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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Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (b. 1980) is a Mosotho filmmaker who has spent his career crafting poetic movies about identity, landscape, and collective memory. Born in Hlotse and now based in Berlin, Mosese gained international acclaim with the release of Mother, I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You. (2019) and This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019). Self-taught, his works employ a form of storytelling that is characteristic of what he experienced while growing up in Lesotho, including the vibrant anecdotes he heard from his mother and the recreation of films in his classrooms. His newest work is Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025), a dreamlike portrait of childhood, place, and community. The film screens as part of this year’s Cinéma du Réel—more information can be found here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Mosese on February 16th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss his new film, how he approaches sound, and the importance of imagination.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: How’s your day been?

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese: Today was very relaxed. The last few days have been hectic as I’ve been putting the final touches on my film.

Is there anything in particular that you always end up doing last with a film?

Yeah—letting go. Once you get closer to the date of a screening, your eyes become a magnifying glass. I’ll look over the [onscreen] text in the film and think, “Oh, I could’ve done things this other way.” But I have a team who conspires against me to make sure I don’t keep doing this (laughter). I managed to squeeze a few things in, though. It was almost like I was preparing to watch it myself. I know that if there are things that’ll bug me, I won’t want to watch it. And it normally takes me three years until I can watch one of my movies with other people.

In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned your love for the composer Julius Eastman. He’s talked about how he loves improvisation because it allows for an instant expression of feelings. And in participating in improvisation, he says that he is in the act of “seeing himself.” I was thinking of this while watching Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025) and while revisiting your old works. In previous interviews you’ve talked about how you don’t try to come up with a meaning for your films before making them but are instead content with letting meanings arise after the films are made. Does what Eastman say about improvisation resonate with you at all with regards to your approach to filmmaking?

Yeah, it makes sense. I create works based on feelings. Speaking of Julius Eastman, I was listening to him a lot, especially the score he did for The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc. In my previous works, the sound guy I worked with didn’t approach things from a technical point of view. The techniques came after, when we had to rectify something. And this is the same with my ideas; I don’t know where they’re going, but there’s a drive for this picture I have and I work my way into it. That’s why I like this essayistic, allegorical form—they allow for these accidents to happen, they allow you to go with your feelings without questioning it. I didn’t go to film school, so this is the only way I know how to make films. I’ve never been on a film set other than my own. I don’t even know how other people direct! (laughter). I try not to be so hard on myself, and it’s rewarding when it translates. You always have to check yourself—is this only affecting for me? But I’ve allowed myself to be free when creating.

Over the course of your career, have you done things to not be so hard on yourself? Has this changed at all, or did it simply come with time?

When I was a kid, the only currency I had was my imagination. I couldn’t fit in with our education system, in my class. We had professionals come into our class—there were police officers and doctors—and I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. But even then, I knew that my imagination was something I could escape to and find solace in. I didn’t need to stay where I was—I could travel. Confidence was something that came when people began to recognize this in me. When people are brainstorming, they may want to smoke some weed, but for me it’s very easy to do this.

I remember when I was in this residency, people were talking about this “stream of consciousness,” but I’m not quite sure what they meant by that. I think it’s this idea of vomiting ideas, where you can’t control anything. And that’s how I actually talk. I cut sentences short and I’m fragmented—it’s vomit, how I speak. Even now, I still spell my name wrong (laughter). But sometimes I don’t correct it, I just leave it. There’s a word in Sesotho that is materamputana and it’s used to describe how children draw. It’s just scribbling, and that’s my process—it’s this puke, it’s this vomit. I’m not good in any language—I’m not good at them. But now I’ve started to embrace it.

This is interesting to hear given the amount of voiceover you do in your new film. What was that process like? Did you have to say things and then edit them? Were you vomiting these words out?

I wrote a lot of material, and I wanted it to be completely separate from the movie and see where they could land. There were a lot of technical things that happened to make it more coherent, but there are also mistakes in the film that I left on purpose. I didn’t feel the need to correct them because it’s how I think they’re supposed to feel. Again, they’re based on feeling. I think I got this from my mother when I was a kid. I remember listening to Michael Jackson and telling her, “He’s using the wrong grammar.” And she said, “No, this is a musical language. It’s a creative language.” I think it all goes back to that moment. I learned that it’s not about how it’s written, it’s about how it feels. And when I have people come in and correct my mistakes, I don’t like the words anymore. They kill the poetry—it’s not abstract anymore. It sounds good, but only technically.

I know that there is this tradition of oral storytelling that you learned from your mother. Is there anything about the way she told stories that you feel is crucial to the way you talk in general, or in how you approached the narration in this film?

Absolutely. My mother is a true storyteller. She can talk about these mundane things, like an encounter with a neighbor, but the way she elaborates on it is pure storytelling, you know? (laughter). It has had a lot of influence on me. Also, back in the day, we would watch movies in the cinema and then we would go to school the next day and re-narrate the whole film from the beginning to the end. We would talk about fighting sequences, for instance, and really try to convey how they came across. So that helped me as well.

Do you remember any specific movies you did that for?

The only movie I remember from that time that really touched me is Platoon (1986). The thing is, even when we were telling these stories, we would improvise. These stories would be fragmented, or would include things we wished happened alongside what actually did happen. Part of that was to make people excited—we needed to exaggerate things. The other thing that really sparked something in my imagination is that I would sometimes not have enough money and just stand in the lobby. I’d listen to the movie as the audio came in through the cracks of the door. I would have this imagination of what was going on. And what would happen is that there would be a break in the middle of the film and they would let me in, but most of the time I’d be so disappointed in what I saw compared to the imagination I formed. I had this epic vision and suddenly it became so small.

At the beginning of Ancestral Visions you have this narration but all we see is red fabric. There’s something beautiful about having your audience hear what you are saying without having this direct visual accompaniment, that it’s just this evocative color. How important is it for an image to tell the story? And how do you know when to hold back?

This is one of the other things I like about this form: People can walk away from these films with whatever they create in their head. It inspires ideas. The only time I didn’t do it is when I mirror the Chris Marker line about the dark. At that point, I didn’t want anyone to imagine anything, I wanted people to understand the point of my film and focus on it. I wanted to impose something. But throughout the whole film, I play with ambiguity, and sometimes the words mirror the action but at other times they don’t. It’s a different kind of storytelling. Even this idea of having the red cloth, it’s because I’m interested in architecture. I wanted this one landscape over another landscape in this transgressive way—something that’s vile and bloody into one that’s beautiful. There’s a line that says, “What I am showing you is not for watching but for becoming.” This initial sequence was 15 minutes but people saw it and were like, “Come on.” (laughter). I wanted to have people in such a trance so that they would let go and just become this river of blood, this place that they’re entering, this twilight.

Do you feel like you’re trying to make your film about this process of “becoming” even outside of this initial scene?

There is this Jamaican philosopher named Sylvia Wynter and she talks about ceremonies and rituals of becoming. I was very much inspired by this. Throughout the film there are rituals, and the last part of the movie allows us to enter the place of madness, to enter twilight. And the place of twilight is a place of becoming. I want to get to this place where we can transcend our perception of life, our own judgments, the ecosystem in which we’re living in. I talk in the film about living in Europe and wearing masks, how you become a monstrosity. The face no longer remembers its true form. But in the twilight, you wear these masks as your own—you recognize this monstrosity and this patchwork and this mask as your own.

When you’re in Berlin, what do you miss most about Lesotho?

In the movie I say that I wish to stand under the sky and say to my son in my mother tongue without any foreign syllables, without saying “I love you.” The tongue is very connected to being seen. That’s what I miss about Lesotho. I’m still seen here, but there is a type of seeing where you can see because I am. It’s in the greetings, and they’re so special. I miss these a lot. Greetings can go long, and it’s a back and forth. It’s like a song. I started to use words like, “How are you?” We don’t use greetings like that in Lesotho. Like, it’s not just “hello.” We lose a lot of poetry, a lot of philosophy, and a lot of spirituality. There’s so much recognition that takes place in the greetings in Lesotho because they’re collective. Even if only two people are together and greeting each other, the salutation has an acknowledgement of this person but also everyone who came before him and everyone who will come after him. It’s always “we,” it’s always collective.

Right, this forces people to think about people in context. You’re forced to think about people as being in this lineage. I’m wondering, then, why you decided to do the narration in English then.

That’s a good question. For me, I always felt that language should be discarded. Language is not something that should be praised; it should be abused all the time. I’m not a purist when it comes to language. For me, what’s important is to get ideas through to people. If I put Sesotho, only a small segment of Basotho could understand it. It would be too much for even them, and the images I bring are already too much. I don’t mind losing the battle of authenticity in this way because the images are already so much—and there’s so much dialogue, too. One element is going to suffer at one point. I was initially thinking of using Sesotho, but ultimately I’m not interested in language—I’m interested in ideas, and I want these ideas to inspire.

Do you feel like there are parts in your film, then, where neither the image nor the language suffers?

That’s a good question. I was in Basel and I saw this painting by Gerhard Richter, Ema (Nude on a Staircase). The first time I saw it, I didn’t care if it was a painting or a collage or a photograph, but it was so beautiful. It was also my height. I was staring into the character, into this woman who was staring at me—what is she thinking? Who is she? Usually when I go to an exhibition I think, “Okay so this is a painting, here are the brushstrokes,” but this one was devoid of language. And this is the approach that I’m trying to learn. The reason I studied architecture is to approach cinema from an architectural point of view.

When I did Mother, I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You. (2019), the praise I got was about being a poet. That’s what came across to people—the style, the language. But I’m always interested in philosophy, in these ideas about what life should be. In a way, I preach in my work. And I’ve realized that this is the most important part of my films. When I did This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019), I came up with these ideas and I felt that nobody had done them before. And then someone sent me another film that someone made 100 years ago that was similar (laughter). You know? This is not a battle worth fighting for—being original. The idea of originality is to create a new language, and that’s not my interest. I enjoy coming up with new ways of telling a story, but that’s not the primary things for me. The primary things are my observations, my thoughts. As I said, language is something that should be abused.

You want to preach in your work, but earlier you mentioned that you want people to be in a trance state. Can these two things coexist? Are they related?

These two things go together. Even if I have a message, if I don’t have a language to carry it, I wouldn’t be passionate about telling it. These two things come from the same source. My observations always come with an image.

You mentioned approaching film from an architectural point of view. Can you expand on that?

I’m learning to be a builder—a builder in the sense that when you walk in, you see the architecture, but you don’t see an artist. And that’s what inspires me now. You walk in and you don’t even think about who made it. You don’t think of the artist. And coming from this essayistic work with Mother that people loved… I mean, people get pigeonholed and it’s okay because that’s just part of the industry, and I’m grateful to even be pigeonholed in the first place—it used to be a badge of honor for me. But at the same time, it’s so artistically-driven—my “fingerprints are all over it,” and now this somehow becomes my “language.” That era has passed for me. I want to discover a language where I communicate to people in a way where, like that painting, they see a film and think: wow, this character is staring into me, who is this?

I have a friend who was trying to teach me about [film] structure, but it doesn’t work for me. Structure blocks my mind. And I was so thankful that I encountered this painting, that I now approach film in a completely different way. When I make a film it’s like I’m building a cathedral, brick by brick. And I learned this with Resurrection. I got rid of so many scenes because I was not aware of the pacing or all this stuff that comes with making a film. I had to get rid of these scenes because they didn’t belong anywhere. I’m now more strategic about how I make a film, and I also think about the audience—not that they influence me, necessarily, but to see them as part of the artwork. They’re part of the finished product.

Do you mind talking about how you approached sound for your new film?

Diego [Noguera] is such an incredible person. Normally when I make a movie, I make sounds and then people interpret them. I’ll say (makes a rapid, oscillating buzzing sound) and then they’ll do it.

You make these sounds with your mouth?

Yes, it’s absolutely ridiculous (laughter). It’s ridiculous! This time, I thought I would use this same process because I already knew what these scenes should feel and sound like. But Diego told me, “Let me do something and come back to you.” I’m like a baby with my reactions, where if I like something I’ll be super happy but if I don’t like something it’ll show (laughter). So I told him to do his thing and when he came back, I was so impressed. He was approaching it as an artist—he was communicating with the image. And how we worked together was amazing. I was in the studio. I initially wanted to work with someone who was both a musician and a sound designer—I didn’t want them to be separated, I wanted them to be the same person. My editor shares a studio with Diego and every time he would pass by he’d look at the image and he would have this huge reaction, and I was like, “Okay, let’s work together.” I needed someone who saw my work as a playground.

Was it a smooth process?

It was very natural. Before we started, he showed me stuff that he did, and I liked that he stretched instruments to their limits. He wanted to break them to produce new sounds. He used broken violins and broken organs—things like this. I like the idea of destroying things and rebuilding them so they have different utterances.

Do you see your filmmaking process in the same way? Of destroying and rebuilding?

