you know, that’s a big, heavy lift in the language. This became one of those ideas that fit into everything.

“Own a piece of history” or “Own a piece of colonial history” or “You belong here!”

Sarah Halpern: Soon you get into this idea that you can, in effect, buy creativity. Or buy a bohemian lifestyle. Or buy proximity to a bohemian lifestyle.

Tim Geraghty: Because before they were renovated and put on the market, these were places where artists were living, but they were…

…Squatting.

Tim Geraghty: Right. So there are layers of history being peeled back. Immediate-past history of bohemianism, recent-past history of industrial decay, industrial glory years before that, redlining, treaty violations, Native exploitation. And then there’s geological history beneath that. So when they say a house is “historic” because it’s from 100 years ago, you’re like, that’s actually not very old at all.

Sarah Halpern: You enter a way of conspiratorial thinking where any and everything could be significant to your project. We stopped at Burr’s Hill Park in Warren, Rhode Island, to have a picnic with our friend and started noticing these big lumps. Mounds.

Tim Geraghty: Mounds that felt significant, but we had no way to know the exact significance. We looked into it and realized it was an Indigenous burial ground, and one of the people who had been buried there was Massasoit Ousamequin, who signed the first peace treaty with the pilgrims. Once you start looking into that stuff, history becomes 3D in a new way…

Sarah Halpern: It started very specific, then became very broad, and that’s what the movie is about: trying to become aware of your own assumptions, then to understand the things around you, in a fundamental way that you skip over or take for granted the first time around.

monument is currently playing at Anthology Film Archives. More information about the film can be found here.

Thank you for reading the 66th issue of Film Show. The pedagogy of ball-busting.

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Karen Sperling (b. 1945) is an American filmmaker who was born in LA but spent part of her life in New York City as a writer and filmmaker. She’s a part of the Warner family—she’s the granddaughter of Harry Warner, the niece of Jack Warner, and the daughter of Milton Sperling—but her two films are highly original, independent works that eschew Hollywood filmmaking conventions. In 1969, she began shooting her first feature film Make a Face (1971), a hallucinatory fever dream of a psychodrama that stars herself in the lead role of Nina, an artist who experiences dissociations. The character’s blurring of reality and dream states is a result of Sperling’s interest in the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, a fact that would become even clearer with her second feature film The Waiting Room (1973), an oneiric depiction of a woman contemplating a marriage proposal. Notably, The Waiting Room featured the first all-women film crew.

While Make a Face premiered at various international film festivals, The Waiting Room only had press and industry screenings before going undistributed. In the five decades since both films’ creation, these works have been revived through the work of Michael Metzger, the Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at the Block Museum of Art, with additional help by Ben Creech, the projectionist and technician at the same venue. Make a Face’s original 35mm prints and negatives were lost and discarded, while the only existing copy of The Waiting Room is on U-matic tape transfers. Digital transfers were made of the former on an extant 16mm reduction print, while the latter was made with the U-matic tape. Karen Sperling’s Make a Face (1971) plays this Friday at the Block Museum. Sperling will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Sperling via Zoom on May 12th, 2026 to discuss her childhood, the “interesting men” in her life, and the creation of her two films.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: You were born in LA. What are some of the earliest memories you have? If you were to paint a portrait of your childhood, what comes to mind?

Karen Sperling: Okay, so since I’m 81 years old (laughter), I was in LA before there were any buildings over three stories. The 405 was a two-lane highway out to the Valley, which is where my grandfather had a horse ranch. That was the Valley: horse ranches. I knew LA, and we did live in Bel Air, but it was just in the mountains. It was not the Bel Air with, you know, the mansions. I went to University Elementary School [now known as UCLA Lab School], which was for a diverse community. I wasn’t raised as a Hollywood person. My parents were very politically conscious, and so was grandpa. And a lot of my friends were not the kids of Hollywood, which was a good beginning.

What sort of things do you remember doing as a child? Were there specific interests you had?

I was always isolated. The house was isolated, and I was the middle child. So, I was the one who always volunteered for everything. I took care of the littler ones, and my older sister ignored me. I was always the one carrying baggage, I remember, when we would travel. My brother is 9 years younger than me, so I liked being the babysitter and singing to him. That was my trajectory. There were four of us—three sisters and then the brother came later.

Can you talk to me about any early interests you had in the arts?

First of all, my mom was an artist—she was painting in the garage. My dad [Milton Sperling] was a writer. I would always stand at the door when he had conferences in his library at the house, and I’d listen to him talk to the other writers. I would check out everything he was reading, so when I was 11 and 12 and 13, I was reading Sartre and things that were not for young minds (laughs). I thought, “Well, he’s reading it, I might want to know what he’s interested in.” I was always interested in what he was doing—I worked for him at the studio when I was 16.

I was a dancer, and that was my first love. When I was 18 and graduated from high school, I went to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and told the head there that I thought patients would be interested in expressing their feelings through movement and art. So I invented dance therapy at the time, and that was just because I was a teenager and said, “This is how I express myself.” The nurses didn’t like me much because they thought the movement would turn into something sexualized. You see some of this dance therapy in my second film, The Waiting Room (1973). Some of that was about my experience. Dancing was my first love, but I was always writing, too.

Can you tell me a little bit about the dancing that you did? Was this ballet or more contemporary dance?

It was contemporary, modern dance. I made it up as I went along (laughs).

Did you take actual classes?

We did at school, yeah. I was a terpsichorean—I was the head terpsichorean. I also tried cheerleading, but I’m not good at following directions (laughter). That’s why I love modern dance. So I did cheerleading, and my boyfriend was the quarterback. I was always separate—I went away for school in the ninth grade. I went to Sedona for a year, and when I came back and went into Beverly High, I was more mature than most people—I didn’t care what I wore, I didn’t care to be in a clique, I reached out to the more odd people to be my pals. And a boyfriend… I always had a boyfriend.

How were these people odd?

They had difficulties fitting in. I was more attracted to someone interesting than someone who was trying to conform. Like, one of my dear old friends who I still have, she’s in Sedona, is an artist. Her mom was divorced and they lived in an apartment. And in those days, that was pretty cheap. That was Sharon, and we really got along. I just didn’t go into the cliques, and I just stayed with my boyfriend or was dancing.

You also said you liked to write. Was your writing as free as the sort of dancing that you did?

Well, by the time I got into Brandeis, I made up most of my courses. I had a literature teacher who let me make up my own courses. The freedom I had there was really important, and I had a lot. I lived on campus, too. I dated a professor (laughs). The head of the psychology department.

So you dated a psychology professor?

Yes.

How did that go?

Well, I was 20 and he was 42. We were going to get married, actually, when I graduated, but I ran away to New York.

Do you think you would’ve married him if you hadn’t run away?

I don’t think so. I had been engaged before that, too (laughs). It was when I was 18—I was engaged to a Broadway producer. He was a Westinghouse producer, and he produced Dark Shadows. Michael. In that time period, from when I was between 13 and 30, I had a lot of different interesting men in my life.

You mentioned that you started working for your father when you were 16. Obviously your father was an important producer. Were there things you learned from that time and being around these other people in the film industry?

You know, I wasn’t interested in making films—I loved writing. And then I guess I was interested. I was going to be a “good son,” but I moved to New York and I made independent films, which didn’t make me a good son at all because I had nothing to do with Hollywood. And my style… I think I chose film as my way of expressing how I saw life—I chose this experiential way of film. I was influenced by R. D. Laing. He wrote a book called The Politics of Experience (1967), and the bottom line was that dreams, fantasy, and reality are all equal. I wanted to depict life in that way, where you don’t need to know which is which and you just get to know the person. I dove deep into that, committing myself—my body and my mind and my art—to that vision.

Film seemed to be the form to take, and I have no idea what I was thinking (laughter). It was like total innocence and commitment. I was working with another writer when I did the first film, Make a Face (1971). He started to direct the film, but I didn’t like how it was coming out, and I didn’t like the way he behaved. I ended up being in the film because I didn’t like how he treated women. We were auditioning actresses and I didn’t like how he talked to them, so I said, “I’m not going to put another person through that, I’ll do it.” He was removed from the film when we started shooting. I ended up with my editor, Barbara Connell, who redesigned the whole film and helped realize the vision I had, which was this experiential vision.

You know, I haven’t seen these films in almost 50 years, and I didn’t want to see them! (laughter). And it’s because of Michael [Metzger, curator at the Block Museum who is responsible for reviving these films] that I’m looking at them again. I’m going, “Oh, why did she shoot that?” [Editor’s note: Karen Sperling is referring to herself in the third person]. I was very schizophrenic making both of these films. I’m only now just starting to appreciate them, and the responses I’m getting now from people of all different ages, of how they’re identifying with these characters… I’ve learned now that the more you go into one character, the more universal the experience becomes. This one young man last year, when we screened Waiting Room, said, “I don’t know what this film is about. I want people to see it. And I know I want to know more about who I am.” That hit my heart. If somebody says, “I want to know more about myself from this experience,” that’s my thing. But I have to say, I’ve been a little sad because I’ve been finding that women are having the same concerns we had 55 years ago: the same confusion, the same difficulties.

You mentioned earlier that between the ages of 13 and 30 that you had all these men in your life. I’m curious if you could talk to me a little about how these experiences informed your films.

My first, longest relationship was with a Hungarian refugee when I was 13. He was 18. He came out of the revolution in ’56 with a bullet hole in his back. He was a lovely man. And then I was with the Broadway producer, and then the professor, and then there were a few others. When I was making movies, I ended up with some interesting people. I always wanted to have a relationship—that was really important to me—and then I got married when I was 30, we divorced, and then I was engaged again, and then I haven’t been in a relationship for like 30 years. I guess I did my share. God stepped in and said, “You’re done, girl.” (laughter). And actually, it’s given me a lot of freedom. I worked with an ashram, taking care of people with AIDS. I played in a street band. I did energy medicine. I went all over the place and had a great time. But sorry, you asked me another question.

With Make a Face, for example, were you thinking of particular experiences with men that you wanted to explore or convey? And I’m also thinking about your dad because the film begins with a phone call with this dad pestering your character about the building you’re living in.

That was just part of the story that we wrote when I was working with the writer. As The New York Times called it, we were creating a kind of Mabuse film, a psychological suspense film, where you have this conflict with money and land and the free spirit of an artist and then someone checking in on her. There’s this character who just shows up randomly in her apartment and there’s this kind of sexual tension. And then the boyfriend—he was actually my boyfriend. I really had to take that film apart and put it back together so I could express something visually.

I was shocked by some of the techniques used. I love the use of the radio, how it’s just constantly playing and providing a parallel sort of narration.

I always had the radio on.

So it was informed by real life?

Yeah. I needed that constant connection so that I didn’t lose myself. And even still when I get up, because I’m a vivid dreamer, I get up in the morning and go, “I have to see what’s happening, I have to get back to the world. There’s got to be something worse going on out there than what’s going on here.” And unfortunately, there is (laughter). So I love that it’s a musical soundtrack to our lives. And whatever is going on out there is affecting us, whether we know about it or not. I didn’t sit down and say, “I want this radio on because…,” but when I think about why that was a choice, I realized that choice was made because that’s who we are. We’re a singular character, all of us. And it’s the sound of the world and what’s going on in the culture, what’s going on in the wars, what’s going on in the planet. It’s all connected.

You played harpsichord for Make a Face. And you said that you were in a band yourself, later on. I’m curious if you could talk to me a little about your relationship with music.

My dad was a classical pianist. He played at Carnegie Hall at 7 years old in a Lord Fauntleroy suit. So we had classical music all the time in our home. Every night, dad would come home—if he wasn’t on location—and play classical music. He was friends with Stravinsky, Piatigorsky, Heifetz. Music was in my life, my whole life. I got a harpsichord and, I confess, the guy who wrote the music was a boyfriend (laughter). Tony. Anyways, he wrote music. So I just messed around with anything I could contribute. And I think that the harpsichord has an eerie sound to it.

You mentioned earlier that you’re schizophrenic.

I think the schizophrenic part was how I was a writer, producer, director, and actor. Every time I had to play these roles, or some of them together, I had to be “her.” I remember looking on the screen, watching me on the screen, and I didn’t say, “Oh, I’m doing this,” but “Oh, she’s doing this” or “she needs to do that.” It was kind of a functional thing.

So you’re not talking about any sort of diagnosis, correct?

No, it was a playful, functional version of how to identify with what needed to happen. Also, when I looked at the performances [in both films], I thought, why is she both here and sort of not here? I realized that it’s because when you’re in a dream, you’re kind of both there and not there. You’re an observer.

Yeah, you definitely have a blank expression, which I think allows anyone viewing it to sort of—

Step in?

Yeah. The film becomes participatory in that way.

I was also influenced by Rudolf Steiner and the Waldorf school system. When you play in Waldorf, the dolls have no faces. Everything is made of cloth, and when the kids go outside to play, there are no swings—there are only trees. You constantly have to create from who you are. I did a whole series of interactive children’s books and they were based on that idea. I had the kids read the story, create the character, complete the pictures, and write their own story in the book. So I think what you’re saying is right in terms of this facelessness, or a non-emoting.

There’s also the actual puppets and dolls in Make a Face. Where did those come from?

The guy who started with me was an artist, so a lot of the art was his art.

You mentioned these influences that are unrelated to film, but I’m wondering if there were specific filmmakers you were inspired by. What were you watching at the time?

That’s a good question, and I’ve thought about it. I know I went to movies in New York City. You had stuff like Antonioni and Blow-Up (1966) and this whole idea of “What’s real? What’s not real?” You know, for my second feature I was shooting on Wards Island and I had 38 or so women on the crew, and I think I had 30 people coming in for the funeral scene. My dad took me to dinner the night before and said, “Who are your mentors? How do you know what you’re doing?” “Well, I’m a woman… it’s hard.” I knew about Maya Deren, but there weren’t that many women. Though, I did learn about some women who made films before me later on. I was not the sort of person who felt they had to go out and see every movie, and I didn’t go to [film] school. I didn’t blame him for asking me, though—he knew his stuff. The next day, he came to the set and watched me. When he left he said, “You know what you’re doing.”

That was good, but my parents did not get the films. They did not support them. My mother stopped speaking to me every time I made something. She was a wonderful human being and did amazing things and was a wonderful artist, but she was really scared for me. I read her diaries later. She wrote, “I’m worried that she’s exposing too much of herself.” But what else does an artist do? My stepfather and mother were socially conscious people. They supported the Dan Ellsberg trial during my first feature, and I remember going to the apartment in LA where they were staying—it was near the courtroom—and she said, “Who do you think you are? What are you doing?” I said, “I don’t know, I’m just doing what I believe in.” “I’ll never speak to you again.” She didn’t speak to me for a year, and then I met her in a bakery in New York and we reconnected.

For my next film, she was involved again, and Jane Fonda was at the house. I said, “Would you introduce me to her? I’m filming with an all-women crew.” “Go and introduce yourself.” I did not get any support. And I say this not because they were bad people, but believe me, when I look at these films now, at my age and as a mother, it’s like, “What was she thinking?! She’s naked! What are these movies?” [Editor’s note: the “she” here is Karen.] It’s taken 50 years for people to go, “Wow, these films are really interesting.” My dad would say, “Why don’t you… tell a story?” I eventually wrote for other screenplays, optioning books. These were real screenplays; I didn’t go back to my “experiential” films after that.

Somebody who read about me came up to me and said, “I heard you were gonna make three movies. Where’s the third movie?” I wrote a memoir after the second film, and that was the third movie. So the first movie is about how she’s single and confused and in fear, the second is about how she wants to have this relationship, and the memoir is about her getting married. So I did complete my trilogy. Again, my mom read that and called me up and she’d never speak to me again. So that dashed me on some levels. Of course, my first feature did go to international film festivals—New Line Cinema opened it in New York at Carnegie Hall, and I did have a PR person—but the second one just took a dive. It hardly got screened. I went to Carnegie Hall to sit with the audience for Make a Face, and I went to the ladies’ room and I heard someone say, “She’s a Warner? Why didn’t she make a western?” (laughter).

I was reading some of the old reviews and stories about Make a Face and of course everyone mentions that you’re the granddaughter of Harry Warner and the niece of Jack Warner. Did you dislike that you were always associated with these people because of how it would color the way that audiences would approach your work?

I was barreling through all that at the time. And my uncle [Mervyn LeRoy] also made The Wizard of Oz (1939). A lot of times, I had respectful interviews that were about what I was creating, but there were others where people just trashed me as an heiress. Like, there’s all these actors and directors who make millions of dollars on a movie and go, “I can’t make what I believe in.” Use your own money! I thought, this is my art, this is what I’m committed to, and I just did what I needed. I never really took the mantle of being a Warner until the past few years—I’ve been going to the studio and talking with the staff and mentoring some of the filmmakers, and it’s so wonderful. They still love the family, and I’ve learned more about my dad and what he gave up. He offered to take Darryl Zanuck’s job and go to war.

One book I optioned was a fantasy sci-fi and my father came and consulted me on it. I threw the book in the fire after he left because he said, “You can’t make a fantasy sci-fi!” This was coming from a guy who owned Brave New World (1932), Dune (1965), and the Edgar Cayce story. There was this stuff I must’ve sucked in from the air, that was in my genes. My grandfather was socially conscious—he refused to do business with Germany even though everyone else did. He said movies should entertain, educate, and enlighten. And my father was brilliant—he taught the PLATO Society and he surrounded himself with people like Groucho Marx and Milton Berle and they all loved him! He was a great storyteller. I was around all this. Yes, we had actors and directors and political activists, but I was always on the periphery of all this until recently. It’s only now becoming a heartfelt part of who I am. In those days, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, New York was a long ways away. I was an independent.

Do you feel like you were working in opposition to a Hollywood style of filmmaking?

No, I wasn’t intentionally doing that. I don’t know what happened to me… I just took this on. I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t prepared, I just knew I had something I needed to share that I thought was valuable filmically, psychologically. Dreams are like film, and I lived so much in my dream life, and I had the independence to also write and create what I believed in. For some reason, I didn’t think about doing it in a business-like manner. I spent years trying to raise funds; it’s not like I didn’t try going to banks and producers. But I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I thought, I’ll just do it myself.

You mentioned earlier that you knew about Maya Deren. Were you familiar with other experimental filmmakers from the time? The Film-Makers’ Cooperative was already around then.

I didn’t belong to any of that. I wasn’t really part of any arts community in New York. I mean, I went to Max’s Kansas City and I collected some contemporary artists’ work—I was friends with Larry Bell, Louise Nevelson, and those kinds of artists—but I was very insulated and isolated. I didn’t have a big social life, I didn’t party down, I didn’t join anything. In my free time, I usually hung out in my apartment (laughs). I had some friends who were interesting but, you know, I wasn’t into The Beatles. I mean, I dated Frank Zappa.

You dated Frank Zappa?!

When I made my [first] film, I was on What’s My Line? and Frank was the mystery guest while I was Miss X. We met, he had just done 200 Motels (1971), and we were both going to be at the London Film Festival. We had gotten together in New York, he showed me 200 Motels, I showed him that I had albums by Stravinsky, and he was a very serious musician. We went to London together, and then we went to Switzerland. I was there during the burning of the Montreaux Jazz Festival. He got thrown off the stage. We traveled together for four years, off and on.

Do you feel like there’s anything about him that rubbed off on you and your approach to making films?

No. I had already made Make a Face and was already starting to make The Waiting Room. And actually, when I was making The Waiting Room, I dated Peter Watkins.

Peter Watkins?!

He invented docudrama! That was another person I had been involved with. Peter and these other guys I dated didn’t really influence me. Frank and Peter saw the movies. Peter came when I was shooting The Waiting Room and said, “Hey, let’s go to dinner!” “Excuse me, you’re a director. You know how it goes—I don’t have time for dinner!” (laughter). The War Game (1966) was the anti-war movie. Parliament refused to show it in England. He was banished from England, and that was just his style. I really enjoyed Peter, he was an interesting guy. And the other guy was Billy Friedkin.

What the heck!

I don’t kiss and tell, but I do share some of this now because, well, all of them are dead—Peter and Billy both died last year or so. Billy was a big fan of Make a Face. He got The New York Times to do a review—he encouraged [Enid Nemy] to see the movie. He didn’t tell her to like it, though. And I did have a PR firm, so there was that. But I got slammed. They were saying this was a film nobody was going to see. The same happened with my children’s books—nobody published them, so I gave out 20,000 books to kids myself. And now 55 years later, people are saying that my films are good! I’m so happy for Michael because that poor guy has been working on this for two years (laughter). And there are people like you who like the film. And the guy at Criterion and Janus said he hadn’t seen films like these before.

Do you remember what the response was like at the festivals?

I remember at the London Film Festival, they were asking questions to the directors and, you know, I look like the character. I remember a woman getting up and saying, “Is she gonna be alright?” And I said, “I love you. You can’t tell I’m right here and fine? You left reality behind.” Just like the guy who said he wanted to learn more about himself, I love when people lose everything and embrace it all.

I wanted to ask about the split screen in Make a Face. How did you accomplish that?

We were working on Steenbecks with wounded film—just cut and paste, cut and paste. Barbara actually died a year later in a car accident. I would’ve worked with her again. She and I found ways to juxtapose the film, and we split it because it was this whole visual theory where you’re fantasizing while you’re talking to somebody, where you’re living out a dream and remembering that while you’re here on Earth. Visions come back to you while you’re walking down the street. We’re having these split-personality experiences all the time but we never acknowledge them.

Had you seen Bergman’s Persona (1966) by this point?

I’m sure I had. I think I had seen that and Blow-Up, but I went so far out… I wasn’t a storyteller, I was more of an “experiential expressionist.” Where my grandpa said films should “entertain, educate, and enlighten,” I was “explore, express, and expand.” It was about psychology, it was about metaphysics—that’s what interested me. Since my dad said I should tell a story, when I was writing my children’s books—I had three children under 3 at the time—I was sleeping under my desk, and finally one day I said, “Once upon a time.” And then within three weeks, all these characters came to my head and I had written 24 stories. And it was simply because I said “once upon a time.” But of course, these stories are for children, and these are about people becoming who they want to be; these were stories, again, about transformation.

Of course your interest in psychology comes into play with The Waiting Room as it’s set inside a psychiatric facility. Were there specific questions you had or things you were trying to explore in making that film? Was there anything you learned in having made it?

Eh, I just wanted to get married (laughter). And I finally ended up getting married. I met the guy on Christmas and we got married in January. It took one month! I was 30. We went to lunch and then we went to dinner and he said, “You know, I haven’t kissed you yet but I’m going to marry you.” He was a great guy. But with the film, I don’t think I learned anything. I just wanted to get married! I don’t remember having the film be my way of processing anything because I was already on that trajectory.

I do know that it was important to me that I hired women. I was the only executive in the business who would hire women. There were two camerawomen, and one had done pornography. She knew how to light a red leather couch, but that was about it. So I knew what I wanted for lighting—I wanted a lot of bounce light and mysterious light. I wanted women because I felt a responsibility to help women, but I also wanted a sterile environment. A set is kind of hot, and I wanted it to be deadened or quieter and not have that interaction between males and females. The film was about this woman trying to find this male, so the decision to have an all-female crew had a creative purpose as well.

Some younger women in their 40s were really identifying with the film [at last year’s screening] and they asked, “Did you write the dialogue? That’s the dialogue in my head.” I went into my boxes and I found out that I did write the dialogue—it was all there. I was amazed. It was all written down. I also found the original shooting script. I broke everything down: scenes, dialogue, props, characters. I knew what I was shooting, and I put it together!

What was it like working with an all-women crew?

Oh, it was a mess. I had Nancy Schreiber, who was a really capable gaffer. She’s my friend now. And then there was Celeste Gainey, who was new. Nancy came to me and said, “Shirley MacLaine wants to take five people for a documentary in China, and I’m going!” “But we’re in the middle of shooting!” I wanted to kill Shirley, but I couldn’t tell Nancy not to go! (laughter). So she left in the middle of that film. I also had [co-producer] Nancy Littlefield. She was the only one in the union, and she didn’t know how to talk to women—she only knew how to talk to honchos!

And then I had Wendy Appel, who was one of the first people who used video. She used to teach at USC. She documented us making the film because it was the first film with an all-women crew, but I threw it all out. I threw out the 35mm too. I’m an idiot! But nobody was interested in this film! At the end of everything, she interviewed me and she took me down—she did the Warner thing. “Who do you think you are?” And then I fired her. I met her like 10 years ago. She called me up and said, “I can’t believe what you did, I so admired you.” I never told her how she made me feel. So, people didn’t know how to talk with each other, how to behave with each other, but it all came together—we did it. Roberta Findlay was a fabulous hand-held camera person—she still makes movies. Doro Bachrach, my production manager, was fabulous. She made Dirty Dancing (1987). [Dolly grip] Alexis Krasilovsky had never pushed a dolly. The union offered to train her. So I just led the tribe and everyone did the best they could—it was new for everybody.

Did you give specific acting directions to the cast?

I guided what I wanted the conversations to be. And I guess I did end up writing all the conversations. But they look and feel spontaneous. And it was my sister’s story—her husband did kill himself.

Both of your films involve projected images and television screens that create these different perspectives. How did you approach those scenes?

The critics who have seen the films are gobsmacked by that. There’s the one scene in The Waiting Room where the couple’s talking and then we pull back and then the doctor and nurse are talking, and then we pull back again. One of the unfortunate things about The Waiting Room, and I’m gonna work with Michael on this when I get to Chicago, is that she’s almost always there, but it’s dark and you can’t see it. When you pull back to the nurse and the doctor, and then pull back to the TV screen, she’s there watching all three iterations. I don’t know how I thought of that scene, honestly. What was I thinking? But it was this commitment to these layers of reality. There’s a scene on a stage, too. That’s a psychological reality check. It’s just scenes of a family, but they’re on a stage, and it’s like how people remember things like a movie scene. The other thing is that, when I watched The Waiting Room and you get to the end, there’s this moment of, “I get it.” I was watching it and going, I can’t believe I’m sitting through this, but at the end it just all makes sense somehow—she’s in charge. And really, I’m taking the film apart with you right now.

Are there things you learned from Make a Face that shaped the way you approached The Waiting Room?

I just… did it. I did everything! I fed the crew, I put up the posters around town, I did the grunt work. When we went to the set for The Waiting Room, I would bring breakfast for everybody. Again, I just went at it. I just did my job.

Earlier you mentioned the importance of R. D. Laing. Do you mind speaking more on that and how his ideas influenced your work?

It was about this open-hearted approach to people. I want to know all about you before I judge you.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about these works after watching them again after all these years?

I definitely believe that I had a clear, experiential philosophy that I wanted to depict visually. I wanted to share an individual so deeply that people could come to know themselves. Now, I finally know I succeeded. And I’m learning more things when I get asked questions.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

Oh that’s funny, when I teach people I always ask people to share what they appreciate about themselves, and now I have to answer this (laughter). I appreciate that I am here to share and learn. If I open up, it gives permission to others to open up, too.

Karen Sperling’s Make a Face (1971) plays this Friday at the Block Museum of Art.

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While Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025) nabbed Locarno’s top prize, the film made its US premiere under the guise of New Directors/New Films. What makes positioning Miyake as a new director troubling—aside from the fact that he has seven features under his belt—is how misleading its associations are for those unfamiliar with his stature: he’s one of the most established voices in the contemporary Japanese film landscape. Not only is he a peer to Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who he recently co-authored a book with, he was also a student of the firebrand Shinji Aoyama and collaborated with Japan’s critic par excellence, Shiguéhiko Hasumi, on a film about John Ford’s throwing gesture. It’s not at all difficult to imagine Miyake being an NYFF mainstay, but that slot is curiously closed off for him.

Awards of the Golden Leopard caliber should theoretically amend the fringe status that Miyake’s had to contend with throughout his career (mostly as a consequence of making, apparently, less “sexy” films than his contemporaries), but all this is only fitting for a director committed to outsiders: Hakodate’s maladroit barflies in And Your Bird Can Sing (2018); a deaf pro-boxer in Small, Slow but Steady (2022); the chronically ill comrades in All the Long Nights (2024). Miyake is the de facto elder statesman in a room of debutantes, though you’d never know it. Luckily, distributor Several Futures is giving Miyake his first-ever theatrical release in the US with a fortuitous opening weekend of sold-out screenings at Metrograph. Dylan Foley conducted this interview on April 24th at Metrograph. Thanks to Graham Carter for organizing the interview and Monika Uchiyama for interpreting.

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Dylan Foley: Okay, so first I want to talk about Tony Scott.

Sho Miyake: (laughs) We’re starting there!

Yes, I’ve seen you mention him a few times and would like to know more about how his filmmaking inspires you.

It’s hard to know where to start, but I’m going to start with a very abstract idea. The thing that I learned from Tony Scott’s films is that we only have this one life to live, but it’s really about how we’re going to push against that fact even though it’s unchangeable. How can we make life better, knowing we only have one to live?

Déjà Vu (2006) is my favorite film by him. It has to do with this completely—this idea of us only having one life—and the protagonist is trying to relive or re-experience it. Even in his films that feel unrelated to that idea, there’s always a moment when the protagonist has this incredible, beaming smile. I feel like he has this talent for capturing spontaneous moments where his protagonists are smiling, which reflects his preciousness for life.

It’s interesting because in that film as well, he gets to survive after dying at the end. When I heard that you were a big Tony Scott fan, it was kind of surprising because I feel like the style of his films is much more gonzo than anything I’ve seen in yours.

I don’t think the look or tempo of his films are in any way similar to mine, so I agree with that, but I’m not trying to reference or copy the style or look of his filmmaking. The thing is, when I think about why I make films, in the back of my mind I always have this idea of the narratives he puts into his films. I’m thinking about the various characters that he created with Denzel Washington. In a sense, I’m a fan of his movies, but I’m also a huge fan of his characters.

He also uses genre in a somewhat related way. It seems like he’s constantly searching for the limits and corroding it from the inside.

That’s true, and it’s the fact that he’s a British filmmaker who was making films in ’80s and ’90s Hollywood, where all of these genres were already very solidified. I think he was challenging himself to subvert them in some way.

To bring in Two Seasons a little bit, what’s really interesting to me is how, in the second part, Li enters the innkeeper’s history, but it’s through these object-images: the rabbit cage and the sliding doors. This feels connected to Déjà Vu’s time travel in a way.

That’s the first time that kind of comparison’s been pointed out to me, and I think it’s true. The protagonist in the summer scene is outside of the film—as the writer of the film within a film—but in the latter half she goes on a journey, and while she’s traveling she almost enters into her own film as she explores a new world. I can see how that’s similar to Denzel’s character in Déjà Vu, trying to go to the other side of the screen. I think another similarity is that each of the protagonists, before they try to go to the other side of the screen—or in the case of Two Seasons, go on this winter journey—they’re both feeling a little bit dissatisfied with life. I wouldn’t say that they’re completely melancholic, but I wouldn’t say that their daily life is full of happiness, either. Li isn’t dead, but she’s also not fulfilled by her life. That was an important element to her character that I wanted to include.

Something very specific about this film is where Li’s screenplays take place. Particularly the contrast between the first, which is about drifting tourists in Kōzu-shima, and the second, which we see starting to be written at the end, but as something rooted in the history and place of the innkeeper’s home in Yamagata.

First, I just want to clarify that I think the last part where Li is starting to write a screenplay, I think that there are many stories that she might be writing. I don’t think that I wanted to say there was one particular script that she was trying to explore. That one script could be about Benzo the innkeeper and his history in that place, but it could also be something about her own life or about something completely outside of her own experiences.

To talk about Yamagata, the original manga was not set in Yamagata. It was actually set in the prefecture next to Yamagata: Niigata. The specific history of Yamagata was not so important to me, but I was interested in the setting of a place with heavy snowfall. Yamagata itself is very important to me because it is very important in Japanese cinema history. It’s the place where there’s a very long-running documentary film festival. And in fact, my next film, which I’m editing right now, is also set in Yamagata. I hope that I can talk more about Yamagata when that film is released.

I was going to ask if Ogawa Productions was on your mind when you were shooting.

Ogawa Productions is very important to me. And of course, the fact that they existed in Yamagata is why the documentary festival was started there. He’s someone that I respect very much. I’m not a documentary director, but when I’m preparing to make my films, I try to approach it as if I’m making a documentary. That has a lot to do with the influence of Ogawa Pro on me and my filmmaking,

I’d like to talk a little bit about how a camera is used in the film, because I think it’s a key element and it’s crucial that we never see what’s represented in her pictures.

To go into an anecdote, Tsuge Yoshiharu [author of the short stories that Sho Miyake adapted for Two Seasons, Two Strangers] was also a photographer. He would travel and take many photographs that were incredibly beautiful, but he was never fulfilled by or satisfied with his photographs. But afterwards, from memory, he would try to draw the things he saw in the landscapes. And when you look at the photographs, at first they appear to be closer to the truth, but in reality his drawings are much more representative of how he saw the world. Of course, as a filmmaker, the world as it’s seen through a camera is very important to me, but this film is about a screenwriter, so it’s not really about the images that she photographs. It’s about what she gets out of the experience of photographing and how that can be turned into inspiration for a story. So I would say that the camera isn’t so important. I really wanted to write a story about a screenwriter.

I’m always interested in seeing the world photographically and how that shifts your perception of it, and I feel like this film captures how it can heighten the present. I’d like to talk about how this relates to Shinji Aoyama, who was a teacher of yours, and his ideas about cinematic representation. In his manifesto, which was about Philippe Garrel, he sought to protect the individual from being reduced to universal categories of images. One thing in particular he said was that, “the individual is words; the individual is not the image.” I thought of that when hearing that Li felt she was trapped in a cage of words.

So first, I just want to say Shinji Aoyama is probably the filmmaker and person that I respect the most. And it’s not only because of his films—I’ve been reading his writing since I was a teenager, and reading them over and over. So the fact that you, an American, have read his manifesto and that we can talk about this together is incredibly surprising and so great.

This resisting of categorized images is quite related to [Shiguéhiko] Hasumi as well and his surface criticism, which sort of posits that the cinematic image isn’t just a surface with hidden meanings.

I’m going to try to get into something that’s quite detailed. For instance, with Two Seasons, Two Strangers, I had a very difficult time coming up with what shot to start the film with. I knew that I wanted to start with an image of the Tokyo landscape, so I went around and filmed various shots. But in the end, they all felt wrong. I felt like they were reinforcing a Tokyo that already existed in the collective imaginary, and it was lacking a freshness. I landed on a shot of Tokyo that I believe is very specific and kind of individual, a view of Tokyo that’s really only visible from that one spot.

My previous film and the film prior to that were both set in Tokyo, but I was exploring Tokyo as a place where people live. The Tokyo in Two Seasons is a destination, a place where people travel to. I’m here in New York today, and it’s an unfamiliar place to me, but when you’re traveling, there’s that first day when you’re at your hotel and you look outside the window and everything is simultaneously incredibly meaningful, but also completely divorced from any kind of meaning connected to one’s everyday life. I think of that as the greatest moment that you can have on your first day on a trip. In that sense, I’m trying to use the camera in a similar way where I’m trying to depict a place as having meaning, but also being divorced from any kind of set meaning.

I think what Aoyama-san writes about and what Hasumi-san writes about are kind of getting to that essence, which is what I’m trying to do, that feeling when you’re traveling and looking out at a very unfamiliar place that you’re encountering for the first time.

One last question: “If you had to tell someone the most important thing, but knew they’d never believe you, what would you do?”

(laughs) “Never give up.” Is that right? Or is it “Don’t give up.” I forget what Denzel says.

“Try.”

Try, that’s right! Damn, it’s because of the subtitles. The subtitle says akiramenai, which means never give up. But if I try to recall the sound, it’s try.

Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025) is screening in various cities around the US. Dates can be found at the Several Futures website here.

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Thank you for reading the 64th issue of Film Show. I’d try.

If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Film Show is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Film Show will be able to publish issues more frequently.

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Meiko Kaji (1947) is a Japanese actress and singer largely known for starring in films such as Lady Snowblood (1973), the Stray Cat Rock series, and the Female Prisoner Scorpion series. It was her decision in the latter films to have a heroine who wouldn’t speak much dialogue, and her intense, emotive stare has been iconic in both the world of Japanese exploitation films and beyond. As was common with other actors at the time, Kaji sang songs to promote these films. Recently, Wewantsounds has reissued her 1970s LPs, but Kaji continues to sing and perform live as well. Kaji’s films are currently playing at the Japan Society in New York. Her films will also play as part of Beyond Fest in Chicago. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Kaji on March 28th, 2026 to discuss her childhood, the influence her parents had on her life, and the secret to an entertaining film set. Special thanks to Monika Uchiyama for interpreting.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in 1947, which is shortly after the war ended. What memories do you have of your childhood? What brought you joy?

Meiko Kaji: My father was a cook and he actually had an interesting career: he would teach Japanese cooking on television in the US. He left for the US and was based in Hawaii, and from there would go to the mainland. When I was in the third grade, he took me to Disneyland. I remember eating popcorn that was so delicious—this was a time in Japan when we didn’t have good popcorn—and it was dripping in butter. I had ice cream, too, and chocolate, which I loved. For a 7-year-old girl, that was enough to make me want to move to America (laughter).

Can you talk to me about your father? Was there anything important about seeing him on television as a cook?

When I decided to become an actor, I reported this to my dad. I told him that I was going to do this and his response was, “I think you should do whatever you feel passionately about. But once you become an adult and enter into society, when you decide on a career, you must take it very seriously.” It’s through him and watching him work that I understood how, as long as you take your career seriously, you’ll start to understand the meaning of the work you’re doing, even if slowly. He had a really strong impact on my life.

I know that when you were a child you weren’t really into movies but instead played a lot of sports. What did you play? What did you take away from those experiences?

I played basketball. I was a very introverted child. There was a period where my father was running a restaurant and I’d be very shy around people. Both my parents were worried about that facet of my personality, that I’d be a kid who never made friends. They wanted me to have an opportunity to communicate with others, and that’s why they put me into sports. I will say that playing sports really affected me and changed how I viewed the world. I had so much fun, I made lots of friends, and most importantly, I wasn’t scared of people anymore.

When I was a kid, “first times” were really difficult for me. If I were to meet someone for the first time, it was really hard to get along with them—it was really awkward. It’s difficult to explain this… but I couldn’t pursue opportunities on my own. Part of this is because I was a born-and-raised Edo kid—I was born and raised in Tokyo. People from Tokyo have this certain quality where they’re not that friendly. If you go to the soba shop and see your dad’s friend, you’re taught to not go up to them and say hello—if you’re chitchatting with that man, his hot, delicious soba is going to get soft (laughter). So, not approaching someone that you know is also a kind of politeness. That’s what you’re taught as a child. Playing sports was about overcoming some of those teachings that I had from growing up in Tokyo.

Can you tell me a bit about your mother? What are some memories that you have of her that paint a portrait of who she was?

My mother loved beans (laughter). She loved simmered beans. Of course there are many types of beans you can eat—there’s adzuki beans, there’s soybeans—but she was good at preparing any kind of bean. Think of the kind of Japanese beans where they’re sweet and have soy. There’s a specific kind of black bean near Kyoto in Tamba. These beans [kuromame] are very round and as you cook them, they turn into ovals, but it’s really important that while you cook them, they don’t wrinkle at any point and instead stay glossy and smooth. I’m really good at doing that.

I keep a diary and write in it every single day. My annual New Year’s Eve activity is to cook these beans and reflect on my year by reading my diary. And the reason I do that is because the process of cooking these beans takes seven hours. I remember that my mom and dad gave me the stamp of approval on my bean-cooking skills—they said that I’m really good, that I could be a professional.

How long have you been doing this tradition?

Since my debut as an actor.

Wow. I know it was your birthday recently and it was the beginning of the new year recently, too. What sort of things did you reflect on this past year, and what sort of things did you reflect on when you first debuted in 1965?

This past year, I was reflecting on how my 70s have gone by so quickly. I remember thinking, “Wow, these years are already at their end.” Ever since my late 50s, I noticed that time sped up so much; I don’t remember feeling like a single year was that short when I was young. But as I age, time goes by quicker and quicker—it really goes by in a flash. In 1965, I was reflecting on how fun things were. I was immature and carefree (laughter). I knew that I was at the starting line of my career, that things were becoming very intense, very quickly. I was realizing that the only way to keep on going in a career like this was to develop a very strong sense of perseverance.

I know that with director Shunya Ito and the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies, you initially asked for your character to not have any dialogue at all. Is that something you saw in your own life? Were there soft-spoken women who had a lot of confidence around you, or were these based on any actors you’d seen?

There wasn’t anyone around me that was like that (laughter).

What was it like to take on that character then? Do you think it had any impact in the way you lived your own life? I know that you also picked out the costumes for your character, too.

I will say that I have never been more worried in my life than when I was filming that first Scorpion film. We decided together that the heroine wouldn’t have very much dialogue, and we knew it was a bold choice, but it was also the director’s debut film. We knew it was something we couldn’t fail at—it could ruin both of our careers. So from the very beginning, we knew we had to confront this challenge with everything we had. The director also wanted to shoot everything chronologically, which is such an impossibility (laughter). If you have scenes 1 through 100, you never do them in order because there are sets, locations, actors’ schedules—all these things you have to manage—and if you were to shoot chronologically, it’d mean that the actors would have to keep coming back.

The shoot ended up taking about four months. I remember that by the second month, the producer came to us and said, “This is too big a challenge, I don’t know what we were getting ourselves into.” The director said, “Well, from the beginning we decided that we’d shoot chronologically, so we all knew what was going to happen and the challenges this would bring.” The director was also the president of the union, so I think everyone on set wanted to work really hard to impress him and make sure he was happy. It was through that passion that we were able to complete that film. This was during a time when films were being made in two weeks, so the fact our film took four months was really challenging.

I know you’ve played a lot of similar roles in this vein, but was it any different to move from this to the role you had in Sadaro Saito’s There Was a War When I Was a Child (1981)?

I wouldn’t say that I approached the acting element of that role any differently from any of my other roles. I think of acting as just being about expression. I was very surprised, though, that I was offered the role. I play the protagonist, and it takes place in Fukushima. It’s about a parent who has a relationship with an American G.I.—the child is half-Japanese. In that era, this would’ve been very frowned upon. Perhaps it would’ve been more acceptable in a place like Tokyo, but in Fukushima, which is more rural, it was very unacceptable. So in order to protect her child, she has to live in a shed. I was really compelled by the motherly devotion that’s depicted in that film. It was very moving for me to be offered a role that’s like that. She wasn’t a typical mom though, and I think that this role, which has so much complexity, was offered to me because of the roles I had earlier in my career.

You’ve made a lot of music throughout your career, too. I know that Shunsuke Kikuchi initially asked you to approach singing as if you were also acting, like you were a performer. You also made an album a couple years ago, 7 (Sette) (2024). Can you talk to me about singing and what it’s like for you to engage in this practice? How does it compare to acting?

This isn’t to say that I’m so used to acting that I don’t get nervous anymore, but when I’m singing, I sense a different kind of tension in my body. It’s very fresh for me, to get that twinge of nervousness. Singing is giving me a new experience compared to my acting.

You’ve stated that you didn’t like Jeans Blues: No Future (1974). Was there anything about the production of that film or just the final product that explains why you didn’t like it?

It wasn’t entertaining (laughter). It was both not entertaining to watch and not entertaining to act in it.