Exactly. It’s what I said about storytelling: it’s not anchored to a specific event—it always evolves, gets reimagined, gets remade. And that’s what I invite people to enter into. It’s a place where everything breaks, where everything is continuous. This is how I think about life, how I think about God, how I think about creation. It’s like a loop. When I was shooting Resurrection, I wanted to shoot these cycles all the time. And you might not see it in the final film but that was the intention. When I was working with Diego on the music for Ancestral Visions, I told him to never have a crescendo. I never wanted a note to break through—that when it was going and going, it would be neverending. It’s almost like this energy.

Is that how you approached the images too?

Yeah. With Diego, I was telling him that I wanted two layers: one that was aggressive and one that was soothing. I never wanted the images or the music to reward you. I didn’t want this catharsis—I wanted to pull the music back before it reached that point so that there would be this continual flow.

Were you worried that audiences would react negatively to that?

I was worried about it for myself! I was upset and thinking, “There needs to be something here!” (laughter). But I felt that I needed to go for this specific feeling… that there wouldn’t be this great excitement.

Is there anything that we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to talk about?

One thing that I was thinking about was that I would love for this film to be perceived as a drama or thriller and not as this allegorical, abstract work. I wanted it to be simple, like you’re following the drawings on a wall and not thinking about it too much.

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?

My imagination. I cherished this from very early on. One thing I talk about in the movie is that when I encountered cinema, it was like the heavens were opening. I could travel anywhere—from Timbuktu to Zimbabwe. And I think it’s related to my imagination: I can remake worlds with it.

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s Ancestral Visions of the Future plays as part of this year’s Cinéma du Réel. More information can be found here.

Thank you for reading the 50th issue of Film Show. Vomit out your story.

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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Claire Simon (b. 1955) is a French filmmaker who has spent more than 45 years making tender, thoughtful films that function as a form of archival work. Whether making fiction or documentary films, she’s always interested in capturing some sort of truth about reality. She began her career in Algeria, helping to edit Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronicle of the Year of Embers (1975). She would also learn from the ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch in his film training program called Ateliers Varan. She would spend the following decades making numerous feature-length films, including documentaries about kindergarteners at recess (1993’s Récréations), the Gare du Nord train station (2013’s Human Geography), and the gynecology department of a Parisian hospital (2023’s Our Body). Her newest film is titled Elementary (2024), and documents Makarenko, a public school in a Parisian suburb. The film has its US premiere this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image—more info can be found here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Simon on March 4th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss her own childhood experiences, TikTok’s impact on filmmaking, and improvisation when making documentaries.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I’m a teacher myself and I wanted to start off by asking about the teachers who meant the most to you throughout your life. Who comes to mind?

Claire Simon: I went to school in a small village in the South of France, and all the children of the village were always in the same room regardless of the class. The teacher was amazing—she was an incredible, nice person. She could teach all kinds of children, and it gave me a feeling of citizenship in this village and in this country. My parents were a bit different—my mother was English, my father was crippled—and she gave me the feeling of belonging.

What sort of things did your teacher do that made you feel this way?

All the children were from different social backgrounds and she was able to teach younger and older children together. I loved her, I really did. My parents were not always around, so I would sometimes go to her apartment, which was a part of the school at the time. She had a daughter who had a genetic disorder and we learned with her—we learned how to behave with people who were not typical. I think that teachers are the most important people—they’re teaching civilization. In France, the relationship between elementary school and the Republic is very strong. This teacher organized a way for us to read and understand reality, to understand history. She would also dig holes in the courtyard so we could play with marbles.

My daughter went to Harvard and I thought I could do this film [Elementary (2024)] at an American school. I came to Boston and scouted different schools, but I felt that watching American children in courtyards didn’t have the same feeling of what happens in France. When you vote in France, you go into schools to vote, and children have this feeling that this school courtyard is a public space. It’s a space where you’re rehearsing your public life. You are linked to the city, to the history of the country, and that’s why in my film it is very important that it is in a school near Paris where 95% of the children are children of immigrants. These children still feel like French citizens, and that’s the point.

You have your film Récréations (1993) where you filmed in the playground of your daughter’s school. You don’t film the teachers in that—there are points where the camera frames their bodies such that their heads are cut out; it’s like we’re watching from the point of view of children. But in Elementary, there’s a larger focus on seeing the interactions between teachers and children. What do you feel like you learned in this new film that you didn’t learn in this old one?

Récréations was shot in a kindergarten and this new one was with an elementary school, and that changes the way kids think about playtime. In kindergarten, children are poets, y’know? They want to rehearse life and to find a good story between themselves. It happens a little bit in elementary school but they also have conventional ways of playing—they’ll sing, they’ll dance, they’ll play soccer. And then they have these moments of invention that I seek out.

When I began scouting for Elementary, I was initially only interested in playtime, but then I noticed that these children were always going to their teachers—they were trying to sort out a conflict or to be cuddled. So this time, I thought I would focus on this relationship between the teachers and the children. And when I went to that school, it was obvious that these relationships were strong as a way to avoid physical violence. This was important for the school because it’s the poorest one in the area. The children are very poor. Eight years ago, when the director [of the school] started working, he said that there was a lot of violence in the courtyard, but it changed because they developed these relationships between the children and teachers. The teachers learned how to be mediators—they did this thing where you have to express your emotions, where they wouldn’t hit others but talk.

The main change between Récréations and this film is that they really noticed the camera when I arrived. They’d tell me to make a TikTok or to take photos. I thought to myself, this film is going to be rubbish, everything looks stupid (laughter). But after three days, the children accepted that I was only interested in observing real life and not in taking selfies. I was there every day for three months; me and my sound engineer completely became a part of the school. Eventually, the students didn’t really notice us when we were around in the courtyard or in the classroom; I could move around as much as I wanted. I’ve been presenting the film with some of the teachers and they always say that I was part of the school. When the film was in Cannes, we went to a cinema and the students saw the film and they said, “How did you film me? I don’t remember that you were there, I don’t remember you filming!” They were so happy about the film, but they’d forgotten that I filmed them.

I’m curious if you can shed light on how things have changed with how people present themselves or want to be filmed in light of TikTok’s rise. Have you noticed anything since making Young Solitude (2018), though of course that was with high schoolers.

This idea of presenting yourself as if you were always seeking celebrity, fame, or a good job… this has become really strong. At the end of the year, a teacher asked the children what they did on social media. They just wanted to do something—to put out a message, to share stories about the school or their friends. It was this idea of doing something on their own. This feeling is very different from being part of a classroom or playing in the schoolyard. They want to say something, but they don’t really know what they want to say—they just feel happy to be active, as if they were adults. Here in France, there’s a lot of cycling everywhere and the children like to be free on their bicycles, to do something by themselves as if they were grown-ups. None of this is bad, really. What is boring is the fact that they mix this with this idea that they should be famous, that they should be selling themselves.

Do you have any thoughts about authenticity and performativity and how these things are affected by the presence of a camera? How much of performativity is embedded into reality and authenticity?

You’re right to use the word performance. In my films, I film the encounter between me and the place or the people I film. In this school, during class, they’re supposed to perform—they have to answer questions and do things that are asked of them. They also perform with their friends in the courtyard. The relationship between the students and the camera is less important than the performance they give in the classroom. In some films, like the one I made about the woods of Vincennes [The Woods Dreams Are Made Of (2015)], we were making a piece of cinema together that would be for an anonymous audience. But it’s less a performance than a relationship.

Are there things you’ve learned from making fiction films, like Sinon, oui (1997), that you’ve applied to how you make documentaries?

When I do fiction, I’m interested in how real it can be. Well, maybe not “real” but convincing. You can watch it and start to think it’s all made up. I like the idea of things not seeming intentional. I always say that with documentaries you’re always looking for a story, and with fiction you have a story, so you’re seeking reality—a convincing reality. I still find that there are actors in both kinds of cinema, and the relationship my camera has with the people I film is always the same. Everyone is an actor; I just try to make sure the camera can help testify about their feelings and truth.

What makes something convincing for you in a fiction film? And what is sufficient for a documentary to feel like there is a story?

I’m very happy in fiction films when I feel I’ve made an archive. When I did Gare du Nord (2013), there were a lot of people—these figures—that I felt belonged to Gare du Nord. I felt that I made a portrait of this place at this particular moment—it was a true archive! I make films about “lacking archives.” Nobody has seen, for example, a conversation with the lover [Yann Andréa] of Marguerite Duras [I Want to Talk About Duras (2021)]. I made a fiction film about family planning [God’s Offices (2008)]—this was also a lacking archive. When I did this film about a girl who sets fire to the forest [Ça brûle (2006)], it was the same thing. I remember that I felt relieved at the exact moment the fire began—it was only then that the film was going to be complete. And fire is really reality. I always thought that with this film, with the horse and fire, that “the real” must be bigger than fiction.

There is always a part in the films I make where reality is stronger than fiction. In Sinon oui, it was the baby—it was completely true, it’s bigger than the story. The fire is bigger than the actors. Marguerite Duras… in any existing archive, she’s always above the story, not under it. In all my films, I’m interested in this confrontation where reality is bigger and stronger than the story. When I film a documentary, I’m always looking for a story of the people I’m filming. In Elementary, I like that each child is a real character—they have a real story and their own problems.

I’m intrigued by this notion of the real coming out of fiction. I feel that’s always been present in your career, even with something like Tandis que j’agonise (1980) with the different TVs and the different representations of film present. You mentioned Gare du Nord, and now I’m thinking about how Jean Rouch has a film with the same title and that you studied under him. I’m thinking about how you were an editor on Chronicle of the Years of Fire (1975). Do you mind sharing what you learned from these early experiences in your career?

I’m amazed that you know so much about my work—I really want to thank you. What I discovered with Jean Rouch is the idea of improvisation. In jazz, you of course have certain patterns and structures, but there is also improvisation. And I feel like documentaries are improvised cinema in this way. It’s a wonderful thing to try and see what film you can make right away in your current situation, with your bare hands, with nobody to help you. Just be open to the people you meet and what’s inside the frame—it’s always amazing. I just finished a film about Annie Ernaux, the Nobel Prize winner. I decided I would go to a lot of high schools in France and see classes studying her books. I filmed some classes, but I also said to the students, “I’d like to see you talking about these books on your own, without any teachers.” I would go to some place in the high school and say, “Okay, talk!” And they would talk! It was so amazing—I couldn’t believe it. They were so good, so strong, so real, so passionate. It’s so incredible that you can just ask two or three young girls to talk and they just do it. And they have so much grace!

I’ve interviewed musicians who have shared with me that improvisation is ultimately about listening—listening to the room you’re in, listening to other musicians. And this is a sort of listening that is incredibly focused. What is the act of looking and listening like when you’re in the process of making films? Do you have any thoughts on that, especially with regards to what you said about documentary filmmaking being an act of improvisation?

Oh, I am a listener. I can’t shoot with headphones—I can’t! I sometimes shoot without them but it’s very rare. I’m always defining what I’m filming based on the sound—that’s why I’m so happy with the sound engineer I work with, Pierre Bompy. He understands exactly what I need to tell a story. And really, he’s telling the story and I’m doing the mise-en-scène. For me, what I did in the Duras film was completely improvised. Even though I had these ideas for how I would use my camera, I would change my mind and we’d have shots that would last 35 minutes. Everyone was doing this together, and we were all listening to each other—the actors, the sound, the DOP Céline Bozonwho was changing the lighting if I was getting closer to the actor. It was wonderful. And that’s what I like—being in a moment where everyone is together.

How do you feel like making films has impacted the way you approach your everyday life? Do you feel like it’s been impacted?

I don’t know… I’m always working (laughter). I’m very lucky because when I don’t know what to do, I can watch a film, which is part of my work in some way. I am finishing this film about Annie Ernaux and I’m rewriting a script for a fiction film, and I’m thinking of different documentaries that I should do. Again, I’m thinking about lacking archives.

Are there any lacking archives that you want to make sure you document right now?

It’s complicated right now because we are in this terrible political moment… it’s this pre-war time. We’re terrified here and we don’t know what to do. It looks like Nazis are everywhere. I imagine that Philip Roth must have awakened in his tombstone, thinking that what he wrote as a fiction is actually happening in the States. I hope that people in the US find a way to resist—it’s against humanity what is happening. My thinking every day is, how can I work on my fiction as the war seems to be coming? This is my question all day long.

I saw Our Body (2023) at True/False Film Festival in 2023 and the person giving the introduction noted that it was the most radicalizing film of the festival because, as an American, it’s alarming to see the amount of thought and care that is on display in this film. Obviously the healthcare we have in the States is very different from what exists in France. And I think the film feels even more timely now given the hateful anti-trans rhetoric that politicians are more loudly spouting.

Thank you, it’s very nice of you to tell me how it was like at True/False—I really love this festival. I was really happy that it was released in the US. I feel that American critics sometimes understand me better than French ones (laughs).

How so?