What’s needed for acting to be entertaining for you? What sets have been fun for you?

Stray Cat Rock. That wasn’t even about acting. The director was trying to create something that he’d already given up on—it was no longer a reality—so it wasn’t as if he would nitpick on specific acting directions. It was such a free set where I could do anything I wanted, and that’s why I think the director was amazing and made the film so entertaining and great.

You’ve once said that you made a lot of enemies throughout your film career. Who are these people, and how did this happen? Were they just unwilling to hear out your ideas?

I don’t know if I’d call them enemies (laughter). And it’s because my biggest enemy is myself! That’s how I’ve always worked. Perhaps there are people who don’t like me, but I’m not interested in other people! I simply don’t have the time and don’t want to make the effort to care about other people. If other people don’t like me, it’s probably because I don’t like them either! And that’s completely fine. I just can’t bring myself to make any effort to make people like me.

I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

It’s my honesty. Ever since I was little, I’ve been very honest.

Meiko Kaji’s films are currently playing at the Japan Society in New York. Her films will also play as part of Beyond Fest in Chicago.

Thank you for reading the 63rd issue of Film Show. No time for enemies.

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Jack Auen and Kevin Walker have been making movies together since they were teenagers, and named their production collective Cosmic Salon after an exercise from one of their high school classes. Their work—including several short films from the last few years—blends elements of documentary, history, and formal exercise, but has always aspired to genre fiction. Their shared obsession with an now-obscure conspiracy theory about a device called the Chronovisor, invented in the mid-Twentieth Century and said to view the past through remaining vibrations of speech or memory, formed the basis of their debut feature film of the same name.

Chronovisor follows a solitary academic as she dives down the rabbit hole of this conspiracy. Compelling as a thriller, the material limitations of its production become a strength as the filmmakers develop a variety of innovative approaches to narrative and characterization. The film’s present day setting, mid-century aesthetic, and centuries-spanning premise form a study of how our present experience is formed by our consideration of the past, and how texts are the medium for this experience. Chronovisor had its world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam, and will have its North American premiere at New Directors/New Films, and its West Coast premiere at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies.

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Alex Fields: The film begins with credits that say “A Film by Cosmic Salon,” and the shorts are credited that way too. What is Cosmic Salon, and how did it come to be?

Jack Auen: That’s a good question…

Kevin Walker: No one has asked that before. We sometimes use the word “collective.” We sometimes use the words “production company.” It could accurately be described as both. We have also made a film co-directed with my wife, so it’s a crew of us, and we hope to expand, bringing more filmmakers on board in that capacity. For the most part, we do production, both narrative and commercial. As for the name’s origin—Jack, you can speak to that. You discovered it first.

Jack Auen: I guess the reason we named the company that is because we wrote a very early screenplay that had that title. Kevin and I went to middle school and high school together, and we’ve known each other since fifth grade, technically—since we were 12. That title came from a professor from our high school who had a very specific assignment called “A Cosmic Salon.” You would fictionalize two important figures from history, whether they were real or not, having a conversation—like Aristotle and Odysseus. You would use that as the dialogue to explore some idea in your history or philosophy class. So that title bounced around with us for years, and then, when it came to naming something, it seemed appropriate for what we wanted in terms of our filmmaking.

When did you start making or talking about making films together?

Kevin Walker: We started making YouTube videos right away. Thankfully, those are not publicly accessible (laughter). It was in seventh grade when we had an awakening and realized we were inordinately interested in this subject compared to others. We started really bonding over it and some of the entry-level cinephile films at the time—some of the big directors that everyone latches on to right as they start to explore film. Then we started to take cinema seriously, and our first big effort was in eighth grade, when we made an action movie—a lot of guns, a lot of muzzle flares, a lot of goons getting shot execution-style (laughter). It had a zany comedy element to it, absolutely nothing like what we started making in the post-collegiate era, but that was how it started out. We were just making action movies and comedies. Hopefully, those are also not available on the internet.

Jack Auen: We scrubbed them pretty thoroughly, I think. They are relics.

They will be the Blu-ray special features (laughter).

Jack Auen: Maybe for the boxset (laughter).

Did you go to the same school for college? And did you go for film?

Jack Auen: Neither of us did, actually. Kevin went to University of North Carolina for undergrad, and I went to Yale for undergrad. I studied psychology and Kevin studied Classics and English. We kind of dropped off in terms of making movies. We still watched a lot of films, and I took a lot of cinema studies classes, and I know Kevin took a lot of screenwriting classes, but it was on the back burner. Kevin was also an athlete in college, so other things were taking up time. It wasn’t until Kevin went to grad school, and then eventually I went to grad school, that we rekindled that desire to make movies again and just be fans of film.

Did you go to grad school for film?

Jack Auen: No (laughter). Kevin got a master’s in theology, and I’m still technically in grad school. It’s an MBA and MFA dual-degree program from NYU, and it’s for film production. Finally, one of us actually studied film (laughter).

I’ve seen your three shorts—Marblehead (2021), Roundabout (2024), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (2025). When did you start working on those? When did you start thinking of filmmaking as something to submit to festivals and not just something you were doing together for fun?

Kevin Walker: Yeah, that was in junior year of college, the summer after junior year. We made our first serious effort at a drama film. It was sort of autobiographical about our high school days. It’s egregiously bad. We immediately buried it because we were like, “Oh my god, this is so humiliating to witness.” Actually, that’s a truly buried one. Like, we don’t even have it. I don’t know where that is. Do you have a copy, Jack?

Jack Auen: I don’t think so.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, thank the Lord. With that film, we wanted this to be step one in the journey toward, hopefully, a career in filmmaking, and it was a depressing start. I was in England then, so we were separated for a while. Eventually, during the pandemic, I got back from grad school and we were back in Baltimore, hanging out with our parents and trying to figure out what we wanted to do with our lives. Jack was working a job in consulting. We were like, “Let’s give this another shot.”

We met this guy who spent all his time in a cemetery. When Jack came and visited me in England, we took a trip to Dublin. We went to a famous cemetery there, and immediately, when we met that guy, we were like, “Oh, this would make an interesting character for a film.” Then, while sitting around during the pandemic, we were like, “Let’s try and bring that idea to life.” We knew nothing at the time about how to generate a legitimate production—you know, hiring sound people. It was still very bare-bones, but Marblehead actually turned out okay, and we thought that we could build on this.

Were you always thinking of narrative features as the goal, or were you also into experimental shorts? I see some influence from experimental film, especially in Chronovisor (2026), but even in the shorts too, and I’m wondering if there is a background there?

Jack Auen: I think in terms of what we wanted to be doing long-term, it was narrative features. That was just the extent of our film knowledge at an early age. It wasn’t until the end of undergrad that I was exposed to Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow and any of that stuff. Of course, naturally, we went through a phase where we felt we had a lot of homework—we needed to do a lot of catching up on the history of film as a form. Eventually, we brushed up on all that required viewing. Experimental film was never what originally drew us to making films; it was always narrative fiction. Then, other influences came in through the back door without us ever realizing it—there was interest in semi- or pseudo-docu-fiction, and using non-actors. Some of those things didn’t come from thinking critically or explicitly about them as an intentional choice. These things come to you project by project and it’s only in retrospect that you connect the dots about the through-lines of what interests us.

Kevin Walker: Experimental film is definitely not something we thought about at all with Chronovisor, unless I’m misremembering. They weren’t reference points for us. It’s been really interesting seeing friends, colleagues, and critics bring up a variety of experimental filmmakers while talking about Chronovisor. I find that extraordinarily surprising, and very cool (laughs). It was truly not a conscious decision, and I actually have a hard time even thinking it was a subconscious influence, because I haven’t seen some of the films they’re talking about, and I don’t think Jack has seen many of the ones that have been referenced either. So I think it’s just, like, a cool coincidence that we tried out a couple things that those people beat us to many, many years ago.

As soon as the onscreen text starts happening in Chronovisor, I’m thinking of David Gatten. I don’t know if you’ve seen his films, but they all play with historical texts, often filming actual historical copies. He’s got that same trick where excerpts of texts appear across the screen. It’s driven by his interest in the medium specificity of our engagement with history through specific objects and texts. And if you’re coming from that same place, you’re arriving at some of the same tools—you can see how you get to the same place, even if he’s working in a fully avant-garde mode and you’re working in narrative.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, I guess there are a limited number of ways, if you are interested in text, you can even approach it. It’s sort of just filming words, so there is automatically some overlap. We did encounter David Gatten after we had started filming. A friend of mine—he’s a big New York City rep rat—was like, “You should check this guy out. He does similar stuff to what you’ve been talking about.” I really loved it when I saw it. There’s definitely a spiritual siblinghood there, or I hope someone would say something like that about us. He’s great. I don’t know if we’re quite at his level... we’re definitely not (laughter).

Jack Auen: We were definitely keeping our eyes out for any film that involved text, even if it was just for a single shot. I remember there was a shot from one of my NYU professor’s films, Lucio Castro, where someone opens up a letter and reads it, and the text comes in superimposed over the image and slides across as they’re reading it. I remember sending that to you, Kevin. Every time we saw anyone who was doing something that felt like a novel approach to onscreen text—like Ricky D’Ambrose and Matías Piñeiro—it was always something we were excited to share, and it was proof positive that you could do novel things and have it still be fun to watch.

I could name a thousand films in the avant-garde that extensively use onscreen text, but as far as narrative films, there’s not so many. There are subtitles, of course, or more recent efforts where filmmakers are grappling with how you represent cell phones and computers, the screenlife thing—you know, a horror film where the whole thing takes place in a chat room—obviously you are doing something very different, where these are older texts, not computer screens on screens. When did you realize that this is what you wanted to do? How much of a decision was there of, like, can we get away with making half of this film text on a screen?

Kevin Walker: Yeah, it took a long time for us to crack it because we became obsessed with the Chronovisor story just on a personal level—you know, the conspiracy theory. In the same way our character becomes obsessed with it, that was kind of our life for a few months, and we were really like, “There is something obviously cinematic about the Chronovisor in a very literal way: this camera that can photograph the past.” Also, the story was so bizarre and brought together scientific and religious themes that were really appealing to us. We were trying to find a way to explore that story in a budget-conscious way. You know, there’s a very high-budget version of the story that tells the whole history of it and takes place in Italy and France and is an international mystery.

Probably much less interesting than the one you made.

Kevin Walker: Yeah (laughter). Not only was it impossible for us to make something like that, but it wasn’t generating the excitement we require to dive head-first into a project. Very often with a project, there’s a moment—and it’s often after Jack and I have been shooting the breeze for a long time—when someone brings up something that sounds like it won’t work onscreen. We’ll be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Is there a way to make that work?” It may be something that seems boring or uncinematic or tedious. With every film we’ve made, when we found something that seemed inherently uncinematic we were like, “Okay, that sounds exciting—is there a way to make it cinematic?” It becomes high stakes because it could easily not work. You could fall on your face, but at least it gives you something to shoot for, and it’s capable of rousing us from a kind of drowsiness about the story. I don’t know if I’m saying that right, Jack?

Jack Auen: I don’t have much to add. It does feel like the text element—the sheer amount, the volume of text—was so early and fundamental to the idea that it’s hard to pinpoint. I don’t know if there was a version of this movie that didn’t have that, where we said, “Well, what if we add this in?” Given the way we were experiencing the research ourselves, it became very meta in the moment, where we were noticing our own obsession, needing to order more old magazines in case there was some new clue. Realizing the excitement inherent in research is part of what we were trying to capture emotionally for the audience. Then you just have to live and die by that sword—this is a movie you’re going to have to read. It felt very fundamental to the idea.

That makes me think there is a version of this film that’s an autobiographical documentary essay film, where you’re narrating in the first person about your own journey. I’ve seen versions of that film at festivals a bunch. I assume those are actual copies of the François Brune book and other texts, so have these real books and magazines, but then your character is having phone calls with people who are actually dead in real life. How do you go from what could just be a documentary—because this is a real conspiracy theory—into, okay, we’re going to make this fiction and get voice actors to play these characters?

Kevin Walker: For me, as of now, I’ve never had the impulse to do something autobiographical—we’ve always wanted to be fiction filmmakers. The fact that in this film we use documentary and fiction together is kind of incidental—a matter of happenstance. We just got really into the Chronovisor story, and as we were thinking about adapting it, it was always something that we wanted to fictionalize. I don’t think we’re truly documentary filmmakers by nature. The story was already so robust, the mystery already so profoundly interesting, that we were like, “Let’s just bring it all in. It’s already all there. The screenplay is already written.” So once we realized it was going to be this research film, and we knew the themes we wanted to explore, it became: What is the best character, or characters, to use to explore the Chronovisor and the larger questions we want to provoke? So the fiction element is more primordial than any of the documentary elements.

Jack Auen: I would add also just that, as Kevin alluded to, there was a period of time when we were just interested in this conspiracy without having plans to turn it into a film. The sort of animating question, the fun texting back and forth that we could have about this was: Could this be real? Why would someone be lying about all of this? Why the cover-ups? Why are there these conflicting, contradictory narratives? These questions were the first things we cared about with the Chronovisor. It felt like if we were going to make a movie about it, we would want to answer those questions, or at least tell a story about a character who has the same ones, and for whom they were equally important. So that required it to be fictional to some extent, given the loose threads of the actual story since 1994. Early on, we knew we would be bringing it into the present tense in a way the materials don’t allow for in a purely documentary form.

I watched the film twice. The first time, I didn’t know anything about the Chronovisor story, so I didn’t know it wasn’t a total fiction. I’m thinking this is like Umberto Eco or Borges-style fiction or something. Seeing it again, after realizing this and having read a lot of this stuff online, I saw it in a different light. It’s interesting—I had thought for a while, the first time I was watching, that I was watching a period piece. You don’t see a cell phone until 15 minutes into the film. There’s a point where she has letterhead, and it’s dated 2026. For a while, this could be taking place in the 1980s. Was that deliberate? Part of it is that it’s shot on 16mm, so we’re watching this in the 2020s and it has an older look. But how much of that was a conscious choice, to play with what time period it feels like as we’re watching it?

Jack Auen: Definitely intentional. We for sure wanted to do something that was modern-day, and I think it really comes back to our experience of researching the device at first—this feeling of the gap that yawns between when the story came out and was buried, when it came back up as Pellegrino Ernetti was close to death, and then when it disappeared again for another twenty years. There is something about that unearthing, and the amount of time between then and now, that made the discovery process and the research process feel all the more exciting. There’s this thought of how something this interesting could have happened and not still be talked about all the time—which is the feeling we were constantly overwhelmed with when we were researching this stuff (laughter), like, why is this not way more viral? We felt lucky that we had discovered the most interesting story that no one has been talking about, at least in the Western, English-speaking world. I don’t know if I can quite land the plane on that thought, but that level of excitement was something we were always going for, and having those time-period differences added to that sense of mystery and unearthing. Kevin, do you want to add anything?

Kevin Walker: I think we didn’t want the film to feel indulgently nostalgic for no good reason. Obviously, as you mentioned, it has some inherently nostalgic qualities—the nature of the subject matter and the shooting format. It was very important to us that when she picked up the phone, it wasn’t a rotary phone or something (laughter). That’s what we wanted aesthetically, because it’s more in line with the analogue nature of the rest of the film, even though we don’t really like contemporary technology. There is a reason we wanted to make a film that is about books and these relics of the past, but we were like, it’s really important that we show this is modernity, for all the reasons that Jack said. Also, it emphasizes our character’s choice to not be involved in this world of contemporary technology. If it took place in the past, she would be doing more traditional research typical of that era, but it’s interesting that she chooses to wall herself off in a world that is alien to the contemporary academic.

I think those decisions are the right ones. To me, what’s really special about the film is how it captures the phenomenological experience of engaging with history. There is a line in the film where someone says something about the Chronovisor—that your memory starts to meld with those on the other end of it, or something like that. Yes, here she is in 2026, but then she’s experiencing—well, there are layers to it—the 1950s and 1960s, when all this was supposedly happening, but also Jesus on the cross. As you dive into this rabbit hole of text, your experience becomes not an actual historical experience of what it was like to live at that time, but some version of it that you’re creating in your head, as opposed to being situated in your own time.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, there is totally an extent to which the act of reading and the act of researching something deeply intertwines your mind with another’s. It’s one of the really special things about intellectual pursuit. I honestly never really thought about it in the way you just described. You know, the memories-merging aspect of the Chronovisor was a really crucial one for us thematically, for a variety of reasons. It’s not only a fundamental feature of the Chronovisor and its impact on its users, but also a fundamental feature of the life of the mind and your engagement with minds of the past. Yeah, yeah—that’s really cool.

I don’t know if it was actually an influence for you guys, but after watching the movie, it got me thinking about how I’ve always wanted to read The Name of the Rose (1986) and hadn’t, so over the past week or so, I’ve been reading it (laughter).

Kevin Walker: Oh wow!

Jack Auen: Really!? So you get to experience it for the first time.

I’m really loving it. I’m just about finished. I keep thinking about how, in the book, there’s all this stuff about the library being a conversation—texts talking to texts about text. It’s signifiers all the way down. That feels like it’s in your film too. I don’t know if you were thinking about that reference point, or other literary reference points.

Jack Auen: We definitely were. Before we ever shot the film, when we were just describing it to our friends, colleagues, and classmates, we found ourselves using literary influences more than cinematic ones. The cinematic ones came eventually, but that was definitely an early impulse. Obviously, Eco and Borges are geniuses, so we could only make a small offering on the mountain that is their body of work, but that is for sure the lineage we wanted to cultivate comparisons to.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, the obsession with the analog and books and The Name of the Rose, and then the conspiratorial aspects of Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), were 100% top of mind—mostly aesthetically, and related to the joy we experienced reading those works. More than anything, more than any specific aspects of the plots or the themes or the semiotics of it, it was just this pure ecstasy of being in those cozy headspaces with academics doing their thing, acting like intellectual detectives. It was just so much fun, and to combine those with elements of genre is so exciting. Discovering Eco was like, oh my god, I can’t believe someone did this—made this super literate subject into genre fodder. That’s so cool and exciting to us. So yeah, that sensibility played a huge role.

I read a really cool book called The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey. It’s a detective novel. She wrote about this detective many times, and the book is part of a series. In this one, he had broken his leg and was super depressed because he couldn’t go out and solve mysteries. So he instead tries to solve the historical mystery of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, trying to understand how his nephews were murdered. I’m losing the plot details, but that was really cool too as a proof of concept—like, if someone is solving a mystery from their armchair, can you make it interesting? I don’t know if I’m missing any literary references, Jack?

Jack Auen: No, those are the major ones for sure.

We’ve talked a lot about text, but obviously sound plays a huge role in Chronovisor. From the very first scene, you have this conversation happening in a restaurant where the ambient noise almost overwhelms the conversation, making it hard to hear. Then you have the language switching going on, even in the first shot. How did you think about sound, or can you talk about that choice?

Jack Auen: It depends on the decision when we get to it. Sometimes it was in the writing, sometimes it was in the edit. Kevin and I have definitely often discussed, and are very concerned with, how dialogue is used in films—and in our films in particular—and with finding tools that allow you to color dialogue or invite a reading between the lines, rather than putting everything in the text of what people are saying. That is something we’ve experimented with, going back even to our early shorts, though without knowing that it was something we were interested in. Some of those experiments have succeeded more than others, and we are still trying our hand at new techniques in that way. It’s something that really excites us: figuring out whether you can get audience members to operate in a different mode, rather than just trying to process the content of what is being said. That was definitely an early decision throughout the whole film, and definitely in that opening scene as well, in terms of how we could train the audience to watch the film in the way we wanted them to, particularly in their relationship to the dialogue.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, how can you get the audience to not care about what your character is saying? The audience is immediately primed to pay attention to what is being said, especially if you just open with a scene of dialogue. We drown her out a little bit. We have her switch languages without subtitling it, and then eventually we have the music fully drown her out. That’s to try and clue you in to the fact that we, as filmmakers, are not interested in the content of her speech, it’s the fact of her speech that we want highlighted. That’s true for scenes all throughout the film. Other than that, I think our sound design is honestly pretty standard. We wanted it rooted in realism. That’s also partly why we made the restaurant so loud because restaurants are insanely loud, and it bothers us when, in films, everyone is incredibly audible in a restaurant. When we’re at a restaurant, like with my family, we’re screaming across the table. You’re not catching 30% of what people are saying. Maybe it’s a little indulgent to be so committed to that realism (laughs), but I don’t know—it’s important to us.

Yeah it’s not just abstract realism. You mention being at a restaurant, screaming to hear each other. In that situation you’re paying attention to body language and vibes in a way where you’re not just engaged with the content of what people are saying—you’re emulating that experience in film.

Kevin Walker: That’s exactly right, yeah.

You talk about the way the music eventually drowns her out. The score, by Gustav Holst, plays such an important role throughout because if you’re reading the dialogue, you’re not listening to it. So what’s going on sound-wise is often more about the way music is used, even more than in a conventional film, where music is giving emotional cues on top of speech. First of all, why Gustav Holst, and how was that decision made?

Jack Auen: Kevin was the one who found it, so I’ll let him talk about that. We knew pretty early on, though, that we were looking for something classical, something orchestral, something that felt like the types of scores that weren’t really accompanying films in the 2020s—even the 2010s. We were looking back at the 1990s and 2000s, where it was standard to have scores like this. There’s something about its nostalgic quality and grand scale that we knew we were excited about.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, we definitely wanted something really grandiose. We were trying to communicate the adventure of intellectual pursuit, how cosmically important it feels, how profoundly meaningful it is when you’re engaging with the text and feel like you’re discovering something. Of course, we want to try to get as far as we can in portraying that just with our character and the text itself, but I think the music also contributes to taking that intimate experience and signaling the magnitude of it—at least the magnitude of it in our minds—and I hope we maybe managed to communicate that to audiences.

In terms of finding the piece, an author I love named David Bentley Hart sent out a bunch of music that he recommended in his newsletter. I was combing through it, seeing if there was anything that fit the film, and this piece had that quality of grandiosity we were looking for. Also, it was just fun: it’s mysterious and spooky. It goes back to the Eco and Borges aspects of how we all have our own pet themes and semiotic interests, but we also wanted Chronovisor to be cozy, mysterious, and eerie—we wanted to give the goods of a genre film. The Holst works at all those levels. It’s a large suite of music, and it has many different tonal moments that we could distribute throughout the film. It was also an interesting coincidence that it has this science-fiction quality to it. It’s called The Planets (1914-1917). It felt like what one of our teachers used to call an “interstellar cross-pollination,” right, Jack? It had that sense of fate when we found it.

Jack Auen: “Celestial cross-pollination.” (laughter).

You call your collective Cosmic Salon and the Holst piece is called The Planets, so there’s an obvious thematic connection. It works in the immediate, emotive way that a traditional film score is meant to do, but there’s also this historical dimension of it being a recognizable early 20th-century piece and not an original film score, which complements the layers of historicity in the film. And because there is onscreen text for so long, the score often takes the place of dialogue. There’s also the fact that Ernetti is a musicologist. It’s not clear whether Beatrice Courte is actually supposed to be the chair of Pre-Polyphonic Music, or if that’s just a lie she tells to get what she wants, but she does talk about it. So there is all this stuff in the film about music, musicology, the history of music, and all these layers come together.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, that is so true. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that we only dive a little bit into his musicology background. He had an insane number of areas of expertise. We don’t even get into the fact that he was one of the most renowned exorcists in Venice. He just did too many things, so we had to limit it to some extent (laughter). He studied ancient music, pre-polyphonic music, and we do use one of the Gregorian chants that he recorded. There is something that is essential to the film about music and sound. The discovery of the Chronovisor stemmed from studying sound decay—that’s how they started dabbling in these ideas about waves in the ether that can be captured. Yes, Beatrice is definitely a profligate liar, though not pathologically. I think she has good ends, but we did have some fun tallying up her various impossible and nonexistent positions (laughter).

Jack Auen: For a film about a device that reconstructs the past, having these elements felt right to us. In the same way that the archival material is real archival material, or that Beatrice reconstructs a VHS tape, all these things—and not necessarily intentionally—felt of a piece. And The Planets just slotted in place so satisfyingly.

How did you develop the character of Beatrice? The actress, Anne-Laure Sellier, has no previous acting experience. How did you meet and cast her? Was she part of developing the character, or did you already have the character in mind and then cast her for it?

Jack Auen: I can talk about reaching out to her, because I found her. We knew pretty early on that we were going to need a real academic and a non-actor. It became clear that our requirements for the role were so specific and demanding that we would really have to narrow our search to people we knew would have that type of skill set: being multilingual, having the ability to understand academic jargon, and just the way they talk. We were combing through websites of NYU faculty, Columbia faculty, and universities in New York City, and we came across Anne-Laure. She teaches in Paris, among other places. She was a visiting NYU Stern professor. I was, and still am technically, a student at Stern, so I found her contact information. We found a TED Talk she had given that was really helpful in allowing us to hear her manner of speech, her accent, and her body language, all of which immediately piqued our interest. We reached out, and we were very lucky she responded to the email (laughs). We read it the other day because she dug it up in her inbox and sent it to us, and it does kind of sound like two crackpots writing to her about, “Do you want to be in a movie, even though you’ve never acted before? It’s about this crazy conspiracy theory…” (laughter).

Oh, and you’re basically the only actor in the film (laughter).

Jack Auen: Yeah, we might have buried the lede a little bit (laughter). She was very generous and got coffee with us. Kevin, maybe I’ll let you take over in terms of how we built the character. It was definitely in heavy collaboration with Anne-Laure. She took to it like a duck to water. She got very excited about what the film was going for and about her experiences with academics. She took a lot of ownership on that front. So, as soon as she was on board, it was very much a mutual path of discovery.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, it took us a long time during the writing phase to home in on exactly what we wanted this character to be like—she represents a complex dilemma about how one can attend to reality. I won’t go too deep into that, but I will say two touchstones for us were Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009) and Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism (1994). They really helped us get a grasp of the best way to communicate, through someone’s psychological profile, certain ideas we wanted to explore about contemporary life.

Jack Auen: Yeah, and also working with Anne-Laure was a lesson in figuring out what tools were left to us in terms of characterization when, yeah, you’re basically the only actor in the film, and most of your behavior is alone in a room reading. We don’t have any knock-down, drag-out fight scenes or traditional high drama going on. We had to really sit down and say, how can we learn about this character, given the tools, parameters, and conceit of the project we set up for ourselves?

Most of the film is her engaged with text, or her on the phone with people trying to get ahold of them, but there are just a few scenes—two in a restaurant, the one toward the end where she is giving a talk—that are like intermissions between the main thing that’s going on in the film and where you’re being brought back to reality. Her body language and way of speaking do so much, especially in the end, when she’s being asked to communicate an extreme discontent from reality in the way she delivers her speech. I think she does a great job. Like you were saying, the content is not in the words that you’ve written but in how it’s delivered. It all hinges on clarity being derived from the way she’s stumbling over her speech.

Jack Auen: We were pretty naive, honestly, about how much of the weight of the film would end up on the shoulders of whoever we cast (laughter). It didn’t really hit us until we were filming all of these scenes and having her memorize these massive monologues, a lot of which were much longer than what you end up seeing in the final version of the film, and she nailed them every time. We just pinch ourselves every day that we found Anne-Laure and she found us, because I can’t imagine the character working, or the film working, nearly the same way it does without her.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, she was truly a miracle. She was incredible to work with, and a naturally gifted actor in terms of coming across organically on screen. She made it so easy for us, and she’s also just so dedicated and committed. In those scenes where she is back in her academic context, reality has become oneiric for her. Her reality is back in the library, and that is definitely an important aspect of her character.

My editor and I were talking about the film, and we both saw ourselves in it as people who get deeply obsessed with things, and for whom reality can start to feel like a distraction from the thing you’re obsessed with. It’s a film that is going to resonate with a lot of obsessive cinephiles for that reason, in a way that a much more casual viewer may not have that response to. Do you feel the same way, like that’s an expression of something in you guys?

Kevin Walker: Yeah, we are wannabe academics, and we love that process and rabbit hole. It’s been really nice and encouraging to hear people who are real academics, who write for a living and live in a very literate and intellectual world, talk to us about what you said, about relating to that experience and feeling like there is at least some degree of verisimilitude for them watching it onscreen. We weren’t sure we were doing a good job of capturing that experience, but I think people of that ilk might see themselves in it if we did our jobs right. Fingers crossed.

Jack Auen: There is a fine line too, because we’re not wholly uncritical of that way of being (laughter)—to say it in an understated way—but we definitely wanted to capture the love for it that we do have, and why it is so tempting and enticing and seductive as a hobby. If we could get both those things across, we knew we were on the right track.

Yeah, back to The Name of the Rose, that’s the repeated theme there: both the dangers and pleasures of intellectual obsession, and the impossibility of distinguishing between them.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, totally, 100%. So many of Borges’ stories have these tantalizing objects that the story orbits around, and I think Eco does as well—the lost book. I think it’s Aristotle’s book on comedy, if I’m remembering correctly? But there is something cool… It’s as old as the fountain of youth, the philosopher’s stone, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997) is definitely a major influence on this film. Nicolas Flamel and the hunting down of immortality with the philosopher’s stone—we definitely see Beatrice as a similar figure.

Towards the end of Chronovisor, there’s an extended, fairly abstract sequence that is effectively an experimental animation. I’m curious how that was conceived and how you made it.

Jack Auen: I’ll start by saying that one of the first things we had about the film was the ending. Again, this was weeks, months before ever thinking about a feature film—just the question of whether this device could be real and what it would be like to have access to it. Kevin had drawn up a proto version of that sequence, which changed a lot once we wrote the rest of the film, but it was the initial impetus. We had that, and always knew it would be where the film was pointing.

How did you actually shoot or make it?

Jack Auen: Well, while still trying to preserve some of the movie magic…

Kevin Walker: It’s quite extensive, all the various resources we pulled together to make that sequence. And we spent a long time refining the specific permutation, or specific swirls of color, shadow, and light. That was something we really wanted to home in on, you know, coming in and out of focus and visibility. It was a very protracted process, but also a fun one. We won’t reveal our sources because it would spoil some of the magic, but I’ll say we spent a tremendous amount of time on it. We knew that the film needed to stick the landing.

Again, this might be me projecting my own interests onto the film, but I’m thinking that it has some of the look of a Lillian Schwartz film.

Kevin Walker: We’re very honored to be compared to figures like that, these foundational figures in experimental film and video. It’s been really cool that people have been comparing it to that, because it’s just an honor to be associated with any filmmakers people love and respect.

Jack Auen: Yeah, especially from that time period. It feels like the era that should be evoked, whether or not this film was made in 2026.

I guess Chronovisor has only screened at Rotterdam, correct?

Jack Auen: Yes.

What was the audience reception there? The people I know who have seen it are all other critics who are into experimental film, so I’m curious—not that the Rotterdam audience is the general theatrical audience—what the reception was among a different audience that’s not made up of professional critics?

Kevin Walker: I think for the general public that went in cold, even the people that ended up really liking it, there was an acclimation period. Especially because the logline of the film might lead one to believe that it’s a classic sci-fi film about this really interesting international mystery with a tantalizing device at its core, and then the text starts coming and you realize it’s not going to go away.

That’s when I realized I was going to love it (laughter), and maybe other people are having a very different reaction.

Kevin Walker: Yeah, then for some people, that’s the moment they realize they are going to hate it, and for other people, that moment is very skeptical and cautious, and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know if this is going to be my speed.” But I really appreciate it when those people give it a chance and hopefully—and eventually—submit to its rhythms. I hope we win some of the audience over in that way. There were some frustrated viewers in Rotterdam, but I think some also saw the vision and what we were going for. It’s cool when there are polarized reactions. I think it was, on the whole, okay—positive (laughter). Right, Jack?

Jack Auen: I would definitely describe it as a positive reaction. We were really happy with sold-out screenings, engaged people asking questions, sometimes not even asking questions but just talking about some other related conspiracy that really inspires them. We love those people—that’s who this movie is for, to a large extent. Naturally, it’s going to be more polarized for general audiences, especially if you don’t know what you’re getting into. Honestly, we were so sure that this was a very niche film—you know, the people who love it will love it, but there will be a large group of people that it’s not for—and that was our preconception of the film before releasing it. It’s been more broadly accepted and enjoyed than we expected, which we’ve been really happy about. We’ll see if that holds when we play in the US and other non-European film festival markets, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised so far.

Was Rotterdam your top choice where you wanted it to premiere, or did the timing just work out?

Kevin Walker: We actually had a short at Rotterdam last year. It was a wonderful experience—incredibly welcoming, the programmers are amazing, super engaged audiences, just a really well-planned festival. In terms of your ability to meet filmmakers and industry people, it’s an incredible launching pad. As the film and the funding were coming together, it was like, “Oh, there’s a chance we’re in time for the Rotterdam deadline, which would be so cool, we’d love to take it back there.” It felt like it could be a good fit. Then we didn’t finish on time—not even close, really. I think we were five weeks late after the deadline, and we just threw a Hail Mary and were like, “Hey, would you guys still take a look at this?” Luckily, we knew some of the programmers from last year’s festival, so they were a little more amenable to us bending the rules there. They got on board with the film and were excited about programming it. We felt so lucky. We thought we didn’t have a chance, because they were just weeks away from closing the lineup.

I think now that the film has premiered—Jack, you can speak to this as well—we were talking about this with our producer last night, and I think it was the perfect place for us to play. I think at other festivals, a film like ours could get buried in the lineup. At other festivals of equal prestige, some have very celebrity-forward films or very press and media-focused competitions where a little film like ours might get lost. Rotterdam is incredible at platforming micro-budget work, work that is coming from small teams, and making it the focus of the festival. I think we were honestly able to get on more radars than at Berlin, Cannes, or Sundance. I also think the Rotterdam crowd, both the public and the industry, were more hospitable to a film like ours.

Jack Auen: That’s right. It was always the top choice. It was always a race to make it to the deadline, which we did not hit, but we could not have submitted a day earlier than we did. It was down to the wire for us in terms of getting it into shareable shape. It was a perfect match in sensibility, curatorial taste, size, and our previous relationships with the festival. It was just a match made in heaven.

I have a number of filmmaker friends who’ve shown films at Rotterdam. Once they have that experience—in contrast to some other festivals I won’t name—artists have a great experience and want to take their films back. And these are particularly artists who are making formally inventive films that need a particular type of home. I think it’s interesting—I don’t know if you saw Julian Castronovo’s Debut, or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025)?

Kevin Walker: People keep bringing it up, we want to see it so bad!

Jack Auen: Yeah, we haven’t seen it, but we’ve heard about it.

Based on your film, I’d think you’d love it. It’s also got conspiracy elements, very analog filmmaking, and conspiracy-theory vibes. Charlotte Zhang’s Tycoon (2026), too—these are the most interesting American independent films I’ve seen in the last couple of years, and they’ve most premiered at Rotterdam, with some at other European festivals. Definitely not at Sundance or South by Southwest. I think that’s interesting, though maybe that’s my taste—I like the sorts of films that play at Rotterdam and not at Sundance.

Kevin Walker: It is an interesting question. There are some great festivals in New York that program these kinds of films, but they’re not focused on world premieres for the most part. The options for having a world premiere on a big stage with a film like that are definitely limited, especially in America. So you do sort of have to find safe havens on other shores, and we feel lucky that Rotterdam invited the film, because there aren’t a lot of slots for films like ours out there.

In the American film festival world, you have a divide—you’ve got the experimental film festivals and then the narrative festivals trying to sell their films to a commercial market, and there’s maybe not that much overlap. Whereas Rotterdam, and to an extent Berlin or Marseilles, aren’t divided in that way. They’re not distinguishing between, “here’s the festival for the 100 people who like avant-garde film” and “here’s the one for people who want to have a theatrical release.”

Jack Auen: Yeah, absolutely. We love works that blend an attempt at high art with genre. When we went to Rotterdam for the first time, we were like, “Oh my god, there’s a place for all these movies—this is where they go.” It was a real revelation to us.

Where were each of your favorite or most rewarding things about working on this film?

Jack Auen: There have been many rewarding things, but I will say we had a very difficult time making this movie with very few resources, and there was an insane amount of research and collating and organizing. There were many long days and nights where we felt like we were off in some corner, hiding from the world and working on this movie, and there are questions like: Will anyone ever see this? Will it be finished? Will anyone connect with it? It’s 12 months of that feeling. So now, being able to share it with audiences and at in-person screenings, having a Q&A, and speaking with people afterwards—all that has been very gratifying. It doesn’t feel like we’ve wasted a year of our lives.

Kevin Walker: I think for me, it’s just been really cool to force this story upon the world. You can go and see some YouTube videos about it that are pretty popular. They don’t dive too deep, because they don’t reference the primary sources that we ended up collecting for the film. I don’t think I’d ever encountered, in real life, a person who had heard of the story before, and every single Italian person we have spoken to has not heard of it, which is crazy because it was a genuine scandal in the ’70s in a lot of their major publications—the story just disappeared. Some people interested in the occult on YouTube have latched onto it, but in terms of the general population, it’s totally absent from the cultural conversation. So it’s just fun coercing people—once you have them in the theater—to train their eyes on this crazy story.

I think Pellegrino Ernetti, say what you will about him, is a fascinating figure. He was incredibly respected in his time, a tremendous intellect with huge erudition, and I think he deserves his claim to be taken a little seriously. I hope people give him more of a chance than the world has for the past 25 years.

Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s Chronovisor had its world premiere at IFFR. The film was also play at this year’s edition of Los Angeles Festival of Movies and New Directors/New Films.

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Thank you for reading the 62nd issue of Film Show. I want to believe…

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Charlotte Zhang (b. 1999) is a Canadian filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Zhang got her start as an artist through the Nanaimo Art Gallery, and has produced works in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, zines, laser-printed collages, and multi-channel video installations. Her debut feature film is Tycoon (2026), a tremendous low-budget imagining of dystopian Los Angeles. Set shortly before the 2028 Olympics, the film follows two twenty-somethings—Lito (Miguel Padilla-Juarez) and Jay (Jon Lawrence Reyes)—over a loosely-plotted 90 minutes that freely move between different registers and textures. Shot on her iPhone, MiniDV, and Super 8—and incorporating Xeroxed photographs as well as props she made herself—Zhang captures the beauty and grotesqueries, humor and banalities present in Los Angeles and its people.

Tycoon draws from Zhang’s research into the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and considers the throughlines that both connect and shape historical events past, present, and future. Inspired in part by Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978), Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole (1998), and Isiah Medina’s 88:88 (2015), Tycoon was one of the major highlights at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film will also screen this weekend as part of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Zhang on February 24th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss the musical nature of her editing, how she made a film on a low budget, and the necessity of mythologizing historical events.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: In your Paradise Holds Itself Shut zine, your mini-bio says that you’re “interested in reenactments of shared fantasy, social scripts produced by spectacle, the perpetual collapse of punishment and celebration; vengeance.” Have you ever enacted vengeance in a satisfying—or even unsatisfying—way? What’s your relationship with vengeance?

Charlotte Zhang: (laughs). That’s such a good question. I have, but I can’t go into detail. I’m interested in vengeance as an ambivalent concept. I’m interested in the ethical, political, and ideological consequences of vengeance and why certain events are narrativized as revenge. What does it mean to narrativize a historical event as revenge? Often, people will invoke revenge to place themself in a diminished or underdog position, even if that’s not necessarily true—it serves a purpose. I’m interested in all the different ways it might manifest, whether revolutionary, transgressive, or regressive. And I think that’s apparent throughout my work.

Where did this interest stem from?

Since I was a kid, I was interested in revenge as a form of personal justice, fragile as it might be. Where I grew up was racially alienating, at least at the time, and I was trying to narrativize my experience in that light as a way to move through it, without the feeling lingering too long. I grew up on Vancouver Island in this city called Nanaimo. There are aspects of it that are great—it’s visually very stunning. By the time I was 15 or so, I was doing art programs at the Nanaimo Art Gallery and I was exposed to this contemporary arts education for free. I don’t want to understate the importance of that.

Nanaimo had a motley mix of people—it’s a former coal-mining town, and there’s a lot of history with Chinese workers. It’s a funny mix of rednecks and draft dodgers, so it has this dated form of progressive politics. There was a sense from very early on that I wasn’t interested in inclusion—it wasn’t something I was meant to aspire to; it wasn’t a question of whether or not I’d be included because I just wasn’t. I don’t hold any resentment—it’s a historically and visually interesting place and I do like to go back—but it wasn’t the most fun environment to grow up in.

Can you talk to me about the art programs at the gallery?

I was exposed to the work of a lot of artists, and they had a treasure trove of art catalogues and photography books that I would pore over. They would invite artists like Elizabeth Milton to come in and do workshops. There was an application process that I did when I was 15, where I wrote about Nan Goldin, and when I was a bit older they put me into exhibitions in the gallery. I still work with Jesse Birch, the curator there—he’s really sick.

Were your parents supportive of everything?

My parents were super supportive—they were psyched when I got into art school. People get surprised when I mention that. My mom paints and she’s a writer, but both my parents are people who are interested in arts and culture. I’ve always had the freedom to explore that, and I’ve never had any blowback to pursuing this.

Do you see any qualities of your parents in yourself?

I’ve been thinking a lot more deeply about the context they grew up in being the end of the Cultural Revolution—their understanding of gender roles and independence and liberation. I think those things affected me very deeply and the way I move through the world. I remember when I was growing up, my grandpa would say things like, “High heels are bourgeois,” so I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to conform to a lot of feminine rituals or forms of presentation. I never had to contend with these traditional roles for women. They also have a sense of cynicism that I really appreciate. Having lived through such an immense part of latter-20th-century Chinese history, with so many shifts occurring in such a short span of time, they have a healthy suspicion of things that happen in the world. That’s definitely part of who I am.

You work in different mediums—what was your first work that was exhibited?

When I was 16, this really great artist named Ron Tran had a retrospective at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, and he invited local artists to recreate works he had made in the past. The one I did had to do with salvaged family photographs, and my mom gave me photographs from when she and her American friends toured New Orleans jazz bands throughout China in the 1990s. I think those performances led to the formation of a Chinese jazz festival. So, I used those photographs and it was the first time I had something in a real gallery. I don’t remember how I felt about the experience though; it was more about the making of the work. And today, that’s still what’s most interesting to me. I like that someone can receive the work and have a reaction to it, whether positive or negative, but the making of the work is really compelling to me. I was working with textiles for the first time and, at the end of the show, Ron Tran copy-pasted hundreds of gigabytes worth of movies from his hard drive onto mine. I was watching through those as a teenager.

What led you to filmmaking?

I wanted to be a filmmaker first, but I just got around to making that work later. I would watch music videos very religiously as a kid. I didn’t watch a lot of movies until I was 12, and then I watched A Clockwork Orange (1971) at a friend’s house and, from then on, I taught myself how to write screenplays. I didn’t start making films until I was 16 or so, and I don’t know if any of those still exist. To this day, I feel like I’m less interested in the art world than I am with film. It’s been my goal to work in feature-length filmmaking for a long time, but it’s a long process; having a shorter process, and the result of your thinking appear sooner, is a shortcut of working through certain ideas.

It’s really obvious when watching Tycoon (2026) that you love music. What music videos were you watching as a teenager? What fascinated you? And what do you feel like you’ve learned from studying music videos?

At the time, Kanye West’s “Runaway.” That’s one of my all-time favorite videos. And then there was Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” and “Telephone.” Those were by Jonas Åkerlund. I was interested in these visually propulsive music videos. I hope that my films don’t resemble music videos—that isn’t the goal of the work. It’s more so that I intended it to resemble music. I studied classical piano for 11 years, and I have the Royal Conservatory degree or whatever that is. I was really serious about it, and that skillset—of interpreting sheet music, of pacing, of structure—is really essential to me as an artist. Even when I’m editing, there are certain things I’m thinking about. I’m wondering how a leitmotif moves between hands, between keys, and what it means to have a theme and variations, and what happens when a theme returns further in the song, in a different context, and what has been changed as a result of what has occurred beforehand. So there’s a lot of things I’m thinking about, like, “Oh, this is a passage I have to play staccato, how do I translate that to film?”

Is this mostly an instinctual thing?

There’s a certain relationship between the images and the sound, but as I’m building it out and refining it, I’m thinking about what passage of the composition it is, I’m thinking about symphonic voices. In Tycoon, there are a lot of motifs that appear as sound, image, and text, and then there’s voiceover that travels through it, and I’m thinking of musical themes that play throughout different symphonic voices. It’s similar to collage, where you’re thinking about combinations that feel explosive and exciting, and once you place them, you’re thinking about how they should be melded together musically.

Does this musical thinking come into play with your other visual art? You have your laser-printed Joyride pieces, for example, as well as PINUP where you’re creating a sort of sculpture from different materials.

It’s less, which is why I enjoy it less. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it or think that this visual art is not complete, but it’s like a musical study versus a sonata: it’s a shorthand version of an idea I’m exploring, whereas with film I’m fleshing it out. With collage, it feels like editing exercises to see what it means to place certain images in relation to one another. Not having the dimension of time, or having a sonic dimension, makes it a way of working through ideas.

Can you give me an example of how working on these collages informed the way you approached your filmmaking?

Those works were the result of a lot of reading and research, so they compelled me to do that, and they also helped me contextualize and work with that research instead of just putting it on display as evidence. There’s a lot of shared research between that work, especially with regards to 20th-century LA history. There’s certain archival footage in the film that’s related to this research too. I was also thinking about color and visual gags—there’s a sense of humor—and I’m creating a narrative flow out of this historical research to make it entertaining. Those works were also made with the help of friends and artists who were involved in the making of Tycoon, including Carlos Agredano, Vincent Hernandez, and my friend Kenneth Yuen, so there’s a throughline there.

Can you talk about the importance of humor in making art? What’s valuable about humor, and what function does it play in your work?

That’s a good question. In the midst of turmoil and violence, absurd situations arise that are incidentally funny. That’s part of the human experience. My friend Vincent’s dad is a photojournalist who was on the ground during the ’92 uprising, and he was telling me that for months after, there were just the best yard sales ever because people were selling their looted goods. That anecdotal history adds a layer of richness that makes it more complete for me, that helps me understand and process it. I always knew this was gonna be the case, but there are jokes in the film that are particular to LA. You show it in Europe and there are things that are not recognized, which is totally fine, but in that way, there’s another dimension—there’s another way that the film can be understood.

What was it like showing Tycoon in Rotterdam? What were you surprised by?

I was surprised that the Q&As were so friendly. I’ve seen some film festival Q&As that feel like struggle sessions (laughter). And that’s interesting too. When there are shared tensions in response to something in the film, someone can release that valve and it can be explored in a way that’s productive. I was curious if there were any aspects of the film that would pose that kind of challenge, but I was told later that it’s common for Rotterdam audiences to be more interested in technical aspects, in the process of making it. I thought the response was good, but maybe I’m not so observant and I was just talking my shit on stage and then said, “Okay, thanks for coming!” (laughter). I’ve never had this big an audience for any work before, so it was a little shocking. I didn’t think there’d be so many emails. It’s nice to have work out in the world in that way.

You mentioned that art serves as a pretext for research. In the zine I mentioned earlier, you have citations from Dylan Rodriguez, Barbara Voss, Kerry Abrams, and others. Can you talk to me about the research you’ve done and what you feel are the topics you keep coming back to? In reflecting on your work, do you feel like there are certain ideas you keep revisiting?

When I look at all the work I’ve made throughout the years, I wonder if it’s all incoherent, but as I make more work, I see that I’m interested in collective experience of a particular moment in history. I’m interested in the mythologies and iconographies that remain from events and periods in history, and how we contend with them in the present day—how they’re reconfigured, subsumed, and then consumed once again. I think I’ll start to understand this better when I make more work, but I do think it’s ultimately about contending with a collective experience of history, which is unstable and partially—not to mention necessarily—mythological.

Why is mythologizing necessary?

I think mythologizing allows us to fulfill a collective desire. I’ve been going back through Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits (1969) and he talks about how in times of turmoil and intensified violence, as a form of collective catharsis, we seek to construct a violence avenger who can do what others are not willing to do. I’m also placing that in relation to the rise of “dark woke” (laughter), and these sorts of discourses. It’s so Hobsbawmian! When we produce these mythologies and archetypes, they have these gravitational pulls that swallow a lot of historical narratives and experiences. So it’s about unearthing those.

Do you feel like you mythologize yourself at all? And this could be with art or maybe just in how you live your life. Maybe there’s just a mythologizing aspect to just being alive.

Right, like it comes from being perceived and in any public sphere. I don’t know about mythologizing, but I am aware that there are certain ways that I am made legible, especially in a racial sense. I was always interested in ways of manipulating that, like, what does it mean to work with that awareness or understanding? As I plan more films and projects, I am thinking more about what it means to be an artist out in the world, where there’s public information about you out there. I think my tendency is to be private, but I do have the responsibility of presenting my own work, and I do believe in its longevity. As with anyone else who grew up on the internet, I am paranoid about what’s out there. I’m sure there’s some random debris, and that’s fine, but my impulse is to keep wiping the slate clean… but I can’t (laughs). I do think being on the internet as a young person and having public debates and conversations gives you a thick skin.

I wanted to ask about your interest in Los Angeles. You initially came because you went to CalArts. When was the moment you knew you loved LA?

The first weekend there before school started, I took the train down into the city because I got tickets to see To Sleep with Anger (1990). I went with my friends Kennedy [Arnette Mitchell] and Justin [Pineda], who are both in Tycoon and my past films. We watched this movie, it was amazing, and I talked with Charles Burnett—I don’t remember what I said, it was probably embarrassing. There was an open backroom in the theater and we swiped an open bottle of wine and were walking down this street, passing it around and taking swigs. It was the best thing ever.

When did you go to your first [street] takeover?

I think it was in 2020. I knew of their existence and I thought they were one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, but I’d yet to catch one. I lived on an intersection where they didn’t happen very often because it’s a smaller intersection, but there was one night—out of the blue—where it happened. Since then I’ve been completely obsessed. I was very lucky to have a friend who’s involved in the scene, who let me tag along and shoot the one you see in the film.

How do you approach shooting them? Is there a specific visual language you’re aiming for?

There’s footage in existence that’s just unbelievable, where people are running into the center of the pit. Everybody’s filming at a takeover—they’ve all got their phones and cameras out—so you’re just part of the crowd. I was chatting with a few people because I had this old, bulky MiniDV camera and people were curious if I was making a movie. When you shoot on this very wide-angle lens, the motion is so dynamic—it really feels so extreme when the car swings back around from the other side of the intersection and almost runs into you. I’ve been enjoying shooting handheld in general because it feels like you’re holding up a child to see the world (laughter). It’s like I have more affection for it, and I feel that most distinctly when I’m shooting takeovers. Seeing other people on each other’s shoulders, and raising the camera higher than my eyeline to capture something closer… both those things in parallel really makes me get this sense of the anthropomorphized object.

Can you talk about the auto shop that plays a heavy role in your filmmaking process? I know you edited the film there—what was that like?

The car shop doesn’t exist anymore, but it cycled through a lot of iterations. For a long time it had art studios, and there were backyard music shows around once a month. There was a lot going on, and I’d spend a few days a week there. So much of the film was shot in and around the car shop, and I was editing in the back corner, while Kenneth was working on cars in front of me. I was already imagining less of a reliance on synchronized sound, or at least having the freedom to move in and out of that, so being there worked out because it’s so loud, even with headphones—there’s the sound of the tools, of hardware hitting the ground, of trucks in the background, of the lift going up and down. I cut a lot of the rapid montage sequences in the shop, and I got a sense of the rhythm independent of any sound I had.

I’m assuming you have a car?

I don’t know how to drive, I don’t even have my license (laughter). I should. I don’t know what problem I have; I think you have to compartmentalize when you’re driving so you’re not thinking about the wildness of the thing you’re doing. I just can’t conceptualize getting used to it enough where I can do that. Thankfully, I have a lot of friends who love driving and we’ll cruise around. Walking and taking the bus is nice because I’ll encounter a lot of strangers, and I’ll get into a lot of conversations with people at the bus stop or from going on walks.

Is there a particularly memorable conversation you’ve struck up with a stranger?

The scene in the film where they’re making fun of the guy in the five-toed shoes, I was actually sitting on the bus once and having a great conversation with someone next to me, and there was a white guy in front of us wearing them. The guy I was talking with stopped the conversation and said something even crazier [than what’s in the film] and I think the guy could hear us (laughter). That was one of my favorite bus conversations for sure, so it made its way into the film. I think his name was Melo, like Carmelo—I hope he’s doing well, wherever he is.

There are scenes in the movie where we’re in the car and nobody’s talking. Can you talk about the thinking behind those passages? I thought those were really beautiful scenes. There’s an implied intimacy when you’re silent in the car with someone.

I like that it can go both ways. It can be this total serenity and comfort with somebody, or it can be like… there’s something unspoken that everybody is afraid to unleash in the car because you can’t escape it, and the place is too small, and the way you sound when you speak in it is too enclosed. You really have to commit to a confrontation in a car if you’re going to have one (laughter). Do you remember that meme that’s like “When you’re on your way home from the club but one of you almost died”? (laughter).

What sort of things do you feel you’ve learned about Los Angeles as a result of making Tycoon? What questions were posed and where’d you end up?

Wow, that’s a good one. I learned that the neighborhood I live in, which is situated between Koreatown and South Central, was quite active during the ’92 uprising. An owner of a store down the street was telling me that his father, who used to own the store, was really terrified of looters coming in and that he sat at the door with his gun. It was a Black-owned store, and people just came in regularly and were saying, “Hey, what’s up!” and just bought stuff and left. I thought that was funny and interesting. I was also understanding which buildings were actually affected. I know that the Winchell’s Donuts was set on fire.

I was also really interested in the throughline between the 1984 Olympics and the ’92 uprising, how the militarization of the police, the formation of these task forces, increased funding, and increased access to this Draconian technology—and the displacement and widening of the socioeconomic gap—set the stage for the ’92 uprising. I was reading a lot of different essays and books, but I also took the opportunity to chat with random neighbors and people who lived in my neighborhood. I asked people who lived here in the ’90s what they remembered. Those were some of the most interesting stories.

How did hearing these stories shape the film? Did it inform the process or how you wanted specific things depicted?

It was the more mundane horrors. I think people don’t talk enough about that process of “rebuilding.” There’s this whole thing with the Rebuild Los Angeles project, which was headed by Peter Ueberroth. It was a total disaster and none of those promises were fulfilled. A lot of South Central was left ravaged for months and months after, and it was never given the resources to recover. The intense public spectacle of the violence in those few days produced all these iconic images and discourse, and that meant the more quotidian violences could remain obfuscated.

I was also thinking a lot about the feeling of living in LA before the riots, during the Rodney King trial, and then in the months afterwards. Living through that kind of intensity, you do feel a sense of dread. I watched Strange Days (1995) recently and I was like, wow, what a budget [Kathryn Bigelow] had—the tanks in the street! If I don’t have the resources to orchestrate that, how do I illustrate this sense of being monitored, of being enclosed? How do I do that with the materials I have at hand, and with the things I see in the city every day?

How are you directing your actors? And I need a sense of the timeline here regarding when you shot Tycoon and when the shooting of Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism (2025) happened, given that you star in that.

That was in early 2024, and it was really amazing being on that set because, until Tycoon, I hadn’t made a film in a few years. It allowed me to become familiar with being on a set environment again, and knowing how Isiah and Kelley [Dong] ran everything was really helpful on a fundamental level.

For Tycoon, I had written this 130-page script and I ended up rewriting it. We did a bunch of weekend shoots over the course of about a year. I didn’t construct it in a way that would make it malleable and porous, where I could patch together new scenes and remove others; I was doing that in the time in between shoots. I was at a loss for how to start and Isiah was like, “Do you have one or two scenes where you have the location and props?” “Yeah.” “Just shoot it and see what happens.” So I did that and kept going and going until it was done. I don’t think I could do that again, but I think I was also just so excited to shoot.

There’s this quote from Cronenberg—and I think we made our debut films at the same age, which is quite lovely—where someone asked him about Stereo (1969). They asked him why he shot it on 35mm instead of 16mm, and he said that the desire to make a film he could recognize as “a real film” was compulsive. I really felt the same way. Every week I tried to have a new location ready. I would make sure the actors knew well enough in advance what scenes we were shooting. I wanted to make sure everybody’s schedules were aligned. The crew was usually just me, and I would set up the sound equipment, and then do a quick tutorial with whatever friend was down to help that day.

With the actors, they were already friends of mine—Jon [Lawrence Reyes], or JJ, is the little brother of a friend. For the first shoots, we had rehearsals. We’d pick through the scenes with more dialogue and see if any of the wording was awkward and then rework sentences so they’d flow in the best possible way. I felt they were really easy to work with, and I really commend them. Directors say that when you work with first-time actors or non-professional actors, people tend to disappear mid-shoot, they won’t be committed. These actors showed up every shoot for the course of a year, which is really incredible.

I gotta ask about the music, which you really let breathe in the film. There’s Dinah Washington; Earth, Wind & Fire; Cindy Lee. How did you know what songs to use and how long they’d last? Were these just songs you loved?

For the most part, these are songs that I was obsessively listening to while I was writing the script, so they became very important to the film itself. Basically, we shot a lot on Sundays because that was the day people would reliably have off, and Sundays are also when they have the Art Laboe [radio] show. There’s a certain Art Laboe show homage in the film: marking when oldies appear is a way of marking time, of marking Sundays. These were songs I really loved, and a couple of them were songs I heard for the first time on the show. Also, learning about the production model of Killer of Sheep (1978) inspired me to make this film, and so “This Bitter Earth” was my homage to it. In terms of spacing the songs, it goes back to the process of editing. I was thinking about what segments would be legible as melodic, and how that interacts with the sound design before and after.

What about Killer of Sheep inspired you?

It was just the fact that he shot it over weekends for a year. He had the kids in his neighborhood record the sound. It’s a film that feels part of my DNA now, and I’ve seen it quite a few times. It’s a film I’m passionate about, but while I was shooting it, there wasn’t a conscious reproduction of things, though the music selection in that film is amazing too. There’s also a musicality to the structure. He lets sequences breathe. He hits these unexpected cadences that don’t always… land on the tonic (laughter). They’re a bit unresolved and they can lift up to the next sequence, and there’s a real flow to it that I really adore. So, reading about the production of that film and hearing Isiah’s advice really made me feel like it was possible to make this film on a small budget.

Were there any problems you faced because of the budget?

I ended up saving a lot of money on locations because of the car shop and the surrounding areas, but also because there were places I knew I could shoot in public without much of a bother. I had an understanding of these locations and who lived around there, so I saved a lot on that. My biggest workaround was doing a lot of roles myself. I don’t know if I would do that again. I enjoyed it a lot, but I do think it took over my life in a way that I don’t know is sustainable for the next three pictures—we’ll have to see. I owned the cameras that this film was shot on, and I even made the props myself—the delivery robot was made out of a garden wagon, fiberglass, and BMW headlights. Seeing how much I could fabricate with my own hands—that was big. Hopefully I’m able to work with a larger budget for the next film.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’m genuinely so curious about whoever I encounter, and it’s really nice to ask questions and find the ones that get people interested in talking. I get to hear about some really incredible experiences and ideas, and I appreciate that I have that ability to talk with others. As much as I was talking shit about Nanaimo earlier, there is this quality that strangers will get into unexpected conversations with you. That’s one of my favorite aspects of Nanaimo, and I bring that with me in my day-to-day life.

Charlotte Zhang’s Tycoon premiered at this year’s edition of IFFR. It plays at this year’s edition of Doc Fortnight this weekend. More details can be found here.

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Charlotte’s Picks

A list of albums and compositions that have been influential to me in regards to editing and thinking about filmic structure, in no particular order.

• Sly and the Family Stone - There’s a Riot Goin’ On (Epic, 1971)

• Shawty Pimp & MC Spade - Volume 1 (self-released, 1994)

• The Ronettes - Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes (Philles, 1964)

• Olivier Messiaen - Quartet For the End of Time (Éditions Durand, 1940-1941)

• DJ Screw - Bigtyme Vol II: All Screwed Up (Bigtyme Recordz, 1995)

• Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 9 (IV. Adagio) (Universal Edition, 1909/1912)

• Throbbing Gristle - 20 Jazz Funk Greats (Industrial, 1979)

• Claude Debussy - The Sunken Cathedral (1910)

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Yoshihiko Matsui (b. 1956) is a legendary Japanese filmmaker largely known for his interest in depicting outsiders in Japanese society. After learning about Shuji Terayama’s Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974), Matsui devoted himself to film. He started a production company with Gakuryu Ishii, and made his debut feature film, Rusty Empty Can (1979), on 8mm. His films have been self-financed wonders, capturing the conflicted and complex emotional spectrum of humanity. He has made five films throughout his career, including Pig-Chicken Suicide (1981), Noisy Requiem (1988), and Where Are We Going? (2008). His newest feature is There Was Such a Thing Before (2025), and it’ll have its international premiere at this year’s edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. More information can be found here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Matsui on January 24th, 2026 to discuss working with Ishii, how he approaches working with non-professional and professional actors, and his new feature film. Special thanks to Monika Uchiyama for translating.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: What are the earliest memories you have related to the arts? This could be film or music or anything.

Yoshihiko Matsui: When I was a teenager, I encountered the films of Shuji Terayama, specifically Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974). It was both poetic and avant-garde. Up to then, I’d only thought of films as entertainment, and it was my first time seeing a film that was an artistic expression in that way. And so after seeing this I watched all of Terayama’s films. Around this time I also discovered Kinema Junpo, the cinema magazine, which is where I learned about international arthouse film directors like Fellini, Bergman, and Kubrick. Those were my first steps into the world of film.

Are there things prior to seeing Terayama’s films, though, that were crucial in having you pursue the arts? Were you involved with the arts in school? Did your parents encourage you at all in these endeavors?

My family were farmers. I don’t know if you know this, but in a traditional Japanese house there are all these paper sliding doors. Sometimes they have artwork, but ours were all white. When I was in preschool, I drew a giant airplane on four panels while my parents were out farming. My mother came home from her farmwork and was completely shocked. She said, “When dad comes home, I’m going to have him properly discipline you.” I was so scared. But when my dad came home he said, “Is this plane flying through the air?” I told him yes. “In that case, you’re going to have to draw a bright, red sun.” I took a red crayon and drew a very large red sun. My dad was so proud of my drawing that he invited ten of my relatives over to show them the plane and said, “My son drew this! Isn’t it great?” Everyone said, “Oh, how bold!” They were saying all these nice things about my artwork. In hindsight, I realize that other parents would’ve gotten angry, so the fact that my parents didn’t get angry at me about this is something that makes me very happy. My parents kept those panels for about ten years, well into when I was in junior high school.

That’s a beautiful story. I’m wondering, did you draw a lot as a child then? Were you the sort of kid who was always doodling in school?

Yeah, I continued to draw, but I also wrote poetry and made ceramics out of clay. All of that was self-taught. My father passed away when I was in second grade, so after that it was just my mother and my siblings. They would often use the plates I made—they’d eat off them. That made me very happy.

You mentioned that you saw Terayama’s films, which led you to become a filmmaker. Were you invested in pursuing the arts in any capacity prior to this? Did you ever think about making a career out of drawing or pottery?

Of course I loved drawing and pottery, but once I encountered film, it became my favorite artistic expression by far. When I was 18, I graduated high school and someone that I knew worked at a film studio. He was able to hook me up with a part-time job there, and that’s where I met the director Sogo Ishii, who now goes by Gakuryu Ishii, and we made a group together [the production company Kyoeisha] and made 8mm films. We submitted the film we made together [Matsui’s Rusty Empty Can (1979)], to the Pia Film Festival. At the time, the jury of the festival was made up of the directors Nagisa Oshima, Nobuhiko Obayashi, Yoichi Takabayashi, and Shuji Terayama—all the big names. Our film was selected. There was a big party and they all praised my film. I remember at one point, Oshima was to my right and Terayama was to my left and they smacked me on the back and said, “Matsui, you’ve really got talent!” I remember thinking, “I have to become a director.” (laughter).

Did you make any short films prior to your debut? Were you experimenting at all with your 8mm camera?

Rusty Empty Can was the first film that I ever made. There wasn’t any experimentation before that. Both myself and Ishii worked as staff, both as an editor and assistant director. As independent filmmakers, it’s really hard to make a living, so we were really just trying to survive through part-time jobs.

What part-time jobs did you have? And do you feel like there were any experiences you had in those jobs that informed the way you approached filmmaking or the arts? And this could just be logistical things, too.

Among my part-time jobs, most of my work was from working on film sets. But because my family was farmers, I also did farmwork. This included growing vegetables and rice, but I also worked in pig farming and chicken farming. The pay is quite good for those types of jobs because it’s really heavy labor, and a lot of young people didn’t really want to do that kind of work. I just wanted to do anything that could make me as much money as possible—I needed to fund my films.

I read an interview you did in the past where you said that prior to making Rusty Empty Can, you didn’t necessarily have the most positive opinion of gay people, but through making it, you realized that they were just like anyone else. How did you decide on this being the topic of your debut? And I’m also wondering if you had seen a film like Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) by this time given its depiction of queer people and outsiders.

Of course I had seen Funeral Parade of Roses by then, but it wasn’t particularly on my mind while I was making Rusty Empty Can. As to why I made a gay film, you have to understand that Japan was very conservative back then with regards to ideas about sexuality. I had been watching films that featured gay relationships, whether it was men in love with men or women in love with women. That made me question, well, if love between a man and a woman is considered romance, can’t love between two men for be considered love, too? I hadn’t even considered this until seeing these films—that two men could love each other, that this could be considered a romance. I started to think, well, this must mean that we’re all equal.

I was thinking about films featuring love triangles with heterosexual relationships, and I started to wonder what it’d be like to feature three men in a love triangle instead. I started to write and shoot this film, and it was a sort of challenge for myself. The characters experience all the things that those in a love triangle typically experience: love, envy, they comfort each other, they encourage each other, and of course they fight. This made me realize that people are all the same. Through the experience of making that movie, I grew to be very supportive of gay people and I continue to have that stance today.

Do you remember the films you saw that showed these gay relationships?

So, of course Funeral Parade of Roses was one of those films, and it was probably the one that shocked me the most. It may have just been one scene, but there was Midnight Cowboy (1969). There were Japanese underground films shot on 8mm that showed gay stories. There was also Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971). Also around that time, in conversations with people like Oshima and Terayama, they often talked about sexuality and, frequently, queer sexuality.

I’m thinking of different scenes happening in Japan in the 1970s. You have the Nikkatsu Roman Pornos as well as those from Toei. There were also independent filmmakers creating small-budget works on small-gauge film. Were you ever creating works that were in direct response to what else was happening in Japan? They feel distinct from everything else that was being made, despite sharing a similar spirit.

Of course I wanted to make films that were different from those I was encountering, and even though that wasn’t the first thing on my mind, the main goal was to draw from the depths of my soul, my gut impulse—what did I want to make? What was the story going to be? What were the images? I wanted to translate all this into a film. And because it comes from deep in my heart, I think it’s a very unique film. I wasn’t thinking about what might appeal to the different, existing film worlds; it was more about what I wanted to see, the world I wanted to depict. I would say that all five of my films are born in this organic way where I ask, what world do I want to make right now?

Do you mind talking about your relationship with Ishii? I know that he worked as your DP on Rusty Empty Can and that you were also his editor on Crazy Thunder Road (1980). Was there something you learned from working with Ishii that you feel like you wouldn’t have learned otherwise? I’m curious to just hear any stories about your time working together.

Ishii has a very particular language—it’s almost like an “Ishii lingo.” His films contain a lot of action scenes, and I remember when I first arrived as an assistant director on one of his films, I’d hear him use a lot of onomatopoeias, like, “You have to go bahhhh or gahhhh or dahhhh!” (laughter). He’d use these kinds of sounds and I had no idea what he was talking about (laughter). On set, there was an actor who was Ishii’s friend since elementary school. I went up to him and I said, “You’ve known him long enough, can you translate what he’s saying? What’s he even talking about?” And he said, “Ah, Matsui… you’re still a beginner. You don’t understand Ishii’s language. What direction was he pointing in when he made that sound?” “Oh okay, he was pointing at the car.” “That’s what he means—he wants you to go straight for that.” It was a combination of gesture and sound. It took me about a week to understand what he was saying, and I remember the actor coming up to me later saying, “I think you’ve finally figured it out!” (laughter). The same would be true in the editing room. He’d use the same kind of language to describe cuts that he would make in the edit. But the longer that we worked together, I kept asking for clarification, so he started to properly use words around me.

A lot of things I learned from him were on set. For instance, through watching his directing, I learned how a script may feature specific kinds of images or locations or emotions, but those are often not the same as what we end up accomplishing in production. He made me realize that a script is something you do at your desk, and that production is something that’s completely different—suddenly you have the actor’s voices, you have sounds from the environment, the landscape is really different from what you could’ve even imagined while writing the script. It’s important to work very flexibly.

So that’s one thing I learned from him. The other thing is that he’s an incredible editor. That’s something I watched first-hand when I worked part-time on these sets—he’s incredibly sharp, even compared to other editors. He’s very passionate about the idea that the finished product is going to be shown to people. I’m always fixated on my own expression and my own ideas, but he was really fixated on not boring the audience and finding ways to make things entertaining for them.

Can you talk about how you approach sound and music in your film? What you were saying earlier about Rusty Empty Can and wanting to make a gay love triangle based on what you’d seen with heterosexual romances made me think of the sex scene in that film—you include the song “Itsudemo Yume wo,” which is a very famous love song. I’m also thinking of the opening of Pig-Chicken Suicide (1981), where you have the animal noises over the Korean National Anthem.

A lot of the music I include in my films are things I’ve decided on as I’m writing the script, but as to where I may precisely place the music, that comes up in the edit. But when I say that I’ve decided on the songs, I mean that I’ve decided on the ending theme. For the music that is incorporated into the actual film itself, I might decide it during the storyboarding phase or while we’re shooting or in the edit; it all comes together gradually. As to what kind of role music and sound plays in my films… ideally, I wish my films were completely silent. I wouldn’t want any sound, diegetic or otherwise. I often think it’d be best to just have the focus be on the actors’ expressions and their movements, as well as the cuts made in the edit in a way that doesn’t bore the audience and allows me to convey what I want to say. That would be ideal, but it’s often not enough to show what’s going on in the interiority of the characters this way, so that’s when we use music or sound design to make it legible to the audience.

I know that Terayama didn’t like your second film, Pig-Chicken Suicide. Do you remember what he said about the film?

His critique was that the scene where the pig is slaughtered was too long. He said it’d be uncomfortable for audiences to sit through that. “I could never shoot a scene like that,” he said. “But you tried… why?” I said, “Well, as humans we eat pork. Isn’t it natural that we see the act of them being slaughtered and cut up?” I said that to Terayama with a bit of a snarky tone. I remember he was frustrated, but then he said, “You’re right, it’s exactly as you say. But wouldn’t it be helpful if you separated the act of eating from the act of showing?” It’s really stuck in my mind, how I was able to disarm him. His initial anger and criticism toward the scene became toned down. A lot of staff members who worked with Terayama were there and they later came up to me and said, “I can’t believe you said that to him, I can’t believe you spoke to him that way!” They were all so intimidated by him. But from my experience, when you’re an artist and talking to another artist, you have to be honest with each other, you have to be direct. And that’s why I was able to tell him that without any hesitation. So even though he was initially critical, he seemed to be happy with my response to his question.

Is the slaughter footage something you shot yourself while working on these pig and chicken farms?

No, that footage isn’t from when I was working on the farms. I may have not even been working there at the time. We got special permission from a pig farm and a pig slaughterhouse to allow us to film. I was there when it was shot, but I wasn’t holding the camera.

You just mentioned how you were able to disarm Terayama. Is that something you hope your films can do too? Like, do you want your audience to view these outsiders, disarm them, and help them better understand who these people are?

What I think is important in my films is the ability to convey the interiority of the people onscreen. Something I’m sure about is that all of us have a complex. We all have this sense of inferiority, and it’s something I imbue all of my characters with, though not because they actually are inferior. People in the mainstream experience this too, but I want it to be apparent that those on the outside, that even if they have this complex, are still able to have romances, experience frustrations, and go through all of the same things in life that everyone else in society goes through. My films may depict protagonists on the margin, such as buraku or Zainichi Koreans, and while they may have complexes because of their societal position, other characters might have a complex regarding their body or a psychological state.

Regardless, all of us carry this sense of inferiority, and that’s true of the audience as well. Of course, every so often you might encounter someone who doesn’t have any complexes about themselves, but for the most part, we all experience this feeling, and I think that audience members are able to watch my films and insert themselves into the positions of the characters. They might think, “Oh, this character is going through a difficult thing, and so am I, but I have to keep on living.” At the core of a lot of human emotion is this complex, this sense of inferiority, and it’s just that I choose to depict it with people who live at the margins.

Was there a specific experience that led to this realization? And I’m wondering if you could share specific feelings of inferiority that you had about yourself and how you were able to overcome that.

This is a very personal story, so I don’t know how deep I can get into this. When I was little, I had a stutter. During elementary school, I have this memory of being in Japanese class where we were supposed to read the text, one line at a time, starting with the front of the class. I was nervous about being next, but right after the person in front of me went, my teacher said, “Next will be the person behind Matsui-kun.” She skipped over me. I think it was out of some strange kindness, that she wanted to spare me the embarrassment of struggling through that sentence. But from my perspective, even if I had a stutter I wanted to read. I remember coming home and telling my family about this experience, and everyone looked down—they wouldn’t look me in the eye. My mother started crying.

Strangely enough, after I made Rusty Empty Can and had my idols—Terayama and Oshima—tell me that it was good, it built up my confidence and I stopped stuttering. I had issues with words that started with vowels. I remember that day, when my teacher skipped over me, the sentence that was coming up started with aki (“autumn”). She knew that I struggled with words that started with vowels, and this is probably why she skipped over me. Looking back at it now, it’s so funny that at age 23, just from being praised by my idols, it would boost my confidence so much to make my stutter disappear (laughs). It’s quite shocking.

Given that we’re talking about confidence, I wanted to talk about how your films are made on a small budget. I’m wondering if there were specific challenges you faced. These parameters force you to come up with interesting creative decisions, and I’m wondering if there’s a specific memory you have of finding unique ways to get a certain shot or capture a certain atmosphere as a result of your circumstances.

My films are described as difficult, and I think a lot of people assume that production is very challenging, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. I’ve never actually struggled on set. Nothing has ever gone poorly. Of course there are things like getting permissions for locations, but I find that if you just talk to people without lying and negotiate with a sense of passion, most things go through. That can get a little bit difficult with public permits, but I really have to say that I’ve never felt a sense of difficulty in making my films.

With my newest film, There Was Such a Thing Before (2025), we first started filming in the middle of summer and I suffered a heatstroke. We had to halt the shoot and reschedule for the following May, which is almost a year later. This was done out of precaution for everyone’s health because anyone could’ve gotten a heatstroke. I was worried because, at that point, we had only shot about half of the film and we’d have to wait a year for the other half. My biggest concern was the actors’ schedules. One of the leads, Arata Iura, is quite popular. I thought that we might have to recast him for the remaining half of the film. I spoke to him and his manager and he told me, “No, of course I’d move my schedule around so we can make this happen. I want to be in this film.” In the end, most of the staff and the actors remained for the second half, and I was able to make adjustments in the script and with locations—we were able to make it work.

So my sets can be difficult, yes, but I never get a sense of actual struggle. When you talk it out with the people involved, you can reach a state of understanding. With Arata, he had watched my films before and said he was a fan, and he was excited to be in his first Matsui film. We had a great time working on set, and I’m really looking forward to being in Rotterdam with him when our film premieres. I’m excited to get a beer together and say “cheers!”

What is it like to work with professional actors versus amateur actors? You’ve primarily worked with the latter, so I’m wondering if you approach working with them in different ways. Do you feel like when someone has more experience that you have to work with them differently?

With amateur actors, non-actors, and professionals, I ask all of them to act naturally for the role they’re playing. But in that sense, oftentimes with non-actors, they do things that are way more interesting than professionals. Like you said, actors come with all of this experience and they end up making these choices that I’m tired of seeing—they come with these preconceptions of how things are supposed to happen. When someone’s sad, it’s not uncommon for a person to smile through the sadness. I’ll say something like this and an actor might say, “I didn’t think of that!” They think that by having down-turned eyes or through welling up with tears, that this is sadness. But I tell them that it’s too ordinary, too predictable.

With non-actors, their presence is often enough. If they have a sense of presence, then on the screen and through the image, they have these incredible auras. And with professional actors, it’s so easy for them to go into hokey acting. With the professionals, I tell them not to bring in any of the baggage of theater acting—don’t overact in the way you would in the theater. And with the non-actors I just say, “You’re free to do whatever you want.” (laughter). I’ll tell them, “Act however you want and don’t study. Come as a blank slate and do whatever your impulses tell you to do. If there’s anything I want to be done differently, then I’ll direct you to do so.” In ordinary conversation we talk frankly and flatly, and I think that’s how conversations should appear onscreen.

I’m thinking about the conflicted emotions that appear in your films, as well as the violence that is portrayed. Some of the most violent scenes are when you see outcasts interacting with those who are a part of “normal” society. In Noisy Requiem (1988) we see that with the little sister on the bus, and in your new film we see how these people affected by the nuclear explosion are ignored by those who aren’t. They’re bonded by this event, and I’m curious if you feel that rejection from dominant culture in this way can be a positive thing for those on the fringes of society.

Anger and rage are incredibly unpredictable. It’s hard to know when that type of feeling can be triggered. In both my films and in society, I actually don’t think it has to do with a clash between outsiders and the mainstream. Rage and violence can happen amongst outsiders and amongst the mainstream; it has little to do with the characters’ societal position. It has everything to do with the fact that people are unpredictable and that rage can be easily triggered—it can be triggered by a slight shift in words. A person’s reaction can be to tolerate what is happening, to not say anything, while others may react with violence.

In my films, there’s this basis of love, and from this love can come jealousy and hatred, and on that same plane there is rage and violence. How a person reacts is something I can only discover through the process of writing and making the film. For myself, I’m not a violent person, and I’ve never thought to be physically violent. My ethos is always to talk through things and to reach a sense of understanding, but with my characters it really changes depending on their personality and the situation they’re in. So whether it’s an expression of love or rage, writing the script is a process of trying to discover what sparks that feeling; it’s not something I decide upon out of nowhere, it’s really from writing scripts that I encounter it for the first time.

Rusty Empty Can and Noisy Requiem end with these violent bursts of energy. They’re dramatic but also ordinary—it feels like a pattern that’ll presumably persist in the characters’ realities even after the film ends. I’m wondering about your thoughts on endings in general, and how you negotiate this idea of finality in your films. A lot of filmmakers place a lot of emphasis on endings to wrap a neat bow on their work, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the case for you.

That’s true. I don’t try to wrap things up in a neat little bow. I’ve worked with a sound recordist and engineer named Tomoharu Urata for a long time, and he once said something on set that I overheard. He said, “Matsui always manages to push away his protagonist by the end of the film.” When I heard that I thought, oh, that’s really true, even if I wouldn’t exactly word it that way nor would I say it’s exactly my intention. For me, I want the audience to walk away from the film wondering about the kind of life that the protagonist is gonna go on living. As the person who wrote the script, I have the answer, but I don’t want that to be clear to the audience. It’s true though, my films always end up with the protagonist getting abandoned.

I know you were affected by the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake in 1995. I’m curious if your experiences with that have shaped your scripts at all, especially There Was Such a Thing Before.

When the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake happened, my family home was completely destroyed, and I had to take time off of work from Tokyo to rebuild it. It was a very difficult period. Something that I encountered was that, in this region where we were all struggling, so many people showed so much kindness even though they were struggling themselves. There were people who said they had extra rice and would come over and give it to us. There were stores nearby who’d say, “These vegetables are about to go bad, let’s all cook and eat this together.” I was really struck by how many people could show kindness in these difficult times. However, there were people who acted in the complete opposite way, who acted quite cruel. I realized that in times of difficulty, people really show their true sense of values—I was really confronted with the full spectrum of humanity. At the time, I wanted to make a film about it, but I diverted all of my savings to rebuilding my family home and I wasn’t able to do it.

Then in 2011, there was the Great East Japan Earthquake, and about a year after that, I visited Fukushima. The scene that I saw there was exactly what I saw during the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. There was all this destruction, all these houses that were destroyed, but I also noticed the same behaviors—people were banding together and showing a lot of kindness. I thought, okay, maybe I will make a movie about this. However, if you make a movie about Fukushima, it ostensibly becomes an anti-nuclear film, and it’s an anti-nuclear film, it’s very hard to get funding. I thought, I need to work in order to fund it myself. I worked for 10 years and now I’ve finally been able to make a film about this topic. It just struck me that people can suddenly transform and become cruel during times of difficulty. And at the same time, there are people who you don’t think you’re close to or who you don’t get along with who really show up with a lot of kindness. Moments of struggle are when people show their value system but also their full sense of humanity.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’d have to say that I’m most proud of the fact that I’m surrounded by people who are very kind and wonderful. It’s hard to say what I like about myself, but a lot of people tell me that they like my personality, that I’m very tolerant. I’m accepting of all kinds of opinions and people, and we’re all just doing our best to live. So, let’s all just do our best and find a sense of happiness together! I’ve been told by the staff and actors who work with me that they want to keep following me in this journey.

Yoshihiko Matsui’s new feature film, There Was Such a Thing Before (2025), has its international premiere at this year’s IFFR. More information can be found here.

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Basma al-Sharif (b. 1983) is a nomadic moving image and installation artist currently living in Berlin. Her works use absorptive mixed media and intricate formal conceits to explore the disorienting experience of diaspora and the generational violence of colonialism. Her latest works, Morgenkreis and Old Masters, premiered respectively at Toronto International Film Festival 2025 and the Göteborg International Biennial. Alex Fields spoke with al-Sharif on December 10, 2025 about her work, her experience as a Palestinian in the American and European art world, and the role of art in a world violently in crisis.

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Alex Fields: The first film of yours I saw was We Began Measuring Distance (2009), so let’s start there. Could you tell me how you decided to make that film—where was it made and where was it first shown?

Basma al-Sharif: It was the first work I made out of school. I finished my MFA in Chicago, and I had this material I had been shooting in the city. Through my master’s I started to develop this visual language for the work I wanted to make, and that meant working between shooting a lot of material—just out of aesthetic formal interest—and finding archival material. I’d bring these things together to see what they’d say. I am Palestinian diaspora, and I wanted to make it very clear from which position I was speaking—I’m looking at Palestine from the outside, but at the same time, I’m someone who has access to Palestine, and specifically Gaza.

Right after grad school I moved to Cairo to work with this news gathering agency called Ramattan, which began in Gaza. It was a group of local camera operators who were teaching people on the ground how to record things so we could record our own material. They were an independent company, so they weren’t affiliated with any party. They partnered with Al Jazeera, who was on their board, to conserve and preserve the archive of video material in Gaza they were amassing. This was 20 years of footage that was in Al Jazeera’s archive that then became a part of Ramattan’s. They started in Gaza and branched out to the West Bank and then beyond Palestine, and then they established an office in Cairo. I wanted to work with them to access this archive, and what they were doing was transferring the material to Cairo so it’d be saved.

I was really struck by the material I was seeing. It gave me a different understanding of the represented violence of Palestine, and specifically Gaza, which is where my mother’s family is from and where I’ve been able to go for most of my life. I was always uncomfortable with the inundation of violent images that we see from Palestine because there is also a completely different reality on the ground. Of course, there is violence and it’s an unjustified and endless violence, but if that’s all you’re seeing, and then you see a more human kind of material, it starts to shape how you understand yourself and your people and your culture. This created so many questions for me, and I started to feel that I needed to make a film that addressed what these violent images do to the population, and how implicated the West is in these images being made.

I think one of the curators of the Sharjah Biennial in 2009 reached out, asking if I was working on anything. They had seen an earlier film of mine—my grad school film—and they said they wanted to commission work. It put a fire under my ass to take it seriously. So I started working on it, and it was really influenced by Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which at the time was still pretty fresh. We’re in the middle of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, so the idea of violent images is a big question on everybody’s mind. I’m working on this film, I’m working in this office in Cairo, and then the first large-scale military attack breaks out in Gaza. I was working in this office with Palestinians from Gaza, responsible for uploading all the footage that’s livestreaming from this first war.

It was crushing and fascinating in this grotesque way, and I’m starting to understand that the world is being fed these images because I was literally making price lists for news agencies. We were the only source—we were uploading this material for the rest of the world and it was Japan, Canada, US, UK, and I’m making the price list for people to buy this footage from Gaza, all while my entire mother’s family is living through this war. It was an incredibly surreal situation, and I understood nothing would actually change what’s happening on the ground. There’s a complicity, and what we have to do is ask ourselves what these images do to us as a culture, and that’s the film that comes out of all this. It gets shown at the Sharjah Biennial, and it wins one of the jury prizes—not the main one. It was a really formative process, albeit a very crushing one.

That film encapsulates something that goes through a lot of your work—the tension between this horrific political reality, this violence, and how we’re supposed to not just represent it, but process it as people. The moment in that film where you have the jellyfish dancing and then it transitions into the tentacles of a missile attack—it’s devastating and horrifying and impossible to wrap your head around, but it’s also beautiful. I think there’s an interesting tension between the beauty and pleasure inherent to working with moving images and music, and what you’re trying to talk about. That ties into what you were saying about how it isn’t just violence and victimization, but there is a whole other side to life. How do you represent that at the same time?

The drive was more from Susan Sontag’s text. I was really struck by what she says, which is that if the viewer has an empathic reaction to a violent image, they’ll feel absolved of responsibility for what is producing it. There’s a kind of pleasure in like, I’m weeping and thus I have nothing to do with that violence. That was very frustrating as an American. Society is hanging on by a thread, things were way better than they are now, but there is no universal healthcare, no child care, no safety net in this culture, and yet all this money is going to all these wars, forget just Israel, but all of this militaristic domination around the world, and nobody is questioning it—it’s insane. The richest county with air conditioners blowing everywhere, giant glasses of water for free, the excess of America, this empire, and there’s zero questioning of the things that make the most precarious citizens even more precarious and then having access to this violence and feeling empathy.