I think it’s because in France, they don’t seem to understand documentaries very much. They always say, “All you did was put your camera in the courtyard” and I say, “No, I don’t just put it there. I carry the camera and I look through it. I have a specific way to film the kids, and I have a specific purpose.” I wanted the viewer to feel like they’re a kid in the classroom, and I wanted what was happening on the faces of the children to be visible. This is so important because what they feel, what they think… you can see it. I can tell you that, for example, there is another film about a primary school called To Be and to Have (2002) and you don’t see the faces of the children in that way. It becomes very different—it’s this different idea of film. Films aren’t just defined by the topic or the place where you film them; it’s about the way you approach things.

You’re taking an active role in your films at times, and there are personal aspects to some of them too. Mimi (2003) was about your friend, for example. How often do the relationships you make in the filmmaking process persist?

I see Mimi still, though she’s getting very old and can’t move. I have a good relationship with some doctors from the hospital [in Our Body]. I have a very good relationship with the teachers and the director of the school [in Elementary]. I keep in touch with some of the students in Young Solitude. But really, it’s like a love that has finished. We had a great love and now it is over. Most of these relationships are done, except right now with the teachers at this school. It was really nice for me to discover these people because I have so much admiration for them. They’re really incredible. Most of them had another job previously, and some of them had much more money beforehand. The teacher who sang the Rihanna song was working on a website for a bank, the teacher of religion was making glasses in a shop, another was working in a company based in Africa, another was a social worker. They have this conviction that is so strong, and they want to give to these children. They want to teach them how to talk, how to think, how to be a citizen. I’m just amazed by them. I admire them so much.

You mentioned that filming is like a love that is finished. Is it hard to come to the end of production, to leave the space you’re working at?

No. This is a passion, and like with all passions, you can’t stick with it too much or it’ll end badly (laughter). The exception is that you must do as well as you can with your children—you can’t have a bad story with them. I’m very proud of my daughter, who is a feminist philosopher. I try to have the best relationship I can have with her. That’s the thing with children—the love you have with them or with your grandchildren must be eternal and you must be very good at it. You have to learn every single day. It’s like dancing—you learn every time you dance. You can’t go into it with good intentions; it’s much more difficult. You must know that yourself, as a teacher (laughter).

I love that you compared it to dancing. Do you feel like you’ve learned a lot from dancing in your life?

The rhythm is something you are always learning. Always. The rhythm is endless.

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 hope to be funny, and when I’m funny, I’m proud of myself. I think it’s very important to laugh—it’s one of the most important things. And in Elementary, the fact that they’re able to laugh about religion is so wonderful. So yes, I’m proud when you can laugh while watching my films. The thing about laughter is that it happens when you are surprised, and with documentary filmmaking, you’re always surprised. It’s never like you think it’s going to be, and then you laugh. You laugh at your own stupidity, that you really never understood this thing before.

Claire Simon’s Elementary plays as part of MoMI’s First Look this weekend. More info can be found here.

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Thank you for reading the 49th issue of Film Show. Laugh at your own stupidity!!

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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Julian Castronovo (b. 1998) is a Chinese-American filmmaker who was born in Miami and is currently based in Los Angeles. His debut feature, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025), premiered at this year’s edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It was also the highlight of the entire festival, delivering a microbudget detective story that grappled with the slipperiness of authorship and identity. Described by Castronovo as an “inverse autofiction,” the work sees the director in the lead role as he learns of an art forger named Fawn Ma. Through miniatures, slideshow presentations, and laptop-camera footage, he invites the audience into a rabbit hole that constantly brings into question the fictitious nature of its proceedings. Its ingenuity and humor mark it as the first great Gen Z feature film made by a Gen Z filmmaker. Those in New York can watch Debut later this month as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Castronovo on February 15th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss Yoko Ono, his debut’s $900 budget, and how to apply the logic of literary modernism to cinema.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you grew up in Wisconsin, were you also born there?

Julian Castronovo: I was born in Miami and lived there for a few years and then moved to Wisconsin when I was 5 or 6. I say I’m from Wisconsin.

What was it like? Do you feel like there’s anything notable about growing up there?

The most interesting thing about it was how uninteresting it was. It was a vision of American childhood that’s become almost obsolete. I went to this high school that had this football and cheerleader dynamic, which I was slightly removed from—I always had this “I hate this town!” attitude. I went to Brown for undergrad and I remember being ashamed of being from this Midwestern town, but I’ve grown to be proud of it.

What was the reason for this initial shame?

You get there and meet these people who seemingly know much more about the world.

I like the importance of the word “seemingly” there.

Yeah (laughter). When I was 19 or 20, I drove from a friend’s house in Chattanooga, Tennessee back to my hometown in a day. It was 11 hours or so, and there was construction on the freeway so I had to go on this small state highway that was a dirt road for a long time. I drove the length of Illinois and went through town after town that looked exactly like mine—like, here’s the gas station, here’s the high school. And then when I got to my hometown, it felt like a nice experience. All these towns felt the same and one of them was mine.

Do you mind talking about your experiences at Brown? What things were helpful and what things were stifling, and how did that affect your practice? I know you studied Modern Culture and Media.

I don’t know how much of it was the institution in particular or being 18 to 22 and becoming a person (laughter). But that program completely shaped my practice in a really fundamental way. I had important mentors, and in a way it was kind of crazy. I was 19 or 20 and I walked into my first film class, as a freshman or sophomore, and it was RaMell Ross teaching. He became an important source in shaping my thinking. This was before Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) had come out, before Nickel Boys (2024). I never sought out these people who helped me in these profound ways, but just kind of wandered into contact with them—I was lucky. There was RaMell, there was my teacher Jennifer Montgomery who was really important in shaping my work, and then in graduate school, Juan Pablo González was really helpful and generous.

Can you pinpoint specific things they said or did that was instrumental to your practice?

In a way, all of them taught me to be suspicious of images. They taught me how to think about form.

Your first film was your thesis film, Hannah’s Video (2020). I appreciate that there’s this aspect of performance that feels like a throughline into Noise (2022) and also Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (2025). What were you trying to explore there?

I think there is a throughline. To me, the throughline is an interest in a ritualized performance, or in posing. I think I’m interested in this quality of fiction filmmaking where even filming something fictional has a non-fictional aspect. As in, a fictional image is a non-fictional document of the performance.

Right, and I think that’s something that’s even more explicit in Noise because it’s centered around an audition process. What interests you about this tip-toeing between fiction and non-fiction?

There is a lot to be said about what some people might call “post-fictionality.” I’m interested in this slipperiness because of my own shortcomings as a writer and director. I think if I was a better, more imaginative person, I could just think of a fictional thing and make it. In response to what I have felt to be limitations, I have found it to be an interesting strategy to confront those things in the work rather than try to work around them.

What does it mean to be “more imaginative”? Why is that the phrase you’re using there?

Maybe it’s a bit of self-loathing. Let me take a step backwards. I work on this boundary between artifice and reality, and this is a very simple answer, but I make work about that because it’s what I’m interested in. If other people are much more interested in interpersonal relationships, they make films about those subtleties. I guess I made a film about the things I have the most to say about. It’s a kind of stupid answer, but it’s the truth.

With this slipperiness that you’re interested in, are you at all invested in Twitch streams or what people are doing on TikTok or IG reels? I’m thinking about the ways in which people perform in front of their phone camera—or their computer with Twitch—and how that’s something that people are interfacing with more regularly today. And these people are presenting “themselves” to an audience, too, which is sometimes live. Do you care about any of this and the parasociality of it all?

I don’t think that social media should be viewed as some drastic break in what it means to be a person, what it means to be performative. In many ways it’s a continuation of what has always been the case, and I’m more interested in this aspect of “what has always been the case.” To me, “pretending to be the person you want to be” is a very similar activity to “being” the person you want to be.

I think about this all the time. I think there’s something very incredible when you realize that if there’s someone you want to be, you can just be that person. It sort of collapses this notion of aspiration versus reality. This feels like self-help talk in a way, but there’s an interesting thing that happens when you understand that you can just be the person you want to be, even if you feel like it’s not an “authentic” version of yourself initially. And I mean, I guess musicians and actors talk about this but it’s also just something you can practice in your “normal life.”

The vernacular phrase to express that is just “fake it till you make it.” But I think this logic of pretending and being—that type of metaphysical game—was the point of origin for Debut. I thought that by inventing a certain type of fiction, becoming a filmmaker and making a film would be a self-generating endeavor.

Can you explain why it’s self-generated?

I’m gonna express this in a roundabout way, in literary terms. There’s all this talk these days about the notion of “autofiction” for young American writers. To me, I saw this film as an “inverse autofiction,” and by “inverse” I mean rather than taking my life and distilling it down to a fiction by the process of changing little things, I could invent a fiction that would require reality to form around it. The film generates real evidence of its story, and it’s a film built around evidence. For example, in the film, Julian Castronovo goes to Prague. Because that had to happen for the film, it had to happen in real life. The fiction demanded that Julian Castronovo go to Prague, and then all these real things that testify to that were created.

So you didn’t plan to go to Prague before thinking about the film?

Yes, correct. So because the fiction demanded it, now there’s this real evidence. Here’s this Scandinavian Airlines ticket that has my name on it. My footprint is really in the mud in some Czech field. The fiction generates real evidence.

Something I always recommend to people is to live in a way where you’re forcing yourself into positions that are surprising, that you wouldn’t be in otherwise. And it’s interesting when it doesn’t feel like you’re the one making that decision, exactly. It feels somewhat external.

That’s why I made the film in the way I did. I felt that making a film otherwise would be impossible—there had to be some semi-external force, which is to say the film itself forcing me to make a film.

Why is that something you wanted versus having the entire idea for a film in the first place and making that?

I felt that I was incapable of advocating for myself in a way that would make it possible. I think making a film in this typical, linear idea of film production—where I have my idea, I write it out, I get all these people together and some money to make it—requires a confidence in one’s own ideas that I simply don’t possess. It was an ironic thing, in a way—an ironic response to certain trendy things that young filmmakers are asked or tasked with these days. “Why are you the right person to make this film?” is always what grant applications will say. So I think I wanted to take that logic to the most extreme: How could I make a film where I’m the only person who could make it?

That’s so good. That’s something that comes up a lot in the conversations I have with artists. They’re having to get these grants and in writing these applications, they put themselves and their art into a box, and of course a lot of it is related to identity politics, which can be stifling in the way you want other people to approach your art.

I think American independent filmmaking is—and has been—very invested in authenticity and identity. I was much more interested in the opposite things. That is to say that I was much more interested in artifice and the way identity itself is this deeply performative endeavor in the first place. I set out to work in a way that was opposed to that, and maybe aligned with it at a certain point. My sensibility is that artifice is much more compelling than authenticity.

I appreciate that you don’t see this dichotomy between artifice and authenticity, that they’re always intertwined in ways we may not fully recognize. This makes me think of the different artists that you’re inspired by and reference in the film: Yoko Ono, Sebald, John Ashbery, Pynchon. These are all heavyweight names, of course. Were these artists specifically chosen because they tackle similar ideas, or did you mention them because they felt right for the story that was unfolding?

Their influence pops up in different ways. I’ll start with the literary modernists. I was interested in applying the logic of literary modernism to cinema and how images create meaning. For the most part, cinematic images create meaning through a dialectic, as any film major will tell you after their freshman seminar (laughter). Here’s one image, here’s another, and in conversation they’re creating meaning. The logic of literary modernism is that representing the world is impossible, but you can approach it by creating long lists of things. The theoretical term for that would be parataxis.

You read Joyce, and all these giants of literary modernism, and they have a similar rhythm. Short little words with lots of “and”s and stuff. “Eileen had hands that were long and white and thin.” And they’re very obsessed with little objects all the time. Sebald is a huge influence for me, and his obsession with little objects is, I think, taken from [Gustave] Flaubert. I felt that this obsession with little objects resonated with the kind of forensic examination I was doing. I wanted to create a film that was trying to do “here’s an object, here’s an object”—this sequential, little object logic of little things, as opposed to a dialectical logic, which I eventually abandoned. The images function as an inventory instead of some other type of representational apparatus. That was my attempt at formal innovation.

I think for the artists… I didn’t have a good reason for wanting to be like Yoko Ono aside from the fact that I like her work. I think it had to be performance artwork, because it was part of the central question about authorship and performance. “What does it mean to make an artwork and say it belongs to someone else?” The question I was interested in was, “What is a forgery of a performance artwork? Is there such a thing?” I think I just wanted to make artworks like that, and knew that I couldn’t make them, but I could make them if I had this other mechanism of attributing it to someone else. The thing I’m interested in is a question of what it means to be moved by art, to find art good or bad, and the bearing of authorship upon that judgement.

In terms of the identity of the author and how that impacts your understanding of the work?

Yeah. I think I have an equivocal understanding of that where I’m not on one side or the other. What’s the phrase? “Severing the art from the artist”?

Is there any clarity you came out of all this with? Or did you have more questions?

Oftentimes, after I screen this film and I’m there in the room, people are often unsure if the artwork of this artist, Fawn Ma, is real. I think they like it better when there’s certainty.