In 2009 there was an immense outcry around the world about that war, people took to the streets, there were protests, and there was outrage at what was happening and yet it didn’t change anything. Growing up in the States and thinking about the televised violence against Black and Brown bodies by police is the exact same thing, and it changes nothing. I always say this, that the country that produced lynching postcards certainly understands what happens when we see these images over and over again, so for me it’s also about the pleasure in watching violence and refusing it, and making clearer that there is a kind pleasure. It’s like the gaper’s delay, where there is a car accident and everyone wants to look at it and it causes a traffic jam. It’s the same thing, it’s the same mentality. I’m not saying I’m absolved of that guilt. I am also very much wondering why I look at these images, what they do for me or to me.

One of the things that draws me into experimental film, relative to narrative or conventional documentary, is the way someone can escape or try to challenge that sense of absolution. Was that part of what you were thinking when you started making this sort of film? What was your journey into experimental film and your background with it?

I didn’t study film, I studied photography in an interdisciplinary program. We had access to everything and all kinds of mediums. I feel like I went into art because I felt like that was where I had my strengths; I knew I was a strong writer, and I had interest in formal image making. I come from a really militant, activist family who have participated in all sorts of ways in our struggle for liberation. There are doctors, freedom fighters, lawyers, activists, and writers. I feel like this is my niche, this is where I’m going to contribute. I grew up in diaspora, but I also have access and curiosity with how these things work. It feels like a natural place to put that energy, and it feels important that I’m in the West. I learned the master’s language, I know how it thinks, and I can infiltrate it. It felt very much like that, because the experimental field or genre didn’t have this voice when I started. I mean, there were certainly Palestinian artists who were known in the Arab world and abroad, and the ones in the diaspora who were known, but there weren’t as many as now.

At the time, it felt like a way of infiltrating something. Like, you’re in an experimental program and it’s mostly white people, and they’re talking about form, and you show up with work that is forcing a discussion about Israel. It felt like a powerful move, a powerful strategy, and it seemed worthwhile. I have to say I don’t feel the same anymore, I feel betrayed. I don’t regret having done it this way. I was aware at school how much anyone who wasn’t white, straight, predominantly male, but also female, would be categorized as something else. I would keep getting asked, “Are you a Palestinian artist or are you an artist from Palestine?” What does that mean? (laughter). Does it matter? Is there a difference? And what are you?

These are outdated questions. At the time I was like, oh, okay that’s how this works, let me make it uncomfortable for others. Or… not even uncomfortable, but it’s also just an interest in the pleasure of watching things and how you can get people to feel things instead of thinking about them, because that’s a powerful tool, and certainly experimental cinema does that. It’s such a different mode of experiencing moving image that it produces a different kind of reaction in its viewer, so that felt very powerful to me.

When you say you don’t feel the same now, you feel betrayed, what do you mean by that?

I feel like the sector of non-commercial, experimental visual arts, it feels like there has been a massive betrayal against our voices. Everything is okay but Palestine. Once you come in as a Palestinian and speak the truth, you’re silenced. These established spaces—both publicly and privately funded—have clamped down on us and have always sort of done this, but now that it has become critical it’s very clear we are not welcome, so I feel betrayed. The establishment is Zionist, that’s pretty clear, but I think in smaller spaces, that’s what was surprising. There were places that supported my work, and curators who I worked with who were championing this voice, this narrative, who have gone silent, taken distance, or blatantly said they’re no longer supporting.

That feels crazy because part of the motivation behind doing this work was that if these people accept your voice and work, then these places can’t turn their back, but they did. Very, very clearly. It’s a pity for those people that the Ukraine war started just before. They were so publicly against Russia, so proudly boycotting, and now they’re like, well, with Israel we can’t. That’s a betrayal that is revealing of a supremacist ideology. I don’t accept it’s about having one’s hand tied, not feeling like they can’t take the risk. Our lives don’t matter, our voices don’t matter in the same way, so yeah, that feels like a betrayal. It’s disappointing after almost 20 years working in this sector. I have to say there are curators and institutions, without batting an eye, who have stood with us as much as there are those who have been shockingly against us.

I’ve seen or felt that a little bit even as a writer with Berlinale and TIFF. It’s one thing after another, these high-profile institutions tied to state or wealth just bailing…

I would say TIFF handled it better, and with Berlinale it was a grand, sweeping shut down and they wouldn’t change their position. TIFF was faced with something that came from the outside that the programmers had no say in, and they themselves stood their ground. They really made an effort to protect our voices while this controversy was happening, and that made the controversy look idiotic on the side of the CEO and the board. With Berlinale it’s just like everyone went against us, it’s insane.

You originally planned to pursue photography, right? You got into filmmaking while in grad school?

I did my undergrad and grad school at the same university, all in one period. I entered as a photography student. I think it was then that I started taking, I mean you have to take everything—you take sculpture, graphic design, it’s one of these Bauhaus modelled schools, the University of Illinois in Chicago is modeled after that. One did everything, and one attended critiques of painting, drawing, sculpture, design, industrial design even. I had already started making video and film, but it wasn’t until grad school that film was more broadly offered. I’m trying to remember now, but it felt really natural, but not in the filmmaking sense. It’s not a traditional film school.

What I liked about it, and what I think is still probably strong about that program, is that it first thinks in ideas and then in how you implement them. Even in grad school, everyone applies with a specific medium but then you can do anything—you’re not beholden to working in this one medium. Photography has remained a very significant lens through which to think about work. I still think about my films in terms of the still image and representation to channel their concepts and ideas. I don’t feel like I left photography or went into filmmaking; they all go together and they all work together. Even if this last film is the most narrative, it’s not traditional.

If you’re working in commercial cinema with theatrical exhibition, there’s more of a formal separation between different media. Most of your works premiered in gallery-type spaces, and a lot of them are part of installation work, right?

It’s a real mix. It’s funny, filmmakers are like, “Oh, you’re a visual artist” and visual artists are like, “Oh, you’re a filmmaker.” (laughter). I would say I move pretty seamlessly between the two. I work predominantly with moving image, but whether it’s cinema or installation, it’s pretty even.

How much do you think about where it’s going to be shown? There’s something different between a video that’s part of an installation in a gallery versus one that’s in a program of experimental shorts in Wavelengths at TIFF. How much do you think about where the works are going or who the audience is when you’re making them, or do you not at all?

I do, but I think it’s pretty open in the beginning. Again, there are formal things I’m curious to try out, and there’ll be a political or conceptional idea that I’m pursuing. As those two things are coming together, it becomes clear whether it’s for a gallery or if it’s really a cinematic piece. Morning Circle (aka Morgenkreis) (2025) was 100% a cinematic piece. I didn’t think of it as installation even though we actually showed it in a gallery as a single-channel film with installation and sculptural elements.

Old Masters (2025) was commissioned by a biennale, and I certainly could have set it up as a piece that would be in a darkened gallery with a bench, but that wasn’t the thought. As I started making the work, I was really aware of the space of the museum, the paintings, and what it’s like walking through it and how that’d be a part of the visual—that we would see Gaza from my other film. This is not a cinematic piece. I think it could be shown in a cinema, but I think its ideal installation is the gallery space, and ideally a painting space. I think if a gallery in the future were to ask for it, I’d reproduce paintings to hang on a wall around it, and maybe even go out of my way to reproduce the gold frames. I don’t know if you saw installation shots?

No, I just saw the video itself.

It’s on a free-standing HD monitor in a museum, surrounded by the paintings you see in the film. It’s really strong. The monitor is the size of the paintings, and I think it’s really visually striking. But also, I’m aware that people engage with moving image in a cinema very differently than in a gallery. I don’t know if patience is the right word, but people have a different attention span, and are more receptive to something less immediately legible in a gallery space than they are in a cinema. I think cinema is more passive; you’re just receiving things. That can be a powerful mode of production.

I made this feature film called Ouroboros (2017) that is very experimental in structure. It premiered at the Whitney and at Locarno Film Festival in the span of three or four months. The reception was so wildly different, from the questions to the frustrations to the celebrations of the work that it were as if I showed two different films. For me, that was a big lesson, an important one in how people receive even the political message of a work in a museum or at a film festival.

Can you say a little more about what the differences were in reception?

I think that more classical questions about character and narrative and dogmatic political messaging were expected in cinema. People felt more frustrated with the film or were celebrating that aspect of it—the way the characters were used, the way narrative was manipulated. Then in museums, we skipped all of that and we were really just talking about how it was working conceptually and politically. I felt like nobody cared that the actors weren’t actors or that there wasn’t a real story. They were really concerned with, “Why this piece of music? Why this text?” It was like dealing with the material form rather than the structure typical to moving image in a cinema.

Your works may have archival material, original footage, both film and video, frames within frames. One of your videos on Vimeo, Turkish Delight (2010), shows the work with people moving around the gallery. Is the gallery space part of how you conceived some of these works where you have a film being projected within the frame of your camera?

Yeah, definitely. Sometimes people ask me, how do you work with sound or how does music function in your film? I always say that everything has the same value: the sound, the text, the language, the image. When I imagine the ideal landing place for a work, and let’s say I’m thinking of it in a gallery, like I did with Everywhere Was the Same (2007)… is that what you’re referring to where it’s a slideshow inside the space?

Yeah, O, Persecuted (2014) has something like that too.

For me, O, Persecuted is very cinematic and should be in the cinema, it should be totally dark and immersive. It starts with a film and transitions to video. That question of the gallery or the cinema comes up so much with people, and the problem is with the spaces themselves that host these works. There are so few that understand works are malleable between these two spaces. Seeing a cinematic film in a museum should be the same as seeing it in a cinema or at a film festival. These spaces need to catch up in technology and reception of the medium. It’s not so weird to have a feature-length film inside of a museum, but everyone acts like it’s a weird thing.

I think that there’s increasingly an audience for the sort of work you make that’s not the film festival attending audience or a museum/gallery attending audience, but a home audience. These are people who are finding these works on the internet and watching them on their computer. That brings it back to what you were talking about the last few years with spaces shutting down on Palestine. I see that but I also see a large interest from people wanting to see this stuff on their computer, and I’m wondering if you feel that.

I agree. Sadly, there is less interest in seeing things in the cinema, and more interest in watching things on laptops and on phones. So many people are like, “I won’t make it to that screening, can you send me a link?” Yeah, of course. I’m not elitist about it, but it’s too bad. I just had a screening of my two most recent works, Morning Circle (2025) and Capital (2022), here in Berlin in the cinema. This was self-organized. I had a lot of friends there who had seen the works in progress and who definitely saw the last version of these films after it went through post-production. A lot of them were like, “I never saw the final cut,” and I was like, “No, you definitely did, you just saw it at home.” (laughter). It was definitely the same film! (laughter).

If you’re in 5.1 sound and it’s projected and you’re in the dark with other people, it’s such a different experience. With that said, I do think it’s really important to be able to access stuff. I think it’s really beautiful that we can watch and rewatch things and share things and not have to go and pay $17 to a cinema or $25 to a museum in order to watch something, even if it’s a slightly different experience. This is really important, and with Palestine that’s become very apparent.

I have this very cynical line that I’m always like, don’t say it Basma, you don’t have to say it every time, but it’s true: it’s better that there is always more interest in Palestine as Palestinians are being killed. And that’s been my experience as an artist for the last 20 years. As soon as Palestinians are being killed and it’s front-page news, people are like, “Can I see your films?” That’s not what hurts—what hurts is the despair between these wars as Palestinians are picking up the pieces and rebuilding their lives. I want people’s interest to be in stopping that and less so my films. Even if I benefit in some way, or it’s nice for my ego, it’s also brutal. It’s always been like that.

This’s what I felt with We Began by Measuring Distance. I graduated in 2007, it’s the first work I make, and in 2009 after this incredibly devastating, horrific war that begins the process of the rest of my family leaving the Gaza Strip, that’s when I win a jury prize at a biennial and it launches my career. It’s crushing. From that first exhibition and winning of a prize, I thought, is my work good? Or are people just taking pity on the fact that my people are dying? That doesn’t feel good, and that remains today. I have to try to keep those thoughts out, to keep working, because I feel like my career and my motivation ends up being oppressed or owned by this thing that may seem positive. This is really a thing, not just for me, but for a lot of Palestinians. I hear other artist friends say, my god, you work your whole life to insist that you are also a person, not just a Palestinian. Then here we are back to just being Palestinian, and it’s because we’re being slaughtered.

Yeah, every time Palestine is back in the news, like after October 7th, everyone is wanting to put together a program of Palestinian films. Sure, if art can be one element of consciousness raising, that’s good, but these artists are working in very different traditions and different modes and deserve to be considered in their own, not just, “Here’s a list of Palestinian films to watch while there is a war happening.”

Yeah, exactly.

Speaking of theatrical exhibitions, our local film festival, Film Fest Knox, did screen Morgenkreis (2025).

That’s right!

It was very cool getting to see that on the big screen, but also in a program of other formally related works rather than topically related. I think it deserves to be seen that way, and thought of that way, and have an audience that way that isn’t just, we care about this because of what it’s about.

Exactly, that’s what was really exciting for me. It’s been funny with that film because a lot of parents who work in the industry are like, “Oh my god, I related to this so much! My kid was also screaming being dropped off at a daycare, so it hits different.” They are interested in it for those reasons. For me that’s also really beautiful. That was the thing that inspired the work, because the idea started before the genocide. I was just like, there is something fucked up, for lack of a better word, about being treated the same as everybody else in Germany as I’m dropping my kid off and I’m an immigrant.

I don’t speak German. My kid doesn’t speak German. His separation anxiety and mine is a whole different category, and there is something crazy about everyone insisting that we’re crazy, you know, that there’s something suspicious and not comfortable about this situation. It evolved after the genocide started, but it’s moving to me when programmers identify other things that connects them to the story. Even foreigners who live in Berlin are like, “Oh my god, the opening scene is Berlin in a nutshell, just the menacing darkness of it.” (laughter). Which is great!

Do you find yourself wanting to make films about other things to avoid this pigeonholing?

I think I do, my films aren’t always on Palestine—

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that!

No, no, but I am saying that because even when I make works about other places, the Palestinian perspective is still there. Just like anyone’s perspective is always in their work, one’s lens onto a subject is one’s biography and ethnicity and religion, or lack thereof. Capital is about Egypt, but of course it’s seen through the lens of a Palestinian who understands gentrification is also the same as occupation—it’s the same thing. Ethnic cleansing is gentrification—there are parallels. When I made High Noon (2014), which is an installation work, it was made in Southern California and Japan. It’s coming from this feeling that time is arbitrary. The way we’re grounded on land is our perspective, and it can be beautiful and hallucinatory, and that feels Palestinian. Whether it’s an active avoidance of being pigeonholed or not, it’s there. It’s not something for me to silence, but I don’t necessarily feel like all the work has to represent Palestine, if that makes sense.

Yeah, just about all your work deals formally with time and geography. Lots of footage is shown in reverse or plays with different locations, echoing between them. Were you consciously searching for the formal means to think about that stuff from the beginning?

I think so. And again, it was because of this frustrating question of, what am I? Am I a Palestinian artist or an artist from Palestine? Am I speaking like someone who grew up there or am I speaking from the diaspora? I don’t have one fixed perspective. I grew up in multiple places and have a strong influence from being in Gaza throughout my life, from my mother’s family being there, and from being in the United States, which was supporting Israel first and foremost as its proxy state. I felt like if I couldn’t identify as one thing, then I had to create the language and the code for what my work looks like.

One of the driving forces is a curiosity in form—how to make things, to rely on cinematic tropes or certain formal strategies—and then to change them to create a unique visual code. Even with Morning Circle, I really wanted to shoot on film and Steadicam in Berlin. That was so much of the challenge and the exciting element of making this film. I really liked the cinematographer in Capital. He was excellent and such a generous, wonderful person to work with. I was asking for a big challenge in working with children, on Steadicam and with film (laughs). The idea is a nightmare, but he was excited. It’s a really beautiful thing to try.

Seeing it with a local festival audience that’s not used to experimental film, I was thinking about how you could find a way in for people. There are more conventional cinematic virtues there that are obviously impressive—there’s an obvious virtuosity to the cinematography. Before you even make sense of what the film is doing, it looks cool in a way you recognize from arthouse cinema.

Yeah (laughs). It’s true, and maybe that’s cheap in a way, but cheap isn’t a bad thing, actually. I didn’t just want to speak to a niche audience with this film—the themes are much more broad and universal. It’s like these cheap tricks are really beautiful because that’s the most common denominator. It’s something you can really agree on, and that’s an interesting formal strategy in cinema.

There is a reason you go to avant-garde film programs and there is film after film using double exposure. These sorts of techniques—their ubiquity doesn’t make them not effective.

Exactly, yeah.

But it’s because they are obviously effective that everyone wants to use them. Of course that doesn’t mean all the works are equally successful (laughter).

Sometimes you go to a film program where it’s a single image and a voiceover, and it’s so powerful. It’s not about being bombastic, inundating with light and sound. Sometimes the quiet, simple strategy is also immensely powerful when it’s done well.

I think what makes some of your work so powerful is how you blend those two things. Structurally you start out more on the one side with voiceover or onscreen text, moving a little slower. Even in your very first video, Everywhere Was the Same, you’ve got the slide projector slowly cycling through images and at some point, it starts to speed up. What was once a more reflective space gains momentum and becomes visceral. You repeat that in a number of films including Morgenkreis, which at the end escalates into multiple exposure.

It’s a good reflection. I hadn’t thought of it that way, and Everywhere Was the Same and Morning Circle are very structurally similar.

What was the source of the slides you’re working with in Everywhere Was the Same?

I have to remember all these details… that film was made during my master’s. Between my first and second year of doing my master’s in 2006, I was supposed to go with my family to Palestine but we couldn’t because this is when Hamas won the election, and there was a war between Fatah and Hamas. It was very intense. We agreed to meet my family in Alexandria, Egypt instead. I hadn’t been to Egypt very much—I was always going through Egypt to get to Gaza, or in these situations where we couldn’t get to Gaza, so we’d meet in Egypt—so it’s weirdly a non-place even though I was dazzled by it.

We meet in Egypt and a war breaks out, there’s a hostage that gets taken, a family gets assassinated, and there are several events that are happening that summer between my first and second year of my master’s. This little girl whose entire family was massacred on the beach, whose image appears across the world, [Huda] Ghalia, I was really shaken by all these things. I had spent the summer in Egypt with my family, and I was taking pictures in this beachside villa as these horrific events were taking place. I’m taking pictures everywhere, and I’m still in this mode of production of amassing archives, both my own stuff and from the news. I bring them back to Chicago, and what really struck me was the inability to communicate what had happened. It was the inability to describe all of these things that had such geopolitical reverberations, were connected historically, and were connected to what was going to happen to Palestine.

I had grown up with these icons of Palestinian suffering, and here is another one, and another one. I just kept thinking, how do you describe this very specific, very local series of tragedies? If you just take one summer and one site, how do you make that a story that isn’t connected to the place? It was a way of trying to understand how it’s represented. So this was the beginning of these inquiries. It sounds very simple, but that’s really what that film was. So it’s complex and overly ambitious and very much a school film, but it was a way of trying things out.

These different modes of communicating tragedy are all told in the form of the film, where I go from this monotonous [recitation] and slideshow into lush film and music. This was an exercise that made clear how I wanted to make work in the future. We Begin by Measuring Distance actually opens on the sound of that little girl, who is screaming for her father and asking the camera crew to come over and record his death. They’re very connected, and Everywhere became a study for the rest of my work for years to come.

It feels like with that work and all your others since, there’s an idea that information on its own—in the sense of fact or documentary—can’t articulate the meaning of the experience. A more conventional way of reporting doesn’t really tell the story you want to tell, and that there is no way of doing that through just one narration or image, so it’s the formal complication of how they are brought into dialogue that becomes the story.

There’s this saying that the way the story is told is the story itself. I think that’s how a lot of my work can be categorized.

How long were you in Cairo?

I was there for two years from 2008 to 2010, and then I lived there again from 2018 to 2020.

How long have you been in Berlin, and where else have you lived in the time since?

I’ve been in Berlin since 2020, so I moved here sort of accidently with my partner and our child in 2020. Before Cairo I also lived in Beirut for a couple of years, and Paris and Los Angeles for three years overlapping, and I was sometimes floating without a place for a year or two, here or there.

With your work being shown everywhere, I’m sure you’re on the move a lot.

Yeah, although Berlin is the longest place I’ve lived as an adult, and it’s no doubt because I have a child now, but it’s a big irony to end up in this place during the genocide (laughs). There’s a bitter darkness about ending up here, although I have to say it’s also the place where I’ve found the warmest and most beautiful community.

Can you talk about your relationship with the Gallery Imane Farès? It seems like several of your works have premiered or been distributed there, is that right?

I was not a very strategic careerist with my practice (laughter). I never thought about whether gallery representation. I was moving around a lot, and I was trying to figure out my work, and understanding the world in relationship to our occupation. It was very much not on my mind, like I didn’t even know what that meant, to be represented by a gallery. A good friend of mine, another Palestinian artist named Yazan Khalili, was having a show and he wasn’t represented by the gallery, but Imane Farès was in the nascent years of opening. Sometimes Farès had exhibitions of artists she was representing, and she asked if Yazan could recommend an artist to show alongside him, maybe someone working in moving image. He was like, “There’s an artist who is living in Paris right now, maybe you should meet her.”

I went to her gallery and we meet. I didn’t even know she was going to look at work, I didn’t understand what those kinds of meetings were, but I sat down, took out my laptop, and I showed her The Story of Milk and Honey (2011), which I had just made. She is Lebanese but was born and raised in Senegal. We watched the video together on my laptop, in a brightly lit gallery, and it was as if I had known her my whole life. We just started talking, she told me about her upbringing, I told her about my upbringing. It was such a human, warm, and powerful conversation to have—two people from such different walks of life fundamentally understanding each other. She asked if I wanted to be represented on the spot, and I didn’t even know what that meant. I was like, “Yeah, sure, sounds good.” (laughter). I went home and told my boyfriend at the time and he was like, “Wow, that’s amazing!”

She had just opened the gallery a few years earlier. Ali Cherri, another artist of hers, makes beautiful work—he’s one of my favorite artists—and had also put in a good word about me. It’s been an incredibly supportive experience. She’s really involved with the artists she works with, and she supports production. She is someone who tries to understand what you’re doing; it’s not just about making works to sell, and of course that’s what galleries are there for and she does sell work, but it’s unique and incredibly rare to have someone who is aware of you as a person, as a human being, as someone in the world, and as a maker and what it is that you want to make and how to make it.

There are things I have pursued that are not very market friendly, and she is very supportive. She’s like, “Okay, what is the strongest form of this work, and how do you promote and present it in the strongest light?” I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for the gallery and the work we’ve done together. She’s equally supportive of like, if I want to make a film that’s for cinema or if I want to do installation, and that’s been really wonderful.

How big of a difference did it make to have gallerist representation? You say you didn’t even know what that meant at first, so what difference has that made for you?

I don’t know because there is no way to know how it would have been if I didn’t have a gallerist. I’ve just made the work I’ve wanted to make. I’ve been commissioned outside the gallery a lot, and had invitations to make work, and sometimes they’re uninvolved in what I’m making, but she is there, her team is there to support it and to talk about it. It’s almost like having studio visits, like let me send what I’ve made, let’s have a call, and in addition to feedback, we check in with each other like friends. I think that can only be beneficial. If I didn’t have it, I’m sure I would rely more on friends and curators that I’ve worked with, which can have a similar role. I’ve had really productive experiences with certain curators, who have really worked with me as an artist. With Morning Circle, the Vega Foundation commissioned the work. It’s not just like “here’s some money, go make the work now that we’ve approved it.” They’re really there as part of the process, and that’s such an important thing, because I think making art can be really isolating.

Certainly not all artists welcome this kind of intervention or engagement, but for me it’s really meaningful to have someone for feedback and to bounce off of who’s invested in what I’m making, not just to sell it, but because they’re interested in what you’re doing. I don’t think I would have failed or given up if I didn’t have a gallery, but I feel grateful because of the specific kind of support they’ve provided, not just financially, but from an emotional, psychological standpoint too.

What was the first thing that you made after you had representation?

I believe it was a film called Home Movies Gaza (2013). I sign with Imane in 2012 and I tell her I’m going back to Gaza and that it had been several years. I wasn’t sure I wanted to make a work because I hadn’t been there in a long time, and all my work was being made outside of Palestine. It was emotional. I was accompanying my grandmother back home, who had been outside of Gaza for a few years. I tell Imane I’m going and could potentially make something, but I’m not sure, and she was like “No pressure, we can talk about it when you get back.”

I brought my super 8 camera and a video camera, and I was just recording, recording, recording. Two weeks in, a war breaks out. This is the first time I experience war directly. I had shot a bunch of material, just for me personally, because I couldn’t make sense of how much Gaza had changed. I start to dig through the material, and I’m like, “Oh, it’s impossible to see this place as not being affected by its politics. That people are living under this every day, that everything they live and breath is the occupation.” It’s my life as well; I can’t escape this menace even though I don’t live there full-time.

I told Imane, “Listen, I’m going to make a film from the material I shot and it’s shot on a shitty Handycam, but I think I have something important here.” She was super supportive and saw the work as it was taking shape, and then we showed it in the gallery as the premiere for the film, and then it went on to festivals afterwards. That’s one example of how I worked with her—it was more like the studio-visit support of making a work. It’s something that also premiered traditionally. You know, you make a video and show it in a gallery, and then it’s going to cinemas and festivals afterwards. If I remember correctly it went to Rotterdam and to Berlinale and some bigger festivals, and it continues to be shown both in gallery and cinema contexts.

It was also very formative for me to understand that you can decide how you show moving image work—you don’t have to follow one trajectory or another. Premiering at festivals and in competition will produce a certain kind of engagement with your work, but I’ve had works that I’ve made that start off as an installation, and then nobody shows them for five years, and then suddenly it’s everywhere. When I talk to students or people working in moving image, I tell them that you can decide how your work is shown as long as you can accept that there’s sometimes less demand and there’s sometimes more demand depending on the path you choose.

So you shot Home Movies Gaza without really having an idea of the film you’d make, and then figured it out afterward?

Mmhmm, yeah.

Do you often work that way, or do you usually have a plan and then execute it?

I think all my work until Ouroboros, the long film, was like that. I have ideas but it’s process-based in terms of what form it will take, whether it’s an installation or shown in a cinema, and it’s not clear until the end what it’s going to be. Even Ouroboros, which was more structurally planned, was still very open. It was clear I was going to make a feature film, but at the start I thought of it as an installation, that every location would be on a different screen.

I worked that way for many years, but I think after Ouroboros I wanted something more narrative. Ouroboros was the first time I was working with actors, and I was really interested in that. I thought that you had to be really industry trained to work with actors, but I realized, no, you can just work with them in the way that you work. You can use actors in the same way that you use music or text or voiceover. They’re very prone to be experimented with (laughter), and that’s what actors do—they’re waiting for you to tell them what to do. You can play with that, but that means you have to know what you’re doing, because acting produces a whole range of material (laughter). I would say that’s also the reason Morning Circle feels more classical even though it’s still experimental.

You made Deep Sleep (2014) around the same time. How did you get into this idea of self-hypnosis or hypnosis for an audience, what’s the background for that?

Around that time, after I went back to Gaza in 2012 and the war broke out, I decided that I had to keep coming back to Gaza, that there had to be this strong connection and that I couldn’t leave anymore. I have a Gaza ID, a Palestinian passport, which places restrictions on where I can move around in Palestine. This has been in place for the last 25 years. I haven’t been to the West Bank. I’ve never been allowed inside what is called Israel. I can’t go to Tel Aviv, I can’t go to parts of what is 1948 Palestine, like Haifa, Jaffa, these places. For 25 years I haven’t been able to go, it’s only been Gaza, and now it’s to be determined when I can go back there. At the time, I was really struck by how, despite destruction, Gaza just kept moving forward in time, but it kept feeling like it was out of time for me and I couldn’t understand it. I kept feeling like I needed to connect it to other sites because this idea that it’s isolated and far off is completely false—it’s part of the violence that’s being done to that territory.

Another artist that I really admire, Rosalind Nashashibi, speaks about this in relation to a work she made, Electrical Gaza (2015), which I think is an incredible film. I know I have Gaza in my heart, but objectively speaking, I think it’s such a beautiful film both formally and ideologically. I was making Deep Sleep before that film came out, but maybe around the same time. I really wanted it to make a connection with other sites that were similar landscape-wise, but where their ruins were being preserved. Greece and Malta are places with significant archaeological heritage that’s preserved by the EU, but Gaza has older heritage sites that are constantly being destroyed, and I wanted to suture these places together. I don’t know how hypnosis came about, but there was inspiration from Maya Deren; I was getting to know that sort of work because I was around people who were working in that genre.

I wanted a film that actively hypnotized its audience, so I had to be hypnotized. I wanted to produce a collective experience of Gaza with other sites, so we have to lose sense of time and space and place, and even memory as we’re watching the film. This is not a joke, but I was like, why don’t I learn how to hypnotize myself? I was kind of, like, not believing it, but I did it for a year. I bought this guide to self-hypnosis, read a lot about it, and for a year was following this process and shooting while in this trance state. While shooting under hypnosis, I was “projecting” myself in the places I had filmed in Gaza, and I was aided by other people in Malta and Athens, too. I filmed there first and then shot elsewhere. I kept trying to apply for permission to enter the West Bank, and it wasn’t happening, so I was stuck in Gaza. I decided to make that film connected to that place, and I edited it so that it’d be really hard to know where one was, to have this dream-like film that would force you into Gaza.

And the horse, is that a Malcolm Le Grice quotation?

Everyone thinks that! (laughter). No, it’s a coincidence because I didn’t know that film then. It’s a relative’s horse farm. She was training these horses, and I was spending a lot of time with her, so she’d take me out to ride when I was there. It’s this beautiful part of Gaza where they have agricultural land. It was my favorite place to spend time, and her horse was running free on her brother’s land and I was just filming it. A funny anecdote is that the super 8 camera was this old Soviet camera that would make this crazy sound and smoke would come out. Eventually it caught fire and I had to abandon it. I took the film out thinking nothing was going to be on it, and all these beautiful images came out.

So some of that was created by accident?

Yeah (laughter).

That’s amazing. Maybe an opposite experience to that is how, not long after that, you started working with cinematographers and camera people instead of shooting things yourself and using archival material. When did that first happen?

With Ouroboros, actually. With Ouroboros, it was my boyfriend at the time—Ben Russell, who’s a filmmaker. It’s a lethal choice to work with your partner, so maybe it wasn’t a great idea, but it was the first time I wasn’t shooting and recording the material—and given the scale of the film and the ideas I had, I couldn’t. Also, I had no experience with shooting Super 16mm, and it would have been impossible to make that film even if he or someone else had trained me. To relinquish control of the actual image and working more on direction was huge; I was like a fish out of water, and I think it taught me to think of things differently in terms of filmmaking.

There were failures in that film because of that, because it’s not the kind of image I was imagining I would get. I didn’t really understand directing in a way, and you do need to know directing if you’re not the one shooting, and that’s such a different position to occupy. I think the film is beautiful, he’s incredibly talented as a cinematographer. I’m still happy with how the film turned out, but it was then after that point when I understood that I wanted to focus on directing and work with a cinematographer. When I worked with Simon [Veroneg] on Capital, it was like, oh, this is what I want to do. I don’t want to make images anymore, I want to make films and direct and think away from the camera. I want to trust that, with someone who is talented, we can make the thing better together.

You also worked with Sky Hopinka on Ouroboros, how did that come about?

We were friends. I met him while he was still studying, and there was an immediate synergy in how we thought about the work we made. To this day, his work is so startling in its uniqueness, and so beautiful in the way it experiments—it’s unafraid to experiment outside of what is expected. I think for me, when I was making Ouroboros and he was still at the beginning of his career—this was before he was as well known as he is today—I felt like his voice and the way he understood what I was trying to do was so organic. I was like, I don’t want Arabic in my film, I want your language in my film, because I thought it’d be too obvious—it had to be in someone else’s voice.

I couldn’t think of anyone more… I don’t know how to say this, but handing over that part of the film to someone else was the same as handing cinematography to someone else. It had to be in his voice so that it was no longer in mine, and that felt really powerful, even if it was going to be obscure to an audience. It was this interaction between him and me, through language, that was the most important part of the film. We have this incredible footage from Gaza, which is now completely destroyed, with the voice of someone in a language that was nearly made invisible. I feel like without knowing it, that was the thing we understood about each other, that we’re a people who are actively being erased, and that will continue, but we will never actually be erased. It’s been beautiful to see how well received his work is, and how it changed, and how true to himself he has remained, which seemed really clear even as a student in his earliest films.

I feel like there are a number of examples of that sort of visual or textual proxy in your films, where someone other than the author of a text is reading it or it’s being read in a different language, or with the person shooting the camera, there is displacement that serves as a formal analogue to diaspora, or the fraction of community.

That is a really beautiful reading, I would have never put it in those words, but that seems really obvious what you’ve said (laughter). There’s not an active awareness of that, but it sounds absolutely right. Maybe it’s a different way of saying that I have this interest in representation and how something passes through something else to become something new. That sounds very abstract, but something written through someone else’s voice—or is represented by an image that is shot through, drawn by, or translated into someone else’s voice—is the experience of displacement. But it’s also an awareness of how the way that something is told is the thing itself.

Yeah, you’re trying to find a way to represent something that is, in some sense, unrepresentable. Like how do you go about daily life, when children are being rounded up in cages in the United States and there’s the genocide in Gaza? And then you’re just supposed to go to work and talk to your co-workers? It’s all of these things at once, and there’s no addressing one without the other. Everything about the reality of our experience is full of these layers and contradictions, and you have to find some way of representing that in art instead of just telling one story in isolation.

A good friend of mine, Carmel Alabbasi, is a Palestinian from Gaza who has been living outside of Palestine for a few years. I saw her in the first few weeks after the genocide started. I think all Palestinians, especially outside of Palestine, felt so unable to deal with the outside world, like all of us just hid away or went to protests, you know what I mean?

The thing is, as a Palestinian you’re always aware of this force of erasure, of violence, of the impunity of Israel. To live with this gaslighting, generation after generation, is insane. To know my mother’s stories, my grandmother’s stories, it’s indescribable what that means, even though there are so many different people who have this experience. I think having that suddenly be livestreamed for everyone to see, in a similar way to what’s happening in the United States with ICE… it’s just this recorded violence that is so apparently criminal, and then nothing is changing, and there is nothing we can do to change it. It’s insane.

When I ran into this artist friend of mine in Berlin, the first thing she said to me, unprompted, was, “Isn’t it crazy how our parents always said you should be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, because that is exactly what we need? We need doctors to care for the wounded, we need engineers to rebuild our homes that are continuously being destroyed, or lawyers to defend our rights, and here we are. We decided to be artists, don’t you feel like an asshole?” That’s exactly what I feel. I feel ashamed, I feel embarrassed in front of my parents, even, who supported this, who were not thrilled, but were very supportive nonetheless. Through the course of the evening, we were like no, “Fuck that, of course we’re artists, of course there is value in this! We shouldn’t take for granted what we’ve done, and we shouldn’t give up.”

There are people literally fighting for their lives and for the lives of our people. We can’t be wallowing in pity and shame. What’s shameful is that you have a roof over your head, you have meals every day, you’re not being killed, you have passports from powerful countries, and then you accept defeat. You can’t give up, you don’t give in—that would be shameful to our people and to those who are faced with this. With Western Europe and the West in general, there is supremacy across the board, and this unwillingness to see us as human and to understand all this… it will also reach you. Like, you do this to other people, and this will happen to you, resources will dry up. If you’re not the most powerful, you will also die. You won’t have access to clean water and a roof over your head, because that’s what you’re essentially allowing to happen.

To give up is to give in to that, and that’s the real shame. On a more basic level, I think in the beginning, I was like, “I don’t want to make work anymore, I’m done, this is ridiculous.” But I feel like I have gained so much strength from what other people continue to make and from being steadfast, standing their ground on their politics. That has been incredibly inspiring. There are a lot of other filmmakers and artists who I’m like, oh wow, they pushed through and made the thing, and it’s beautiful and powerful and their politics are clear; that’s been the motivation to keep going, even though it’s not always easy.

Even to write about art in times like these, I completely understand what you are saying, but it feels sort of like how I’m embracing still being alive, still wanting to be alive, still valuing things about this world…

Exactly.

Whereas politics feels so, I don’t want to say hopeless, because I believe in fighting, and organizing, and resisting, but it’s just so bleak, you know? (laughter). It’s like we’re fighting for the long-shot outcome and not the likely one, and I just feel like you have to have something to live with in the meantime.

Absolutely. Another friend of mine said this, that accepting despair is maybe more useful, in a way. It’s a moment of immense despair, and I think that’s how we start over, because hope—in the sense of the hope we had in the world before COVID, before the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars—I think that ship has sailed. It’s not about this kind of idealized sort of human rights—Western civilization, democracy, all that bullshit is done, you know what I mean? But from the despair of this moment, I think something far better could emerge, even if it’s emerging from a sinking ship. That means something. That’s where we can reaffirm humanity.

More information about Basma al-Sharif’s work can be found at the Galerie Imane Farès website.

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Thank you for reading the 59th issue of Film Show. Reaffirm.

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Dennis Cooper is a cult novelist, poet, critic, and filmmaker. Best known for the George Miles Cycle (1989-2000) and the 2004 novel The Sluts, his work examines sexual taboo, intimate violence, queer adolescence, sadomasochism, LA punk culture, the death drive, and self-destruction. His long-running blogs (one of which was censored by Google) serve as a contemporary literary beacon and as signals of taste. Olivia Hunter Willke spoke with Cooper on September 14th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss his career and newest film in collaboration with artist Zac Farley, Room Temperature (2025).

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Olivia Hunter Willke: So you’re flying into Chicago [from Paris] on Tuesday, you said?

Dennis Cooper: That’s true.

Are you dreading coming back to the U.S. after this tumultuous week?

No, I mean, I’ve been there during tumultuous times.

Sure, sure. Okay, let’s jump right into it. So first question is, what is the role of the suicidal poet in today’s society, when everyone seems to have a death drive? In the age of Trump, I suppose?

Like who? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they would be more popular.

A lot of the sex workers in your work walk this very precarious line between choice and survival. Has that work ever called to you? Have you ever dabbled yourself?

Not on that side. My first boyfriend, when I was a teenager, was this boy who was actually extremely rich but found it very interesting to be a street hustler. And so, he was a hustler and I would go hang out with him when he was street hustling in Hollywood. I got to know him and the other hustlers and things, so that world was very familiar to me. Other than that, when I was researching the George Miles Cycle (1989-2000), I went through a period of renting escorts, renting prostitutes, because I wanted to experience things that I didn’t really understand for my work, like objectifying people. And I wanted to try out different personas or people I might have in my work, to see and to imagine what it would be like. Other than that, I never was a sex worker. I have lots of friends who are sex workers, but yeah.

Your characters deal with a remarkable lack of shame, even like, the meek or timid characters in your novels. Is this something you’ve had within yourself, or is it more of a fantasy, how you wish queer people could exist in the world?

I don’t know that they don’t experience shame. They’re very withholding and they don’t always understand themselves and they’re very introverted, so I don’t know that they don’t experience shame—maybe they just think their shame is selfish of them or something.

God Jr. (2005) deals with explorations of grief through virtual space. The Sluts (2004) deals with intense fixation through internet forums. In a time when virtual spaces are so corporatized and censored, do you still see a possibility for organic feeling online? And if not, where do you think people will move to deal with these feelings in a communal manner?

I don’t think it’s any different. I mean, God Jr. was more about video games, but yeah, I don’t know. I see people expressing authentic emotions. There’s all kinds of sites and message boards and things and people. I have a blog and there are a lot of people on there and they seem very open about what they’re doing and feeling. I think there’s probably a lot of spaces where people can do that. I don’t know about doing it on Instagram or Bluesky—I think that’s a strange thing to do, to expose your intimate feelings to people you don’t really know. But yeah, I don’t think there’s any problem. There must be places that exist, that are accessible and people go to them and nobody pays much attention to them or even knows they exist.

So you think it’s always been kind of the same thing, where you have to find those corners of the internet as opposed to just what you’re presented with?

It’s different now because there’s the mainstream, which is Facebook and Instagram and all those. There wasn’t a mainstream then, there wasn’t a centralized place. I guess that makes these things on the side even more secretive and obscure. With my blog, I link to it on those sites, but people generally kind of stumble on it, and they feel very safe there. And I’m always finding sites and things that I didn’t know existed and that nobody seems to know about and, like, maybe only 15 people are interested in them. So yeah, I don’t see any difference other than the fact that there’s the mainstream, which in a way reinforces that there is an underground, too.

Speaking of your blog, you’ve remained in open dialogue with fans for decades, and that seems a rarity among artists. They often pin themselves above that type of open discussion. Has it been hard to maintain that dialogue for so long, or is it a natural thing to always be in communication with fans?

Oh, well, it’s second nature. It’s a lot of work. I don’t really think of them as fans. Some of them come in because they’re fans, but I always try to completely… I don’t like hierarchies, I’m an anarchist. So immediately I’m like, “Let’s talk about you.” That’s probably the key to it—I don’t treat them as fans. The blog is a huge amount of work, but for some reason it’s a natural rhythm for me. And I’ve always been interested in making things. It’s also a very curatorial thing, and I’ve been curating things since I was really young; I had magazines and a press and I curated readings. I’m very interested in younger artists. With whatever power I have because I’m known to the degree I am, I want to help them. People helped me when I was starting out, and it meant a lot when people that were well known supported what I did—it meant everything. So if it’s possible that I could do that, it’s nothing. I mean, it’s a a gift to be able to do that.

Your curatorial work, is that a practice that you’ve had to hone and develop? Or has it always just come naturally?

I think it’s just been a really natural thing. I used to have haunted houses in my basement, I used to organize carnivals in my backyard when I was a kid and delegate people to do different jobs. I had a theater company that I ran, and I got kids to be in it. It just seems to be something I like to do. And then, you know, curating art shows and all that stuff. It’s just really natural to me, and it’s a parallel interest of mine to making art.

You always seem to have your finger on the pulse. I love your lists that you do mid-year of what you’ve been reading and watching. What was one of the first works of art or books or bands that you discovered as a child that you intrinsically knew was cool, if you can remember?

When I was in high school, they took us on a field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for an art show. There was an artwork there by John Baldessari and it just completely blew my mind. It was just this absolutely... it made me realize what art could be, and this kind of ingrained itself into me. That was really big. Until I was 15, I just read shit, and then I discovered French literature and that woke me up. But it was mostly just music. There were lots of bands that I was really into that certainly were important to me when I was a teenager. But as a kid, I don’t know… I mean, my grandmother was really into Winnie the Pooh. She used to make up stories where me and my siblings were little bears. You know, I think that probably influenced me, the idea that you can make up these stories and take real people and turn them into these other things. My grandmother was actually a taxidermist, but she had a big impact in terms of writing stories and narratives and things like that.

I know that you said reading, like, de Sade as a young teen was a type of awakening, that you realized others fantasize in that way. When I read The 120 Days of Sodom (1904), there’s a point that I find it becomes too much for me personally. And I was wondering, does that point exist for you? Or do you think there’s no such thing as “too much”? Does the excitement come from pushing yourself to find that point?

I’m pretty objective about stuff. It’s hard for me to be just really, deeply disturbed. In the real world, there are things to disturb me every second. But if you’re talking about art, I don’t know. I always just study everything. Like, how does it work? How’s the artist getting this effect? Is this something I can learn from? I always approach everything like that. But at the same time, I’m not chasing snuff movies or anything. Those Faces of Death movies, I wouldn’t watch. You know, I tried to watch one, it made me extremely ill just because it was so completely amoral and everything. But I can’t think of a work of art or something that offends me. But again, I get very distanced and objective about stuff.

What’s the last uncool work of art you liked, that you responded to? Something that was maybe panned, or just considered not very chic that you that you were like, “Oh, I kind of like that. I dig that?”

I have a fondness for blockbusters. I find them really interesting. I know they’re just what they are, but I can get something out of watching them—how they’re built, these formulaic structures, and the CGI. I actually didn’t like the last Jurassic World [2025’s Jurassic World Rebirth] but there are films like that where I’ll watch it and be like, “Yeah, that was really fun,” you know? I watch blockbusters on the plane, and I’ll watch something and think, “Yeah, that was actually kind of okay.”

Do you have something you’re looking forward to watching on the plane?

I don’t know what’s there. You know, I always hope that all the blockbusters are there because I don’t like to see them in the theater—I like to see them on planes. I like the idea that it’s built to be this huge spectacle and then I’m seeing it on this little thing with this really shitty sound. It makes it easier to study it, too. But I don’t know, the new Mission Impossible, or one of those movies that was a big, huge thing like Minecraft (2025) that I would never watch. That would be a really nice way to kill two and a half hours.

It seems you’ve tackled every possible artistic medium, literature, poetry, film, puppetry, blogging, theater, graphic novels. Is there anything you’ve yet to fully engage with that kind of calls to you? Is there a medium that you want to tackle next?

No, no, I’m really locked into filmmaking. I wanted to make films since I was a teenager, so that’s what I’m really excited about. I have made, you know, theater, all that stuff. I find I’ve collaborated with people and made a lot of things. But I can’t really think of anything. I don’t have musical talent, so I can’t do that. I had bands when I was in high school, but they were terrible. So no, I can’t think of anything.

How do you reckon with creating transgressive art in a literalized age when a lot of people, especially the younger generation, assume that artists are always reflecting their own worldview or opinion in their art?

I can’t do anything about that. I’ve dealt with that my whole life. When I meet people, I’m nice, and if they look at my blog they’ll see that I’m a weird guy that’s into Halloween and all kinds of weird shit. I’ve always just done what I needed to do, and if people think I’m a monster, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m only a writer, so nobody’s going to try to assassinate me or anything, because nobody gives a shit about books. That’s the good thing. I’m, you know, whatever, transgressive, I’m also queer. I didn’t have to deal with what Brett Ellis had to deal with because what I’ve done has always been very marginal. I don’t have huge consequences. I mean, there were consequences when my books started coming out. I got a lot of shit with Frisk (1991) because of what was going on at the time and everything. But since then it isn’t so much. I see people hating me all the time online like, “Oh god, he’s disgusting, he’s a monster.” Whatever. I don’t know what I can do, so I just do what I do and not worry about it.

A lot of your work has been collaborative, including these most recent films. What attracts you to another artist? What sparks your desire to create with them?

It depends. I made a bunch of theater pieces with this theater director, Gisèle Vienne. In that case, it was kind of an accident. She liked my books and wanted me to try doing something with her, and we did it. In that case, it’s her work. I’m filling in the textual element in her work, and also doing dramaturgy and other stuff. It’s different with Zac [Farley] because we were completely equal, and we want the same things and like the same things. It’s very much a mind meld. So that’s a very unusual situation, where you meet someone where you’re just completely on the same track, and your talents mesh because he has these strengths, and I have these strengths, and we want to do the same thing.

With making these films with Zac, do you have equal footing on what you’re going for? Like, are you directing as well as writing, he’s writing as well as directing? What’s the dynamic that you have going on there?

Every single thing is mutual. From the concept to the final post-production, we do it together. I mean, I’m a writer. He’s a visual artist. I can’t visualize things very well. That’s one of the reasons why I never made films until I met him, because I wanted to but I couldn’t do it. And he writes, but he’s not like a literary writer or whatever. But every single decision is completely collaborative. I’m more dominant, I guess, on the kind of the dialogue and structure and narrative and stuff, and he’s more dominant on the visuals, but we’re both exactly on the same page. We talk everything out. Everything that anyone sees in the film, we’re both equally responsible for. On the set, he’s directing because it’s too complicated to have two people directing. And I work with the actors, and I talk to him all the time, and we decide things, and we’ve already talked about how everything’s going to be anyway beforehand. We edited this film for six months, and we just sat there for six months together and made all the decisions. It’s very mutual.

Do you have a favorite part of the filmmaking process? Like, are you really attached to writing? Or do you like being on set? Do you like sitting in the editing room, going over the footage? Is there anything that stands out to you in the process?

I mean, the editing is really the best—that’s where you make the film. When you’re shooting it, it’s like you’re gathering the material. It’s very shaped, it’s very focused, and you’ve made your decisions on it, but then the film really is made in the editing. We worked on it for six months, and that was a great pleasure, even though it was completely ridiculous to work that long on it. I do really like the shoot. I love working with people. I love working with performers and with the crew and stuff, because the performers were, you know, we’d almost always only work with non-actors. They’re creating these characters, and we’re helping them create the characters. It’s really exciting to work with them and see them find something in themselves, where they’re going to manifest this thing that I’ve written. You shoot from 11AM until 5 in the morning and it’s exhausting—I’m not 34 years old anymore. But I do really, really love that. So I would say that editing is really, really the most exciting part. But I do really like shooting it. I mean, casting it is fun, too. And writing it, I like, too. But the editing is the prize you get for doing it.

What was the casting process like [for Room Temperature (2025)]? What did that entail—finding these people, seeking them out. Did they come to you? Did you come to them?

It was a mix of a lot of things. There was a friend of mine, Erin Cassidy, and she’d made films, and she had been the showrunner for Big Brother at one point. She was the casting director and we told her what we wanted, and she cast it. But we were doing it in LA and that’s where I’m from—I know a lot of people there, and most of them are artists, and she’s an artist, and her spouse is an artist. It ended up being a lot of reaching out to the artist community. A lot of people came through there, and then people would suggest others, or I’d get an idea.

We were having a hard time finding the dad. There were people that were interesting, but then John Williams, who plays the dad, is a very old friend of mine. He’s a sculptor and a painter. It was just like, “What about John Williams? What a weird idea.” I was like, “John, would you want to do this?” And he’s like, “Well, I don’t know.” And then we talked to him, and he did the reading. It was like, oh my god, that’s it. With the children, we knew people, and it was like, “Would your child be in this?” The psychic boy who sees the ghost—he’s the son of friends. And then the little kid, that little boy who walks through the swamp with the long hair, he’s the son of an art gallerist.

Andre was a really hard role and we couldn’t quite figure it out. One of our producers on the ground is Luka Fisher, and Luka’s trans, and Luka suggested Charlie Jacobs, who’s trans. And we were like, “Oh, maybe that would work!” And then we met with Charlie, and it was just like, yeah, he’s Andre. It was not a “sit in an office, and then people come in for 10 hours and sit with you for 15 minutes” thing. We just want to base the characters on who they are, and just fine tune who they are already.

I know you have mixed feelings about adaptations of your work. Has it been fulfilling to navigate these recent films, more or less on your own terms, along with Zac?

Yeah, it’s great, it’s fantastic. But I’m not interested in adapting anything, no. They’re books, and they only work as books. They’re text, you read them, and they’re the drug, and you take the drug, and you build the novel in your head. It’s like a completely different thing than film, where things are already presented to you solid. I write for words, I write for how words work, and how the reading experience works. It doesn’t make any sense to try to adapt them.

The Puce Mary accompaniment in Room Temperature is wonderful. What do you look for or seek out when considering musical accompaniment for these films?

Well, we don’t have scores. We don’t want music in the films—we’re against it. It’s important that any music in the film has to be heard by the characters. I hate, I hate scores. I hate them. It’s cheating. It’s manipulative. A lot of films use scores, and they’re great films, and they’re great scores. But for me, and I guess for Zac too, we want the world of the film to be this transparent thing, to be open and shapeless where it drifts. That’s what we want. And we want people to enter it and have this strong connection with the characters. We don’t want to fuck with things. If the actor or the character does not react emotionally in the way that we thought they would, that’s the way they react. We’re not going to enhance it by putting in some music that makes you get sad.

In the previous films, there were songs we wanted, and some of them we could afford and some we couldn’t. In this case, we needed someone to do the haunted house sounds because that’s the only music in the film other than the song that Andre sings. We’re both huge fans of Puce Mary and so we just went to, Frederikke is her name, she was the very first collaborator. We worked with her for like four years before we even shot the film, just working with her about how to do that. It just made sense because her music’s fantastic and she’s fantastic. In that case, it was a no-brainer. But generally, we don’t want any music in the film.

I know that you’ve talked about going to “home haunts.” Is there a distinct one that you remember going to that influenced this movie, or some memory that you have of something?

Zac and I go to LA every year and go to like 20, 30, 40 of them. I’ve been doing that forever. I’m obsessed with home haunts. And I look at every one and go, “Oh, that’s an interesting trick” or “Oh, that’s new.” So no, it’s just a general thing. Also, it’s a shitty haunted house [in the movie], and it was meant to be a disappointing, shitty haunted house. It wasn’t like we were trying to mimic some really good haunted house. We were just taking the most basic things that haunted houses have and then making them fun, but not actually very scary or fulfilling.

Is there anything that you’re working on right now? Do you have a next project that you’re planning?

A new film. We’re almost finished with the script. It’s very close. I only wanna make films right now. I’m not interested in writing fiction.

Thank you for reading the 58th issue of Film Show. Happy Haunted New Year.

If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Film Show is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Film Show will be able to publish issues more frequently.

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Mamoru Oshii (b. 1951) is a Japanese filmmaker known for directing several influential and groundbreaking anime films including Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984), Angel’s Egg (1985), Patlabor 2: The Movie (1993), and Ghost in the Shell (1995). 4K restorations of both Angel’s Egg and his first live-action feature The Red Spectacles (1987) are currently playing in theaters around the US. In light of this, Joshua Minsoo Kim corresponded with Oshii via email questionnaire. Find his answers below in both English and Japanese—all the formatting in his responses, especially line breaks, have been left as is. Special thanks to Kaila Hier at Metrograph for coordinating the interview and Junko Okada for translating.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: In the past you’ve lamented how anime has become a way to simply replicate what happens in live-action films. Historically, there was more experimentation in animation, especially among independent filmmakers. I was wondering about your earliest experiences with watching animation—what films excited you and made you believe in the medium’s power? Were you watching a lot of Western animation? Were you familiar with the Japanese animators from the late ’60s and ’70s such as Hiroshi Manabe, Tatsuo Shimamura, Nobuhiro Aihara, and Taku Furukawa?

Mamoru Oshii: I had some knowledge of independent filmmakers, but I was interested in several works of commercial animation.

The film that excited me was Wanpaku Oji no Orochi Taiji (1963) [Little Prince and The Eight-Headed Dragon] by Toei Doga [Toei Animation], which I saw at a school screening when I was in elementary school.

As for Western animation, I had seen a few Disney films in general, but I wasn’t particularly interested in them.

In the late 1960s you were involved with the New Left movement after feeling lost in high school. Your father eventually locked you in a mountain cabin because of this and upon coming back home, you didn’t want to pursue activism anymore. Can you share about your time in the New Left and in the mountain cabin? What memories come to mind for you, and how did these experiences shape the way you thought about the way you should live your life?

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to pursue activism anymore, but rather, I began to feel a sense of dissonance.

My experience at the mountain cabin was actually cozy, and I enjoyed living in nature.

Perhaps the time I spent alone, away from my mates, had changed something within me.

I continued to participate in political activism afterward, but I no longer had the same passion for it as I had before.

I know that as a kid, you spent a lot of time imagining fantasy worlds and daydreaming. You once said that you didn’t “believe in reality.” Can you talk about how your understanding of dreams and reality has evolved over time? Is it hard to maintain this spirit of daydreaming as you get older and have made more films?

It hasn’t changed much.

I think my filmmaking profession has allowed me to keep that kind of tendency.

You read science-fiction novels in high school and watched films by Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard at a film club in university. You’ve said, however, that these books and filmmakers were influential at the time but are no longer things you care to engage with anymore. Can you share, though, what the initial lessons were that you took from such artists? What did they make you realize about art and how you wanted to approach making works yourself?

It’s not that I no longer care to engage with them. Rather, after I became a professional director, my interest was not as enthusiastic as before. I simply look at them more objectively.

Instead of ignoring the commercial side, I began to think that I could get closer to the real nature of films if I could achieve my expression within those constraints.

You worked in the department of education in college and have said that your teaching experiences were helpful once you entered the anime industry. I’m a teacher myself, so I am curious if you could expand on how you feel like teaching helped you in your animation career. Were these just practical things, or more philosophical? Did you have a guiding principle for how to teach people, and does this apply to your own films? Do you feel like your films are meant to educate the audience in any way?

I think that by working with children in practical training settings, I learned what was needed to inspire people’s initiative. In particular, when dealing with large groups of children, I learned some techniques to draw their attention to their own existence. I find that these things I learned have been very useful when motivating staff as a director.

I do not direct films with the intention to educate the audience.

That kind of intention is a way to change films into propaganda, which is the action I detest most.

Being an artist requires an incredibly large amount of passion, obsession, and commitment. I know that you ran away from home in order to focus on your work while making Urusei Yatsura: Only You (1983), much to the chagrin of your then-wife. I also know that you were dissatisfied with the film and felt depressed. How did you grapple with disappointment back then, and how have you pushed through such low periods in your life throughout your career? I mention this because obviously you made Beautiful Dreamer (1984) afterwards, which was successful in numerous ways.

First of all, I must say that I am a professional director, not an artist.

This is a very important fact, and something I have repeatedly told on many occasions.

The history of film is only about a hundred years old at most, and compared to arts such as painting and dance, it is still a far less mature form of expression. I think that is the reason why expression through films has a unique appeal found nowhere else.

Can you talk about your mentor Hisayuki Toriumi? Can you share a story with me about him that highlights the sort of person he is? What do you feel like are the most crucial things you’ve learned from your relationship with him? In other words, what do you feel like you wouldn’t have known or been able to do as a filmmaker if you hadn’t had Toriumi as your mentor?

Among the things I learned from my mentor, the most important thing was “how a director should behave on set.” It’s something I am reminded of after my mentor passed away.

A director should take responsibility for their staff first, more than for anyone else.

Because they are “the first audience.”

When you became a director, you started working with the mindset of an auteur, but when you eventually started freelancing, you felt restricted by what you could do. Since then, you’ve realized the importance in finding a balance between directorial vision and creating audience-pleasing entertainment. Can you share a time when you were surprised by what you were able to get away with as a director, and a time when you were deeply saddened by having to water down some of your ideas? Do you think about your audience much at all when making films, whether that’s dumbing things down or finding ways to still respect their intelligence?

The word “audience” comes with many misconceptions, but perhaps the audience itself is least aware of what that word means. The audience who will watch a film ten years from now, the audience who watches it a second time, or a third time, or those who watch it again and again, are not the same.

When you say “making films that are dumbed down for the audience,” which audience exactly are you referring to?

Films do not exist independently of the passage of time.

That’s because films exist by being watched, and films can only exist within memory.

While working on Garm Wars: The Last Druid (2014), you said that “Angel’s Egg is my core, so I cannot get over it.” When you reflect on Angel’s Egg (1985), what do you feel like is present in the movie that reflects your beliefs and ideas about art, life, and reality? How is the Mamoru Oshii who made the film back then similar and different to who you are today? Do you feel like you were more idealistic back then?

What ultimately sustains film as a form of expression is fetish, and that is the core.

The work Angel’s Egg is, in fact, solely sustained by that core, and since an individual’s fetish does not change over a lifetime, it is only natural to always return there.

When I was making that film, I was not so much idealistic, rather, I was ignorant and unconscious about film as a form of expression.

Along with Angel’s Egg, your film The Red Spectacles (1987) is also playing in theaters around the United States. This was your first live-action feature film, and I’m curious how your experience with creating anime shaped how you worked with actual actors. Do you recall any specific difficulties you had in working on this film, or big lessons you feel like you learned in having made that film? I know that it initially began as a promotional video for actor Shigeru Chiba too—how did you manage scaling this into a bigger and bigger project?

It was an extremely unique experience, so I’m not sure where to begin…

But the most important lesson I learned was a highly practical awareness of which side of the brain, left or right, to prioritize if there is any difference between live-action films and animation films.

Since it is a practical awareness, it can be developed through training, regardless of the individual quality of directors.

When thinking on a large scale for films, the difference between live-action films and animation is a trivial matter.

Any talented filmmaker should be able to create excellent work in either medium.

All that is required is training through practice.

I end all my interviews with the same question and wanted to ask it to you: Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself? And why is this quality important to you? And I’m wondering if this quality is something you feel is related to how you view yourself as a reincarnated Basset Hound.

I think I have a stubborn, persistent personality.

It’s completely the opposite of a Basset Hound’s traits.

And that’s why I love them.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: 以前、アニメが実写映画で起こることを単に再現する手段になってしまったと、嘆いていらっしゃいました。アニメはこれまで、特に独立系の映画製作者の間では、より実験的なものでありました。そこで伺いたいのですが、最初にアニメを見た時の体験について教えてください。どのような作品に心を動かされ、アニメの持つ力を信じるようになったのでしょうか？西洋のアニメはよく見ていましたか？真鍋博、島村達雄、相原信洋、古川タクといった、60年代末から70年代に活躍したアニメーターについてはよくご存知でしたか？

独立系の映画製作者に関する知識はありましたが、私が興味を持ったのは商業アニメの幾つかの作品です。

小学生の時に学内の上映会で観た東映動画の「わんぱく王子の大蛇退治」です。

西洋のアニメはごく一般的にディズニー作品を何本か観ていましたが、特に興味はありませんでした。

1960年代後半、高校を不登校がちになり、新左翼運動に関わっていらっしゃいました。そのために父親によって山小屋に軟禁されることになり、家に戻って来た時には、運動を続けたいとは思わなくなったそうですね。新左翼運動と山小屋での体験について教えていただけますか？どのような記憶があるでしょうか？そしてこれらの経験が、人生をどのように生きるべきかを考える上でどう影響しましたか？

運動を続けたいとは思わなくなった、というより齟齬を感じるようになりました。

山小屋での体験は、実は快適であり、自然の中での生活を満喫していました。

おそらく仲間と離れてひとりで過ごした時間が、自分の中の何かを変えたのかもしれません。政治活動への参加はそれ以降も続いていましたが、以前のような情熱を持てなくなっていたことは確かでしょう。

子供時代、空想の世界を想像したり、ぼんやりと夢想したりする時間をたくさん過ごしたそうですね。かつて、「現実を信じていなかった」とおっしゃっていたこともあります。夢と現実に対する理解は、時間とともにどのように変化しましたか？歳を重ね、より多くの映画を作るようになると、夢想する心を保つのは難しいでしょうか？

いまでもあまり変わっていないように思います。

映画を職業とすることで、そのような性向が保存されてしまったのだと思います。

高校時代にはSF小説を読み、大学の映画研究会ではクリス・マルケルやジャン＝リュック・ゴダールの作品を見ていたそうですね。しかし、これらの小説や映画監督には当時影響を受けたものの、今ではあまり関心を持たなくなったとおっしゃっています。それでも、こうした作家や監督から最初に学んだことは何でしょうか？芸術や自信の作品の作り方について、どのような気づきを与えてくれましたか？

関心を持たなくなったわけではなく、職業監督になってからは以前のような熱狂的な関心でなく、より客観的に観るようになっただけです。

商業性を無視するのでなく、むしろその制限の範囲で自分の表現を実現することによってこそ、映画の本質に近づけると考えるようになりました。

大学では教育学部に所属し、教職の経験がアニメ業界に入ってから役立ったとおっしゃっていました。私自身も教師なので、教える経験がアニメのキャリアにどのように役立ったと感じているのか、もう少し詳しくお聞きしたいです。それは単に実務的なことなのでしょうか、それとももっと哲学的なことなのでしょうか？人に教える際の指針がありましたか？またそれは、ご自身の映画製作にも応用されていますか？ご自身の映画が、観客に何かを教育する意図を持っていると感じますか？

実習の現場で子どもたちと接することで、人間から積極性を引き出すには何が必要なのかを学んだように思います。特に多人数の子供を相手にするとき、自分の存在に興味をもたせるためのコツのようなものを学んだことが、監督としてスタッフを動かす時に、とても役立っていると感じます。

私は観客を教育する意図を持って映画を監督しようとは思っていません。

それは映画をプロパガンダの手段に変えることであり、私が最も嫌う行為です。

芸術家であることには、非常に大きな情熱や執着心、そして献身を必要とします。『うる星やつらオンリーユー』を製作していた頃、仕事に集中するために家を飛び出し、当時の奥様を困らせたと聞いています。また、その作品に満足できず、落ち込んでいたこともあったそうですね。当時、失望感にどのように向き合っていたのでしょうか？また、キャリアを通じてそのような低迷期をどのように乗り越えてきたのでしょうか？その後には、『ビューティフルドリーマー』を製作され、さまざまな面で成功を収められていますね。

まず言っておかなければならないのは、私は職業監督であって芸術家ではありません。

これはとても重要な事実であり、あらゆる場で繰り返し述べてきたことでもあります。

映画の歴史はたかだか百年程度にすぎませんし、絵画や舞踏のような芸術に比べれば遥かに未成熟な表現に過ぎませんし、それだからこそ映画という表現には他にない魅力があるのだと考えています。

師匠である鳥海永行氏についてお話いただけますか？同氏の人物像を表すようなストーリーがあれば、ぜひ教えてください。同氏との関係から学んだ最も重要なことは何だと思いますか？同氏が師匠でなかったら、映画製作者として知り得なかったこと、あるいはできなかったであろうと思うことは何でしょうか？

師匠に学んだことの中で最も重要なことは、「現場において監督はいかに振る舞うべきなのか」ということであり、このことは師匠を喪った後に、あらためて感じたことでもあります。

監督はまず誰よりも自分のスタッフに責任を持つべきです。

なぜなら、彼らは「最初の観客」だからです。

監督になった当初、映像作家的な発想で作品づくりに取り組んでいましたが、やがてフリーランスとして活動するようになると、自分にできることの範囲に制限があると感じるようになったそうですね。その後は、監督としてのビジョンと観客に楽しんでもらえるエンターテイメント性とのバランスを取ることの重要性に気づいたとお話しされています。監督として許される範囲に驚いた経験があれば教えてください。また逆に、自分のアイデアを和らげなければならず、とても悲しく感じたことがあれば、そのことについてもお聞かせください。映画を作るとき、観客のことをどれほど意識しているのでしょうか？わかりやすくするべきか、それとも観客の知性を信頼する方向で進むべきかを意識していますか？

観客という言葉には様々な誤解がつきまとっていますが、実は観客自身がもっともその言葉に無自覚なのではないでしょうか。十年後に観るであろう観客、二度目に観る観客、あるいは三度目…何度も観る観客はそれぞれ同じではありません。

「観客にわかりやすい映画を作る」とは、いったいどの観客に対して「わかりやすい映画」なのでしょうか？

映画は時間経過と無縁に存在するわけではありません。

映画は観ることによって成立するのであり、映画は記憶の中にしか存在できないのですから。

『ガルム・ウォーズ』の制作中に、『天使のたまご』が自分の核であり、それを超えることはできない、とおっしゃっています。『天使のたまご』を振り返った時、芸術や人生、現実に対するご自身の信念や考え方がどのようにこの作品に表れていると感じますか？当時その作品を作ったご自身と現在のご自身の間にはどのような共通点と違いがあるでしょうか？当時の方が、より理想主義的だったと感じますか？

映画表現を最後に支えるもの、その核となるものはフェティッシュなのです。

「天使のたまご」という作品は、実はその核だけで成立しており、個人のフェティッシュというものは生涯を通じて変わらないのですから、絶えずそこへ回帰するのは当然のことです。

あの映画を制作していた当時の自分は、理想主義的であったというより、映画という表現に無知、無自覚でした。

『天使のたまご』と並んで、『紅い眼鏡』も現在アメリカの各地で上映されています。これは初の実写映画ですが、アニメ製作の経験が実際の俳優との活動にどのように影響したのでしょうか？この作品に取り組む中で特に苦労した点や、製作を通して学んだ大きな教訓を覚えていますか？また、この作品はもともと俳優の千葉繁氏のプロモーションフィルムとして企画がスタートしたと聞いていますが、そこからどのようにして、より大きな企画へとスケールアップさせていったのでしょうか？

非常に特異な体験でしたので、どこから話せば良いのか分かりませんがー

最も重要な教訓は、実写映画とアニメ映画に相違があるとすれば、それは脳の左右のどちらを優先的に用いるか、という極めて実践的な認識でしょう。

実践的な認識ですから、当然ですが監督個人の資質のいかんに関わらず、訓練でこれを行えるようになります。

映画とという大きな枠で考えるなら、実写とアニメの差異など些細な問題に過ぎません。

有能な映画監督であれば、そのどちらでも優れた作品を作れるはずです。

実践を通した訓練が必要なだけです。

私はすべてのインタビューを同じ質問で締めくくっているのですが、押井監督にもぜひ伺わせてください。ご自身について好きなところを一つ教えていただけますか？また、なぜその資質が大切なのでしょうか？そしてその資質は、ご自身をバセットハウンドの生まれ変わりと捉えていることに関係があると思いますか？

私は諦めが悪い、執念深い性格だと思います。

バセットハウンドとは全く逆の性格です。

だからこそ彼（彼女）たちを愛しています。

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Akihiro Suzuki (b. 1961) is a Japanese director, producer, and film distributor largely known for his contributions to the history of Japanese experimental, underground, and queer cinema. After graduating from college, Suzuki began working in film distribution, which eventually led to him starting the first queer film festival in Japan in 1992 called the Tokyo Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. He would highlight queer filmmakers both in Japan and abroad, including Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Jim Hubbard, Marlon Riggs, Ryosuke Hashiguchi, and Hiroyuki Oki. He would also work as a producer on Oki’s films, eventually becoming inspired to make his own feature-length works, including the 1999 gay pinku eiga masterpiece Looking For An Angel. The film, which was recently remastered and is currently on a theatrical run throughout the US via Kani Releasing, follows the death of a young gay porn star named Takachi and the consequent grieving of his friends. Suzuki called the film “neither straight, gay, queer, bisexual, asexual or pornographic, but [rather] anti-heterosexist.”

Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Suzuki on June 13th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss formative arts experiences as a child, the importance of sex scenes in cinema, and the making of Looking For An Angel. Special thanks to Monika Uchiyama for translating.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: What year were you born, and where were you born specifically?

Akihiro Suzuki: I was born in 1961 in Hamamatsu-shi in Shizuoka Prefecture.

What was it like growing up in Hamamatsu-shi?

In the ’60s, the city that I lived in was the second largest in that prefecture, but I wouldn’t say that it was a cultural hub. By the time I was in middle school, there were people doing things in underground film, theater, and music, and so it was around high school that I started to make friends in that area. That’s how I became familiar with the underground scene. And because it was a small city and there were so few people making underground art, it was easy to immediately meet everyone—they were from various generations and working in all kinds of different genres.

Can you recall any memorable experiences you had with art?

When I was in university, I was friends with many more artists than when I was younger. I was working on films at the time, but there was this underground theater performance that was really memorable for me. It was an outdoor avant-garde theater piece where the actors set up a tent as their set, and at the end they set fire to the area around the tent and the actors were singing. The curtains that formed the tent then dropped and the area that we were all watching from was consumed by fire. I remember thinking, this is so incredible, I need to see more things that are new and shocking to me.

Do you remember the names of those involved with the performance?

They were called Kyoku-Ba-Kan, which means “Circus Hat,” and they were active in the ’80s. The first piece I saw was “Jigoku no Tenshi,” which means “Angels in Hell.” [Editor’s Note: The group’s music can be heard on a self-released LP from 1978].

What were your first experiences like with filmmaking? Did you have your own cameras?

I wasn’t studying film at university. I was involved with the film club there and we watched films, made films, and wrote film criticism. As a teenager, even in a small city like Hamamatsu, there were people making films, and these were mostly personal and experimental films. In Tokyo, there were a lot of experimental film screenings by the Art Theatre Guild, so then there would be independent screenings held in Hamamatsu for screenings like those. My interest in high school was more about music and less so about films. I was really into punk music and played in bands.

What sort of music did your band play? What was the environment you were part of?

In high school I was listening to Zuno Keisatsu, Les Rallizes Dénudés, Yonin Bayashi, and Magical Power Mako. This was also the time of early punk, so I was listening to people like Sex Pistols and Television. I mainly listened to progressive rock, so I liked King Crimson but also avant-garde German rock bands such as Can, Faust, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, and Klaus Schulze.

Did you see Les Rallizes Dénudés live?

I saw them twice when I was in college.

Wow. I have to ask, what was [frontman] Mizutani like live?

You show up before the show, and then the start time comes and they’re nowhere to be seen, the background music is playing in the club, and oftentimes we’d be waiting an hour or two for them to come on stage. Mizutani would eventually come on stage and say, “Thank you all for coming” and then hit a huge, loud chord on his guitar. I just remember thinking, wow.

Do you feel like your experiences with being in a band were significant for your filmmaking practice?

In high school I was in a prog rock band influenced by Pink Floyd and Supertramp. I was on keys and vocals. We were also playing covers of the Flower Travellin’ Band. Once I was in university, I was more interested in punk, so my band then played covers of Echo & the Bunnymen and The Damned. Then we started making our own original songs.

Were you involved or interested in any of the hardcore punk bands in Japan, or was it mostly these post-punk and new wave bands from the West?

I was never that into hardcore punk when I was at university. I was into post-punk and I was into a Japanese band called Jagatara, which was more influenced by funk and Afrobeat. I was also interested in bands on Rough Trade, so this was more like art punk. I was listening to The Pop Group, Throbbing Gristle, This Heat in terms of overseas bands, and then Inu, Yoshino Daisaku & Prostitute, P-Model and many others in Japan. I also liked ’60s music such as The Velvet Underground, The Doors, and free jazz.

So you played music in college but also made films, did you feel like these two practices were connected?

I definitely saw the two as very connected, and never considered them to be distant practices. I think it had to do with the people around me because they were both music and film people. During that time, music and film—and I’m talking about personal film and experimental film— were very intertwined. You could see that in New York City with no wave, with how it wasn’t just a musical movement but also a filmmaking one. Something similar was happening in Japan.

Were you aware of filmmakers like Richard Kern and Nick Zedd? Were these films being shown in Japan at all?

When they were released, which is when I was at university, I didn’t have an opportunity to see them. But once I became an adult and worked in film distribution, I had the opportunity to distribute Richard Kern’s films.

When did you start working in distribution?

This would’ve been after university in the 1990s.

I know that before Looking For An Angel (1999), you were a producer for Hiroyuki Oki. Can you talk about the things you were doing prior to making the film, shortly after college?

After university, I started working at a film-related company. They put on screenings and handled distribution, so I joined the latter department. Films that I had helped distribute were those by Morio Agata, who was a folk singer in Japan. He made a 35mm independent film. Then also Gregg Araki and Bruce LaBruce. It was my work in distribution that led to me starting the Tokyo Lesbian and Gay Film Festival with another director and film programmer who was my colleague. That was the first LGBTQ-focused film festival in Japan, and that led to my general focus on distributing New Queer Cinema and working with Hiroyuki Oki, who was under that umbrella.

Wow, there’s so much here that’s incredible. I didn’t even know Morio Agata made films. What was his film like?

So his film was called I’m No Angel (1977), and it was actually based on a manga from the 1970s called Red Colored Elegy (1970-1971). It was about an animator and his lover living in a very small room together. Agata cast himself as the lead. His girlfriend at the time, Mako Midori, was the lover and they shot this 35mm film.

Who was the other filmmaker you started this festival with?

The other person I mentioned is Takashi Toshiko, who still continues to be a filmmaker. Back then, she was working part-time as a projectionist and we shared the same taste in film. They’ve had retrospectives of her work at the Yebizo International Festival and also at the Yamagata Film Festival.

Oh yeah, she’s credited as a writer on Looking For an Angel, right?

Yes, she was a really important consultant on the film and helped a lot on the making of it.

What was the inaugural year for the festival you started?

1992. Coincidentally, there was another LGBTQ film festival that started the same year, but ours took place at Parco, which is a cultural space in Shibuya. It was the first large-scale LGBTQ film festival in Japan.

Was there a lot of pushback? What films screened there? I’m curious if you could share anything about what it was like to run the festival and what the response was like.

As far as films from abroad, we showed a lot of experimental shorts and documentaries. Things that come to mind are Bruce LaBruce’s No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando (1981), and Gregg Araki’s Three Bewildered People in the Night (1987). For Japanese films, I remember we screened an Hiroyuki Oki film that he made on 8mm [Color Eyes (1992)], and a Ryosuke Hashiguchi feature film also made on 8mm [A Secret Evening (1989)].

Since we were starting a film festival from scratch, we were trying to find funding and reached out to various companies to see if they’d like to sponsor us. We were completely rejected. None of these bigger companies wanted to help out our film festival; they even said that we were just running a porn film festival. Thankfully, Parco was very supportive from the beginning and understood the importance of putting a spotlight on LGBTQ culture. We used the space for about a week, having screenings from morning until evening. And even though we didn’t have the understanding of the public at the beginning, by the end of the festival we were selling out most of the screenings at the 200-seat theater. One thing I remember is that there were men, of course, but there were a lot of women in the audience.

Were you surprised by that?

I wasn’t surprised so much as really happy to see it. I already knew that gay culture in Japan had a lot of women fans. Also, we had a lot of staff helping us run the festival who were lesbians. We had a lot of lesbian audience members, too.

What about yourself? Are you gay?

No, I’m not gay.

Wow, how did you first get involved with LGBTQ culture then? You’re not just making films about this, you’re distributing works and starting up an entire film festival.

When I say I’m not gay, I guess it sounds like I’m saying that I’m heterosexual. And I suppose it’s true, but I’ve always recognized a kind of queerness in myself. I see in my own sexuality something that is very relatable to me in queer culture. When I was in elementary and middle school, there were friends around me who were gay, so I never felt homophobic either.

What was the impetus for starting the festival? Everything you’re saying can be true, but I’m curious to know why you wanted to do something at this scale.

Initially, it was that I had heard about gay and lesbian film festivals abroad. When I heard about the concept of this kind of fest, I really just wanted to go and see what that was like. Takashi and I went to the Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival in New York and I remember it being so much more diverse and broad than any kind of queer film festival I could’ve imagined. I was really drawn to how free and personal that many of the films were. I wanted to take that feeling—of being moved and inspired by these works—and bring it with me to Japan to show others.

Can you share a bit about what it was like to work on those Hiroyuki Oki films? What do you feel like you learned that was important for your own practice?

It’s interesting. What did I learn from him? I produced some of the films he made that were larger in scale than those he screened at our festival. Oki, early on, was making films on 8mm and 16mm where he not only directed but manned the camera. He was really interested in doing something with a bigger budget, all while maintaining that style of filmmaking that he put together with a small crew. That idea really resonated with me, this notion of preserving the same spirit while scaling up. In Japan, there are gay pinku films that are made for the purpose of screening in a porno theater. We were approached by a company that produced these films, and I said that Oki would be a great director to make a feature-length film. He hadn’t made one yet, and I thought him making a gay pinku would be great. This is what led to him being the director and me being the producer.

Is this Tarch Trip (1993)?

This was I Like You, I Like You Very Much (1994). Other than that, I also helped produce other pinku eiga that were not specifically gay. With Tarch Trip, there was this German producer who worked on Bruce LaBruce’s No Skin Off My Ass. He approached us and said that Oki should make a film, and I was the Japanese producer on that project.

When I saw Oki’s Tears of Ecstasy (1995), I was really struck by how it was a structuralist pink film—each scene is 60 seconds, so it’s something like James Benning’s One Way Boogie Woogie (1977). I love that this spirit of experimentation exists there, which is something I also feel with Looking For An Angel. What sort of things were you thinking about with regards to form and materiality?

This has a little to do with Oki’s influence on me, which you asked me about earlier. Up until Looking For An Angel, I had only worked on personal films and I hadn’t really made a feature or anything that was fictional. I wanted to keep this idea that he had, that one can maintain their own style and sensibility and scale up, and that’s what I did with Looking For An Angel. The agreement with the film production company was that they would fund half of it and I would fund the rest. The criteria was that it had to include a number of erotic scenes, but other than that I had free rein to determine the story and anything else. Within those restraints, I really wanted to make a film that experimented with form in a way that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do otherwise.

Even with the screenplay, it was all just plot and storyline; I didn’t really write a scene-by-scene script. With this film, I wanted to combine narrative film elements with footage of the gay community around me shot in a very personal way. It would be a diaristic film but also a narrative one.

How much of the film’s story is based on real events?

It’s not based on anything that happened in real life, but I did know that I wanted to make a film that was about someone who died and then his friends remembering him.

I wanted to ask you about working with Jun Kurosawa, as NEKO-MIMI (1993) has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. Looking For An Angel also has one of my favorites, and it was really beautiful to learn that you two collaborated. Why was he chosen as one of the cinematographers for your film? Why’d you bring him on?

Jun was the main cameraman for Looking For An Angel, and I met him through this director from the Netherlands, Ian Kerkhof. He made a film in Japan called Tokyo Elegy (1999), and I was the producer on that film. Ian said to me that he loved NEKO-MIMI and wanted Kurosawa to shoot his film, and that’s how we got in touch and how he joined my own film project. And actually, with regards to Tokyo Elegy, Kurosawa and Kerkhof ended up having a fight so Kurosawa ended up leaving the project. Still, I knew that I wanted to work with him.

How did you know that?

I knew that I wanted to work with a cameraman who had different qualities from myself; he’d be able to capture things that I would never be able to. I was familiar with his films, and we eventually became friends and would drink together, go see movies and shows together.

Can you talk about the decision behind shooting certain scenes digitally versus on film?

I shot on DV, MiniDV, 8mm, Super 8mm, and 16mm, but in the end, we had to transfer everything to 16mm and blow it up to 35mm for screening—the digital version was scanned from the 35mm print. Any of the scenes that had plot written into the script were shot on 16mm by Jun Kurosawa, and this was because it required a cast and crew. Any scenes that I decided to include after the fact were shot on 8mm or other types of media. There are portions of the film that are shot narratively, and these are objective. And then there are the more subjective scenes that are shot on 8mm. It was important for me to mix all the media together.

Why was it important?

I didn’t want to create a world that only reflected a single value system—I wanted to convey a variety of perspectives. I’ve always felt that the textures and resolutions of different types of film media can convey something different, whether that’s emotional or something else. When combining personal documentary and narrative film, I didn’t feel that shooting everything at the same resolution would convey everything effectively. I thought it’d be easier to match the emotionality with specific formats.

When did you recognize that these different formats provided different emotional resonances? Was that from seeing different films or from personal experiences of using these cameras yourself?

I think if anything, it was just through the process of making films. I started to realize that there were different harmonies that existed between the emotion and the image that’s captured. I was referencing those experiences.

You said that you had these films that Jun shot on 16mm and then you had your own personal footage. Did you have a specific structure in mind early on or did things only come together during the editing process?

Things were really shaped during the edit. We would film a certain amount of footage and then review it, and then begin editing. The process was quite haphazard because depending on what I saw, the narrative was very malleable. I knew that there was going to be this mix of narrative and personal storytelling, but it was really just about watching the footage, editing it, and adding footage where I felt something was missing. I couldn’t fully reflect on what the film was actually about until the first time we screened it—it was a private screening. I watched it from beginning to end with the sound and music, and it was only then that I could be satisfied with what I made.

Can you share a little bit about the songs you decided on for the film, like those from Koji Shishido?

(in disbelief) Oh, wow! Yes, Koji Shishido.

The music is crucial in shaping the images that they soundtrack, in maintaining a specific atmosphere. How did you approach this?

With regards to that Koji Shishido song, I believe it plays while people are walking on a walkway or overpass, and it’s something that I already knew. I just went to him and asked for permission. Otherwise, it was just a selection of music that I liked or music that was recommended to me, or CDs that were given to me by friends. I’d file through them and see what’d be apt for certain scenes, what’d make sense as soundtrack music.

Given that you had seen and known about pink films and Looking For An Angel is part of this lineage, I’m wondering if you could talk to me about the significance of seeing sex in film. Just generally speaking, do you have any thoughts on sex scenes and how to make them meaningful, or if they even have to be meaningful?

I think my answer may connect back to your question about my own sexuality and how I described it. I believe that sexuality is deeply connected to identity. Sex is not just a means to understand or affirm one’s sexuality, it’s a way to understand and confirm one’s existence. That’s what I think about with the importance of sexual acts. When I was making the movie, that’s what I was thinking about. In the film, the protagonist is very hesitant to recognize himself as gay, or accept his gay identity, yet he has these sexual urges and desires towards men. But then he’ll also try to pursue sex with women to try and affirm the opposite—that he’s not gay. I think of sexuality as being something fluid, both in the film and in my life, and that sexual relations are not just confirming what your category is, but affirming your own existence.

This is all so beautiful. I had to stop myself from crying.

Thank you so much. To add to that, and this continues on today with how I think about things, sex is more about intimacy and less about the actual act. Sex is simply under the umbrella—or one shape—of intimacy and connecting with one another. That’s the type of world I wanted to create within the film. Sex and sexuality are not identity categories—it’s not like other people can really define others, like oh you’re gay or you’re lesbian. Sexuality is very much an in-between state, and sex is one representation of intimacy, which is the true essence of relating to one another. Sorry I gave such a complicated answer (laughter).

It’s okay! These things can’t and shouldn’t be so simple. Were there any filmmakers you were inspired by for Looking For An Angel? And this doesn’t have to be with regards to the look of the film, but maybe something more broadly, or with regards to its spirit.

I wouldn’t say that there were any specific works that inspired me, but I was really inspired by New Queer Cinema, Nouvelle Vague, New American Cinema, American underground cinema, and the Nikkatsu Roman Pornos. I was absorbing so many different kinds of films, so when I started to think about how I wanted my work to fit in this landscape, this is what came out.

I was also greatly influenced by Japanese underground and experimental films, as well as the many 8mm personal and independent films that were being made in the same era. These are small films that are hardly mentioned by name in books on Japanese film studies and are no longer available for viewing. The freedom in these films, and the passion to make what you wanted to without worrying about “the common sense” of film made me feel new possibilities, and I could not get this from mainstream films.

I love that you had this online cinematheque called Art Saloon where you presented experimental films. And I know that you introduced works by the late Masanobu Nakamura for Collaborative Cataloging Japan. One of my friends, Ann Adachi-Tasch, runs that archive and I’ve been following it for a long time. Is there anything about him that you’d like to share?

It’s hard to choose a favorite work of his because he made so many—he made over 30 films. Two that come to mind are Autumn in Beijing (1978) and Windmill Walk (1972). I think of him as a very quintessential queer filmmaker despite the fact that he’s heterosexual. It’s in his filmmaking. His films are very fetishistic in a lot of ways, and he manifested whatever he wanted to make and was very free in how he made them—he pursued his vision without any hesitation. That’s something I really admired about him, but I also think that he’s a filmmaker that a lot of people resist and ignore, and I have a soft spot for filmmakers like that—it makes me want to share them with more people.