Certainty about the fact that Fawn Ma is a real person or isn’t?

Either way. They don’t like not knowing. I think people feel affirmed or comforted when I have to reveal that I’ve made them all.

What sort of things did people ask at screenings?

I think at both screenings, someone straight-up asked, “How much was real and how much was fake?” which I really liked. Those questions prompted me to realize that way more of it was real than I thought was real. I said, “It’s a fiction that Julian Castronovo went to Prague,” but at the same time it’s not a fiction because I did do that. I think for the most part, people “get” it—I don‘t think it’s a super difficult film. This is actually one of the things that I thought hardest about when I was beginning to make it: I wanted so badly for it to work on a purely narrative level. That was the most important thing to me. In my own thinking, that type of thing comes last, but these tropes of detective stories really made it easy. Detective stories have such a clear logic provided by clues where one leads to another, and it becomes very easy to follow. I also tried to make my voiceover, my narration, super repetitive and explicit about how this thing led to this other thing. I think you can only begin to get away with the more interesting things when one has already made a coherent story.

How so?

I think I would find a film of pure formal experimentation to be unwatchable if it was not grounded in narrative, especially one of this length. You could make a very short film of image experiments, but to make an experimental film of this length, there has to be something familiar as a spine.

Are there specific films that you were looking at that allowed for confidence in knowing that your film could work?

One of the things that I’m most proud of is that I didn’t know it was going to work (laughter). The entire time, I was so anxious about it. Then I read this quote by John Cage that was so comforting to me. He was talking about music, but he said, “Something is only experimental when you don’t know what’s gonna happen. If you know what’s gonna happen, it’s not an experiment.” I was making this whole film, and I didn’t know if it was going to be coherent at all, so much so that when I was almost done making the film, I shot another short film because I thought it was going to be so incoherent. I thought I was going to graduate from film school having nothing to my name (laughter). At the same time, I’m very proud of the fact that I worked in a way that was sincerely in this spirit of experimentation, where I didn’t know if my ideas would work.

That’s awesome, and there’s a real satisfaction to it when it’s done. It feels like something that’s bigger than yourself. Did it feel like you were part of some larger thing?

I don’t know if I see myself as doing a greater service to art (laughter). I think the broader thing for me was inventing a vision of a filmmaking practice that I could bring with me into the future. I wanted it to resemble a studio practice where you can wake up every day and work on stuff with your hands, which is why I wanted to do this object-oriented approach, because I was forging a lot of this evidence to be semi-antiquated, giving it effects of age. And I just wanted to make a film in a way where I felt like an artist.

What are your qualifications for feeling like an artist?

Waking up and working on art every day. In the methodology of filmmaking, one does not feel like an artist all the time. When you write a screenplay, you haven’t made a film, you’ve only made a screenplay. And then maybe several miracles happen and you get to shoot for 10 or 15 days. What I wanted to do was wake up and make things, and make images, every day for months and months. I almost built the film around that desire to work on it in relative solitude, just in my apartment.

Something I wanted to address is the $900 budget that’s mentioned in the descriptions for the film. Are you able to break down what those $900 were?

Really, the only significant expense I had was that I paid my voice actor, my narrator. At CalArts we can get $1000 reimbursed, which is nothing to make a film. I was saving my receipts (laughter). And then the rest of it was from making miniatures and documents.

This $900 figure calls into question what you even consider part of the budget. You went to Prague—was the ticket counted in that?

The $900 is a bit of a convenient figure. It’s under $1000, which is a cool little fact that I get to say. It was an imprecise method of counting. Like, if my room is my studio and the location that I’m filming in, should my rent be included in the budget?

This is all interwoven with the other things that we’ve talked about. It’s this impossibility of precision and accuracy.

The film itself is also very forgiving of imprecision, inaccuracy (laughter).

Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you want to mention, or anything that you always wanted to be asked in an interview?

That’s a good question. I don’t think so—this was a good interview. I think we hit all the stuff that I wanted to cover. The thing is, I think it’s a fairly dense film, and since it’s my first film, all of my ideas went into it, everything I’ve ever been interested in. So there’s lots to say about it, but I think it works nicely as a standalone document that in some ways is better without me tracing every detail. It’s nice to have it stand without explanation.

People always talk about how a debut film or album will be something you’ve prepped for your entire life, and how one’s second work is then a tricky thing to navigate. Like, “What am I going to explore now?” Have there been any struggles with the next feature you’re working on?

I don’t feel I’ve exhausted my resources. If anything, I feel invigorated by what aspects of Debut felt exciting to people, and I’m thinking about how I might work with those on a slightly bigger scale or in a slightly different mode.

I end all my interviews with the same question: Can you share one thing you love about yourself?

My film is full of things I love and hate about myself (laughter). One thing I love about myself is my memory. I have a very good memory, but I can’t recall a particular time it came in handy.

Julian Castronovo’s Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued premiered at IFFR. More information about the film can be found at Castronovo’s website. Debut is also playing as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight—information for the screenings can be found here.

Thank you for reading the 48th issue of Film Show. Make it till you fake it.

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Rashid Masharawi was born in Gaza in 1962 and grew up in Al-Shati refugee camp after his family fled ongoing Israeli attacks on their home city of Jaffa. Starting at age 18, Masharawi began a self-guided study in film production, a process which culminated in his first short film, Travel Document (1987). After a decade of working in occupied Palestine, Masharawi founded the Cinema Production and Distribution Centre (CPC) in Ramallah in 1996, an entity chiefly devoted to organizing workshops for young Palestinian filmmakers and providing on-set work in active film productions. Masharawi’s CPC also created a Mobile Cinema unit, which projected films inside of refugee camps, including an annual Children’s Film Festival. In addition to his mentoring programs and advocacy on behalf of a Palestinian cinema, Masharawin has continued to direct his own films—Passing Dreams (2024) just opened the Cairo International Film Festival this past November.

Passing Dreams finds 11 year-old Sami (Adel Abu Ayyash) living in a refugee camp in the West Bank. With his father in prison and his faithful carrier pigeon lost, Sami heads off to Bethlehem to ask his uncle (Ashraf Barhom) for help finding his lost bird. The film nests personal portrait and genre convention inside vérité-style location shooting, a formal dichotomy that pings more than a few of the works found in From Ground Zero (2024). Composed of 22 short films from 22 different filmmakers, From Ground Zero enacts Masharawi’s workshop theory of filmmaking in explicit form, running through a multitude of forms that range from narrative fiction to confessional documentary. The works are written in languages as disparate as stop motion animation, musical performance, and puppetry. Most movingly, to consult the biographies of the filmmakers involved is to witness film (Ahmed Hassouna, “Sorry Cinema”) and television (Islam Al Zeriei, “Flashback”) professionals producing work alongside theater makers (Tamer Nijim, “The Teacher”), therapeutic art workers (Alaa Damo, “24 Hours”), journalists (Hana Eleiwa, “NO”), and all manner of storyteller. The point isn’t as pat as suggesting that anybody can be an artist; surely that point is true and needs no insistence. Rather, From Ground Zero achingly presents art and life as equally fundamental entities, like air or sleep. Even during ongoing genocide, we miss our fathers, our birds. We move towards home.

Masharawi acted as producer and artistic mentor on the project, which finds his enthusiasm and rigor combine into an omnibus film that’s as wrenching as it is hopeful. On the occasion of From Ground Zero’s wide US release—and its shortlisting for an Academy Award—I spoke with Rashid via video chat. While we spoke in the days preceding the January 19th announcement of a ceasefire, it remains clear that Israeli attacks against Palestinians will continue so long as the occupation does.

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Frank Falisi: Hi Rashid. I apologize for the view of my car you’re getting.

Rashid Masharawi: It’s okay, this is not important. What’s important is what we’re talking about, not where we’re sitting.

How are you doing?

I am fine. How much it’s possible to be fine, you know, but I am fine, yes.

How are all of the filmmakers who are involved in this film? Is everyone safe, all things considered?

It’s been… let’s say, they stay alive. They are alive. Some of them are not really in safe places. This is why we are in contact almost daily. And some of them, it’s more than one time a day. But I mean, they are moving from one place to another, sometimes more than one place in the same day. And lately, some of them are losing some people, some relatives. Except for two or three of them, they have no houses.

Have you worked with most of these artists before? Or were you familiar with their work, at least?

I knew—but hadn’t really worked with—three or four out of the twenty-two. But most of them are new. Some of them, I know not as filmmakers, but as people that are interested in cinema. They made small, short films. They are cameramen, actors from theater, directors of theater, painters, and now they’ve made a film with us. And most of them, it’s their first film.

What was your role, working with these folks? Especially for first-time directors?

In the beginning, I was selecting the ideas and selecting the people. And I worked with them to develop the idea, then discussed the shooting because this material must be edited, you know? The content was very important for me. I mean, what’s possible artistically, technically—you have to imagine we worked without equipment, with no professional crew or assistants. Some of the filmmakers were the director and the cameraman, most of them were the story and the storyteller.

So I’m the one who has more distance from the daily details on locations. I had this vision all the time, trying to go for untold stories. Because we know all the time what the news is showing, day and night, especially in the beginning of this war, January, February, March, April. Most of the shooting was done in these months, but continued until almost June. So my role: I was the artistic supervisor for all of these films, along with some assistants who work with me. And I had advisors work with the directors, share ideas, try to develop their stories, give comments and make rough cuts, things like that. And to keep it so that it looks like them, because it’s their film, you know? This is why you have different genres in From Ground Zero. You have documentary, fiction, you have experimental, video art, stop motion, even marionettes. They are different, which means they have different ways to express their own cinema. Not only different ideas or feelings, but tools, too.

You said something, that a lot of these artists are not only the storyteller, but they’re the story too. That feels like it could be both a gift but also an expectation on the kind of story you’re able to tell.

You know, when we started this idea, when we were making these films, the situation on the ground was very dangerous. There were no safe places in Gaza. So for someone to search for an idea, he went to himself, he went to his family. He went to his mind, his own mind. He earned the feeling, he earned the location, let’s say, and he earned what he wanted to share with the world. It’s kind of a protection, because nobody went to research to search for an idea. Some of the filmmakers could not go with their idea because reality interfered. So the idea changed. But personal stories, this was my decision.

How do you make a personal cinema when so much of the world assumes that it’s a political act, simply by its existence? Does that make sense as a question?

No, it’s very important. It’s a very important question and it makes a lot of sense. First, I was not trying to deal with politics, because the politics is there. We are full of politics. Each frame. It’s politics because all that you see is a result of a political situation. The Palestinian struggle did not start on October 7th. It started more than 76, 77 years ago. And we don’t need these films to have political debate. We belong to nobody. We are not working under any authority, we did not get support from any authorities to say “We believe in Palestinian authority” or “We believe in Hamas” or “We make this film with the aim of showing the world the massacres and the genocide and all of what Israel did.” It’s all there. It means we need to go for real, personal stories of the daily life of people and filmmakers who deal with culture. We make it to try and make art all the time, to share it with the world. I believe it’s a kind of resistance to share it with the world, not only the film, but the fact that there are people thinking that now, today and here in the middle of this bloody area, in the middle of hundreds of martyrs dying a day, we are trying to protect our identity. We are trying to protect our dreams.

These things nobody can occupy, you know? Nobody can occupy dreams or thoughts or ideas. You have your ideas, you have your dreams, you are a free person like others. Okay, they can kill us because they have the possibilities. They have weapons, they have equipment, they have the technology, they have the support of the big countries in the world with money and military facilities. But our existing in the area—nobody can occupy that. You talk about culture, history, identity… cinema can take all these things. Cinema can deal with these things. This is why I love cinema. I trust cinema. I count on cinema. Cinema has a space to deliver all these things, especially when you are honest and you tell the truth, which is reality.

I really love that phrase, “I love cinema.” Do you remember the first time you felt that this was an artform that you could put your dreams into?

Many years ago, yes. Many, many years ago. And it’s repeated itself many times. I’ve made films as a director for the last 35 years, maybe more. I’ve made only films in my life. I started when I was around 20 and now I am more than 60 years old and I am in cinema. Cinema protects me and makes me able to face how I spend my life. Cinema was my shelter; I could talk to the world.

I remember when I was 25, 26 years old, I had a film in Berlin, in competition. The film was called The Shelter (1989). And they were discussing then, Is there a Palestinian cinema? Is there something called ‘Palestine’? How are we going to make the identity of this film a nation? Then, we were not allowed to write ‘Palestine’—there was no ‘Palestine’ to exist in their catalog. So they were busy with all of those things and I was busy making my films. And cinema pushed them to discuss Palestine. It was 40 years ago. I was not going to ‘do Palestine.’ I’m going to do films, stories.

So really, I trust cinema, and I believe we, the Palestinians, we have a state in cinema. It doesn’t exist on the ground, it’s bigger, it’s stronger in the cinema. Because in the ground, you see the image, yes? In cinema, you have the history. I am from Jaffa, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It was occupied by Israel in 1948 and now they name it Israel. This is in cinema. So if I tell my story of Jaffa, it’s so deep, it’s so strong, it’s so beautiful. They have theaters in Jaffa and they have cinemas in Jaffa and they have life and they have vacations. They have the sea. They have everything, you know? Cinema can carry us.

You just had a film open recently, right? Has working in this capacity as a kind of artistic producer on From Ground Zero got you dreaming about getting back to directing yourself?

I am making films all the time. My last film, Passing Dreams (2024), was the opening of the Cairo International Film Festival. Three weeks ago, it’s in Tunis, a big festival. And soon it will be in many festival in Europe. It also has distribution and co-production and stars—I’m making films all the time. This was my feature number nine. So I am swimming in my water. But this time, in this way, I decided my next film was going to be different. It’s going to give a chance to 22 filmmakers from Gaza, from the ground, to make them bring the idea, to make them do my next project, because they have the rights to tell their own stories and I can help them. I have experience, I have relations, I know companies, I know festivals, I know media. I can help and support. I know cinema. I mean our cinema, when I say “know cinema.” Because I don’t think anybody knows cinema. It’s not something that somebody can know. But I know our cinema, how to produce it, how to show it. Cinema is an unfinished experience. It will never finish. We all experiment in cinema. I mean all the filmmakers in the world. There’s no recipe to tell you, do one, two, three, and you have the best film in the world.

If I talk about the “real” cinema, I’m not talking about commercial things or people who want to make money and make something easy to sell, easy to watch. This is not our cinema. Cinema is everybody experimenting. And I believe there are people not born yet who will make much, much better films than all the big stars and big directors in cinema. So it is not finished.

I think unfinished is right. Can you talk a little bit about exhibiting films in Palestinian refugee camps? That seems an important part of keeping cinema as a continuous process.

The last exhibition in a refugee camp was in this war, between the tents of refugees. We made a film festival in Gaza and we showed all the films in From Ground Zero between the tents, with the filmmakers. I have photos from these screenings inside Gaza, during this war, with people watching their own life under bombing. Historically, we have no cinemas in Palestine. I was running, for many years, a mobile cinema, which was showing films in schools and universities, refugee camps, villages, just to make people watch films. Because I had, in Ramallah, the Cinema Production and Distribution Center. It’s a production and training center. I had this for many years, to try and develop the Palestinian cinema. Most of the filmmakers and producers from the Palestinian cinema now who are showing films in the world, they passed by there, through those workshops.

Can you talk a little about the art scene in Ramallah, and maybe how it impacts art creation in Gaza?

From Ground Zero is all shot from Gaza, which is far from Ramallah. And Gaza is in siege, before this war. So they did not even have the possibilities to communicate with the outside world. They did not have the possibilities to get experience in cinema, because to get experience, you need the cinema atmosphere. You need to watch films, to talk about films, to experiment to make films. And they don’t have this in Gaza. There are very few people in the West Bank trying to make cinema, where in Ramallah, it’s more open. It’s next to Jerusalem, people can fly, can participate in different festivals in the world. Like me.

I’m a Gazan. I was born and grew up in Gaza, but I live in Ramallah. So I was travelling all the world to festivals, and I was able to watch films and read critics on my films and learn many things during the process of my own filmmaking. Let’s say in Gaza, they don’t have this possibility. But Ramallah, for me, it’s between real and fake. On one hand, it looks like free life. But it’s under Israeli occupation. On one hand it looks like we have a president, we have ministers, we have ministries, we have everything that looks like a state. But we have no states. It is upside down. In Ramallah, we have peace and war and calm and intifada in the same day. We are a state and we are occupied territories in the same day.

But I am happy that for From Ground Zero, I made a kind of workshop for more than a hundred people. Because you work with 22 filmmakers, everybody has four or five assistants on their own film. So more than a hundred people dealing with cinema in spite of everything. Yeah, that’s okay.

It feels like the film itself turns into a workshop.

It is, yeah. Clearly, yes it is. Because some of these filmmakers, now they’re making more films. Some of them with me, some of them without me. But the project itself encouraged them. It showed how important a link with the world is. We were officially selected for the Toronto International Film Festival. We had many, many screenings in Italy, in the UK. We had almost the entire Arabic world. I made a big event in Cannes for From Ground Zero. So the filmmakers feel the importance of being a filmmaker and making films. Now they know. In the beginning of From Ground Zero, I was explaining to them all the time, “You have to do what you can. It’s your role now to play. You have to participate. We need the image. We need to tell our stories.” Now they can tell me these things.

That’s a pretty beautiful note to end on. Is there anything you’ve wanted to say about this movie that you haven’t been asked about yet?

I don’t know. I always have many things to say about From Ground Zero, because me myself, I am still in the situation because the war did not finish, you know? Things are going on. I can say that these films were written, shot, edited, in many festivals, now shortlisted for an Oscar. And the war is still going on. What we need to do is not only keep showing films. We need to stop this war. We need to end this massacre. We need to give a chance to these people to live normal lives like others. I want to tell others outside Gaza—who are in the world—that because we are all human beings, we are all sharing this life. That means in Gaza, they are not only killing us—the Palestinians—they are killing you also. As a human being, we are sharing this aspect together. They kill you in Gaza every day. I want these films to show these elements.

More information about From Ground Zero’s screening dates can be found here.

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Thank you for reading the 47th issue of Film Show. From the river to the sea.

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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Theo Montoya (b. 1992) is a Colombian filmmaker whose 2022 film Anhell69 stands as one of the most accomplished debut features of the decade. Inspired by the parties he hosted at the now-defunct Club 1984—a space he created for queer people in Medellín—the film takes on the woozy atmosphere of a late-night DJ mix. When I first saw the film at True/False Film Festival in 2022, Montoya expressed his love for techno music twice in the post-screening Q&A, and describes in the conversation below that editing Anhell69 was similar to using the DJ software Traktor. Utilizing archival footage, Instagram feeds, interviews, and a diary of the making of the film, Montoya captures Medellín as he understands it: through tragedy and pain, but also glorious moments of intimacy and ecstasy. Legendary Colombian director Víctor Gaviria appears in the film, complicating notions of Colombian past and present, but so do “spectrophiles”—people who love ghosts—as a way for him to navigate queer desire, loss, and survival. Theo Montoya and I spoke via Zoom on June 4th, 2024 via Zoom to discuss his love of dance music, pushing back against mainstream cinema, and the making of Anhell69.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: What was it like growing up in Medellín?

Theo Montoya: That’s a very interesting question. I remember there being this sunny day while downtown. There were a lot of motorcycles and this very specific smell, this incense from the church. My memories now are in December. I remember these campfires, a lot of music, music in all the streets.

What would you usually spend your free time doing?

It depends when we’re talking about. When I was a child I was playing most of the time, and then when I was a teenager, I was watching a lot of movies, not just in the cinema but on television too. I know that I speak a lot about cinema in my movies, but there are only a few independent cinemas in the city, and to go to the cinema in Medellín is very expensive. It’s not something you can do often. The most popular way you can consume cinema is through television.

Are there any films you saw on television that were really important for you?

Titanic (1997) was a very important film. I was talking today with a friend, and once DVDs arrived, it was very important because I was always renting a lot of DVDs. Brokeback Mountain (2005) was a film I was renting almost every weekend. I loved the music. This was a successful business where you’d rent pirated DVDs. I think it was a very important moment for cinema in Colombia because we didn’t have Blockbusters. You’d pay one dollar to rent two DVDs for three days. I would rent films based on the suggestions of the owner of this DVD place. He was a mafia guy but by day he owned this DVD business. He had a funny name.

Do you mind talking about your relationship to music? How did it shape your understanding of film?

When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with electronic music. I listened to trance—normal DJs like Ferry Corsten and Armin van Buuren. As I grew older I listened to Richie Hawtin and that opened me up to many things. He was the owner of Plus 8, and Marco Carola was on there. I also liked Magda and Troy Pierce. From there I started to understand more about techno and minimal music. I explored Detroit techno and the pioneers of German techno. When I was in my 20s, I was listening to Stockhausen and started to make music on my computer. I downloaded Traktor and started planning parties with my friends. I was really into these plastic parties that Richard Hawtin was hosting—he was playing as Plastikman. I was very inspired by this concept even with Anhell69 (2022); you can see plastic at the parties.

Do you feel like making music yourself unlocked things about the creative process for you?

I never played with vinyl, I used Traktor. It’s very similar to [Adobe] Premiere because it’s all digital software and I was mixing and it’s not about the quality of DJing. It syncs for you. These older DJs were way more technical; with this it was more like a game. I was interested in mixing all types of music—maybe I was inspired by Stockhausen. And through Richie Hawtin, I started to learn about Ricardo Villalobos, who would play Latin music while DJing. I was in love with this concept of mixing different styles. When I started to make movies, it was similar because it was more about editing. My favorite part wasn’t just shooting places and people, but to have a concept appear from the editing.

There is a very interesting DJ mix called Balance 014 (2009) by Joris Voorn. He mixed a lot of different kinds of music, like thirty seconds or a minute of something and it was like a collage. When I was a teenager, I was more focused on music but there weren’t a lot of critics. I was in love with people describing music with all these descriptions that compared electronic music to spaceships and aliens.

Given your love for music, how’d you decide to make films?

I would say there are two important artists in my life. There’s Richie Hawtin—as a teenager, I’d even make drawings of him. There was a video clip of his music being played over a Tarkovsky clip, I think it was The Mirror (1975). I was also in love with Andy Warhol. I loved that he made movies but also had parties. Before I made movies, I was the owner of a techno club called 1984. I was playing and hosting these parties. I realized that as a DJ, it was easy to get lost… in Medellín, there are a lot of drugs, and I loved alcohol. I was drinking a lot and involved with everything.

Like Andy Warhol’s Factory, everything was silver. I was also inspired by Berghain—no phone, no pictures. I wanted to have a safe space in Medellín for queer people. I wanted people to go there who could hear everything, it would be more than just reggaeton. I remember I would play post-punk. People could take drugs, fuck, anything—it was a free place in the city. I remember it had a very beautiful rooftop. I have a lot of good memories with it. I had this club for one year, it was 2016, but I was hosting parties before this too. Anhell69 is connected with all these ideas; it’s a homage to all the parties we made. I met [actor] Camilo Najar at a Halloween party that I hosted. It was in a small house with friends and he was there.

What was it like when you first met him?

He was this beautiful guy. It was the first time he tried drugs—the first time he smoked weed and tried cocaine was there. The friends he made in his teenage years were people he met at this party, as he wasn’t born in Medellín. I didn’t pay attention to him a lot that night because I was playing music. I actually won a prize with a short film that I made, and to celebrate I had this party.

So this was before Son of Sodom (2020)?

It was a very bad short film for a local festival and they gave me money, and I invested it into this party. Early on, my idea of cinema was totally different—it was more about Andy Warhol’s vision. I wanted to create parties all day and to support short films with parties. It was about creating a movement.

So what happened after you stopped running the club and before you made Son of Sodom? Like around 2018 and 2019.

I went to live in Peru. I was very lost and didn’t know what to do. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) was very important to me. I wanted to be a DJ, I wanted to be an artist, but I also wanted to be a beatnik (laughter). I wanted to travel and so I quit everything. I’m making a movie now about this trip I made. I actually went to find someone there. When I came back, I started to make Anhell69. 

Son of Sodom is a precursor to Anhell69. Can you talk to me about making that?

I had Anhell69 in my mind at first, and then in the middle of it came Son of Sodom. I was thinking about how to make a film because my background was so different… I didn’t know a lot about festivals. I thought the future of cinema was through the internet because it democratized everything—I was making short films and putting them online. I thought festivals weren’t going to be important, but then I realized that people were interested in these things.

In Anhell69 you have the Colombian filmmaker Víctor Gaviria star in the film, and you’re also making a homage to other Colombian filmmakers like Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo. Do you think there’s anything distinct about Colombian filmmaking in general?

For me, this question of identity is very important. We’re in a moment where everything is globalized and we’re taking in all these cultures. To say that Anhell69 is from Colombia is very difficult. Our religion—Catholicism—is very Colombian but it isn’t originally from here. It’s like sushi. There is an adaptation of sushi everywhere and it’s different depending on where you’re eating it. Everything in this world is a mix.

What’s your relationship with religion? It appears throughout the film.

With Anhell69, I was trying to talk about this duality in society. Religion says no gay people, but all its images are very gay. I’m trying to point out these holes. We will say something, but in the dark, all these other things are happening.

Did you have a specific goal with Anhell69?

I felt that my film was going to be for young people and that it was going to be against colonialism. I said that my inspiration was an American writer, and Richie Hawtin is from Canada. I had these references that were outside of my country, and it was important for me to see my own culture. The beatnik generation exists in Colombia too but with other writers. There was Gonzalo Arango and he loved Kerouac and tried to send letters to him. So even if we are talking about local artists, these people also liked artists from other countries too. But the idea was that Anhell69 would be an invitation to research our own history. I knew young people would be interested in all these images and would want to look into Ospina and Gaviria.