Is there anything about Looking For An Angel that we didn’t talk about today that you want to mention?

One thing I’d like to mention is Akira Kuroiwa, who plays a character named Sarao, who is a young boy prostitute. Kuroiwa, the actor, unfortunately passed away in May 2023. I want people to see the film and really take in his glistening aliveness at the time. It was his death that was the catalyst for having the film remastered and shown in theaters. When I was able to see it on the big screen for the first time in a long while, it was something that really struck me. Cinema is a way of preserving the aliveness of people, and that was something that deeply moved me when I got to encounter him again. I want people to see the film as a record of the lives of those who appear in it.

I have to ask, then, as I know that he’s also in Angel’s Body Temperature (2003)—are there any plans for that film to get remastered and distributed?

Of course if there was an opportunity to remaster it I would take it, but since it was shot on DV, I think it would be a little difficult to make it viewable on larger screens. There’s also the issue of subtitling, so let’s just say it comes down to financial issues (laughter). [Editor’s Note: Kani Releasing has recently announced that they will make the film available on home video from a brand new scan of the tape elements].

I appreciate that you brought up Akira Kuroiwa because he was a lot less known than Koichi Imaizumi, who was in a lot of Hisayasu Sato’s films. In Looking For An Angel, you have those who starred in multiple pink films whereas others who haven’t really starred anything. I’m curious if you could talk about the casting.

Imaizumi, who plays Takachi, and Hotaru Hazuki are the only two professional actors. Everyone else is a non-actor, and that was something I knew from the beginning—I wanted to work with people who weren’t professionals so there could be this documentary element. For example, the drag queen in the film is an actual drag queen. I scouted people from around the community, and some of my gay friends are in the film, and even Oki is in the film as this really strange man. That was all intentional.

Do you remember what the reception was like when the film was first shown in 1999?

When it came out, professional film critics and most people in the film world largely ignored it. I don’t think that there was any reaction from them, really. Of course there were some people who wrote about it in magazines and were passionate about it, but critics who were well known didn’t pay any attention. I think it was largely because people didn’t see the film as polished; it was seen as this amateur, trashy film. But once we had our theatrical run, I remember that there was a large demographic of women who came to see it.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing that you love about yourself?

(gasps). That’s a hard question! If you asked me this question at the beginning of the interview I’d be thinking about it the entire time. (pauses to think and then bursts in laughter). I’m a little squeamish about this, but I’ve landed on an answer. I want you to know that I’m a person who’s generally against authority. What I love about myself is that I’m a tolerant person and I try to be as open-minded as possible. The most important thing for me is to be free. Therefore, I dislike power, social norms, and categorization by others that suppress my freedom. I feel that this is a very violent thing, and I think Looking for An Angel also depicts the discomfort of minorities living in a world dominated by heterosexual values and the violence of heterosexual values.

When I am asked about my sexuality and answer, “I am not gay,” I am always asked, “Why are you making a gay film if you are heterosexual?” I would then ask, “What is your image of heterosexuality?” Issues of sexuality and identity are very important to me. I make films that are honest about my sexuality and identity. Films are closely connected to my personal sense of self—that’s why I’ve always been independent. Someone will ask, “Gay or not gay?” and categorize me or my work by someone else’s standards, and when I am ignored or denied, whether it is from the gay side or the heterosexual side, I feel I am being treated violently. I want to be tolerant of others because I do not want to be violent. I am looking for freedom and intimacy in our relationship.

Akihiro Suzuki’s Looking For An Angel is playing in theaters around the United States via Kani Releasing. Find all details here.

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Akihiro Suzuki’s Picks

A selection of Japanese underground, experimental, and independent films that Akihiro Suzuki likes. These are listed in the order that he emailed to me.

• Michio Okabe: I like all of his films, especially The Doctrine on Creation (1967), Crazy Love (1967), Camp (1970), and Seasonal Calendar (1973). He is special to me!

• Isao Fujisawa: Bye Bye Love (1974). This film is being distributed by Kani Releasing in the US and Canada.

• Masato Hara: Hatsukuni Sirasimera Mikoto (1973-2001). Double-projection expanded cinema.

• Masao Adachi: A.K.A. Serial Killer (1975)

• Hiroyuki Oki: Tarch Trip (1993). I was the line producer and production designer in Japan.

• Jin Tatsumura: Carol (1974). Pop documentary film about the Japanese rock and roll band Carol.

• Hisashi Hasegawa: Nen Neko Rin Rin (1981), Tomato Pin (1982). He is the trash film master in Japan.

• Shiroyasu Suzuki: His diary films are great!

• Yuri Obitani: Hair Opera (1993), Taiwan Shonen (1994)

• Masanobu Nakamura: Commemorative Photo (1978), Omen (1988). Even if everyone denies it, I like his films!

• Michio Takeuchi: Otaru (19??), Free Broadcasting for Mako Ishino (19??). It’s almost impossible to see, very long live screening and performance films. Excellent!

• Toshio Matsumoto: Shura (1971)

Thank you for reading the 56th issue of Film Show. Sex as existence.

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Takashi Ito (b. 1956) is a Japanese experimental filmmaker born in Fukuoka. As a child, he was interested in being a manga artist but decided to quit his endeavors after reading Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix, feeling that he’d never be able to accomplish anything of such high caliber. He studied art at the Kyushu Institute of Design and, after watching films by the pioneering filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto, decided to take up filmmaking. After creating a few 8mm films, his senior thesis work—the beloved avant-garde masterpiece Spacy (1981)—was made under the guidance of Matsumoto himself. Ito would continue to make numerous short films in the decades that followed, eventually shooting footage of his family in the 1990s, starting with Venus (1990). More recently, he’s started making feature-length films, with his newest being the beguiling Distant Voices (2024).

Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Ito on July 19th, 2025 at the experimental film festival Invisible Spectrum: Media Imagination in Experimental Cinema, hosted in Beijing by the Outtakes Screening Group. The two discussed his relationship with his family, how his films are akin to shooting the audience with a gun, and the ideas that permeate his entire body of work. Special thanks to Yunming Zhang for live interpretation during the interview.

Tone Glow is also excited to present the North American premiere of Takashi Ito’s Distant Voices in Los Angeles this weekend at WHAMMY. His film will also be screened in more cities around the United States. The film follows two girls engaging in some magical form of communication—both with and through each other—across various liminal spaces. “A field of wilted sunflowers, a group of public housing units turned into ruins. Two girls who are like alter egos of each other. They wander around with a camera, one pointing it at mysterious things and at herself, the other hanging a black dress in various places and taking pictures of it.”

Tour Dates

• Los Angeles: November 7th at WHAMMY (Ticket Link)

• Milwaukee: November 14th & 15th at Union Cinema (Tickets in person only)

• Philadelphia: November 15th at Asian Arts Initiative (Ticket Link) [This event is co-presented with Collaborative Cataloging Japan]

• Seattle: December 22nd at The Beacon Cinema (Ticket Link)

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in Fukuoka. When you think about growing up there, what comes to mind?

Takashi Ito: I was born in 1956 and the war ended in 1945. Fukuoka underwent a lot of airstrikes, so it ended up as a place in total ruin. Through ten years of effort, Japan was able to build a lot of new buildings in the area and, as I was growing up, I was watching this city—half in ruins, half newly developed. I remember playing in these ruins with my friends, amidst these fallen bricks. There was this collapsed castle, too. Up until 6th grade, when I was 12, I was drawing a manga about monsters coming to town. They came to destroy things, and it was based on the street where I was born. We watched Distant Voices (2024) yesterday, and both that film and the one that screened before it, Zone (1995), were shot on location. I chose these dilapidated spaces for the films because, deep in my mind, I wanted to experience the scenery of my childhood.

I know that your father was a newspaper reporter and that your mother was a nurse. Do you mind talking about your parents? Did they have a significant impact on your life, or were they busy and not in your life much?

Because my parents were both working, I have more memories of spending time with my grandfather.

What was he like?

He was quite successful as an owner of a cafeteria. He had a big building in the middle of Fukuoka on this street called Tenjin [Editor’s Note: Tenjin is the biggest shopping street in Japan]. He owned the building and had a lot of staff—maybe over 100. All of this success, however, was before the war. During the war, it was lost in an airstrike—it was reduced to nothing. And after the war, he got conned; the land was taken away from him and he was left with nothing, so my family wasn’t rich when I was growing up. I lived with him, which is why I saw him a lot. When I would come home from elementary school, I would see him watching television, watching sumo wrestling. He’d be marking the charts for these matches, whether they won or lost, and that was his main interest.

Did you like sumo wrestling?

Not really (laughter). I remember that when my grandfather watched his favorite sumo wrestlers win, he’d celebrate in dramatic, grandiose fashion (mimics his loud, boisterous cheering). Most of my memories with my grandfather are of being indoors; I don’t remember him taking me outside.

Since my parents were always working, I didn’t get to see them a lot, and I felt there was a strong distance between us. We didn’t have a strong relationship, and I didn’t feel a strong parental love. I’ve never really thought about this until now, but when my first child was born, I shot footage of my baby. I made a few films with him, and as I started making those films, I was interested in depicting the distance between a parent and his child. This was probably a reflection of my experiences with my own parents. These are very good questions… you’ve made me realize that throughout my whole career, I’ve perhaps been focusing on this distance between people. In Distant Voices, you can tell that these two girls can’t get within reach of one another. There’s always this theme of distance.

Who was the first person in your life you felt close to? Was it your grandfather?

I have really fond memories of this boy from kindergarten. I still remember how we played together, and it felt like real friendship. We were close through elementary school and would visit each other, but we lost touch in middle school. We’re no longer in contact, but I still have these memories of going to his place and playing with him. I don’t even know if that friend is still alive, but what remains is this knowledge that he was a good friend. This idea of having someone who was close to you who is now no longer accessible… it perhaps instigated my filmmaking and the unbridgeable distance between my characters

You talked about drawing manga. I know you were inspired by Osamu Tezuka, and I read that you felt that he was so good that you decided to give up on pursuing manga. Is there a reason why you didn’t feel the same with filmmaking?

As a kid, I always wanted to be a manga artist. I was reading a lot of Tezuka’s work, including Mighty Atom [aka Astro Boy]. In elementary school, I was drawing my own manga, but in middle school Tezuka released his series Phoenix and I was in shock. I was astonished by the broadness and philosophical depth of how he depicted human beings—it was about the evolution of human society. He was able to depict this world in such a tremendous way that I never felt I could catch up with him. I was in despair, and so I gave up on being a manga artist. With film, I felt like there was still hope, there was still possibility. And I eventually discovered experimental films, which really explored the possibilities of the medium.

In the 1970s there were numerous Japanese experimental filmmakers. There was Toshio Matsumoto, of course, and Nobuhiro Aihara, Isao Kota, and Shunzo Seo. Where did you first see Japanese experimental films and what impact did they have on you?

My first contact with experimental film was during my freshman year in college at the Kyushu Institute of Design. There was a screening of Toshio Matsumoto’s films and I went there with the expectation that I’d be watching something very different. I had no idea what experimental films were, and instead of the despair I felt with manga, I felt excitement, like I was being called to make experimental films myself. At this time, I was already a big fan of films and would go to the movie theater. These were big productions, though, and more so about entertainment. They cost a lot of money to make, so seeing Matsumoto’s films made me realize, even with a single camera, you can make inspiring images, images that convey a lot of meaning, that meant a lot to people. It didn’t feel like the door was closed to me because I didn’t have a lot of money. I was so shocked by the screening that I wasn’t able to leave my seat when it ended. I was really inspired by his films’ vision and methodologies.

You mentioned that you watched these bigger films, and I also know that your dad was a cinephile. Did any of these films inspire you as well, or was it just these smaller experimental films?

One director I want to highlight is Steven Spielberg. I like him for his storytelling devices, how they always draw the audience into the film. His dramaturgy was something I always wanted to absorb and appear in my own works. Even with Spacy (1981), I had this idea of introducing a narrative structure into the film to make it more alluring. There was also Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). I watched it when I started making experimental films, and what really struck me was that towards the end of the film, Travis kills people but is still treated as a hero. There’s this ambivalence, and you see how good and evil can co-exist in someone. I’d never seen that before, and this ambivalence is what remains an inspiration for my own filmmaking.

I was always interested in boundaries. What’s the boundary between life and death, between good and evil? Is there a clear line? Perhaps there isn’t one, and that things are beyond good and evil. There was also, traditionally, a line drawn between reality and fiction or maybe reality and dreams. I wanted these things to be blended, to melt into one another. That’s how I approach my films. As I was maturing, this idea of blurred lines became more concrete within my art, though it initially started with Taxi Driver and Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969).

I wanted to show you Nobuhiro Aihara’s Stone (1975) on my phone (shows video). Do you remember when you first saw this film?

I watched it around the time I watched Matusmoto’s films. It was a big inspiration for me because Aihara was using a lot of animation, though it was a different methodology from what was typical. You could even say that Aihara defied conventions regarding the animation that came before him. That inspired me to approach animation in my own way. Around when I was 20, I watched a lot of films that defied common sense. It was the trend of the day, really, and I watched a lot in a short period, and that was what sparked my career as an experimental filmmaker. As I was watching a lot of films that defied stereotypes, I felt that I should do the same.

I know that you studied ceramics and sculpture when you were in college. Were there people who inspired you from these fields too?

I didn’t major in that, I just took a course. I majored in… it wasn’t studio art, it was more like a craftsman’s art. That’s why I was able to study a lot of techniques in different fields, including graphic design, painting, sculpture, and photography. We had to take photos, develop them, and print them—it was good to learn that.

In the ’60s and ’70s there were a lot of folks involved in avant-garde theater productions, and these involved a wide array of artists and mediums. I’m thinking of the stuff that Shuji Terayama, for example, was involved with. I’m also thinking about how, for example, Takehisa Kosugi made both music and films, and how the Taj Mahal Travellers would have films play behind them as they performed. Did you experience a lot of these multimedia events?

I was always in Fukouka, and a lot of the multimedia events that you’re talking about happened in Tokyo. As a result, I didn’t get to watch a lot of them. But there was this author, Kobo Abe, who had this experimental play. There was this huge white linen cloth laid on the stage. The performers climbed under it, stood up, and acted. And during the performance, there were projections and other things as well. That was a really good experience for me. The core concept of Kobo Abe’s experimental theater was also to defy common sense, to defy stereotypes. I also watched this around when I was 20. [Editor’s Note: Ito is talking about Abe’s The Little Elephant is Dead.]

Before you made Spacy, you made films on 8mm. These were Timespace (1977), Noh (1977), and the Movement trilogy (1978-1980). You’ve said that you were essentially copying Matsumoto with these works and that Spacy was the first time you made something that was distinctly your own. What made Spacy stand out in that way?

I was very conscious that I was copying Matsumoto. I was so inspired by Atman (1975) that I just wanted to make something just like Matsumoto for those first two films. As I was repeatedly imitating him, I realized that I wanted to make my own works. Movement 3 (1980) was when things started to change, and that was essentially a test run for Spacy. As I was making Spacy in 1980 and 1981, Matsumoto actually came to teach at Kyushu University, and Matsumoto was actually a film instructor.

How was he as an instructor? What kind of guy was he?

Before Matsumoto came to Kyushu to teach, I only knew him through his works and I thought, oh, he must be a magnificent person. I was a bit of a troublemaker, though. When Matsumoto came to our school, he heard rumors about how I was a troublemaker, and during our first meeting, he had a very serious and cautious face. He asked me to bring him all my previous films, so I did. These were the 8mm works. Matusmoto saw them and eventually became the [advisor] of my senior thesis, which was Spacy. When Matsumoto saw my ideas, he screamed very loudly, “This is going to be great!” And he also asked, “Can you actually do this? Can the camera go into the image, and keep going into it?!” It was through this film that we started working together.

How were you a troublemaker?

I had already done four years of college before Matsumoto came. I got a job after graduation and passed the exams and I said yes to an offer for this company, but after I learned that Matsumoto was going to teach at Kyushu University, I reneged and just went back to school. Both the school and the company got mad at me.

A lot of the soundtracks for your films are also experimental, be they ambient or musique concrète. Did you talk a lot with Takashi Inagaki about what the soundtracks should sound like?

Me and Inagaki were in the same year in college, though we were in different departments. He liked minimalist music, and when I started to make films, I just asked him to make the soundtracks. I would let him do whatever he wanted—I wouldn’t give too many instructions. He was interested in classical music, but he was also interested in composers like Terry Riley. If you listen to the soundtrack for Thunder (1982), it sounds like a woman speaking, but she’s just saying nonsense. She’s saying things like, “I’m a pepper, I’m a cabbage.” Inagaki thought that we should defy conventions of music, of this notion that music had to have any sort of meaning; we wanted meaninglessness to be the basis for the music. It was interesting because I would just do the visuals and he would make the soundtracks, and when we were done, I’d get to see the film in a new way. The films became richer.

Did Inagaki already have music that he’d add to your films, or did he make them after he saw your works?

We’d have meetings where I’d tell him I was making a movie, and I’d explain what it’s about. I’d go make the film, edit it, and it’d be picture locked before handing it to Inagaki. For example, before I made Spacy, we had a meeting and I told him what I was going to do. Inagaki said, “Based on what you’re saying, we should have the music have these scales that move infinitely up and down.” (mimics soundtrack). There are these repetitions.

I wanted to ask, given Spacy’s setting—did you play basketball?

Yes. I was on the basketball team in middle school—I wasn’t on the bench, either. After that, I had an accident and the doctor told me that I shouldn’t play anymore. In college I thought, maybe I can play again, but it still wasn’t feasible. Historically, there is this term called “the second generation of the atomic bomb.” When the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, my father was working and exposed to the radiation. I was a weak child growing up, and I sometimes wonder if that’s the reason why.

There are films like Thunder and Grim (1985) where we’re in domestic spaces. Was this a specific goal for you, to take these familiar locations and make them unsettling?

There was always this idea of transforming the everyday. That’s why I always pick something that everybody knows: a gymnasium, a family home, a street next to where people actually lived. I wanted to depict these spaces as alienating, as something that is no longer everyday. I’m trying to find the manga I drew as a child (looks through phone). I had a solo exhibition recently and they presented the manga I made in elementary school. The title is Fight, and this is the monster manga I mentioned earlier—there were three volumes (shows photos on his phone). Even in this manga, it was about the city where I lived. A monster invades it and the things you see every day become transformed.

What was the reception like to your films from the early ’80s?

The first films, including Spacy and Thunder, had a good reputation, especially overseas. I sold a lot of copies to international institutions and there’s works in the Centre Pompidou’s collection, for example.

You worked on films made by other directors, such as Gakuryu Ishii’s The Crazy Family (1984). You also worked on Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap (1988) and films by Kaizo Hayashi. I wanted to show you the final aerial scene from The Crazy Family, as you can clearly tell you made it (shows clip on phone). What was it like working on these films?

I didn’t really gain any insight from those experiences. They were just jobs.

You talked about filming your son earlier. You have films like December Hide-and-Go-Seek (1993), The Moon (1994), and Zone (1995). Was it hard for you to make films that now involved people in more deliberate ways? The ’90s definitely feel like a new era in your career.

With regards to shooting footage of my own family, including my wife and son, I wasn’t really thinking, “I’m the father and you’re my son, I’m the husband and you’re my wife, and we have these relationships.” It’s not so simple. This goes back to my previous conversation about distance. It’s more like, “I’m the husband, and I’m going to look at my wife from a distance. I’m a father, but I’m going to look at my son from a distance.” This started with Venus (1990). With December Hide-and-Go-Seek, I was very conscious about maintaining a sort of distance. There was this unsettling, unpleasant feeling as a result of it.

Did you try to be close to your own family as a result of the distance you felt between yourself and your own parents?

Even though I said that my parents were always working, it’s not that we didn’t have a loving bond. It was just a fact: they were always busy. In daily life, he was a loving father. Filmmaking is different, though. Filmmaking is a series of “what ifs.” What if we have this distance between us?

Do you feel like you’ve learned anything about yourself given that you’ve made films that pose such questions?

I made these films because I wanted to understand myself more. I believe that everybody has these internal questions that they want to explore and filmmaking is just a way to do that. When December Hide-and-Go-Seek first screened in front of an audience, they said it was a cruel film. “You’re treating your child as a thing—he’s a person!” And I said, “Yup, you got it.” (laughter). That’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted to explore how cruelty could be translated onscreen. This was another “what if.”

You’ve started making feature films lately. You had Toward Zero (2021) and yesterday we saw Distant Voices. What compelled you to make these longer works?

My earlier short films, like Spacy, were “one-shot” films. By that I mean, it was as if I had one bullet in my chamber and I was shooting the audience with a gun. For longer films, you can enjoy the process a little more, as there’s no longer just one bullet in the chamber. You can stab a person, give them a little jab, and then keep punching them so that they’re in a lot of pain but not quite dead. And then you can take out your gun and finish the job. A longer film is like this.

What was it like to make Distant Voices? You have techniques that even harken back to Spacy.

Distant Voices certainly has this interest in merging animation and on-location shooting. As you saw, the beginning of the film starts with these pictures, and these were actually works by the girl who later appears in the film. It’s almost by necessity that you then have that sequence.

How do you find the actors and actresses for your films?

They’re mostly people close to me. And when I was teaching at university, I’d ask students from my seminar or other instructors in the department to appear in the film. I don’t have a specific “type” that I need for a film. In Toward Zero, I did need a specific actor—I needed someone who could dance. I went to Nobuo Harada, and he has been studying Butoh for a long while—I needed that sort of physicality. That was an exception to the rule. Otherwise, no actor is different from anybody else. I don’t want to bring on people in my films who know how to act. I want people who don’t know. Most of the characters who appear in my works should appear as though they have a Noh mask on them, where there is no expression. Through this lack of expression, the audience is able to detect what they are expecting to feel.

What are you working on right now? What’s next for you?

It’s a work in progress—a thought in progress. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be. I want something innovative, and I’m thinking very hard about that “how to kill the audience” problem with the new film.

There are a few quick questions I wanted to ask you. Were you familiar with experimental films made outside of Japan when you started making experimental films?

Yes, of course. Norman McLaren, Jan Švankmajer, and the Brothers Quay. I had the most shock from the latter, especially Street of Crocodiles (1986).

Are you inspired by any contemporary filmmakers?

Not really. I’ll watch the new Steven Spielberg film when it comes out though.

Do you feel like your films are distinctly Japanese in any way?

No.

Were you ever inspired by pink films or Roman Porno films?

I watched them but didn’t find them very interesting.

Is there anything you wanted to talk about today that we didn’t get to?

No, but it’s been a good conversation. It really inspired me to think about my own career and films. You have great vitality. My face and others’ faces at this festival look so tired, but you’re always so energetic.

Thank you. There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

It’s hard to answer it directly. There are things in me that I dislike, but I can take them and turn them into images. The fact that I can do this—that I can make images based on the parts of myself that I dislike—makes me feel good.

What are the parts of yourself you dislike?

I dislike that I want to remain distant from people.

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Mary Stephen (b. 1953) is a Hong Kong-born, Paris-based filmmaker and editor best known for working as Éric Rohmer’s editor during the latter part of his career—from The Aviator’s Wife (1981) to The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007). Stephen studied at Concordia University in Montreal, making her first films in the early 1970s. These works—Labyrinthe (1973), The Great Canadian Puberty Rite (1974), and A Very Easy Death (Mary Stephen, 1975)—were partly inspired by experimental filmmakers like Maya Deren and Charles Gagnon. She would crystallize her ideas with Shades of Silk (1978), a hidden gem of diasporic Asian cinema. The film takes Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975) as its foundation and displays languor and longing through the context of societal and familial pressures placed upon Asian women. In her words, it is about people who are “stuck in their destiny.” Stephen’s newest work is Palimpsest: the Story of a Name (2025), a documentary that excavates the story behind her Western surname.

Stephen’s films are currently showing at Metrograph in New York. More information can be found here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Stephen on September 30th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss her earliest memories of cinema, finding protection in Rohmer, and the stories behind her different films.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in Hong Kong. What memories stand out about growing up there?

Mary Stephen: It’s sort of what’s in Palimpsest: The Story of a Name (2025). It was a lot of going to cinemas, of being bundled off into a car and then going with everybody into the cinema, probably to see some American film. There are also memories of being at home. At the time, we were in our old place which had this large terrace and garden. I remember my mother had these potted plants and there was this patch with wild papaya trees in the back. You don’t find that anymore in Hong Kong.

Tell me about those early experiences in the cinema.

There were a lot of us—at least five or six—so in a child’s mind, it felt like we were taking up a whole row. I remember my first impression of a film was with a Hitchcock, or something like that—it was something suspenseful. I went to a Protestant school and I remember how, in Asia in those days, you would talk through a film while you’re viewing them. There’s a scene where the criminal or hero was being chased and something evil was happening, and I kept saying, “Don’t be too conceited!” It was a very moralistic judgment (laughter). I remember that very well.

After that, we “graduated” from Hitchcock to animation, and one of the earliest films that made an impression on me was Lady and the Tramp (1955). There’s a Chinese expression that says you’ll determine what you will like at 80 years old when you’re 3, that you’ll have all these character traits. I have this feeling that this idea of class differences, as well as this idea of an impossible romance, appealed to me even then. When I look back on works or things I like to research, it’s always those kinds of themes.

At the beginning of Palimpsest, you talk about how your father was really into film. That has me wondering if you feel like there are similarities between yourself and your parents in terms of personality.

It’s definitely in our storytelling. I never delved into this until I was researching. Whether I’m editing my film or someone else’s, the writing comes in the editing. Some of the stuff in the film I excavated very late in the editing process, and this whole thing about storytelling, when I am making up this story, I actually became my father’s daughter. I only realized this after editing.

A lot of the feedback I got about my father was that he’s a colorful, fascinating character, but the starting point was not fascination. We were very put off by him when we were children, when we were young adults. We didn’t like him. We went through phases of wondering if he was mentally ill because he was believing these stories he made up, and he was also glorifying himself in these journals as some sort of hero. So it started with that, but he comes off very fascinating in the film and, today, I’m now thinking… I did exactly what he wanted to do (laughter). He wanted a film that glorified himself. In spite of things, I did it for him (laughter).

How did it feel to come to that realization?

I’m glad it came now, while I have a little bit of wisdom (laughter). I can digest it. I dedicated the film to my brother and I think that if he were alive, he wouldn’t have been very happy, but maybe he would’ve gotten to an age where he would’ve had some wisdom too. It’s not a matter of “forgive and forget,” it’s just… they did what they did, and we should keep going and create our own path. We shouldn’t be stuck in these things.

Can you talk about your relationship with your brother?

We were five children—four girls and one boy. You can imagine the dynamic. I didn’t realize, until I was editing the film, how important it would be as a tribute to him. He was extremely important to me. He was 10 years older and he was a scientist—he was in physics. In Hong Kong, it was typical for someone to study abroad and then come back to take over the family business and do big things, but at one point he said, “No way, I’m not going to do that.” He wanted a small teaching post at a small college and to just live a happy life. He was the one who taught me about music, poetry, and history; he was interested in all these things that had nothing to do with science. He taught me so much Chinese poetry. I wonder if things were different, if he didn’t have this family pressure, that he’d have a different destiny.

What sort of things do you remember him showing you?

He always thought that I was very smart, so what he would do—and I was 10 years younger than him—was bring me to play bridge with his classmates. He wanted to show off how smart I was, but of course I would lose. And he would get mad! (laughter). Later on, when I went to university and studied film, he went through a phase where we had this sort of parent-child clash; he would say that all these artistic films I was interested in were useless, and that the only thing that would be good is if I made something like a George Lucas film. He was very negative about my filmmaking. But then I went off to Europe, and then in his last years, he was very supportive and became very proud of me.

The funny twist in this is that one of my three children, Julien Chheng, is an animation director and has his own animation studio. He was commissioned to make an episode of Star Wars: Visions and he asked me to collaborate with the editing. They went to George Lucas’ place to do the sound mix and, you know, my brother had already passed away but I was thinking, “I finally made it!”

Was there a point at which you realized that you wanted to study film in school?

There were two moments like this, yes. I went into mathematics—again, this was my brother, as he said I should get into pure math. I went to Nova Scotia and studied pure math and couldn’t stand it (laughter) and the second year I took four or five different fine arts classes at Arcadia University. I realized that Loyola College, which was part of Concordia, was next to where my parents’ house was. One summer I went over there and found that the courses were exactly what I wanted to take—it was heaven.

They had very strict rules for gaining entrance—you needed a portfolio. I literally stood outside of the department head’s door at 9 o’clock on the first day and said that I wanted to join. He was a Jesuit priest and said there was no way to get in, that I needed to submit a portfolio. However, there were seven people that were enrolled who didn’t come, and I could have one of the spots until November. At that point I would need a portfolio and submit that. When November came, my television teacher heard about this—she was a woman who became very political later on, her name was Gail Valaskakis—and she said that I didn’t need to go through this entire process, that I was already doing fine. She just changed my status. Imagine if that happened today (laughter). Every step of the way I kept having ridiculously lucky breaks.

For the second year of that school, and I was in Communication and Arts, I had to choose a specialty. I chose film. Charles Gagnon, a famous painter, photographer, and experimental filmmaker, was teaching one of the two courses and said, “Why not photography?” I said, “No, in my head I see images that move.” The first years doing this Communication and Arts program was tough. This was the early ’70s and I was fresh out of Hong Kong, completely lost. At that time, when I wasn’t sure, [Tang Shu Shuen’s] The Arch (1968) was showing in Montreal. Coming out of that film, everything clicked. It felt like I had found a stillness in the middle of a hurricane. I knew from then on that filmmaking was my path. That was really the moment. I co-presented the restored version of the film in Toronto, and it’s also coming to the New York Film Festival.

You mentioned Charles Gagnon. Were there specific things that he taught you that were important later on?

As we keep conversing, I realize there’s one divine coincide after another, as I’m about to tell you another one (laughs). First of all, he never taught me because I wasn’t in his section—there were two, and one was taught by a Jesuit priest named Father Fisher. I kept up with Gagnon, though, and when I got my first Canada Council grant to do The Great Canadian Puberty Rite (1974), I showed it to him. I was horrified because I thought it was such a bad film. What would he say? And he looked at me and John Cressey, my partner, and said, “I wasn’t bored! I found good things in it.” He had always been an elusive figure, and he found ways to be a mentor without actually teaching.

What happened was that my mother passed away. I made A Very Easy Death (1975), and I only made four copies for my brother and sisters. Many years later, I went back to Loyola and I saw a young girl walking. I thought it was a student, but it turned out to be Charles’ daughter, Monika Gagnon, who was also teaching at Concordia. Years later, Monica wrote me an email and told me that she was going to Paris to see me. Her father passed away, and she was putting together a posthumous film that he left called R69. It never got finished, but all the elements were in boxes, and when she was going through them, there was a reel for A Very Easy Death inside. It had no business being there! How did it end up there? We both felt it was a sign. We worked together on that, and I was one of two artists she asked to make a soundtrack from his elements for that unfinished film. In those elements, he had a lot of bits by Toru Takemitsu and, in fact, my films always had Takemitsu for the guide tracks. But then Suzuki-san, who I worked with, made the soundtrack for my film knowing that I wanted something experimental

I wanted to talk about these early films that you made. What were you trying to do with Labyrinthe (1973)? You’re obviously filming yourself and I think it’s interesting to see that alongside the superimpositions and high-contrast images.

I was interested in the idea of culture shock. The original version of the film is black and white but two or three years later—after I got out of school—I put the color pieces in. The original work was a school exercise made by three of us—the three names in the credits [M. Stephen, P. Bridgeman, A. Macleod]. I wanted to express culture shock and my two buddies, one was Italian Canadian and the other was English Canadian, were interested in this theme as well.

The way that it was cut had to do with the way we were taught; at the time, everything was about experimental films. I was brought up on Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren, who I still teach to my students. With literature, I was reading a lot of Anaïs Nin and the surrealists. There was a girl in our entourage who had the same haircut, and someone suggested that we both should run in the film. That was exactly how I felt, that I was neither white nor yellow. I can’t recall who had which ideas, but when we look at how the film was put together, you can tell that these themes were going through my work for my entire life.

When I watched The Great Canadian Puberty Rite, I noticed that with all this documentation, you’re the only Asian in the entire film. What thoughts were going through your mind? Were you grappling with identity?

Going back to TIFF recently, I was thinking about how different things are nowadays. At the time, especially in Quebec and Montreal, I was the only Asian around. Communication and Arts in Loyola was the only school of its kind at the time. It was a big, big time of disorientation—it’s something that can’t be imagined today. In Palimpsest, I mention that our mother told us to keep our garbage clean because our neighbors would judge us on the cleanliness of our garbage. That kind of thing stays with you. Going to this private English girls’ school didn’t help either. And going to Loyola, I was surrounded by young, hip French kids. They fascinated me, but there was no way I could be like them. On the one hand, there was this Asian family I had; even though we were Westernized, we would have Sunday dim sum and all this stuff. But I was very lost and had no way of identifying what this feeling was.

My whole life story is so strange. Why would I end up in France and become a collaborator with the most French of French directors? (laughter). It’s not like he was doing films about diversity or something. I’ve been living in France for almost 50 years, and it’s the one place where I feel least at home. It comes back to this cliché question: What is home? For me, home is where my children are. It’s as simple as that. Geographically, that’s where it is and they’re all here in Paris. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else or living far from them. My family is very close-knit and I raised them single-handedly.

This identity thing, however… I’ve never been vocal about it. France is always a culture I’ve admired since I learned about the French New Wave in Hong Kong, but it was always a distant thing. And it hits me all the time here because France is very behind with diversity. Even though the society is mixed, the media and their mindset hasn’t moved forward much. Whenever I go to Canada or even England, I feel at home. And that’s especially true right when I land in Canada. I feel it. And the question is, would I move back home? Still, the answer is no because my home is here.

When I go to certain functions at the cinematheque, I’ll ask my daughter, “Do you see anyone else of color here?” She’ll say, “Yes, the waiter who is serving the champagne.” It’s that kind of thing. There’s no Asian community; the Asians here are very lowkey. Being invisible is the best way for them to integrate, which is not the case in North America. I think I suffer more from that now at my current age than when I was young.

You mentioned that you feel most uncomfortable in France. Do you think that discomfort is important in motivating you artistically? Is there a benefit to being uncomfortable in this way?

Definitely. I was just thinking about this two days ago. We don’t do anything when we’re happy. You don’t create a great piece of work. But when you’re down or angry, it really motivates you, this anger and feeling of injustice and not being understood, of not feeling like I have my place here. In the last 20 years, since Éric Rohmer stopped working, almost all of my work has been outside of France and in Asia or Australia. But when you talk to a French industry person about me, they either don’t know me or think that I’ve moved back to Asia. Why would I do that? I’ve lived here my whole life.

I wanted to talk about A Very Easy Death. You’re still working with the same people: John Cressey, James Pogue. You have the techniques in Labyrinthe elaborated on here. What was it like to think about your mother and process things through this film?

It was a piece that I made to get over the grieving process—that’s why I made it for the five of us. The whole film was structured by the text from the book, Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death (1964), and some of it was removed eventually; as I’m doing it, the images and sounds are coming into place, and I knew that I wanted to have bookends with the Super 8 film, which I call my “mother movie.” The film was made the year after school, so we had the same team. The technique was really a continuation of Labyrinthe and what I had learned from Maya Deren and other experimental films. The use of [color] filters is very much a result of Charles Gagnon [Editor’s note: You can see this in his film The Sound of Space (1967-1968)].

A Very Easy Death was something that was made privately, and it was made for my siblings. I realized I was doing that with Palimpsest, too. I love that shot [in A Very Easy Death] of the hand that goes up to the photo, and I use that again on the grave in Palimpsest. I don’t think that was conscious, and I don’t know why I did that, but I loved it—it’s this shot of a hand going up to caress her face. After Toronto, I went to Bali because I was doing a workshop there. I was there for Minikino, a festival of short films, and they showed my three restored shorts. What was really touching was that younger filmmakers came and were very impressed with Labyrinthe and A Very Easy Death, by the film language, by the way they were cut. When you think of experimental language, you wonder if it touches anybody or if it’s very closed off.

You mentioned how text was a way of framing the work. And you were removing text too? How did you know to do so?

I had a nurse friend who explained that when there’s the death of a loved one, you go through these stages of grief and that it ends with acceptance. That’s what the last part of the film is about. At each point in the film, there is text from Simone de Beauvoir as well as stuff I wrote. But reading Simone de Beauvoir’s book, it really shocked me. That was the starting point of the film. There is a structure there, but I don’t remember the structure, really; I just remember the acceptance. I remember the dreamy parts, of when the departed one comes back in dreams and goes up the stairs. I was just putting everything I was feeling into images.

I wanted to talk about Ombres de Soie, or Shades of Silk (1978). I think that film is an overlooked masterpiece. You’re clearly thinking about silence and sound and how they can inform the scene, and you have still images, too. It’s hard not to think about both Chris Marker and Marguerite Duras. And it’s very much a culmination of your previous works. What was it like to take all your ideas and make a feature-length film with them?

Shades of Silk came after my first week in Paris. During my first week there, I went to see Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975).

Wow, this makes so much sense.

I was completely blown away by that film—the soundscape! You can sense the feeling, you can almost even smell it. I was with John at the time—he was both my creative partner and my life partner—and I told him that I’d like to make India Song but from an Asian point of view, from my own point of view. I was in this American film program through the University of Wisconsin that had one year in Paris, and that was very theoretical. I decided to drop out of that and, with these friends, we got money together to make this film.

One of the professors in that program, in the short month that I was there, was a Marcel Proust and psychotherapy specialist. She only passed away a couple years ago. I didn’t speak a lot of French and with my friend Ann Martin who co-wrote it with me, we went to see her with the script and tried to get help. She was the one who suggested using the quote from Marguerite Duras in the beginning, to help people realize that it was deliberate. I wanted the same kind of mood, and that was the year after my mother passed away. All the clothes in that film are my mother’s clothes. If you go to Palimpsest and look at the banquet scenes, you can see the dresses—they’re in a basement somewhere now. All the sets, too, are things we found as students; it was the Southeast Asian students’ residence. There were tennis courts and all that. In Paris you can find all these atmospheric things.

I had a very close woman friend who was from a rich family. She had this pressure to marry someone who was “more suitable.” I dreamt up the whole thing with the other woman and the white lover—very Duras-ian. The story about the white lover, who said that he would wait for her for 10 years, was my mother’s story. It wasn’t a European lover, but it was somebody who was really in love with her, who would wait 10 years to see if she would divorce. And then there was another story about another girlfriend whose sister committed suicide. I put all these stories together for the film.

I knew what I wanted for music. I wanted Erik Satie songs that weren’t yet in the public domain. And I wanted Billie Holiday’s “Blue Moon” but it was out-of-this-world expensive. We were in Montreal and there was this royalty-free company that I wanted to buy things from. This French guy [Alain Leroux] who ran the company said, “Don’t buy it, I’ll make it for you.” So he composed everything, he made this Satie-imitation music, and the song where he’s doing a melody, I wrote the lyrics for that, and it was later rerecorded by a Canadian hip-hop artist (laughs). I get royalties from that.

And that’s it. We bought some [film] stock and we shot it but the lab went on strike; we didn’t see any images until three months later. But when we saw it… I still think it’s John’s best work. It’s a masterpiece in image.

You mentioned that you wanted it to be like India Song but Asian. What do you mean by that?

Just the characters being Asian women rather than European women who were bored and stuck in that place. This is the other side—Asian women who are stuck in their destiny, where there’s a different kind of pressure from family and society. One of the interesting things is the friendship between the women. Three years ago, when I was doing a residency at the Camargo Foundation and making Palimpsest, there was a group of girls there who were doing a project on this dance critic [Jill Johnston]. These four girls discovered Ombres de Soie and they were saying that it was this hidden queer film. We had a big discussion about it as this was never in my mind, but this friendship between the two women in the film is so intense—it goes beyond these boxes of sexuality. And it is some kind of love story.

The film doesn’t have a distributor anymore, as the distributors at the time are all dead now, but one of the biggest champions at the time was this guy named Derek Hill of Essential Cinema. He distributed all kinds of indie films. I remember taking the reels and showing the film to him in London, and he told me that it was the most erotic film he’d ever seen. That was a compliment, of course, and it was very touching to hear that. There is an intentional way of shooting the film, too… you see this shot of an elbow and it’s meant to look like other parts of the flesh.

I wanted to talk about Palimpsest. What do you feel like you’d have missed out on if you hadn’t done all the research for the film?

So this question that I had about my surname subconsciously bothered me for decades. Even today, it still goes on—every time I say my name in the supermarket or whatever, it just doesn’t fit. It’s sort of weird. So the thing is that I was finally able to get rid of that. There are lots of layers to this story that I don’t understand. Basically, it was a very simple story—my father changed his name, and that’s it. But why, all throughout these years, when I saw my family members—like my cousins—would they say, “Maybe you can find out more from that auntie in Bozhou or that uncle in Nanjing.” Why didn’t they just tell me? Why didn’t they say, “Your father was our big brother and he just changed his name.” We all have camouflage, we all make smokescreens for ourselves to present a different personage, a different character.

In making the film, I also got rid of a lot of things, like… this question of what to do with all this footage (laughter). And whether I should get into these journals. I got into two of them and thought it was enough. It was a lot of this self-analysis, of knowing what I could now let go.

This idea of the smokescreen—is this something you feel like you’ve done yourself?

Yes. Even though we live in this self-centered and selfie-centered media age, most people don’t want to be branded as someone who’s talking about themself all the time. And usually we’re not doing that. One of the things that was the most difficult about constructing the film was—and this was the most difficult job I’ve ever had in my editing career—I needed to know how much of me I could have in the film. That is a question that, when I’m mentoring other documentary filmmakers, we address. How much of the filmmaker should we put in the film? What’s appropriate for the film you’re making?

I don’t know if this is particularly Asian but modesty is something we value; we don’t talk about our achievements and stuff like that. But if I don’t come back to that Fire Horse Award at the Reel Asian festival… I don’t come back full circle. It was a dilemma about whether or not I talked about what I did, about the recognition I got late in life. It was one of the most difficult things—we all hate hearing our own voices and seeing our own images. So I went through many, many versions of the film. It’s not even about what version I think is best in terms of structure, but what version I could live with (laughter).

What do you think was necessary to remove or add to get to the final version?

The earliest versions were much more intellectual. There were a lot more quotations from books—it was very academic—and they were organizing everything like different chapters. This was co-produced with ARTE, the cultural broadcaster in Europe, and some of my producers and my commissioning editor, we discussed a lot and one of the things they said was, “Maybe you’re hiding yourself behind these quotations.” It was about getting validation from Western sources; I was quoting all these philosophers and they were all white (laughter). Sometimes you’re so close to something that you need somebody to point these things out.

Then I got to several versions where I went very quickly through the archives, through my father’s things. At one point, we decided that I would have a consultant come in. I wasn’t even thinking of a consultant at the time. I was thinking, “If only I had an editor who could take over the whole damn thing!” (laughter). I wish I could have a me for me! My producers were quite astonished that I would agree to that because directors don’t want to give up their baby like that. But I wanted a consulting editor, someone who was a woman who was not from my own cultural background, but who also had this experience of exile.