With music, when you’re hearing a very specific sound, you want to figure out where it’s coming from. And from there you discover even more. There may be a DJ you hear but then you learn where the music he’s playing is from, and it may be someone from another country. It was very interesting for me to open this door and to invite the audience in, to show them other doors. I wanted one of the doors to be to Colombia’s past.

Part of this invitation is for younger people to understand the colonization of cinema. And there is a type of cinema that is the dominant form around the world. It’s Hollywood. Young people think the only way to make a movie is to make a huge blockbuster, or to make this very specific kind of film, but there are things that are closer to us. Humanity is dominated by the mainstream, and this is something we should be worried about all the time. We don’t want people to think there is only one way to think or make something—people need to explore.

Were you specifically trying to combat specific aspects of mainstream filmmaking when doing Anhell69? Obviously you have these interviews interspersed throughout the film alongside the typical narrative filmmaking, and then you’re inspired by someone like Apichatpong Weerasethakul as well.

I think I was trying to go against my city and the filmmakers from my country. I wasn’t just inspired by Apichatpong either; the shadows in my film were inspired by these mothers in the city who created these figures that represented family members who disappeared—this was because of the government. These shadows in my film don’t move during the day but at night they have red eyes and move and are fucking. It was this idea of giving pleasure to this city. When we hear these speeches about our country, we only think about violence and these disappearances, but these were normal people. They were fucking. And we need to transform this idea—Colombians are more than just victims.

What was the process of editing the film like?

It was connected with this idea of mixing in Traktor. With Premiere, it was like I was editing in many channels. I was just playing and playing and playing. I was trying to mix image with sound, and the sound is super important in Anhell69—it’s full of texture. All the cuts are connected with specific sounds, and there is an unbalance in atmosphere. I was playing with the editing a lot and I got lost because it was a lot of information, so I invited two other editors. I was working with Matthieu Taponier, who is a French editor, and Delia Oniga, who is Romanian.

It’s very interesting because many people talk in the film and especially in the sound design and editing too… it was very connected with the electronic music scene in Romania. There is an important Romanian DJ who’s on the soundtrack: Cosmin TRG. This film was a co-production, and there was this connection with the electronic and minimal music I liked in my teenage years. I discovered this track by him and I decided to put it in the film.

With editing, something I’m learning with the film I’m trying to make is that if you’re not confident with the thing you’re doing, when you watch the same footage you shot over and over again, it doesn’t feel good. Being confused is good, yes, but if you don’t know how to put everything in order when editing… Well, I am a person who wants to destroy and create new things all the time. And I don’t think that’s good (laughter).

Did that happen with Anhell69?

Yes (laughter).

So how did the film evolve over time?

I wanted to be very conceptual with the film’s point of view. I wanted us to be in the car, I wanted us to see this guy who is dead and to just see the sky. I had these strict rules where I recorded many shots in the city that are good, but I decided to delete all these moments because I wanted to follow this concept. But you have to remember this is like a game—you have to play more, you have to write and delete. But it can be frustrating.

I remember when I first saw it at True/False Film Fest in 2022, I was really moved by this constant juxtaposition between this loss of hope and optimism, of suffering and joy, of isolation and community.

The film is not trying to give an easy speech about hope. It’s trying to be objective about what is happening in this country, at least from my perspective. It’s about the nihilism of a generation, but also the history of humanity. We can talk about hope, but we look back at history and see how people keep repeating the same mistakes. I think hope is when you are awake; to be alive is to have an opportunity.

A lot of people think about the future with capitalistic ideas. People schedule their life to have a family, to have a house, and they’re planning in this way that is a result of society telling you that you need to reach these goals. The future becomes about saving money. But the movie allowed me to talk about other philosophies of life, of other ideas. I was very intrigued by Albert Camus. Camus said that one of the important questions of today is whether or not to commit suicide. And when you really talk through this, you can really live life.

Hope is perhaps not how we typically think of it. Hope can just be about living this day, and when you decide to do it—to not commit suicide—you’re living. It is a miracle to live. And the movie for me is about life, because it is about the miracle of cinema, too. Even though they’re talking about death and suicide in the film, we’re watching life as a maximum expression. And at the end of the film, my character wakes up—I open my eyes. I was thinking about resurrection, which is a miracle that can only happen in cinema. I was thinking about the concept of being alive and being dead… everything to me is more dual; there is not only one answer about all these questions we have. And the reality we’re living is crazy: there is a reality we see through our eyes and one we see through a screen.

You describe Anhell69 as a trans film. What does that mean for you?

I don’t really know, but I think this film allowed me to think about identity. We talk about gender identity, but the film itself is also a fiction and it’s a documentary. When you really understand a movie, you understand its territory and atmosphere. All movies have to play with their own codes, their own universe. My movie isn’t really what happens in Medellín; it’s my perspective. I have thought about gender identity for a long time, and the movie is me asking these questions. We were talking about Apichatpong earlier and in his film Uncle Boonmee (2010), he talks about reincarnation and a guy remembers that he is a princess. He’s mixing formats, styles of cinema, and all these other ideas too. But also, Anhell69 is trying to be aware of its own nature, and we have this voiceover to help people think about these ideas too. I think of Anhell69 as a song and that the voiceover is its lyrics.

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?

My legs (laughter). I was looking at them the other day and liked that they were long.

Theo Montoya’s Anhell69 is currently distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Thank you for reading the 46th issue of Film Show. Shout out to the Balance series.

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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Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954) is a Taiwanese American artist and filmmaker who has spent her career creating works that grapple with media corporatization, racial and sexual politics, the internet, and more. After moving to New York in the late 1970s, Cheang became involved with various arts groups and, notably, played a key role in the important low-budget public access television program Paper Tiger TV. It was during this time that she gained hands-on experience with editing and creating works that involved different communities of people. Her monumental queer sci-fi debut, 1994’s Fresh Kill, has a newly restored 35mm print that she is currently touring around the US. Dates can be found below the interview. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Cheang on Sunday, September 15th via Zoom to discuss her early video work, Tent City, and her lack of pessimism.

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Joshua Minsoo Kim: How’s your day been?

Shu Lea Cheang: I just got to Pittsburgh and checked into this hotel, just in time for this interview! (laughter).

I wanted to start off by asking about your childhood in Taiwan. What comes to mind when you reflect on that?

I was born in the South of Taiwan and our place was quite close to the sea. Tainan is one of the more ancient cities, and it’s actually become quite popular—it supposedly has the best food in Taiwan now. When I was growing up, we always had relatives who went fishing and gave us fish, lobster, and shrimp. So in a way, my childhood had a lot of fish (laughter). And Fresh Kill (1994) is about fish.

And you have Sex Fish (1993) too!

Yeah! Sex Fish came in the middle of editing Fresh Kill.

Were there specific things you experienced in Taiwan that made you recognize that you wanted to be in the arts?

Not particularly. I didn’t set out to be an artist at all. By high school, I got really into cinema and that was during the time of martial law. Of course there were no films being shown, and I remember the only way I could see them was when, during high school, I went to the French Consulate or the Goethe-Institut and they’d show French avant-garde or German new wave films. I was really into Godard, so films like Breathless (1960), but I was also really into Fassbinder. At this time in Taiwan, there weren’t any particular filmmakers or a film industry, really, so my first contact with film was European cinema. There were Hollywood films shown too but I was never taken by them.

There’s a lot of time between when you first watched these films and then moved to New York. What were you up to in your 20s?

I got into National Taiwan University’s history department, but that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. After graduation, I picked up some freelance work and then I came to America because I wanted to study film.

How’d you end up in the history department?

National Taiwan University is the best university in Taiwan. I knew that I wanted to go into the humanities. I didn’t get into the English department and ended up in history, but it didn’t really matter; the university is really good and it was where I got into many things. There was a lot of music going on—it was a rock 'n' roll period, and there were some young Taiwanese bands playing in cafés. I became friends with them, and I remember one of the members of a band became a huge theater director.

How’d you decide to go to New York then? What inspired you to make that decision?

After university, I knew that if I wanted to study film, I’d have to get out of the country. At the time there was no film department in Taiwan. I came up around the same time as Ang Lee. When I went to New York, I studied at NYU and he was also there—we became very good friends. He had more of a theater background in Taiwan and by the time he went to NYU to study film, his filmmaking was leading him more towards working with Hollywood.

Do you have any specific memories of being at NYU?

There was both Ang Lee and Spike Lee, as well as Jim Jarmusch. We’d hang out together. I was living in the East Village and, at the time, it was very punk—there was all the no wave filmmaking. So I had this influence from them. I actually wasn’t a filmmaking major; I was a film studies major. That was kind of a mistake. But in cinema studies, I got introduced to New American Cinema, and at the time it was very experimental. I was into Stan Brakhage.

What was it like for you to be exposed to all these different scenes? You had experimental films, you had the no wave scene, and I know that you were engaging with the Wooster Group as well.

In a way, Fresh Kill is about that whole era—it wraps up my ’80s in New York. At the time, the East Village was really wasted. It was a rough time—there were all these empty lots. I ended up living on Bowery, which was the most famous street for homeless people. There was a Salvation Army there, and there were a lot of drunks there. And now Bowery has a 5-five star hotel (laughter). That’s how much New York has changed.

Did you feel out of place at all as an Asian woman in New York? Or did you feel welcome as one in the arts scene?

It was very clear that you would be experiencing racism. As an Asian woman, I was being exoticized, and this was a major factor in my installation, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1992). I tried to reverse this male gaze.

Right, Rea Tajiri is in that, for example.

Yes, she was in it as well as many other women. So yes, you feel racism and have these encounters for sure. I was involved with Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV at the time. I also went into an editing place and worked as an editor. I started as an apprentice to be a film editor, and I was in the field for about 10 years. I was also taking up a lot of odd jobs in independent filmmaking—sound recording, doing boom.

I did want to ask about your work with Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV. They started in the 1980s and were doing a lot of important independent work. What sort of things left an impact in having worked with those groups?

Paper Tiger TV was a weekly show, and it was on a volunteer basis so we kind of just got together at a studio in Manhattan and did all this stuff about media criticism. I was able to produce some of the shows too. For example, I produced a piece that was critiquing the Year of the Dragon (1985). I didn’t say that I produced it at the time because we were a collective, but it was my concept and I invited Renee Tajima to make a comment.

So it was all about being able to work on ideas together. I was a key member; I was on pretty much every show. I was also working with the camera switcher in the studio, and I was also editing. With Paper Tiger TV, there’d be one person who’d say something like, “I want to do a critique on the New York Times,” and then you’d come together around that. We produced these TV shows for basically nothing. We listed the costs and how much money we spent on buying paper or whatever. It was also a show where I was able to meet a lot of interesting, important scholars.

Earlier you said that it was a mistake to be majoring in cinema studies, but to me it seems like it lines up with your work in Paper Tiger TV. Why do you consider it a mistake?

Oh, it’s because I actually meant to apply for the filmmaking department (laughter). Ang Lee, Spike Lee, and Jim Jarmusch were all in the filmmaking department, and I was in cinema studies but I decided it was okay. I was still friends with all these guys. When Ang Lee was making his thesis film, I became his assistant director. We also shared an apartment together, so we were really close.

After I did cinema studies, which only took two years, I got a job at a commercial editing studio—I don’t even remember the name. At the time, commercials were done on 35mm so I learned how to edit on that. Of course we also used 16mm and Super 8 film at the time. I worked as an assistant editor for a year in this company and then I became freelance. That was a time when we were going from analog to digital editing. When I made Fresh Kill, it was shot on 35mm but I actually edited it on Avid, which was one of the first digital editing suites.

Do you have any stories about sharing an apartment with Ang Lee?

I did a wedding for him! You know his movie The Wedding Banquet (1993)? That actually came from a true story. We shared this loft in Chelsea. His parents were coming and he felt that he had to get married. He had this girlfriend at the time, and he thought, what’s the best way to entertain my parents? A wedding! (laughter). I actually organized the whole wedding at the loft, and he always appreciates that I did that. At the time we were poor, we didn’t have much money, but we were subletting these huge lots in Chelsea so we were able to do this huge party.

Did you organize parties in general while in New York?

Not so much parties, but a lot of my work was very collaborative, so I always organized a bunch of people together. Those Fluttering Objects of Desire had like 20 people, and there were a lot for Color Schemes (1989), which had 12 performers. We always had meetings at my place and I’d usually have to cook to feed people. That became the way I worked—bringing people together and eating together in a very affordable way.

Did you have a specific dish that you’d make?

I’m actually quite versatile. Right now I live in Paris and I also do these kinds of parties, and it ultimately depends on the ingredients. I had a friend named Lawrence Chua and at the time he was working at BOMB magazine. He did an interview with me. He came to me at the time as a punkish boy (laughter), but he loved to cook, and at my little loft in Bowery I had a good kitchen. Since he was working at BOMB, he’d meet so many artists and scholars and I’d let him organize things—we’d have ten people over and he’d cook in my kitchen. He’d cook so much.

I wanted to talk about Color Schemes. You’re framing the laundromat as a place for community. I’m wondering what memories you have of these spaces and what actually inspired you to make that work.

I don’t take home management seriously. I’m pretty bad with keeping the house clean, so every time I needed to do laundry, I needed to do three loads. I was also pretty bad at it. I never thought about separating the color clothes from the whites. It was a mess! The white shirts would always become pink—it would always happen! It took a long time for me to separate the two. And every time I did the laundry, I’d have three washing machines and just look at them turning around. Color Schemes is about this idea of the melting pot in America. If you go with this washing machine [framework], you see this separation of the whites from the colors, and how you can actually throw all the color clothes together. Color Schemes was also an installation.

In the ’80s, Hollywood was doing casting sessions and they would sometimes ask for “non-traditional casting.” And what that meant was that they wanted people of color. They would go out of their way to cast specific people in these roles. I was really annoyed by this phrase, “non-traditional casting.” I was working with La MaMa and other theaters in downtown Manhattan then, and Color Schemes came from wanting to work with some of the performers, and to consider how racial minorities would be lumped together.

At the time, I wasn’t setting out to be an artist, but I had this idea of putting a monitor in the washing machine and using a coin to have it turn around. Color Schemes was actually conceived as a three-channel installation with a monitor inside of the washing machine. I was lucky. Right from the beginning I got a New York State Council on the Arts grant, which meant I could work on the piece. I bought three used washing machines and put them in my apartment (laughter). They stayed with me for five years. Later I got discovered by the curator from the Whitney, John Hanhardt. He saw this and was bold enough to say, “You will have a solo show at the Whitney Museum. You’ll have a big room.” So I designed the room with all these different elements, and my first artist show with Color Schemes was in 1990. I remember that this was the year after Yoko Ono had her show there.

Do you have any thoughts on Yoko Ono?

I think she’s quite amazing. Her work with the Fluxus movement especially, and I like that she navigated being a celebrity while also being a part of that movement.

Those Fluttering Objects of Desire came a couple years after, and that involved more people. What sort of things did you learn from Color Schemes that informed your work on Fluttering Objects?

After Color Schemes, I was invited to do some shows at Exit Art on Broadway. I got a grant and decided to do Fluttering Objects. I was feeling repressed as a woman. I was always being objectified, but I didn’t feel like I could counter this situation without bringing more women together to do this piece. And that’s what happened with this. I designed a way to do this with a Polaroid camera and a Betacam. And I wanted the woman to hold the camera and to shoot it. I designed a way to do all this for cheap, and I guess today this is what we would call selfies (laughter).

Why did you decide to have it look like coin-operated porno booths?

I was working in Times Square then, and on 1600 Broadway was this building with film companies, so I was working there a lot. On Times Square, you’d walk around and see porno theaters and porno booths, and since Color Schemes was already using coin operation, I decided to do it the same way for Fluttering Objects.

I see a throughline between all your work with Paper Tiger TV and then these works, and then with Fresh Kill (1994). A lot of the things you care about are embedded in Fresh Kill—did you have everything laid out for how it would look and feel or did anything change throughout the course of making it?

At the beginning of Fresh Kill, you have Tent City, which at the time was at Tompkins Square Park. The whole park had homeless people setting up their tents, and it was probably there for ten years. I think the year I started working on the film, the city actually got rid of Tent City, though I knew from the beginning that I’d want to build a set for this scene. Tent City in the East Village was a staple—it affected me a lot.

In Fresh Kill, you see the shadow of Paper Tiger TV as well because of the stuff with public access TV. Public access TV had a motto: “Use it or lose it.” For me, this is a very important concept. As an independent, alternative media maker—and in a larger society where corporations are taking over everything—public access channels were part of a deal with cable companies in each city. We had to say that they should reserve a couple channels for public use, for free. That’s what public access TV is about. You may have like 500 channels on cable and we would ask for two that could be free. There were also a lot of fights to continue using these two channels, so there was a lot of encouragement for artists to use them too. This included people like Richard Serra. He made Television Delivers People (1973).

We had to occupy these channels otherwise the government would take them away. There wasn’t fear about that; it was more like, we have to use this. And more artists started to use it. You had some crazy shows on there too. The technology was very rough but it was an interesting phenomenon.

I wanted to ask about the soundtrack and sound design for Fresh Kill. I appreciate how varied it is, and how much it plays an integral role in maintaining the pace and feel of the film.

I was familiar with sound because I was working as a sound editor at the time. And it’s true. We just had a couple screenings and I was sitting in the cinema and listening. At the time, we did Dolby SR, and it’s great to hear the different stereo sound with all these different layers; I forgot about that. I was pretty involved with the editing process and I wanted these multiple layers. I wanted this environmental ambience. And this for me defines New York. I’ve returned to New York recently and I was amazed by how noisy it was. So you have sounds that will take over everything in this upper layer, but underneath there’s so much nuance happening. And you can take this in social, political, racial terms. This is sound as a representation of the nuances of society.

Can you expand on that? Where do you see a relationship between the sound design and with racial politics or sexual politics?

There’s a radio soundtrack that’s pretty prominent, and then underneath you have this sort of ambient track. I was using the radio soundtrack to tell another layer of the story; it’s not only the dialogue that’s conveying the narrative, the radio and sounds are doing that too. This means that in our society, there isn’t just one voice that should take over everything. You have this mixture of voices, and maybe at one point you’ll have a voice that stands out, but that doesn’t mean you should be eliminating the other voices—they’re still there. This was why it was important for me to compose the sound with all these layers.

We approached Vernon Reid, who was in the band Living Colour at the time. We liked his music and I believe Jessica Hagedorn, the scriptwriter, knew him. He had never composed music for a movie before, so it was kind of funny because he did wall-to-wall music for the film. It’s such intelligent music with different genres. I can’t say that I directed him to use this specific music, but when he came to us with songs, I would accept them. He’s brilliant.

Something I appreciate about your works is its depiction of everyday intimacy and community. You have that in Fingers and Kisses (1995), which shows public displays of affection among Asian lesbians. What to you was meaningful in making that?

So Sex Fish was because I needed something fun to do because I was getting bored while editing Fresh Kill. Sex Bowl (1994) came from an installation I did for the Walker Art Center called Bowling Alley (1995). At the time, I had this museum work, but I didn’t think they’d accept work with sex, and so I made Sex Bowl for fun. That was done with New York lesbians. There was a loft party on Avenue D and we brought a camera and told all the lesbians that we wanted a picture of them. It was done in that way. None of these films were pre-planned, per se, we just did them. These films didn’t use money; friends just volunteered. They’d be like, “Okay, we’d be happy to do a sex scene,” and then we’d go to the bed and film.

After Fresh Kill, I had a residency in Tokyo. There, I was with the dyke community, and they showed Fresh Kill there too. Every day I’d hang out at Ni-Chome, which was the queer café, and it was there that I decided to make Fingers and Kisses. These films couldn’t have been made unless I was with these communities.

I’m thinking about your second film, I.K.U. (2000). I’m curious about your thoughts at the time around the promise of the internet in relation to queer expression and intimacy.

So before that, in 1998, I had this piece called Brandon for the Guggenheim. I “uploaded” Brandon Teena to the internet to explore gender, the virtual world, cyberbullying, and rape. After I finished Brandon, I felt that the internet was finished. With Fresh Kill in 1994, I learned about cyberspace and I was really eager to get on it, and there was this big commercial from MCI where they said, “There is no race and gender in cyberspace.” That was the promise of the internet: we would all be equal. Of course that wasn’t true. And in a way I made Brandon as a way to combat this idea. So after Brandon, I felt the internet was done, it was finished. The commercial companies were taking over the internet. The internet is a time bomb—you can’t search anything without being tracked.

Throughout the ’90s, a lot of internet artists like myself were trying to figure out how to make money. There was just no way to sell our work in this way, though at this time, porno sites were probably the only ones that were making huge money. People were finally ready to sign up and use their credit cards to keep watching pornos (laughter). So it was like, shit, these porno empires on the internet are collecting orgasm data, which is what I.K.U. was about. Last year, I also came out with the sequel to it called UKI (2023).

Have you been very pessimistic about the state of the world given everyone is on the internet or on their smartphones all the time? Like, people are being tracked constantly now.

Interestingly, when I did the Fresh Kill premiere at BAM earlier this year, the audience was cheering and shouting and were really in sync with the film. And then after two screenings of this current tour, the sense I’m getting is that people are finally catching up with it and it’s speaking to them. A lot of the post-screening conversations have been about us living in a corporatized world. I always recommend fighting within the system; my film is a way to make that resistance known. A lot of my work deals with living in a surveillance society, and at the same time, I wouldn’t say that I’m pessimistic because I don’t feel like I need to surrender. I always had to find a way out, and I’m still finding a way out today. I’m doing my part in this resistance.

There’s a question I always ask everyone at the end of each interview and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

Aww. These days, I tell people that I’m certifiably insane (laughter).

That’s what you love about yourself?

I have to accept it. I’ve been doing so many crazy projects and I keep doing them. I keep getting myself into trouble, and with this current road trip I feel a bit crazy. Even when I made Fresh Kill, there was a nickname for me on the set: “Maniac.” (laughter). I’m very persistent. Once I’m convinced of an idea, I try to realize it.

Tour Dates

Shu Lea Cheang is currently touring a newly restored 35mm print of Fresh Kill (1994). You can find all the dates below:

Sept 13 - Brattle Theatre (Cambridge, MA)
Sept 14 - Scribe Video Center@Ambler Theater (Ambler, PA)
Sept 15 - Pittsburgh Sound + Image @ Harris Theater (Pittsburgh, PA)
Sept 16 - Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH)
Sept 18 - Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY)
Sept 19 - Athens Cine (Athens, GA)
Sept 20 – PATOIS @ The Broad Theatre (New Orleans, LA)
Sept 21 - Austin Film Society (Austin, TX)
Sept 22 - Circle Cinema (Tulsa, OK)
Sept 24 - Ragtag Cinema (Columbia, MO)
Sept 25 - Music Box Theatre (Chicago, IL)
Sept 28 - Marquee Arts (Ann Arbor, MI)
Sept 30 – Stray Cat Film Center (Kansas City, MO)
Oct 02  - Film Streams’ Ruth Sokolof Theatre (Omaha, NE)
Oct 05  - Guild Cinema (Albuquerque, NM)
Oct 06 – Southern Arizona Film Society @ Splinter Collective (Tucson, AZ)
Oct 09  - Grand Illusion Cinema (Seattle, WA)
Oct 10  - Hollywood Theatre (Portland, OR)
Oct 12  - Roxie (San Francisco, CA)
Oct 13  - Mezzanine @ Brain Dead Studios (Los Angeles, CA)
Oct 15  - Pollock Theatre, UC Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA)

Thank you for reading the 45th issue of Film Show. Realize your ideas.

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Joel Potrykus’s thoughtful, ugly, independent filmmaking heralds the artist as one of the last hopes for contemporary American cinema. His depictions of “losers” could easily be spiteful or malevolent, but they’re cherished, witnessed, and valued in their desperate quests. His feature films include Ape (2012), Buzzard (2014), The Alchemist Cookbook (2016), and Relaxer (2018). With his newest feature Vulcanizadora (2024), which premieres June 8th at the Tribeca Film Festival, Potrykus is as contemplative and grisly as ever. A story of two friends on a camping trip with an unnerving destination, the film surfaces the profound sadness and haunting anxiety coursing through his characters, bringing them to an incendiary brink. Olivia Hunter Willke spoke with Potrykus on May 29th, 2024 via Zoom about fear, fatherhood, and catharsis through art.

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Olivia Hunter Willke: Your films consistently defy genre. Is there a shorthand you use when people ask what tone they occupy? I’ve heard you describe them as “spaghetti Midwesterns,” which I love. Do you like to say black comedies, character studies, etc.?

Joel Potrykus: If I meet somebody and they go, “Oh cool, you make movies, what are they like?” I still don’t have an answer, and I just go, “Ughhhhahhhduhhhhh.” I do that for a long time, and then like what you said, I usually just go, “Like dark comedies, I guess...” And then they’re fine with that, but they’re not! They’re not dark comedies to me because that means you’re saying that it’s a comedy and they’re not comedies. I think to me they’re dramas—drama just meaning a story about a human or whatever. So, I don’t know how to classify them, I’m probably the worst to do it. I’ve heard people say, “Oh, it’s a thriller!” But thriller—I’ve never used that word in my life, so I’m the last person to ask about that. Or “weird indies” is another one I say, and people go, “Okay, cool, I love independent movies,” and I go, ‘Yeah, alright then.”

Your characters suffer from a Midwestern boredom that leads to urges of self-annihilation. Does it stem from your own experience or is that something you saw around you growing up in Michigan?