So finally I got this woman, Chaghig Arzoumanian, who is an editor but also a director, writer, artist herself. We don’t agree on everything but one of the most important things she gave me was going through all of my father’s footage in detail. I’d want to fast forward through all this and she’d say, “Slow down, what are you doing? This is fascinating!” She saw things that I didn’t see, that I didn’t dare to see. She did a great job of finding a balance between the self and the audience. And that was necessary.

I wanted to talk about your relationship with Rohmer, and what you said right now reminds me of what you once said about being an editor, that your role is to draw out things that the director censors. What was it like working with Rohmer? I know you were involved with The Aviator’s Wife (1981), which you star in, and also The Adventures of Rosette (1983), but you became his official editor later in the early ’90s. Were there specific things he tended to censor? What were you able to draw out of him?

The last scene in Autumn’s Tale (1998), when Marie Rivière, this happily married woman, is dancing with her husband after having set up her friend with a perfect man. There’s this look when Marie looks up from the dance, this lost look, and I put that in without Rohmer asking. He loved it. For me, it crystallized this whole second layer of the film, that this woman may not be as happy as she seems and that there’s these regrets in her life, and now she’s wondering what would have happened if she was now in her friend’s shoes who found this new love. That’s the kind of thing he wouldn’t allow himself to explore, where if you get married, that’s it for the rest of your life. And in his life, it was a happy case of that. A lot of his other films have that theme, but in this case, he wasn’t thinking about that sort of ambiguity. That was really a case of drawing out something that I think was there but he wouldn’t do himself. He didn’t ask me to look for it.

There was another part in The Lady and the Duke (2001) when the soldier comes to search in a woman’s house. She’s hiding a dissident, and there’s an exchange of looks between the very handsome captain and this lady. I made sure there was a little bit more in this exchange, so that there’d be this second layer. I don’t think that’s something Rohmer would have done. He doesn’t do this kind of subliminal seduction—his seductions are very first degree (laughter).

How would he respond to you adding these additional layers?

He pretended that he didn’t know (laughter).

How do you know he was pretending?

I don’t, but I’m sure he was (laughter). For someone who makes all these films about seduction and lies and the way we tell stories about ourselves, I’m sure he saw everything.

Were there specific things that you two disagreed on?

It’s very boring to say, but no (laughter). Let me talk about something we both agreed on—we were both very musical. It was astonishing to me that when we would look at a scene, we’d invariably go to the same place and say, “here!” We’d understand the rhythm of the piece. Sometimes in his career, he would have these long discourses on religion, which I don’t share. That’s his own thing, and there’s not anything I could ever suggest to him about that, like “get rid of this.” In terms of his film’s themes, they’re all so obviously his preoccupations, and I just wanted to enhance them, to make them more spicy (laughter).

Do you feel like you two had different musical sensibilities at all?

I think that I like silence more. In my own films, I use more silence. For his films, he was very particular about the background sounds. And the use of sound was something that he brought a lot to the editing table. It’s something I learned from him… or, well, I don’t know who learned from who. I would edit dogs in Winter’s Tale (1992) and that’s something I carried with me. When I teach, I tell my students that when you have a scene made of two shots and you don’t think they go together, just put a sound at the cut point and it’ll work. When I’m mentoring someone, I always tell them to cut it first as a sound story, to start with a sound outline.

Did you two talk about music together?

Yes, quite a lot. I was one of his piano teachers, or at least that’s what he called me. He learned to play the piano when he was 70. He had a little electric piano in his office and several of us would go by and play with him. It’s amazing. There was no way that his fingers would obey what he’d think (laughter). He was such a strong-willed person that he would make them obey. But yes, he loved music. Especially when he was not thinking of a new film, he’d just listen to music for entire afternoons.

What artists did you both admire?

He loved Mozart and Beethoven. His taste didn’t go outside of this classical music.

Did you actually try to teach him piano?

He had these piano books on his piano, you know the kind for little kiddies. There was Chopin and things like this that he’d try to play. He’d also have me play for him. In fact, Marie Rivière made a documentary, In the Company of Éric Rohmer (2010), that’s about the last years of his life. It has scenes of me playing the piano for him.

What specific things were you able to bring to the table as a result of your own experiences as a filmmaker that he couldn’t?

I was bringing out this more overt play between the characters, between the sexes, really. My filmmaking since Shades of Silk has always been about this sensual, tactile thing. That’s not really in Rohmer, and I try to highlight those kinds of gestures and looks. Our communication was not him saying, “Oh, I like that.” It was more just him not opposing (laughter). There was this one time where I changed a scene because Diane Baratier, the DP, was astounded why we cut a scene a certain way in the last film. There were other takes that were more sensual, or where the clothes were flowing much more beautifully in the wind, and I thought she was right. I recut the scene, but without having him lose face, I exported it to DVD and put it on his desk in the middle of the night—I had the key to his office. I had to tell him, “Oops, I don’t know what happened, look what I found!” And then he said, “Oh, that’s exactly what I wanted.”

What’s something you miss about Rohmer now that he’s no longer here? What do you miss most?

My answer is the same that everyone else in his entourage would say: protection. He was not just a director or a collaborator; he was always looking out for us. Whenever we went through bad patches in our lives, he’d be there. I’d be somewhere else and he would be opening these letters that an ex would send me—he’d read them out to me on the phone. It was that kind of intimate trust, the sort of thing that only real family members would do. That was the sort of thing that we all experienced with him, and he never let us down. Once he was gone, it was like our safety net was gone. It was like losing a parent; you really have to learn how to be on your own. Before he passed away, he asked me many times, “Mary, what are your plans? How are you going to make a living when I go?” He was always thinking of me.

Wait, so he was reading your ex’s letters to you?

(laughs). He was there when we were going through divorces and separations—these heavy-duty things. There was this guy I was starting to separate from. He couldn’t reach me, so he would send these letters to Rohmer’s office. I would call Rohmer once in a while—I was on the road, or maybe I was on the run (laughter)—and he would tell me that I got a letter. I’d tell him I was miles away, and I would then ask for him to read them to me. It’s weird; this is something only your closest family member would do. He would read these to me over the phone, and I suppose he did it with a straight face (laughter). I don’t know how he could do it!

Did he give relationship advice?

He knew everything about all of us! He knew about all our relationships, from the day we met the guy till the day we separated. I don’t know if he ever talked about this in the press, as he didn’t do a lot of interviews, but for those of us in his close circle, our stories nourished his work. They weren’t word for word, but it’s not a coincidence that Winter’s Tale was about this woman who had a little girl and was trying to find her true love. I always said that Winter’s Tale was a gift for us. At the time, we were all in our 30s and going through divorces and separations and had our little children. He made a happy ending for us. It seems far-fetched, but I feel that way. And Autumn’s Tale, where you see this middle-aged woman… I mean, you see these characters getting older throughout his filmography, and those in his closest circle were getting older too. Every afternoon, he was always having tea with his entourage and learning about all our stories. It’s not a coincidence that he knew the human psyche by heart.

Who were the people in his entourage?

Me, Diane, Françoise, the closest actresses like Marie Rivière, Rosette, and Arielle Dombasle. There were those who were more invisible, too, like those in the script department.

I know you have this film from 1980, Justocoeur. Can you talk about that?

That film is lost. M+ wants to restore that, and me and John were just talking about it yesterday, but we can’t find the negative. I mean, we only made two prints—we were broke. The only thing that’s left is a U-matic copy of someone filming the film on the wall (laughter). Even Unifrance was looking for it because it’s a time capsule of the 1980s. It was at the Hong Kong Film Festival and Tony Rayns wrote the program notes. He said it was one of the only films at the time that was not condescending to its gay characters; he was saying that it was ahead of its time, that sort of thing. I hope to do something about it someday, to make a film within a film so it can still exist.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

Oh my god. What I love about myself? I can talk a lot about what I don’t like, but this is very tough. I think what I love is that I can get satisfaction from any exchange. I do a lot of mentoring, and I say quite often that it’s not just a matter of giving them something, but also taking (laughter). I can get satisfaction from any process of transmission.

Mary Stephen’s films are being shown at Metrograph in New York. More information can be found here.

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Sharon Lockhart (1964) is an artist born in Norwood, Massachusetts and based in Los Angeles. Throughout her decades-long career, Lockhart has created films and installations deeply invested in collaboration and community, inviting others to share in the fabric of her works’ stories, politics, choreographies, and more. Her debut feature, 1997’s Goshogaoka, is a masterpiece of structuralist filmmaking involving a middle school girls basketball team in suburban Japan. Over an hour, one witnesses striking dance routines that display Lockhart’s investment in revealing the beauty in the everyday. Her response to the work was Teatro Amazonas (1999), which features a static long take of an audience in the titular opera house in Manaus, Brazil.

Her films would continue to expand thereafter, often featuring different iterations for theatrical and gallery settings, and involving portraits or paintings or physical ephemera to accompany their overarching ideas. NŌ (2003), for example, was inspired by landscape paintings and ikebana, and Lockhart consequently produced multiple photographic prints of neatly arranged vegetation. Lunch Break (2008) is composed of a tracking shot across a corridor in Maine’s Bath Iron Works, and she made multiple newspapers, books, installations, and photograph series in relation to the work that touch on labor.

Throughout the following ten years, Lockhart would create multiple works filmed in Poland, including Podwórka (2009), which focuses on children and play, and Rudzienko (2016), which was made in collaboration with the Youth Center for Sociotherapy in the titular village. More recently, Lockhart made EVENTIDE (2022), a non-narrative film that conjures drama from choreographed movements within a dark landscape. Her newest work is WINDWARD (2025), and it provides contemplative meditations on geography and geology as children gambol across different spaces on Fogo Island. The film has its world premiere at this year’s New York Film Fest, playing both today (September 27th) and tomorrow (September 28th). More info can be found here. An installation of the work is on view at the Fogo Island Gallery until October 31st. The exhibition will travel to the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and will be presented there from October 22nd to January 7th, 2026.

Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Lockhart in person at her Los Angeles studio on February 20th, 2023. The two decided to postpone publishing the interview until the time was right. Recently, Kim sent emails to Lockhart about her newest film WINDWARD, which have been edited into the below transcript. Throughout the conversation, Kim and Lockhart discuss her childhood, her mother’s eye, finding ways to push beyond the black box theater, and the ideas animating numerous films from throughout her career.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: What memories come up when you think about your childhood and the space you were raised in?

Sharon Lockhart: Nature, my cousins, a lot of time outside.

Where were you born?­

I’m from Maine and Massachusetts.

Is there anything that stands out about spending time with your cousins? Or were you often out exploring on your own?

We grew up on the coast, and so a lot of time was spent at the ocean—I was always swimming — and in the Maine woods. There were always people coming in and out of our house, we always had someone living and staying with us from all over. My mother’s longtime boyfriend was in construction, so he traveled a lot and somehow these people would come back with him and live with us for six months, a few years… they became part of the family. So it was a bit chaotic.

Was that a positive thing for you?

It was what it was. Looking back, it seems kind of crazy—most families don’t do that. But it definitely informed who I am. There were always spontaneous events at my mom’s, and nothing was really predictable. I liked learning about the people who came and about where they were from. They were different.

Are there certain qualities of your mom you see in yourself?

Her eye has definitely informed how I see and how I frame. I did not realize this until 1994 when we were going through photos at her house. Almost all the photos of me have my back to the camera looking out at the landscape. She didn’t have any art training, we didn’t go to museums—I didn’t go to museums until I was in my 20s—but she had these reproductions around the house that were like watered-down Dutch painting, or German Romanticism. She had a good eye. She could also spot things at the dump.

Right now, I’m looking at those jugs over there (points at whiskey jugs). I just incorporated them into a still-life photograph I made honoring Mike Kelley. I never really thought about them in our home growing up but when researching vessels for the photo, I realized they were perfect for it. They are utilitarian, imperfect and handmade. They held whiskey—a substance that undermined social control. It spoke to how Mike worked against a typical sense of order.

What would your mom bring from the dump?

I remember she found an amazing old dresser. She took it home and sanded it and brought it back to life. She could see the beauty in things that others couldn’t. I think that became part of my practice.

Was there a specific moment when you recognized that you needed to pursue art?

Yeah, definitely. I was around 21. This is a good example of my mother’s boyfriend bringing someone home… I went back for Thanksgiving and there was this guy who did construction with him there. He had to leave early to get back to Boston because he was taking a class at the New England School of Photography. And I thought, “You can go to school for photography?” For the first time, I thought about going to study.

I got together a portfolio and a year later I enrolled at the school. It was a two-year technical school. I started with a 4x5 camera and black-and-white film as part of the Zone System, and a required class on the history of photography. In the second year, I had a color photography course and the teacher introduced me to conceptual photographers like Jim Welling and Sherrie Levine. I would say that was my introduction to art and the reason I went on to get an undergrad and grad degree. As soon as I was turned on to art, it was a clear path.

It’s wonderful that it only took knowing this was a thing that existed for you to be on this track. Sometimes you don’t even realize the things that are possible in life, and you just need to know it exists for things to happen.

I am so grateful to that man for telling me about the photography school! My family is working-class and did not go to college so there wasn’t this belief at a young age we could go to college either. People just brought up their kids and those kids went on to do whatever they went on to do. There wasn’t an expectation.

You mentioned you took the conceptual photography class.

It wasn’t a conceptual photography class, it was a color photography class.

Do you remember your teacher’s name?

Tom Pettit.

Was there anything he said or did pedagogically that stood out and made you more excited about this?

He sent us out in the world to see exhibitions. I went a lot to the Photographic Resource Center. I’m trying to remember whose shows were up there when I went. I remember there being Sophie Calle and Barbara Kruger. It was my first time seeing full bodies of work, seeing how someone installed, and how one body of work leads to the next, eventually coming together over a career. I saw how the work could evolve, and was able to think of it as part of an artist’s practice.

That’s beautiful. I think a lot about, especially as a music writer, how hermetic the medium can feel. There are musicians who do stuff outside of music, but a lot of music fans are oblivious to the rest of it. I’m sure there are tons of people who know your films, but don’t realize that your films have other accompanying materials. How important is it for you that the people who engage with your work are privy to all these other things? Do you ever get stressed about the fact that your work can just exist isolated from your entire body of work, or from the other materials that accompany your films?

One thing I’ve always tried to push against is the tendency to pigeonhole artists within their practices and within the kinds of work that they make. When I first started out, photography had its own little world with galleries devoted just to that medium. The Pictures Generation really exploded that. There was also the avant-garde cinema world and all those guys would show in the film-festival circuit but never in galleries or museums. I think there are a lot of artists from my generation who just moved easily between mediums. I try to make different media work against each other; so the photographs, for example, address a similar subject matter in a very different way. I also try to make each project take the work in some new direction.

Like for EVENTIDE (2022), I did a series of cyanotype paintings. And I’ve been working with bronze for the past years in relation to photography. Whenever I do exhibitions and installations with my films, I always think about the architecture, and how I can push beyond the black box. I’ve worked with architects for decades to create these installations. When I’m making films, I’m thinking about architecture and how the viewer’s body moves through space. So, yes, I do hope people engage the larger bodies of work. But your question was…

How do you feel about people who don’t engage with your work in that way?

Everyone experiences work in their own way and I can only try to frame things to create a context that bridges all parts of my practice. The film audience and the art audience are definitely different though.

What do you think are the differences between those two audiences?

The cinema audience experiences the work collectively while the other audience views the work individually and on their own terms. I’ve always been in those two worlds, and I like that they’re different. You get different feedback. But to fully understand what I’m doing, you have to engage the whole—my films always have that other component in galleries or museums.

Before Goshogaoka (1997) you had Khalil, Shaun, A Woman Under the Influence (1994).

That was my thesis film—my first film.

I actually didn’t even realize that you had that film until recently.

Looking back, I can appreciate it and how it informs later work—it was a structural film, and it thought about the clinical and the observational, but in a tender way. I think Goshogaoka was the first time that I was really thinking about a cinematic audience though.

I’m curious, what made you focus on Cassavetes?

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) is such a great film. What interested me about it most was how the child is taking care of the parent. That’s the scene I chose to rewrite and restage. I also find the way Cassavetes worked with children in his films to be unique. Same with Truffaut.

I just watched Goshogaoka again and what you’re saying about it informing your other work was really obvious to me. I think something that is clear in a lot of your work is the way we as people animate the space around us when we move. I love when the girls are running across the gym in the beginning and we see the curtain rustles.

Oh yeah, I love that too. For me it announces that the film is fiction in a very subtle way. The two farmers in NŌ (2003) do that too, as do the workers in Lunch Break (2008), the clam digger in Double Tide (2009), just to name a few.

I remember first seeing Goshogaoka and wondering, is this a pure document of what’s actually happening? But by the end of the film you realize, “Okay, there’s no way this could have been that.” What drew you to making the film in this way? There are so many specific parameters that you set, and then within those parameters you really allow this space to come alive. Could we talk about the planning of the choreography?

I studied the girls’ practices for months and determined that I wanted an hour-long film with a fixed frame, and that I wanted six 10-minute sections (the duration of a 400-foot magazine). Questioning whether or not it was a documentary was inspired by ethnofiction films. I introduced the fiction through choreographing the exercises for the camera. We also had three costume changes. I was looking at a lot of post-modern dance and Yvonne Rainer at the time too. I think the gymnasium speaks to that and to everyday movement.

I knew right away when I saw them in the gym in front of the raised stage that it was the perfect setting for me to make a film about looking at—and gaining an understanding of—a culture outside of my own. I hired Stephen Galloway from the Frankfurt Ballet for the choreography, made costumes, and all of that.

How enmeshed were you with these girls at that school? When I think about Jean Rouch, I think about how he allowed his subjects to participate in the film itself. I’m curious how that played out for you with that film. I’m assuming you don’t speak Japanese.

This was the first time I worked in another country and with a large group. The families were very involved. Some of the parents even sewed the costumes. I remember explaining my concept to so many people. It was interesting how important that is in Japan—making sure that all the details of something are laid out. I was young and it was really great for me that I had to explain my concept again and again. I became clearer about my ideas each time. Even so, I don’t know if the girls really understood until they saw the film a year later. Since then, the way I interact with the people I work with has all become more and more in-depth. I really get to know them and we develop lifelong friendships.

When the students learned Stephen was going to choreograph them I think they thought they would learn dance moves! Instead, we choreographed their everyday movements, things they did all the time. And it was a surprise for them that the film wasn’t really about basketball. We also built in moments of chance the day we filmed by changing some of the movements they had rehearsed for ten days. So that took them by surprise too.

Do you mind talking about what it was like for them to see the film? I assume all the families came.

Yes, the whole community came. It was a big theater. And I remember after, it really felt like everyone got it. With all my films, the participants know the frame, they understand the concept, they know what the camera is seeing at all points. But that’s only part of it, until they see how everything comes together. I also think hearing the soundtrack in the cinema, and the fact that they sounded musical when they counted, was something they hadn’t expected.

Have you ever had a negative response to one of your films from someone you collaborated with, where they saw your film and wondered, what is the point of this?

No. I really think that everyone I work with trusts me and feels like a part of the process. They play active roles. I don’t pay people to be in my films. It’s really about developing something together. Usually my films take a lot of work, because it’s not just a documentary where you’re capturing something—it’s working together.

Your next film, Teatro Amazonas (1999) is also playing at Berlin Critics’ Week. There’s a 10-minute film called Ten Minutes Older (1978) by Herz Frank that just shows kids watching a show, without revealing what they’re watching. Then Kiarostami had Shirin (2008), which is just closeups of women watching a film. I like the humor that’s inherent to an audience just watching another audience. What drew you to that film’s idea?

I thought of it as a literal response to Goshogaoka. The perspective of Teatro Amazonas was flipped—it was the camera on the stage of the opera house in Manaus, Brazil, looking at an audience for a single 30-minute take.

It’s interesting to look back on how Teatro has been shown over the years. When it was selected for the Berlin Film Festival, there was a lot of disagreement among the programmers because I wanted it to be shown as a feature and not in a program even though it was only 40 minutes long. Ulrich Gregor insisted that it be shown alone because it’s really an event. The reactions at the end were very divided, especially between art people, music people, and film people. They were fighting and arguing in the audience during the Q&A. I didn’t really get that many words in. People were angry. When I showed it in Vienna, some guy stayed and asked for his money back. He said it was the worst film he’d ever seen. “Why did you make this, why did you have ten minutes of silent credits, did you expect people to watch that?” Funnily enough, he stayed through the Q&A and then watched the next screening because he had heard me speak about it. I think, early on, my films were tougher for an audience. People now are more accustomed to looking at the durational films. The film-festival world has changed a lot since then, too. It’s much more fluid now.

Did you like the fact that the audience was divided?

I mean, I was shocked. I was used to an art audience. It was great.

You mentioned music people. I think sound is a super interesting facet of your films. When I first watched Goshogaoka, I was wondering why there was this electronic drone in the beginning.

Michael Webster composed that. Musical composition has always been important to me, and I’ve continued to work with people like him and Becky Allen, who is a longtime collaborator, to shape these soundtracks.

I feel like it really sets the tone, priming you to be ready for the film. Sound in film can really animate and dictate the way we approach it. And having the sound bookend the film, to hear it at the end reminds us that what we just saw is a whole spectacle. How did that get decided? What was your intention with that?

The beginning is that tone, and it peaks, and then it goes down, and then the girls run through. I did think of it as setting the stage. It’s almost like those broadcast tones with the color bars at the beginning of a video. I liked that a lot of people thought the tone was inside the space. It’s not—it’s an electronic composition. Teatro starts with a 60-person choir, which also sets the tone, and over the course of the film, it reduces to a single voice.

After I rewatched the film I noticed the list of thank yous, and you thank the Wacoal Art Center, which I know about because they released experimental music in the ’80s and ’90s. I was just so surprised at this connection.

They are great! Arcus, who I did the residency with, had their offices there. I actually made a diptych of it showing women sitting in the window, taken from across the street. There were so many people who opened their doors for me to do research during that time. There was Image Forum who had the most comprehensive library of experimental film, and there was Comme des Garçons too (laughter).

I was wondering about that too.

That was for researching the costumes and sourcing fabric. I could have used any fabrics of theirs that I wanted, but in the end I went with something subtle and everyday. Having so many options was so seductive though! I love Comme and learned a lot there. Most interesting was watching every fashion show they ever did. The girls running straight to the camera in section two reflects that. Also the sound of fabric in sections 5 and 6 was inspired by Comme fabrics.

Wow, I hadn’t even thought about that. Do you still keep up with fashion?

Not really.

You made NŌ (2003) after Teatro Amazonas. That’s the first of your films where this idea of everyday actions and movements—

Like Goshogaoka.

But it’s even more. It seems to say that one’s everyday life is art. That’s the film where everything really came together for me. What is it like depicting that? I feel like some people would almost see it as insulting, saying things like, “This is labor, why are you treating it as art?” As opposed to just seeing the beauty in everyday movements. Have you ever had these sort of internal dialogues?

Well, labor’s been depicted in art for centuries.

That’s true. I guess I’m thinking of it in the context of filming labor.

For me, that film was really about painting. The earth in it is a canvas that’s brown at the beginning, and by the end, it is coated with color—which in this case was hay. I forget what you said exactly but I thought it was really good. “The beauty in the everyday.” I think a lot of my work is like that, pointing that out to people who don’t see what they do as remarkable. Labor is consistent throughout my work. But NŌ—the piles of hay, the mathematics behind it, its costuming, the choreography—really embodies that. Besides the labor in front of the camera, there is also the labor behind the camera and off-camera.

From this point on, your films really take on a painterly quality.

Thank you.

I’m curious, are you looking at paintings and trying to recreate them? Or do you just film, and then it happens to remind you of a painting?

(laughs). Everything is so researched, visually through history. And I read a lot about the subjects or theory around a topic that I’m working with. Most of the time, I’ll show my subjects my binders of visual research. I never show my art to them, I just show how I’m thinking about our film using images I have gathered. And then through that, I learn from them. I’m always asking questions.

Is there a specific reason you don’t show your own work?

I don’t think who I am and what I’ve done is important or relevant in these situations. I think [the people] are important and what they do is important. That’s why I’m working with them. It’s more relevant for me to say, “This is why I want to work with you and am thinking about what you do,” or “This is how I’m seeing clam digging,” or “These are the paintings and historical labor images that I’m looking at.”

Do you mind giving a specific example of the historical labor images you looked at, or how that informed one of the films you made?

(takes catalog off shelves). This is Lunch Break II, which is part of a trilogy of publications that I made to accompany the Lunch Break project. It’s almost entirely the research that I showed to the people I worked with on the film. There are [Works Progress Administration] images from the ’40s of workers from the shipyard going to lunch, and they’re running because they only had 30 minutes. So that’s something I shared with them. Or Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895). The workers in Maine a lot of times would gather and play cards or read newspapers, so I have things like George de la Tour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (early 1630s) or a trompe l’oeil still-life by D’Avila (flips through book). These are some of the factories I did research in. This is Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant FOOD, and then there are paintings depicting labor, like Bruegel’s The Harvesters (1565). So they related to all of this, and they would bring in things they thought related too.

I love that you even made newspapers. I just had breakfast with a friend and I was telling them about Lunch Break (2008) and how you actually made the newspaper [Lunch Break Times].

It’s one of my favorite publications.

In doing this, you position the people you’re working with in this lineage. You realize that your life is not an isolated thing, and that you’re a part of this history. I’m curious what it was like to be involved in a project like making a newspaper.

The newspaper was delivered all throughout Maine and to all the factories we filmed at throughout the state: at the last sardine factory in America, at a chicken factory, at a lumber yard, a shoe factory. Once I gained access to Bath Iron Works, I only used footage from there. It was very important to give back to everyone I worked with, even those who weren’t in the film. Their workplaces are represented, and even if the camera doesn’t see them, they’re represented too. Many of them wrote articles: their spouses wrote, artists wrote, art historians like Lucy Lippard and Katy Siegel wrote, Yoko Ono contributed a painting, James [Benning] made a drawing… it was amazing. The papers were also part of the shows and free to the public. It was also the end of analog and newspapers were disappearing, so Lunch Break Times memorialized that.

I think about that a lot because people are just on their phones now.

You can’t be on your phone at Bath Iron Works because they’re building warships. You can’t have cell phones and you can’t take photographs—they rely on print. I loved seeing everyone read the paper on their lunch break, and they were informed because of that. I wonder what it is like today. So many local papers are no longer around.

In Lunch Break, you use that tracking shot and it evokes so many different emotions. How much of this was planned beforehand? Are there other films that were informing your approach, or were you just trying things out? And I also wanted to ask about Exit (2008). I love that you were inspired by the Lumière brothers.

Film is too expensive to try stuff out. I never just shoot. I always plan and know my frame and rehearse with the people in front of and behind the camera. I had to film Lunch Break during their actual lunch break and everything had to be timed perfectly. The workers knew when we were filming, and they knew what they wanted to do and how they wanted to represent themselves. What you see is a manual tracking shot, so that’s something that also needed to be planned.

With Exit, it was really just about me framing the scene and sticking to the same frame every day of the week for one workweek. But with that film too, the workers have the same kind of awareness and are performing. They knew the Lumière film and were proud that they were now part of this legacy. For me, the film is all about the way the architecture informs their life and routine. As they move, you can see the wear and tear on their bodies. There’s a lot of injury. There’s history within it all. You see their lunchboxes, how they carry them, and how that informs the way they move.

The Lunch Box Portraits (2008) that I made as part of that focus on the individual. They represent all of the trades in the union and they’re all titled with the name of the worker and what they do. They’re still lifes, but they’re also portraits. For example, this is Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator (points at a page from the Lunch Break I catalog). His lunch isn’t in the triptych but his routine is. He reads the newspaper, does a crossword puzzle, smokes a cigarette and takes his medicine. 30 years of ships that he’s built are represented in stickers on the lunchbox that he’s been carrying all those years. Union stickers. The union fought for me to have access to this high-security shipyard, and I wanted them to have a strong presence in the work.

You said earlier that you work with architects. Obviously, architecture informs the way we move around. What sort of things do you feel like you’ve gained insight into from having worked with these people?

They’re amazing—Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena. The firm is Escher GuneWardena from Los Angeles. When we were working on the installation for Lunch Break, we did so wanting to reference the structure of the film itself. The tracking shot is down what is essentially the backbone of the shipyard. For the installation, we ultimately came up with a 65-foot tunnel open at the entrance with the film at the end of it. The viewer has to move down the volume, just like the camera does, before they can sit and watch. For Double Tide, we designed two volumes, one for the sunrise shot and one for the sunset one, so that you can really see how much the landscape changes over the course of a day. They’re open, so if you are sitting in one, and you turn back, you can see the other. I’m always thinking about how films can work both in the cinema and in the gallery.

I think it’s very uncommon for someone to sit down and watch an entire film in a gallery setting, but the positive is that you can think more about space and how they’re interacting with that.

Yes, that is true. Like with Pine Flat (2005). When I installed it, I placed the work in two identical rooms. Each day, only one ten-minute shot from the film was shown in each room. One from the first half of the film and one from the second half. The shots would change every day, and there was a stack of ten-minute film cans next to the projectors hinting at that. You couldn’t see the film’s full two hours unless you went to the cinema to see it or if you came back to the gallery every day.

Are you usually thinking of how the film would work in a theater setting first?

Both at the same time.

Can you give me an example of one where you felt it was a struggle to sort of accommodate for both settings?

I originally made Teatro Amazonas and Goshogaoka only for the cinema because they’re so much about the proscenium and about an audience sitting together. That needed to be reflected in how people experienced them. EVENTIDE, for example, can be shown in either, but since it was shot at night, it requires a dark, black space for the projection to really work. In the end, I think the installation of EVENTIDE works in such a dark space because of how the image informs its architecture. The screen volume sits on the floor. You have no choice but to view it in relation to your own body. I usually hate the black box though. I’ve been fighting against it for 25 years.

Why do you hate it?

I just don’t feel that it’s about the body or how you move through space. It’s important to me that there’s a physical relationship to the work that’s being shown, which I don’t think you get unless you can see the space around you.

I liked your publication with James Benning, Over Time (2022).

Thank you.

Something I really liked about it, which is characteristic of both of your films, is that you’re never really holding the audience’s hands. They have to be patient. In the publication, you have excerpts from your filmographies, and then you have texts sometimes informing the images. It’s sort of like an exhibition in book form. How did you approach making that specific publication? You and James have worked together over the years, how did that come to fruition?

It wouldn’t have come to fruition if it wasn’t for Martin Beck, who edited and designed the book. We knew we didn’t want any text or interviews. With Martin, we identified some of the themes that are important to both me and James and that appear in both of our work. Obvious ones like labor, landscape, and class came up, as did less obvious ones like tenderness and friendship. We then both wrote something very short about each of the subjects. The images came next. As you say, the book does require patience.

Do you mind describing your affinity for James as a person and his work? I’m curious how you feel you have informed each other through dialogues you’ve had.

We’ve been friends for over 20 years now. We like a lot of the same things, we both are very curious people, and we look to each other for feedback. He’s an amazing person and a very good friend.

There’s one line that I thought was very sweet, in the context of you and James doing this together. It says: “Friends give meaning and make solitude possible.” Do you mind speaking to that?

Who do you think wrote that?

I don’t know.

Well see, that’s the great part about the book (laughter). When I read it, I think it’s so obvious who wrote what. James said that one, which makes perfect sense to me. He likes being with people, but he also really likes being alone. And now I’m moving his way. I’m more solitary and less social these days.

But I’m a pretty social person in general. I’ve recently been spending time on Fogo Island, a small place off the coast of Newfoundland, and have started getting to know the kids there and making new work with them.

Is there anything you’re comfortable disclosing about the new film [WINDWARD (2025)]?

In the ’60s and ’70s there were these films called the process films, by a Canadian documentary filmmaker [Colin Low].

Right, I learned about these last year.

There’s this one section about the children of Fogo, which is a key part of my research. The children on the island didn’t know about the film, so we watched it together. They’re showing me places that are important to them, much like in Pine Flat where the kids and I discovered places together, and the film is growing from there.

What sort of things do you appreciate about working with children that you don’t get when you’re working with adults in your other films?

Time is different for children. They are in the moment. Less guarded. More open.

I love the idea of their sense of time being different. I feel like as an adult now, I’m always thinking about what I have to do, the obligations I have…

After I made Pine Flat, I made Lunch Break. The reason I made it was because I started to think about how the kids in this film have free time. As an adult, what is free time? It’s a 30-minute lunch break.

Do you feel like your films are often made in this way? As a response to what came prior?

I’d say there are some, like how Goshogaoka, Teatro and others made me want to make films in the US and look at my own culture. Pine Flat, Lunch Break, Exit, Double Tide build on one another. But then I got commissions that took me elsewhere, and I ended up making installation work with dancers in their 70s, which is something different entirely. That came after I had made a film with kids, Podwórka (2009), in Poland, which was part of three films all made there over ten years. EVENTIDE was the first time I showed people in the distance as part of a landscape, rather than putting them in the foreground. This new film will have that same approach. So the work in general isn’t necessarily made in response to what came before it, but since it’s all part of my practice, there are always some things in common.

In another one of your Polish films, Rudzienko (2016), the scrolling text feels so slow. Usually, with scrolling text you’re—

You’re stressed, trying to read it all.

Right. I think about the scrolling of film credits and how they’re too fast to really be respected by the audience.

My credits always inform the film. In Teatro Amazonas, for example, the credits are crucial to understanding the work.

How do you approach making your credits, and ensuring that it’s understood that your projects involve a whole team of people?

We were talking about Goshogaoka earlier. If you sit through the credits, you realize it’s costumed and it’s choreographed. That’s all important to reading the work. For Teatro Amazonas, there are ten minutes of credits that list the neighborhoods of Manaus that everyone in the audience lived in. You see that I worked with a statistician, and that each neighborhood has representation in the audience. The credits also let you know that there was a composer and a live 60-person choir. In Rudzienko’s credits, you see there are all these workshops listed: critical thinking, theater, mindfulness. You realize that things aren’t just there, they don’t come out of nowhere, and that there’s more to the film than just what you see depicted on screen.

I couldn’t make the kind of work I do without everyone you see in the credits, and that goes beyond just the people who handle the technical or practical aspects of the filmmaking process. Whether it’s a friendship, or sharing my research with someone, or doing workshops—everyone is important.

How did you come up with the scrolling text in Rudzienko?

That was tough. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t look, listen, and read at the same time. My films are so much about spending time with an image and looking at all the details in the frame, really inspecting it. The minute you put subtitles in that frame, it’s a different act. You’re not seeing and hearing anymore. By having the image and the scrolling text presented separately, you’re able to take in the sound of the landscape, the girls’ voices, the Polish language, the intonation. Then once the image is gone, you’re left to really read and understand what they’re saying. There’s no sound accompanying the text, so you’re just interpreting what’s written.

There’s usually such a lack of creativity with how subtitles are presented.

I tried everything. The scrolling text was my first idea, and for months and months I tried all these other things. In the end I went back to the first idea, which happened to be the right idea. I’ve worked with Conny Purtill for many years on my titles and credits, and we also worked on this scrolling text together. It was important for us to not only use text in a way that worked well with the image, but to make it clear that there’s a dialog going on.

It’s presented like a poem because of the indentation.

Yes, and the film begins with a poem. You first hear it, spoken against ambient landscape sounds, and then you read it. The poem is amazing.

Yeah and it all really makes sense. The appeal of poetry to me is that you’re forced to focus on the impact of every single syllable. And because your film is presented in this way, the audience is much more thoughtful about what’s being said. If it was just subtitles, you’d be frantically trying to make sense of everything. This is the exact opposite of what I love about James Benning’s American Dreams (Lost and Found) (1984). I feel like I’m having a migraine trying to keep track of everything. I’m stressed out, but in a good way, and yours is the exact opposite.

That’s a good double feature (laughter).

I’ll ask you the question that I always ask everyone at the end of my interviews. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

That I’m still curious, and that I trust people. I find people interesting and know that I have something to learn from them.

Do you feel like there’s a reason why?

I don’t know why. It’s especially true with kids. The understanding of each other is almost immediate. I never realized that was a special quality that I had until I made Podwórka. I didn’t share a language with the children I was working with, but we still managed to understand each other perfectly. There’s a mutual trust.

Was there a specific moment when you realized that you have this quality?

Yeah. The producer for Podwórka went around to the courtyards with me to meet the parents, explaining what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to work with their kids and film. They were translating what I was saying to the parents, and the kids who I had met while scouting locations were correcting the producer. I just thought, wow, they understand me.

You’ve mentioned to me before that there came a point where you didn’t think you would be able to work with people again. What was it about the children at Fogo Island that convinced you to do so again?

Covid stopped us all in our tracks, and we were all sitting with the solitude that we were talking about earlier. I found myself in the studio making paintings with an assistant, and it was such a different experience compared to how I usually work. I wasn’t with lots of people and I wasn’t traveling. It was a different rhythm, and a different way of working out a process, going back every day until I figured it out.

Coming out of Covid’s peak in 2022, I was invited to Fogo Island by Fogo Island Arts for a residency. When I was there I kept working like I had in the studio, without involving people. It was nice. It’s a pretty small place, so it didn’t take long for me to meet the children there. It happened organically, and they drew me back in to wanting to work with people. There was just such joy. By the end of that summer I had started filming with them, and returned for three more summers to complete the work.

You’ve talked about the importance of building relationships with people when making films, as well as how children have a different sense of time. Do you have any specific memories that stand out about having made WINDWARD with these kids? What was it like to be with them? How did they differ from those you’ve worked with in the past?

I noticed that they had a much different relationship to their environment than most people I know and have worked with. They were much more attuned to the land, the sea, the weather. During the summer, there aren’t any structured activities for them. They’re usually outside playing, and they only go home for meals. It made me think about Janusz Korczak’s declaration of children’s rights, the right to respect, the right to die, the right to be who they want to be… he meant that kids have the right to take chances and to fail so that they could find their limits. He wanted them to not be shielded from situations that might be challenging. The children I worked with on Fogo live that. They take these risks because they have a feel for the land that you don’t have in other places.

WINDWARD doesn’t foreground people, as you mentioned earlier, and I’m curious how that shifts the way you think about the frame and the activity within it. Were there things you learned from making EVENTIDE that informed how you approached making WINDWARD? I especially love that second shot, as it looks like we’re looking at a miniature because of how small the island is.

I know what you mean, it’s like an island within an island. That scene especially reminds me of a Bruegel painting, where you have all of these different figures in the distance, all contained within the same landscape. EVENTIDE was the first film I made where the figures were small rather than up close, and I think WINDWARD takes that even further. They aren’t just small, but they’re enveloped by their surroundings. The film becomes about vastness and the power of the elements, not only because of the setting itself, but also the choreography and timing.

Is there anything about the film that you think is important to mention, that you would like for people to know?

I mentioned it before, but the complexity of the landscape on Fogo, the geology, the natural forces are so important to the film. I hope you can see and feel when watching it how ever-present the wind is there. I’ve never been somewhere where the wind was such a huge part of everyone’s life. It determines everything, the way they interact, the way they play, what they do for work. So when I talk about them being enveloped by their landscape, I mean it quite literally.

Sharon Lockhart’s WINDWARD plays as part of NYFF this weekend. Dates and information can be found here. An installation of WINDWARD is also on display at the Fogo Island Gallery through October. More information can be found here. The exhibition will travel to the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and will be presented there from October 22nd to January 7th, 2026.

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Alexandre Koberidze (b. 1984) is a Georgian filmmaker who has been a central figure of his country’s new era of bold, imaginative filmmaking. His debut feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), was an audacious 200-minute city symphony and gay romance shot on a Sony Ericsson cellphone. Koberidze followed it up with the critical darling What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), opting for better film equipment but maintaining the playfulness and fairy-tale charm that has characterized his career from his early short films. His third feature, Dry Leaf, premiered at this year’s Locarno and will have its North American premiere as part of TIFF’s Wavelengths program.

Dry Leaf is a three-hour road-movie dreamscape that follows a father named Irakli as he embarks on a journey to find his missing daughter Lisa. Assisting him is an invisible man named Levani. Returning again to the Sony Ericsson camera, Koberidze provides meditations on history and memory and loss throughout the Georgian countryside. In the process, he provides opportunities to consider the way that image and sound, in their varying degrees of clarity, can more readily capture the real than anything of the highest quality. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Koberidze on September 2nd, 2025 to discuss the sacrifices of older generations, working with his brother on Dry Leaf’s soundtrack, and how his Sony Ericsson cellphone helped him have a sharper eye.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: How’s your day been?

Alexandre Koberidze: It’s been okay. It’s a strange day here for politics and the next days will be hard, but we’re used to this. Today and tomorrow are a bit different because we have more than 60 political prisoners and they’re announcing the final verdicts for how long these people should stay in jail. Today, it was for 10 people and tomorrow it’ll be 11. These are really young people—they’re like 18 or 19 years old, and some are a bit older. This has been going on for a long time; we’ve been protesting for the whole year. Normally it’s very repetitive because we go out to protest and then come back, but these days are different as there are big things happening.

Have you always been politically engaged and participating in protests?

I was doing it before, though not as actively. Now it’s every day. And there are a lot of people out there, not just activists. It’s very interesting to see how slowly it has become clear for people that there is now no other way. We see these dynamics. When the protests started in the winter, it was much bigger of course—it was like hundreds of thousands of people. Now it’s less because people can’t go out every day for hundreds of days, but it’s been interesting to see how people completely changed their lives for this. When you have this routine every evening to protest, it becomes a really significant part of your day. You have to change all your habits. You can’t just go out in a normal way, you can’t go on a date (laughter). It’s from 8 to 11. It’s really hard to live with this sort of routine; it affects your health and your nerves. But it’s interesting because a lot of people still go there, and I’ve met many different people I didn’t know there and it’s become a meeting place for people who care.

Is there anyone you’ve met at these protests who have really shaped your life?

Yeah. I haven’t been there every single day; sometimes I decide to do something else, and now I’m traveling with my film, but I try to be there every day. There are people, though, who live a normal life—they have jobs and families and kids—and they’ve managed to not miss a single day. They’re the first to arrive and the last to leave. When other people feel tired or feel like it doesn’t make sense to protest anymore, you think of these people and it gives you power. There are many people like this. These are people who were never into politics who then found themselves active in this moment. And there are many different people who’ve shaped all this organizing. There’s so much energy these people have, and these are people you’d never think would be able to do this. They show such unbelievable energy and skill; they give us hope.

Do you feel like engaging in these protests and meeting these people have shaped the way you think about filmmaking or art in general?

It’s different. From day one, there were these amazing folk singers who would sing songs and everything would change. It was really cold in the winter, and to stand there in the snow or rain and hear their voices… you felt like you could do this all again tomorrow. This is a very simple example because everyone has felt how encouraging that music can be, but during these times, when people really needed it—and it’s not just about being in a bad mood, it’s a critical moment for our country and for all of us—it really showed how powerful it can be. I go there without my camera. From the beginning I decided just to be there and not to connect it with my work. But of course, when you do this it shapes who you are and what you do.

What was it like growing up in Tbilisi? This could be related to the arts or politics or anything in your childhood. What comes to mind?