I think what I’m trying to do is just steal from all the movies I love. I didn’t even realize that people would be like, “Oh, these characters are so Midwestern.” I never thought the characters were weird. So clearly they’re just people I knew, and they’re just amalgamations of kids I went to high school or junior high with. The formula’s pretty easy: You cast a grown man and then just write the dialogue for a 15-year-old boy. And that’s it, and it’s not something I thought of consciously, but clearly that’s all it is. All the names and the behaviors are just stolen from dudes I went to high school with and knew growing up. But I always realize that after. There’s a few inside jokes with names and things.

I just wrote an article for TalkHouse and I talked about fatherhood and how difficult it was. I mentioned in there my fear of accidentally going to prison, which is one of my biggest fears. Like, “Whoops, I didn’t know that was illegal, now I’m in prison.” And I didn’t even put it together that that’s the thing Marty’s fearing most, why he wants to kill himself in Vulcanizadora (2024), because he’s gotta go back to jail or prison. So, that stuff is freaky to me, that clearly at the end of the day, it’s just me. All these characters are just different versions of me and my fears and dreams and all that shit. But I guess I don’t like to talk about that too much because then I feel like it takes away from people going, “Ah, I felt so much like it was me in that story!” But it’s definitely just all the different parts of me.

I was reading the Tribeca synopsis and saw that you are referred to as a “provocateur.” Do you view your art or yourself as an artist that way?

No! No, I wish! I view that guy (points), I view this guy (picks up laptop and holds it in front of a poster of Buffalo ’66) as a provocateur! And that’s somebody I love and I love provocateurs, and that’s cool that they call me that, but I would never.... I guess when we’re shooting, I’m like, “Aw man, audiences are gonna be grossed out or they’re gonna be really turned off by this moment.” Isn’t everybody a provocateur trying to provoke a reaction? So when I see that in black and white, I’m like, “Cool, I’m a provocateur, like Andy Warhol or something!” But I’m never like, “Ah yes, I am definitely a provocateur...” I’m just a normal, nice guy who is making movies that are not normal and nice.

Your characters can, I guess, be labeled as “slackers,” but they also have such a drive and commitment. Do you ever worry that they get pigeonholed too much?

I don’t really worry about that. It was a surprise when my first feature was getting a lot of “slacker”-ing. Like, that was my reaction, too. Especially Marty in Buzzard (2014)—that dude’s not a slacker! He’s on his lunch break, he’s going to a bank to get 50 bucks. He is ambitious like you said, he’s got drive. But I get it, we relate slackers to work or something, a lot of times they don’t work. And maybe Abbie in Relaxer (2018)… I don’t know, I never once was like, “I’m gonna make a movie about slackers.” I’ve never used that word, I never ever think about them as slackers or even lazy! I love these guys, so I wouldn’t use anything derogatory, so no.

That’s fine, I get it, I see it in every review now: “Slacker provocateur!” And I’m just like, that’s who I am now, and when I had a manager, he would pitch me around like, “he’s the slacker guy,” and I get it, people need some kind of a label or genre or whatever it is. I love the movie Slacker (1990) and love the whole ’90s losercore slacker aesthetic, so I just embrace it at this point. Sure, I’ll be the slacker guy, but I don’t see these movies as slacker comedies at all. If that’s what people get, then I think they’re missing the sadness—these are sad movies to me. And not heartbreaking melodramas, but just like, ugly and sad is always the vibe. But you can’t just do ugly and sad for an hour and a half, so that’s where they have to be funny a little bit, to break it up and to throw people off balance tonally.

Music, and particularly metal music, features prominently in your films. A scene that sticks out to me in your filmography is in The Alchemist Cookbook (2016) when he’s approaching the abandoned car, and it’s blaring a mutilated version of “No Games” by Serani. In Vulcanizadora, you sing along in parody to “Voodoo” by Godsmack. Do you always have a song or album in mind when creating these scenes or even films in general or is it something that appears later on during production?

I’m always usually listening to one album when I’m writing it, it just helps me get into a certain vibe. And as much as I would love to just write that song or some of those songs into the screenplay, I can’t afford to do that. A lot of it is just playing around and editing. You know, in the first Bill & Ted (1989) movie, when they’re at the mall, and it’s the montage of all the guys and they’re playing, the song is “Play With Me” by Xtreme, and it’s that electric guitar solo. I saw that in the theater when I was a kid and it changed everything that I thought about movies and electric guitars in movies, just like whoa. And then the more mature version of that is when I first saw Funny Games (1997) and the opening, I was like, “Holy shit, this is it. This is what I wanna do, I’m doing this. This is me, I’m stealing this from Michael Haneke.” I can’t describe it, there’s a feeling when a (makes deep noise) guitar comes on, it feels dangerous to me. Aw man, anytime a movie will do that, I am so locked in.

Do you design the gadgets in your films? Like the power glove in Buzzard and the metal face mask in Vulcanizadora?

It’s me and my brother [Chuck Potrykus]. My brother is the craftsman. My idea was that Marty was gonna make a Freddy glove, and then my brother was like, “We should attach it to a power glove because he plays video games.” And I was like, “Cool, that’s like Nightmare 6.” He handmakes these, there’s only one of them. For the mask in Vulcanizadora, my idea was a little lazier but also kind of scary in its own way. I just told him to just buy a ball gag and stick an M-80 in it. He’s like, “We can do better, we can do better.” And I was like, I don’t know, there’s something dangerous and kind of weird and taboo. Everybody was like, “Eh, I don’t know Joel, I think everyone’s gonna laugh when they strap those on.” And I was like, “Good, because it’s gonna be really ugly when they stop laughing!” But everyone convinced me that we should really go for, like, Marty has made it rather than bought it and just modified it. So, these are all made by my brother, and he just loves doing this stuff. I throw out an idea and then he actually executes it and makes it way cooler than I could’ve come up with.

You teach the Summer Film Program at Grand Valley State University. The last few short films you’ve done have been in collaboration with students, Unemployees (2023) and The Thing From the Factory by the Field (2022). Did you feel you were saving that usual kind of dark discomfort for a more personal project?

The short films I make with the students are me just trying out different things, like different types of stories and different ways to shoot stories. The features are all very much their own thing. Like you said, they’re darker, kind of uglier, but even the way we shoot ‘em is different. It’s with my DP [Adam J. Minnick], the same DP I shoot the summer films with, we’re always like, “Let’s try this and then maybe we’ll find something we really like and we’ll use it in a feature later.” And we really haven’t! We stick to an aesthetic for the shorts and we’re like, “This is really cool and this works.” But at this point, we are very much locked in on how the features move in their own way. But it’s really cool to try.

We shot one last summer called Pear that’s coming out, and the big radical idea for that was, let’s shoot it conventionally, what would that be like? I’m shooting one next week, and we’re gonna shoot it all in tight close-ups with a long lens and see how it works. I just want them all to feel different and to just try different things. I’m trying to write stories about women in those, which is different. So, I’m trying different story things, like narratively, and so the students help me with finding the female side of my storytelling. It’s cool to be in a room full of 20-year-old women who are giving you ideas—it’s not something I’m used to when we make the features. So it’s a totally different scene, and it’s awesome. It just helps me become a more evolved storyteller. To me, the features are very much me and my struggles about masculinity and all that nonsense. And the shorts are like, let me try something different and lighten up for a minute.

Before Vulcanizadora, Relaxer also touched on a fraught father-son relationship. Your son was born just days before the premiere. Did that anxiety about fatherhood get channeled into Relaxer or did it happen to be part of the story and coincided with the pregnancy?

Somebody asked me after Buzzard at the Q&A, “What are your daddy issues all about, Joel?” And I didn’t even think about it, I was like, “Oh yeah, he’s got a problem with his dad...” My dad’s great, I dig my dad. I think subconsciously when telling stories about guys, fathers come into that and the “sins of the father,” all that stuff. “What did your dad do to you to make you like this?” And I never want to show it, and I never want to explain it too much, but I just want people to put things together, probably from their own life, I want them to put that into it.

But Vulcanizadora, these two characters, if you followed Marty from Buzzard, you know that his dad wasn’t around, and now he’s gotta tell Derek’s son that his dad’s not gonna be around. Oh man, I love how messy that gets and how fatherhood-y it gets. I like Vulcanizadora very much, I’m so happy with that movie, and I feel like I got out so many bad, yucky thoughts in my head and urges and things. It was great to, whew, detox all that stuff. I mean, it’s super cathartic for me to make that movie for so many reasons. Every single thing… I think there’s something that I just need to put out in public and watch people see it.

What was your experience like directing your now 6-year-old son? And especially in a film that’s so explicitly about parental anxiety?

It was super emotional, but I wanted to make sure that he was cool with it, that we weren’t forcing him into it. But how great is it to have a movie about a dad and to then cast your real son? So for authenticity, I just wanted him to be in it. He’s a super smart kid so I knew he could pull it off if he just, like, took it seriously… or I don’t know, he doesn’t take anything seriously, but like, focus. So just coaching him a lot. And then I was really afraid that on the day he would just be bored or he wouldn’t want to do it, but he was locked in and it was great because he was doing so good—I got emotional watching him. I didn’t watch the monitor, I just stood next to him and watched his eyes. Yeah, it’s really cool.

He’ll see the movie someday I guess. And that’s one of the reasons that the movie is so cool for me—it’s a time capsule of a time in our lives together. It was awesome, I’m just really glad that he was into it. He doesn’t care about the movie now, which is fine. I’ll even show him his scene and he’ll be like, “Okay cool, let’s go play outside.” I’m so glad he was able to pull it off because thinking of the idea of having to cast an actor kid, and then watch the movie with my son later in life like, “Oh, that could’ve been you kid!” It would not have been as authentic to me if it would’ve been some other kid who’s the exact same age as my son playing my son. That would’ve bugged me. But we had another kid ready to go on standby!

There are stunning shots in the film of you guys as small, little figures, traipsing through these environments—the beach, the woods. Where in Michigan was this filmed?

All of that outside, the beach and wood stuff, is in a city called Manistee, which is right on Lake Michigan. It’s these picturesque dunes that tourists will come to. Our friend, our rich friend, owned a cabin there and let us take it over for a week. We shot all the forest scenes and all the beach, dune, cliff stuff. And sometimes, like in that one shot where we first emerge into the dunes, I have small problems with that shot, because it is so picturesque and so “ahh, this looks like a fucking calendar.” And I hate to do shots like that, but that one was more of a story thing. We need to show the woods and the dunes meeting so people can understand that transition. So yeah, it was pretty amazing that we actually avoided a lot of the more beautiful shots.

How long did production last?

I think we scheduled it for 10 days, but we got it in 9. We go really fast. And we’re shooting on film, so we don’t have the luxury of doing a ton of set-ups or a ton of takes. So, Josh [Burge] and I would rehearse it, rehearse it, rehearse it, and we’d usually get one or two takes, and that was it.

There’s such a textural richness because of the Super 16mm, what made you decide to use analog film?

I always just loved film, and with every single project, my DP and I are always like, “We gotta shoot this on 16, gotta shoot on 16.” It’s usually just a budget thing, and so at the last minute before we met with the investors, or maybe like a couple days before, I just tacked on an extra $15,000 onto the budget to see if they would still be into it and they were, which meant we could afford the film for the first time. Usually these are so low-budget, and the reason they’re low-budget is because that means I don’t have to make anybody happy, and I don’t have to feel bad if the movie doesn’t make any money. It just gives me more control, but it also means that sometimes we can’t do things like shoot on film. But I think we’re gonna shoot ‘em all on film because I just learned that trick of throwing an extra $15,000 at the last minute, and then you can do it!

Kind of a cheesy question, but would you consider this your darkest effort to date?

Yes! Yes, just even off of our test screening, people were just like, “I don’t know, I feel just kind of bummed.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s good.” Yeah, I mean, it’s weird. It has funny moments but not as many funny moments as the other ones and the dark moments, I think at least, are way darker. I didn’t even wanna try to raise a big budget for a movie like this. I couldn’t believe that there was even any interest in making this kind of movie from anybody. And it’s a difficult one in today’s climate, like even teaching and making a movie this kind of bleak is... yeah, I don’t know. I knew it was gonna be dark going into it. It was gonna be way dark and I just needed to make this. And it came out exactly as bleak and dark as I hoped.

What’s the origin of the title?

It’s a Spanish word, it’s Spanish for “tire repair shop.” In Michigan there was one in particular, like a Mexican mechanic and it just said “vulcanizadora” on the side, and I just thought it was the most beautiful word I’d ever seen in my whole life. And I always like every movie to sound like an album title, so to me it sounded like an unreleased Pixies album or Smashing Pumpkins album title or something. It kind of just barely relates to the story. I’ve been trying to make a movie called Vulcanizadora for years and this is the one, I was like, “I’m committing to it, this is the title no matter what. This is it.”

Joel Portykus’ Vulcanizadora premieres this week at Tribeca. Details can be found here.

Thank you for reading the 44th issue of Film Show. Trompe le monde, Pisces Iscariot, Vulcanizadora, the list goes on…

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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