It’s a lot, you know? It’s hard to pick something. Growing up here in Tbilisi in the ’90s, which was a post-Soviet and post-Civil War city, we’d often have no electricity. There were a lot of problems, and even as a kid you don’t like when there’s no electricity. I realized much later on how, for my parents and their generation, they were trying to survive in a way so that our generation could still have a normal life. I never really felt scared—maybe one or two times—but generally, I had a happy childhood. Thinking about all this, it’s connected to the idea of how people would always give themselves completely to you. For our generation, this is the main thing that connects more or less everyone. That’s how we grew up, and we realize that we can live a normal life because others sacrificed theirs. I was spending a lot of time going out to play with other kids, playing football. I think most of my youth was spent going to school, being lazy afterwards and playing football instead of doing homework (laughter).

Was there a specific field you went to play football?

Because this time was so chaotic, there weren’t a lot of fields that were in good enough shape to play in. We would just play in front of our houses. Everywhere you went, there was a place to play, and these weren’t actual places that were meant for football, but that’s the interesting thing about sports: you can set up the rules yourself. You can create the space to do it anywhere.

Would you say the happiest moments of your childhood involved playing football?

Football was always a big joy. I went to a school where they’d take us for a month to these camping places and we’d be there in the mountains for a month. We didn’t have anything to do except play football; we had the ball and a lot of kids so that’s what we did. It wasn’t really camping because there were these rooms you stayed in, but we were there for a month, and no other schools were really doing this. This was the first time I’d left my home for that long—I was about 9 or 10. Most people would say that these are some of the best memories of their childhood.

You mentioned earlier that people were really passionate about sacrificing their lives for your generation. Do you mind talking about the people who did this for you, and how you first realized that this was happening?

It’s a slow process. It’s my parents and grandparents and their friends. I wasn’t just observing my own family; it was a big group of people all helping each other, and they were spending a lot of time together. At a certain point, when you’re 25 or 30—and with our generation, we still felt young and were having fun or studying—but you realize that our parents were my age by the time I was born. They had to live a completely different life than the one I have now.

Since the beginning, your films have been interested in fantasy. I think of the history of Georgian film with something like Otar Iosseliani’s April (1961), but where does your interest in the fantastical come from?

I don’t know, but I can speculate that it has a lot to do with fairy tales that my parents and especially my grandma would read to me. This happened for a long time, and I really, really loved it. But I don’t think it’s just this. It’s hard to say why this element is in my work, but I think it has to do with the character of a person, of how they see the world and how they think it all works. It’s about one’s relationship with the world. If I think about the past, I think at some point I started to distrust some knowledge which was given as some factual thing. I learned at some point that animals can laugh, and it might be different than we may expect, but this is something we share.

It gave me this thought that if the feeling of love is something I can’t explain, and maybe there are some theories that can get into an explanation of how our body or psychology works, I would rather try to keep it as something unexplainable. It was a really strong ground to stand on, to say that if something is impossible to explain, and that this is something that connects us with animals—that they can have the same feelings as us, or even more feelings—it means that there are all these other feelings that have been left unexplored. It’s interesting to give space to this.

I appreciate the way animals exist in your film. They provide a reminder of the unknowability of things. That goes back to the donkey in Looking Back is Grace (2013). Do you mind talking about that film and how you approached using that animal? That was 12 years ago, so I know it’s been some time.

It was a really long time ago, and it was one of the first things I filmed. This film is based on a short story that was written by a Georgian writer who is my father’s friend. It’s from 1984. It’s not the exact same, but the premise is the same—something strange happens in a city and it changes the lives of those who experience it. In that story, there are camels that appear in a metro station. I wanted to keep this element, this animal, but I wanted to change it. And there’s a production aspect: working with a donkey was easier. I also remember that we had a choice between animals that were maybe easier to bring. I thought it was an intuitive thought, that donkeys are connected with film history—you see donkeys a lot. It’s such a symbolic creature. And when I think about it now, it’s Biblical, and every time you show it in a mysterious way, it can evoke many ideas. I wouldn’t have done this today. I don’t like bothering animals who all have nothing to do with the film I’m doing. Back then, it was not really too much because this little zoo was near where we were filming and they just walked there; it wasn’t a long process. But I still think it’s stressful how there’s these people with cameras and lights doing stuff to an animal. He was just standing there with very little emotion. I wouldn’t repeat that now.

Your interest in the fantastical feels related to your interest in silent films. You have something like Colophon (2015) which has intertitles, and you allow it to be silent during those passages. I like that Linger On Some Pale Blue Dot (2018) is sort of like a fantastical take on an industrial film. There’s a sort of gravitas to every single gesture and image in that, and you have a lot of dramatic music there too.

It’s impossible to avoid the art that has come before you. I think it’s a blessing. I make films because I love what I’ve seen. If you think about the French New Wave and how they had these ideas that were meant to destroy the films of their elders… well, when you see their films you realize it actually comes from a complete love for the cinema back then. Art is not like science, where one idea destroys a previous one; with art, you make something and it is in a lineage, it becomes a part of something. If I don’t see a good film for a while, I can forget why I love films in general. Films from the early era of filmmaking are really important in that sense; I know that when I can’t find a movie, they’ll remind me that making films is good, I’ll turn on an old film and see all the joy and magic of cinema.

When you think about the beginning of cinema and how differently it worked and how many possibilities it showed, and then think about how narrow it is now—or at least this is what the industry is proposing—it can be discouraging. The mentality you needed to have to make films back then allowed for different ideas about dramaturgy and stories. Companies now have ideas of how cinema should look or be today, and if you’re not doing it like that, it makes you feel like you can’t do it. Some people may feel like, because of these reasons, that they can’t make films in a specific way, but of course that’s not something I think about a lot.

What was it like to go from making your short films to your debut feature Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017)? You used a Sony Ericsson phone to shoot the entire film—what sort of things did you learn from using it?

There was a lot of learning, in every sense. On one hand, I also filmed it myself and it’s a very different experience. I worked with, more or less, complete freedom; I could do anything I wanted. Normally, you have limitations for how long you can shoot. Here, I had as many days to film. It was interesting to let go, to see what could happen. In the writing process, I realized that I needed to create some limitations to the story, about how many subjects could be in the film. As with any moment in history, it was a hard and dramatic time and there were different things I cared about, and because of this I felt it should be a part of my film. And at a certain point I realized it was too much, and it was good to realize this “too much” by myself, that it wasn’t someone else saying it to me, which is how it usually works. An important thing I understood from this process was that I somehow started to believe that you don’t really have to mention everything. I had this idea that if you care about something, and if you really do care about it, you don’t always have to talk about it. If you have a certain feeling, it’ll still be a part of your film—maybe not directly, but someone watching it will still feel it. How much really translates is impossible to know, but even having this understanding of the medium’s capabilities was a big discovery for me. It was very connected with the way of making the film. I was holding the camera and I was making the decisions, which meant that a big part of myself was going to be there.

Did you learn anything about yourself as a result of making the film? Are there autobiographical components?

With every film you make, there’s a big change. After every work, you’re different. It’s kind of scary (laughs). It can also be strange for the people around you because if you make something every two or three years, you can have this feeling that every film is a really big event. I was completely in it, and when it was done, everything around me, including myself, somehow changed. Working with this small Sony Ericsson meant filming a lot, not just for this film but even before and after. I was filming before I was making the film and I became a different kind of observer. I was seeing much more than I would in normal daily life. When you have this camera with you, you know that any moment could be part of a film; if you see something interesting, you can film it. You start having this feeling all the time; it becomes a part of your every moment, this feeling of always looking for something. And I’m not saying you’re doing this to see what could be used in a future work—it’s about what you can take with you now. Even if you’re finished with filming, you still have this eye. You’re always looking for something.

I had a break between Let the Summer Never Come Again and Dry Leaf (2025) where I didn’t use this camera, with What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021). My eye had become less precise because of this break, so I needed some time to sharpen it again.

Do you feel like your eye was less sharp while making What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? because you used more formal equipment?

Yes, I think so. But when I was making that film, I still had my Sony Ericsson with me and I was still taking a lot of pictures with it. And even though I didn’t use them for the film, they still inspired it somehow. We’d go to locations and I’d take pictures, and after we finished What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, I was very tired and we had a break. I acted in my friend’s film [Julian Radlmaier’s Bloodsuckers (2021)], and there was a period where I was really done with filming. I put my little camera aside. I was so used to using this phone that I realized that I really needed it to see. For 10 years or so, it was with me all the time. During What Do We See, I’d take it with me on walks and I was taking pictures and finding places to then use in the film. The walks were with the cinematographer [Faraz Fesharaki], and he’d joke that I’d use this material later in the film. He had his doubts about me making videos with the phone, but it really helped me see.

Was the Sony Ericsson your phone for regular daily purposes too?

Yeah, up until the final preparation for What Do We See. That’s when I got an iPhone from our producer. Sometimes you get images sent to you by the art director or costume designer and you have to respond quickly, and I was the only one without a smart phone. I was slowing everything down and I was told that after the film I could just get rid of my iPhone, but I didn’t.

How’s it been with the iPhone?

It’s strange. I was really addicted to Instagram Reels, though less so now. They were really inspiring though because you’d find things you’d never see, and there would be really funny and crazy things. This is a banal thought, but smart phones take more than they give. I’m sure about this. When I was making Let the Summer Never Come Again, I didn’t have a smart phone and I remember being on the bus or in the city and looking around. You don’t have any other choice but to look around. I’d listen to music, sure, but my eyes would look around. And in that film there are so many images on the bus and in the city; you can tell it’s made by someone who doesn’t have a smart phone. And nowadays, I look less at my surroundings because of my smart phone… (in a dejected tone) so yeah.

So did Dry Leaf get you back into the mindset of those pre-smart phone days?

With Dry Leaf, we were filming outside of the city. And while I tried not to use it a lot, I was sitting next to the driver, who was one of the actors, and I would use Google Maps to see where to go. So it was still an active device, especially because we were driving. I know I missed things because I was looking at my phone to say where we had to go, and I was the person during this shoot who would suggest where to stop.

Earlier you mentioned that you were inspired by the way your grandmother told fairy tales. Was there a specific way that she told these stories that have impacted your films? Maybe it has to do with the tone, or the narration in What Do We See, or the way you structure your films.

It’s really hard for me to remember everything, but I’m quite sure that the voiceover and storytelling in all my films is all connected to that. The tone and pace of this narration has to do with something in my past, no? I imagine it was connected with how she would do it. I know that she would often translate them live—her books were in English or Russian. It was a bit slower than normal reading, and this slower pace has to do with how I make things.

In a past interview you’ve mentioned that you would take screenshots of films and then reference them later. With Dry Leaf, it’s hard not to think about Kiarostami and impressionist painters like Cézanne. What sort of artists were you thinking about when making the film?

This time, it was less precise than with my previous films. With What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, we had a lot of different influences and ideas that were kept in these folders, and these were directly connected with specific scenes. We’d find something in a movie, and then try to connect it with one scene in our film; we had these references later when shooting. For us, it was good to match and connect what we were doing with these influences because, sometimes, two people will talk and think they’re talking about the same thing but they’re not (laughter). We were watching Nanni Moretti and Kiarostami. This time, I still had a big folder of screenshots and images and quotes, but I was not going back there to reuse it, at least not like how we did before. Also, I was doing that alone, and it was just something to feed my brain and my heart. Later, it would appear in something that we’d done, but it wasn’t as conscious as before. The things you love always reappear in your films.

This time around, there were things beyond films. There was literature. Before I was about to start shooting, which was going to be on a Monday, I went to play football on Sunday night. I didn’t break my leg but there was an accident and I had to stay home for two months. I always wanted to read [Miguel de] Cervantes but never managed to read anything. When I read Don Quixote… well, when you read something with so many ideas and forms, it really changes you. I see it now as a happy accident, and this accident also gave me a calmness and a lot of time to think. When a doctor tells you to stay home for two months and not to move, people won’t ask you to do stuff and you don’t feel bad about not being active. You can rest. These two months were very important because beyond the reading, it also meant watching a lot of films and a lot more time to think, at least in a calm way.

I wanted to ask about the use of sound and music in the film. When I went into the film, I was curious about how it’d differ from Let The Summer Never Come Again, and the most notable thing to me was how Dry Leaf’s sound isn’t coming from the phone itself. The sound is a lot higher quality. What happens, then, is that it shapes the reality of the images in a different way; you start to realize that you don’t need complete clarity of image because the sound grants you permission in this way. Can you talk about how you approached the sound?

When I started to film Let the Summer Never Come Again, a friend of mine here in Tbilisi came to visit me and he proposed to record sound. He was here for two weeks and then I made some synchronizations and it was clear that, especially in a city, it would take too long with the sound recording. And I had a feeling it wasn’t needed. I wanted things to go faster; I didn’t want to say, “Okay, we’re filming, we need the sound.” It was also clear that this very clear sound didn’t work with the image. I also knew with the film that I wouldn’t be able to work with a sound designer afterwards and I would have to do it myself, so there was no real possibility to make changes to this recorded sound. That’s when I completely gave up and decided to use the sound that the phone was recording. I think it was a good decision for that because the phone also has an interesting sound.

This time, as we traveled and had time to be in fields and forests, we wanted to talk with people and really understand what they were saying. There was also this interest to see if we could find the right tone. We wanted to find a way to see what could match the image. It’s also not the most perfect recording because sometimes I’d forget to say that we were recording—a lot of times we were just walking around. We didn’t have boom mics and there were other limitations. There was a lot that happened in the sound design and mixing, too. How much do we clean it? How many details do we add? We recorded sound from very far for certain shots, so we had this ambience but not a lot of detail. We had this question about whether or not we should hear the engine of a car. There were a lot of discussions, and at some point we found the right tone and then we were able to follow it.

How did you know when tone was right? Or was it more of a gut feeling? You have this recorded sound, but then that’s interspersed with your brother’s music. It’s cool to see how passages from Giorgi’s album, Forests, Tales, Cities, Forests (2025), make their way into the film. How do you balance these sounds with the more professionally recorded music?

My brother was not only doing music but the sound, so he was there. And this music we used later in the film, he was making that during these same travels. The music was inspired by these travels, so it made sense to use it. It was initially there just as a template, but then I got so used to it that I wanted to keep it.

I was also curious about how Levani’s voice sounds in the film. When we hear him, it sounds like his voice is kind of closer to the microphone. It felt really interesting to hear his presence more strongly given he’s this invisible character.

We were thinking about how detailed his presence should be and about how he should talk. We tried a lot of things. We were wondering if we should hear their footsteps or clothes or if we should hear them breathe. There are so many things you can do to make someone part of this reality, but I had this feeling that I may want to have the invisible characters again in future films. I liked the idea of having it done here very simply, where the narrator is just telling us that he is there. I didn’t want to exaggerate it with anything or have all these ticks. That can be for the future.

Are there any memorable stories you have from all the traveling you did and with all the people you met?

The most emotional thing was to go around and meet people, these animals, and these places, and then to leave. It’s a strange way of living. You go somewhere and get close with someone but you are on this mission of filming, so you have to continue. There was nothing extraordinary that happened to us, but for all of us, every day was unbearably emotional. We were meeting something or someone that was very precious; it was a very hard experience. I always get sad when I meet someone I like because I think the experience of leaving gives you this idea that this person or creature will have hard times. We know that everyone experiences tough things, so it felt like we were wind—we would come and go, and we would only see a little bit of their beauty.

To clarify, you get sad because you know everybody is going to face hardships in life?

The biography of every human is filled with tough moments. I think it’s a big combination of things. Even if you forget about whether it will be tough or good or bad, there will still be a lot of emotions when you leave. It’s hard to bear all of it.

Do you feel like meeting these different people was similar to how you feel when going to those protests? Are the emotions that you feel similar?

I haven’t thought about this before. There are similarities and differences. We meet every day for reasons that we don’t want to exist. And when I go on these travels, it makes me uncomfortable that I’m intervening on the everyday lives of these people and I don’t know what it was like for them before or after.

Did you feel emotional after seeing these football fields that no longer exist?

Not directly. The damage you see is bigger than the football fields. The injustice is just a representation of it on a smaller scale. If kids are in a village, they’ll find a place to play, but if you go to a village and there aren’t any kids anymore because they all left to the city, then there’s no sense for a football stadium.

There’s that line near the end of the film where you talk about the football fields being gone and how the kids can play anywhere. There’s this spirit of making do with what you can. And I was thinking about that in relation to what you said about the protests.

Optimism is a duty. When you’re creating something, when you’re making a film, you’re saying that it makes sense to do so, that you see some sort of future—otherwise, you wouldn’t make it. If you really create something, it’s your duty to at least pretend that you have some hope.

Is that a primary objective of Dry Leaf, to provide hope?

I really don’t know. And it’s also a really strange subject and also ethically problematic. You can say that you are hopeful but then there are things happening where it doesn’t make any sense. They can just seem like words. But I have this feeling that if you keep doing things, it should make some sense to you that you’re doing them, no?

What was the decision behind having Dry Leaf split into two parts?

It’s a tool to relate it to the cinematic form. I like giving shapes and borders or forms to this material, which can feel formless because it’s repetitious. I felt it’d be good to have some sort of order beyond just a beginning and end.

You have the scene with the Georgian polyphonic singing. Is there anything about Georgian polyphony you find interesting? And this isn’t to say that you were relating the form of that music to the form of your film.

This musicality shapes you when you live with it, when you hear it throughout your whole life. It’s a way of living, it’s about togetherness and inclusion. It wasn’t really planned that I would be at this place and that I’d record these songs. I can speculate about the music, but it’s too big a subject—I’d be too imprecise. It defines so much of our being and our understanding of the world—every time you include it in a film, it requires a lot of decision-making. Here, I got the feeling that it was something in the background and not some sort of soundtrack or a sort of music that’d represent the film. It was there in the background with the dialogue; we had some film and we were like, let’s give some time to this sound, to preserve it somehow.

I wanted to ask this earlier, but what was the reason behind having this gay romance at the center of Let the Summer Never Come Again?

The year before I filmed, there was something horrible that happened where they tried to organize some sort of pride event in the center of Tbilisi and they had a really big clash with the conservative people. It was one of the darkest days of our contemporary history. For me, it was a way of supporting this idea that love is love. I was very angry.

Do you have a complicated relationship with Christianity and how it impacts culture in Georgia?

I don’t have problems with it generally, but there are often problems when an institution will present their ideas and it’ll be more than we need. And it’ll be a big part of politics, too, which is wrong.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

How I play football. You’d love to have a teammate like me—I make good passes, and I love giving the ball away to my teammates.

So you’re okay with not being the star?

Playmakers can be stars too.

Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf is screening as part of TIFF’s Wavelengths program.

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Nicolás Pereda (b. 1982) is a Mexican-Canadian filmmaker who has spent his career constructing works that blur the lines between the real and imagined. Concerned with the prismatic nature of mundanity, his films—methodical, slow-paced, and featuring a stable of regular actors both professional and non-professional—revel in the mysteries and realities of everyday experiences, whether harsh, absurd, humorous, or all three at once. Inspired by the films of Tsai Ming-liang, his works unfold patiently, weaving in biographical elements of both himself and his subjects/actors.

Since his debut feature film, Where Are Their Stories? (2007), Pereda has found ways to navigate the docufiction medium to provide ruminations on contemporary Mexico with regards to poverty, labor, race, bureaucracy, history, memory, and interpersonal relationships. More recently, he’s started to view his works less as documentary and fiction hybrids, and more as products of a certain, unavoidable truth: that fiction is always embedded into the real. His 10th feature film, Lázaro at Night (2024), has its New York theatrical premiere tonight at Metrograph. His newest feature film, Copper (2025), has its North American premiere on September 12th as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Pereda on September 5th, 2025 to discuss his childhood, his new films, and how telling lies to yourself isn’t necessarily bad.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in Mexico City. What are the earliest memories you have of growing up there—what comes to mind?

Nicolás Pereda: I grew up in a particular area called Coyoacán, where all of the buildings are colonial buildings. It's quite pretty and picturesque—it’s where the Frida Kahlo house is. When tourists go to the city, they tend to go to this area at some point even though it’s removed from the rest of the city. I had a childhood that was quite free, especially for a city that is so dense. I would walk around alone when I was 7 or 8 years old, though people don’t do that anymore. I went to a school that was about an hour away by bus. There was a little van that took us there, me and my sister, so I just remember crossing endless concrete buildings to get to school. Those are the biggest memories I have of the city.

I can also say that I remember, at some point, noticing the differences in social class early on. My parents are not rich but they’re academics and artists, so they belong to a middle class that’s very, very small in Mexico. I guess most of the Third World operates similarly, but I remember being really struck by the social differences early on.

Are there any particular experiences that made you aware of this?

An experience that I think a lot of kids have is when they go out to eat in plazas. Kids come and ask for money and if you don’t give them any, they ask for the food you’re eating. And you’re the same age as those kids asking for food. It becomes super complex; you don’t know what to do with that, and you feel somewhat guilty, but you’re also only 7 or 8 years old.

Did you ever have conversations about this stuff with your siblings or parents?

A little bit, but it was mostly with my extended family and not my nuclear family, so my aunts and uncles and cousins. I think we all think of ourselves as progressive, left-wing people who can easily point to where the troubles exist in Mexican society and why they continue. Even then, we see that there is a class of people who are exploited, and these are the people who do work for us. But because our houses are not extravagant and we don’t drive fancy cars, you feel like there must be other people who are the bad guys. I was trying to reflect on the way we oppress a different social class, and it’s also quite palpable. If you’re not from that society and you visit, you can see that there are people who are clearly oppressing others.

You mentioned earlier that when you were 7 or 8 that you were walking around. Do you have any fond experiences of doing that?

Mexico City felt like home. I can’t think of anything specific right now, but it was a vivid experience and I often go back to that area to see my parents. And it still feels like home to me.

When did you first get into the arts? Were there any formative experiences where you recognized what art could do or be? This doesn’t have to relate to film, either.

I never thought I would be an artist or that art even particularly interested me. I think art interested me to some degree because of my family and, since I was a good student, my mom took me to places—I was a quiet kid and I would actually pay attention. At the same time, I wasn’t good at the basic things you tend to be good at when you actually consider art: painting, drawing. I had really bad handwriting, too. I thought I was bad at art, and that distanced me from it for most of my childhood.

When I was 16 or so, I took a small workshop where we made films. We had to shoot on VHS with the big camera, and I started shooting. I enjoyed that process, I enjoyed mixing from one tape to another, but it was really the machinery I got into and not so much the themes or subject matters or ideas, really. It was very tech-y. It didn’t matter what I was filming. And while I think I tried to care, upon reflection I was really only enthralled with the machinery.

Were you always a hands-on person, tinkering with objects and such? Or was that the first time you realized that you liked working with machines?

I always liked little projects. When I was 14 I would paint my bedroom without telling my parents. I liked creating little structures and decorating things in bizarre ways. I remember going to the hardware store by myself when I was little because I wanted to pick up things. My parents wouldn’t know I was doing that stuff. Everything I did came out sort of crooked, too—I’m not a perfectionist at all now and I wasn’t as a kid either. I was just happy to build, even if it didn’t work out so well. I feel the films have that same quality too, to some degree.

What was this film that you made at 16?

It was about a kid with a mental disability who was not exactly aware of it, and it’s because it was a slight disability. It was in first person, so it was a subjective film, and it was about his daily life. It was a mundane thing—he would go on walks. There was also voiceover narration, which was part of the workshop; we had to learn how to record voice and know how to mix, so I did a voiceover and was walking around. It was ambiguous whether this person had a mental disability or not, but you could maybe think that they did.

Do you mind talking about the movies you were watching between the age of 16, when you made this first film, and later in your 20s when your first official films came out? A lot of your early works do feel very of their time—I think about them in relation to other low-budget indie films, in relation to other slow cinema.

I went to film school at 19. I didn’t grow up watching movies, so when I went to film school, I started watching movies obsessively. I remember watching Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? (2001) and feeling like it was something I’d never watched before, and it didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen either. The usual ways of interpreting narrative were just not there. His ideas about story and character development… there was something I didn’t understand, but I was also engaged with the film. That feeling of being connected to something that is so alien to you was really exciting. This idea, where I don’t understand something but am still really engaged with it, made me realize that you don’t always have to understand something. With art, you want some sort of emotional connection, not an understanding. And of course I was moved by his whole aesthetic.

I think I watched all of the things that became fundamental to everything I’ve done up to this point quite early on. There were the films of Tsai, Apichatpong, Fassbinder, Bresson, and then the more canonical films. When I watched Chantal Akerman, there was also this big shift for me. The fact she was working partly in the experimental world and the narrative world, and moving seamlessly from one film to the next, became really important.

You just said that it’s not necessarily important to understand everything. How do you approach films that are documentaries, that skew more non-fiction? I’m thinking about your earliest films, like Where Are Their Stories? (2007) and Interview with the Earth (2008). How important is it that your audience understands the reality of situations and that they hear the complete stories of these people?

When it comes to the work that I do specifically—and this is not necessarily what I think about with all cinema in general—I actually don’t care what information gets transferred to the viewer. By this I mean concrete facts and concrete knowledge. I spend way too much time in my films doing stuff that runs counter to that, that prevents you from understanding. There’s so much information that is lacking in those films that you can’t really have a cohesive understanding of what’s going on. And the films could become too lukewarm if I try to do everything.

The producer of Copper (2025), my latest feature, is my cousin Paula Mónaco. She’s a journalist. And my cinematographer, Miguel Tovar, is also a journalist. I was working with them because I was going to shoot in an area that was a little bit dangerous, and they know the country quite well because they’re always traveling for journalism. They create small documentary pieces, mostly as freelancers; they’ve created stuff for The New York Times and other publications. Their work is the opposite of what I do. It’s very committed and thorough. When I watch their works—and they’re working in spaces that are similar to the ones I work in—I know that what they want is for people to understand that there’s something happening to specific people and that action needs to be taken. Different advocacy groups use their pieces to bring attention to certain problems in society.

I think it’s great that they do that, but… if that were my interest I’d just do that (laughter). I wouldn’t disguise it as art, it would just be the thing I do. In reality, what I’m interested in is capturing the same feeling that Tsai’s movies generated in me, of not understanding what I’m watching but still being engaged. That’s what I’m after. For the films that have some kind of social interest, you still don’t know what’s happening and who these people are. You just get a sense of conflict, and there’s nothing you can do about it either, as a viewer.

Let’s take something like The Palace (2013), then. That film has clearer social messaging than some of your other works—and there are scenes where people are directly talking to the camera, too—but it’s obviously not something a journalist like your cousin would make. What’s the intention you had with that film, and how do you know how much to withhold and present to capture that?

What I withhold and what I present is intuitive. I just present the scenes that I feel have weight, and what that means is also subjective, as I don’t always know what will have weight. We could use the word “pulse,” where I feel there’s something that comes to life. Seeing a girl make a bed is… nothing. But seeing that specific girl make the bed… and I watched her make it, and I thought there was something so interesting about the way she made it, and then you think about how she’s young and doing this task thoroughly and you wonder what this all means. Some of the interviews at the end of the film were more striking than others, and they’re all saying similar things, but then there are some people who have more intensity. To go back to what we were talking about, it is on one hand about a complicated subject matter, and the film clearly has an agenda. But at the same time, it’s quite open; it’s not about a specific space where one should try to intervene.

Sometimes you watch a film about a certain problem and you feel like you really know about the problem and you really know what the solutions are. You have a sense of what you should be doing. With The Palace, it’s this thing where you see this injustice happening, but there is no clear way out. It’s not clear what one should do about it; it doesn’t allow you a place for comfort, in that sense. It doesn’t feel like watching it is part of the solution. This is what I find problematic about some documentaries on social issues: as you watch them, you feel like the act of watching them is part of the resistance. You come out feeling emancipated, as if you have already made the first step in solving this problem. And then you get distracted and forget about it and don’t do anything. You can’t save the whales one day and then watch another doc and go help kids who are working in manufacturing plants.

With The Palace, I wanted to create a sense of this injustice, but you get bored as well. It cannot be exciting or moving—when it is, you start to feel emancipated. It gives you too much hope. You may get upset when watching certain films—there will be these extreme feelings—but I’d rather not generate them. It’s not like you couldn’t just look around and see that injustice is happening everywhere. And the thing is, you may not generate those feelings when doing that, but then you’ll watch something and feel intensely emotional… it’s strange. It would take five minutes to read the news and realize that the world is falling apart. Like, why did you suddenly become so emotional and connected to a certain problem? People have become really good at making these documentaries and manipulating people’s feelings, and I’m trying to resist that.

You mentioned the virtues of boredom. That’s a loaded word that feels inherently negative, but I also think in your films, whenever you have a long take, there is an understanding that boredom can be prismatic. Sometimes, this boredom can reveal itself as something mysterious, as something that provides intrigue. Sometimes it can be meditative or ruminative. I’m curious how you navigate this in your more narrative films as opposed to the works that feel more like documentaries. We can talk about your newest works, Lázaro at Night (2024) and Copper (2025).

I’m particularly interested in the mundane. The mundane is strange because it ultimately encompasses everything. Sometimes the mundane is extremely boring. We can think of boredom and entertainment as being on opposite poles, but neither are good or bad things—they can both be deep or shallow. The mundane for me tends to be interesting because I find that a lot of comedy exists in a way where the feeling is not shared by all of the participants. We’ve all been in situations where you see an interaction and find it funny but the person next to you doesn’t think it’s funny, as it depends on your idiosyncrasies and what you perceive. It happens all the time—the mundane is filled with these bizarre and funny situations. And sometimes you want to laugh but it’d be awkward to do so because people are just doing their thing.

I’ve been in situations at the bank where the banker’s trying to offer me something and the way they’re doing it is hilarious. I have to contain my laughter, though, because for him it’s just a normal interaction. The other day I went to buy a washing machine and the way she was selling it to me… at one point it was so ridiculous. I went with my sister and I was just looking at her and tearing up because I thought it was so funny, but this was in a department store and there were other people around selling things, and it was just a natural thing for these people. I like this space where situations can be, depending on your perception, really boring or really funny, or perhaps really complex in relation to social dynamics. To some degree, you see what you wanna see. Sometimes it’s clear what my agenda is, but sometimes you can be really lost if there is nothing you perceive, or if you’re attuned to something that I’m not aware of.

You said in an interview in the early 2010s that you like working with non-professional actors and not giving them instructions because what naturally happens is that they start talking about their own experiences and lives. Has the way you approached working with actors changed throughout the course of your career? Obviously we could talk about Gabino Rodríguez, who you’ve worked with since your debut, but I’m wondering more broadly if your philosophy on working with actors has evolved. We can talk about this in light of Lázaro at Night given that the film is about actors.

At the time, I was much more interested in the possibilities of documentary-fiction hybrids; I was working with both professional and non-professional actors and mixing them together. I was also thinking about the lives of both professional and non-professional actors, thinking about how their own lives can impact the film.

I think when I said that quote, I was probably writing the film Greatest Hits (2012). The second part of the film has my uncle playing a character, but he’s really playing himself and telling stories of his own life. Also at the same time, earlier in the film, there is a father who is an actor but he’s also the father of Gabino in real life. At some point they talk a little bit about their own private lives, of Gabino’s mom dying and how he dealt with it. I was interested in these intersections between the lives of these people and their characters. The characters will suddenly shift into the actor and then back into the character, and you weren’t sure if you were looking at a documentary subject or a fictional character.

What’s happened over the years is quite simple, actually. I’m interested in the actor’s ability to be comfortable with their own movements, within their own skin, without feeling the need to perform. In a superficial sense, I like that the actors I work with don’t have to create or put on a different body for the film. They’re able to move, breathe, and talk in the same way they would without the camera. Their character is not them, but everything else is them. It’s almost as if they’re not acting, but at the same time they’re not playing themselves, but they’re also playing a version of themselves. When I see how they laugh and move, it’s not like they’re rehearsing it beforehand, and they’re not coming up to me afterwards, asking if it looks or sounds okay.

And this is how I think about the documentary element in my films now. They’ve become so entrenched in fiction, so the documentary nature comes from the biographical elements of the actors. Gabino changed his name to Lázaro, so now he’s Lázaro. When I was writing that screenplay, I thought it was funny because we all had this problem remembering his name and we were correcting ourselves. We would correct other people too, because it was like a dead name. It was solemn, this whole idea, but we were like… why is this so solemn? He’s just playing around, he just changed his name, and there’s not that much at stake. We can make fun of it. Or with Paco [Francisco Barreiro], he acted in a TV show called Narcos: Mexico and I took that persona and used it. So there are these biographical elements that seep into the films.

In a very practical sense, working with the same people means that we don’t talk about what I expect of them. I just give them the screenplay and they do what they do. Sometimes I tell them things, but most of the time, we’re already at a place where we’re in sync. They don’t doubt that what they’re doing is what I want from them.

Was there a reason for the name change to Lázaro?

When he was around 34 years old—he’s 42 now, so this was 8 years ago—he told me and some other people that he thought 35 would be the halfway point of his life. He decided that he wanted to live a different life at 35; and that the life he lived up until this point was fine but he had gotten bored and wanted to become a new person. It all seemed kind of abstract, but then he changed his name, got plastic surgery, and changed his face. In person it’s super striking, and the first time I saw him with his new face I thought it was really crazy. I’ve gotten used to it now, but I don’t know if it’s so obvious in the films. Lázaro at Night was the first film with his new face, and perhaps it’s not so striking, but to me it was like filming a new person.

He framed it as an artistic project. He’s mainly a theater director and an actor for plays. His main interest in life is fiction and specifically fiction in the everyday. Before, he was interested in this fiction as a prankster. He would tell his dad that he moved to Tijuana when he really moved to Amsterdam and would write as if he actually did. He would have games like that. He would engage with friends in fictional ways. In fact, when he changed his face, nobody believed him. He would write to people and tell them he did this, but we all thought it was a prank. His jokes were all harmless.

I like his commitment to fiction because, for him, fiction is life. It’s not like there’s the real and then there’s the fiction on the side. The real is just a fiction that we create for ourselves. We come up with different arrangements for life, and we find that it’s just the natural course of things. But these arrangements are what we can call fiction. I enjoy that way of thinking: that fiction is just a way to organize the real. We don’t choose most of the organizations of the real—we go to school because we’re told to, we have jobs and have meetings because that’s just what we do. But all those ways of organizing are artificial. It’s important to differentiate between fiction and lies. It’s not like you’re lying when there’s a fiction, especially when you have an understanding that it is a fiction.

So anyways, I’m interested in the way he thinks about life and how it links to fiction, and this also goes back to the question of where documentary went in my work. After so many years, I stopped thinking of the films as documentary-fiction hybrids. I started thinking about how the fictional has a lot to do with the real, and I don’t want to lose that connection.

What was it like to work with him for Lázaro at Night and Copper? He said that he wanted to have a new life, so I’m wondering if you were pushing him in specific ways. This also feels at odds with what you said about working with the same actor and how there’s this sort of unspoken understanding of what should be done. It can seem, in some sense, like a bad thing as you may not be pushed in different directions.

I think I’m pushing myself in different ways. The filmmaking is going into spaces that I hadn’t done before, and I’m trying to think about sound in a new way. But my relationship with him and also Paco, Luisa [Pardo], and Tere [Sánchez] is one where I give them a lot of freedom. Maybe it’ll change, but I like that right now, I can experiment with things and they can do things, and then I can observe how they enter the films. They’re collaborators; they have their own agency. I’m very tyrannical with regards to almost everything in any film, but not with regards to them. They just do what they do, and most of the time I like it

His transformation is a project that takes over his entire life, whereas the films are just asterisks. They’re very small in his whole project of transformation, and he has become a new person in some ways, but the changes are more subtle; I wouldn’t be able to perceive them if we weren’t close. It’s funny because his plays haven’t changed that much. They have a theater group and they’ve been doing plays for like 20 years. The plays are still in the same vein, so I think artistically, I think he wishes that he transformed his art—his face—even more. I think he’s very difficult to change artistically, too.

You eventually start finding the things you like, the things that make you vibrate. And to be able to generate that level of excitement with something new is difficult. It can be artificial. That excitement of finding something takes time, and you can’t just replicate it, you have to shift the way you make things. If you don’t find that excitement, it’s difficult to continue making. What makes artists continue is this certain fire you have, but it’s not just a weird, ambiguous fire—it has to do with very specific things that excite you. Once you find them you don’t want to let go because it’s so easy to lose the will to continue making work.

Not a lot of people watch these films, they don’t have repercussions in the world, and it’s almost like a ridiculous endeavor when you think about the spectatorship landscape. One time we were making a film and Lázaro asked me, “How many people do you think will watch this?” I was like, “I don’t know, maybe with good distribution there will be 30,000 people or so,” which is quite ambitious. And then he said, “Look at this TikTok, it has 2,000,000 views and was made this morning.” (laughter). I was like, “Fuck off!” You feel the ridiculousness of these endeavors. We’re not trying to change the world, we’re just part of a community of artists and perhaps as a small group, it can make a difference, but we’re really just like one bee in a hive. If one bee disappears, the hive still goes on. And you can view your art in the same way. So the only way to continue is to be really enamored with what you do. And that’s why it’s so difficult to let go of things you find that really move you.

You were talking earlier about fiction as a way to organize reality. Do you mind talking about the reasons behind having the Aladdin story in Lázaro at Night?

I was thinking about the first part of the film, and then I listened to this lecture by an Argentinian writer, César Aira. He’s very prolific, and he’s older now but he’s written millions of books—they’re kind of short. He was writing about realism and was talking about the story of Aladdin and I was really engaged with the talk and his ideas. Sometimes the way I write films has to do with collage—you have different elements and they don’t seem to fit, but then you make them fit and see what happens. In a sense, there was no rational reason as to why Aladdin should be in the film (laughter), and I tried to find a way to make it possible—even then, I had to push the pieces together pretty hard since they’re from different worlds. It’s an interpretation more than the driving force of the film.

In the first part of Lázaro at Night, the characters have a problem with their desire. They’re characters who have been left out of artistic life—they’re in their 40s, they hardly do the things that they wanted to do when they were younger. Clearly, they haven’t managed to become actors or writers properly. Also, the love and desire between them feels very cold and difficult; it’s unclear how they care about one another. It’s unclear how they think they care about one another. Luisa is quite hostile to both of them, and they seem unfazed by their relationship with Luisa. These are people who have trouble understanding their desires, and when I wrote it, I was in that world. I was feeling strange about my own desires and whether fulfilling them would actually make me feel any better.

In Spanish, the word for wish is the same as desire—deseo. So what the genie grants Aladdin, in Spanish, are three desires. “What do you desire?” I like this idea that the characters in the beginning have a difficult time with desire and fulfilling them, and then in the second part, the desires are just granted. And when the desires are given, he just chooses food. These are bare necessities, as opposed to those in the first part who wanted it all. There’s something wise about Aladdin because he perhaps doesn’t want to change his way of life because it’s comfortable; he just wants a little help to maintain it.

While watching it, I also thought, Aladdin’s life is kind of boring (laughter). I grew up in a capitalist world in which I’ve been told since I was a baby that I should desire things and fight for them. I was taught that life should be a series of improvements, where you get better and eventually have more, but Aladdin was written in a pre-capitalist time. The way I tell the whole Aladdin story is the way the beginning of the original tale is written. For the longest time, Aladdin is just ordering food and going back in circles. It’s only until something else happens to him that he needs to move and do other things. In the original tale, he’s totally comfortable with just getting a bit of food and selling it in the market—he finds it pleasurable to bargain and to talk with the merchants.

Anyways, I like the story of Aladdin because of how it links to desire in the first part of Lázaro at Night and also because it doesn’t give answers. Maybe it’s more calm and easier in a sense, but life is super hard when you don’t have other ambitions. Ambition is a funny word for me. The people in the first part have ambitions, but Aladdin is not ambitious at all. And in my view, I can see ambition as a negative thing, but at the same time, when I look at Aladdin I feel like I could never be that dude. I have more ambitions.

Was there an autobiographical component to Copper (2025) at all? I appreciate that the film reflects what you said earlier. There’s a mundanity to everything in the film even though it’s about how this guy needs an oxygen tank. I appreciate the absurdity that’s present in the film in navigating bureaucratic nightmares as well as interpersonal relationships; it’s low-key but also funny.

When there are autobiographical components, they’re hidden. Like with Lázaro at Night, yeah the issue of desire was there, but it’s not really autobiographical. I was feeling something that then shows up in the characters, and not so much with material things but with how they feel. With Copper, I was somewhere else. I think I’ve managed, with the privileges I’ve had in my life, to be shielded from a lot of the more heavy things of mundane modern life, like these jobs that are extremely soul-crushing. We see that there is this job that Rosa has where she goes to this office. It’s unclear what she does, but we see that what she does is not productive. This isn’t to say that productivity is necessarily a positive thing, but for the fulfillment of the human soul… it’s not great to be doing something that you know is meaningless—all that paperwork, all the bureaucracy of different industries.

Copper is more about observing a world that I find is very unfortunate. The fact that the main character has a sickness, but that the sickness is something everyone doubts… and the audience doubts it too, and even I doubted it when I watched it. You never want to doubt someone’s sickness, but at the same time, the sickness coincides with him seeing a dead person, so perhaps he created it himself. It’s unclear. So how do lies play into that? Maybe he’s just lying to himself that he’s sick. Maybe not. And we hear these conversations about lies in the film that I’m interested in. I’m interested in the ambiguity of lies. When somebody says they’re sick and you don’t believe them, you think, maybe they’re not sick but they believe they are, or they’re making themself sick somehow. The relationship between Lázaro and Rosa is kind of a lie, too. Why does Rosa keep him so close when it feels like she’s uncomfortable at times? But she also gives him rope to continue being enamored with her.

I love what you’re saying because it makes you think about the importance of lies, about whether lies can be a part of actual reality in the way that fiction can.

We convince ourselves, or we try to convince ourselves, that the lives that we have are fulfilling. The moment we stop thinking that, we become depressed. People have different ways and propensities, but for me at least, if I don’t convince myself that the decisions I make and the way I’m leading my life are bringing me joy, I start becoming depressed. In a sense, it’s not so much about the things that I do as it is me telling myself that those things are great (laughter). If I just tell myself that these are good things to do and that things are okay, that’s just me lying to myself, at least to some degree. But I don’t think that’s problematic—I think it’s great. If Lázaro woke up one day and said, “Fuck, what have I done with my face,” well, he doesn’t want to go there. I’m sure he doesn’t. He wants to believe that it was a great decision. It’s difficult to live if you doubt what you do. So that can be a way of lying to yourself, but it’s not harmful; on the contrary, it’s good.

That’s an interesting thing to consider, just the necessity of lying to yourself to feel content with the life you have. Was there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to bring up?

No, not really. It was a conversation that went into different places—it was nice.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with that I wanted to ask you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

The clarity that I have towards what I do. The fact that I’m gonna continue making films gives me a lot of peace, and I like that. There’s a sense that whatever happens, I know I’m just gonna do it and that it brings me joy. And the fact that I have that is somewhat rare. Some other people have it too, but I feel very lucky.

Do you feel like part of this is because you’re lying to yourself?

If you become convinced that you’re lying to yourself, the whole thing falls apart. So, I’d rather not find out (laughter).

Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night (2024) plays tonight for its New York theatrical premiere at Metrograph. His newest feature film, Copper (2025), has its North American premiere on September 12th as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program.

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