October 16, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on The Portrayal of Actual Events in ‘Nickel Boys,’ ‘The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire,’ ‘Maria,’ and ‘Afternoons of Solitude’ at the 2024 New York Film Festival
Whether subtly navigating the past and the present, tackling the erasure of history, examining the reliability and unreliability of memory, or reproducing and recreating historical events, these films are thought-provoking and challenge the viewers’ expectations.
At the 2024 New York Film Festival, Nickel Boys, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, Maria, and Afternoons of Solitudeoffer varying approaches in their depiction of actual events.
Categorized as a book adaptation (Nickel Boys), an anti-biopic (The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire), a biopic (Maria), or documentary (Afternoons of Solitude), these films convey their work with distinct sensibilities. Whether subtly navigating the past and the present, tackling the erasure of history, examining the reliability and unreliability of memory, or reproducing and recreating historical events, these films are thought-provoking and challenge the viewers’ expectations.
Opening Night presentation of Nickel Boys at the 62nd New York Film Festival.Courtesy New York Film Festival
Directed by Oscar-nominated documentarian and photographer, RaMell Ross, and co-written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys chronicles the powerful friendship between two Black teenagers navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida. Whitehead’s book is inspired by the Dozier School, a Florida reformatory in business for over a century with a brutal history in the Jim Crow south. After it closed, authorities discovered 100 unmarked graves of boys, mostly Black youths, subject to horrific treatment.
Ross’s film challenges the viewer how and where to look, taking us inside the characters’ POV; we see what they see. (This POV experience is achieved through different cameras that the actors wear.) Ross’s inventive visual approach also reflects on how and what we remember. Discussing the use of archival materials at the press conference, Ross referenced how this further enhanced the storytelling process; it was his way of depicting history – replacing or reproducing an archive that doesn’t exist. Nickel Boys powerfully challenges traditional narrative conventions both in the film’s structure and its approach to subjectivity.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024).Courtesy Madame Negritude
A lush and poignant film Madeleine Hunt-EhrlichThe Ballad of Suzanne Césairecan be described as an anti-biopic in its approach to portraying the Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire Forgotten to history is a major theme of this meditative and nontraditional narrative. Known as a feminist activist and a member of the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s, she was overshadowed by her husband, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire. In the film, the actress Zita Hanrot, who portrays an actress, portraying Suzanne Césaire states, “We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered”.
Filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich employs voice-over and direct address to elicit Césaire’s writing and her reckoning with motherhood (she had six children and worked full-time as a schoolteacher), in an inventive and memorable melding of documentary and narrative traditions. Shot in 16mm, fragments of Césaire’s life and work are revealed in non-chronological order and in various ways, among them – cast and crew read from her work, as well as actor reenactments.
Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria (2024).Courtesy Netflix
Directed by Pablo Larraín and written by Steven Knight, the biopic Maria has garnered Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of the American-born, Greek renowned opera singer Maria Callas, a great deal of buzz at international film festivals. Chilean director Larraín’s prior acclaimed historical biopics Jackie (about Jacqueline Kennedy) and Spencer (about Princess Diana), Maria has been described as his third entry in an unofficial trilogy about world-famous women dealing with the blinding glare of celebrity while at emotional crossroads.
Maria reimagines Callas’s final days of the legendary soprano’s life as she negotiates her public image and private self. Employing the device of a small film crew to interview Callas, segments of her life are revealed in flashbacks and fantasy scenes. The film often focuses on Jolie in many close-ups in an almost suffocating manner. Perhaps it’s a conscious commentary on the male gaze or metaphor for the scrutiny Callas faced as an icon. Nevertheless, for those unfamiliar with Callas’s life, they may be sparked to learn more or frustrated that more of her background was revealed in the screenplay.
Afternoons of Solitude (2024).Courtesy Andergraun Films
A portrait of the charismatic Peruvian-born star torero, Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra captures the physical and emotional brutality of bullfighting in his new documentary. With minimal dialogue amongst his subjects and no voice-over, the film relies on visual storytelling, as it follows Andrés Roca Rey in and outside the bullfighting ring.
This visceral and visually sumptuous documentary is also an unrelenting witnessing of several bulls’ devastating demise. The film underscores the violence and spectacle of what some consider performance art in a man versus animal fight for survival. This film does not rely on clever gimmicks, it conveys the subject matter and subjects with an unflinching eye.
October 16, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Interview with ‘Invention’ Filmmakers Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival
In this wide-ranging talk, ‘Invention’ filmmakers Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez discussed their collaboration, mixing genres, shooting a low-budget Super 16 film, making a ‘dead dads’ project, and so much more.
It was a pleasure to speak with Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez at the Locarno Film Festival where their film Invention had its debut, and Callie was awarded Best Performance at the Locarno in Concorso Cineasti de la Presente. In our wide-ranging talk, we discussed their collaboration, mixing genres, shooting a low-budget Super 16 film, making a ‘dead dads’ project, and so much more.
About Invention
In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s sudden death, his daughter inherits his patent for an experimental healing device. Featuring archives from Callie Hernandez’s late father, Invention explores the process of grieving a complicated parent, and the filmmaking itself becomes a part of the process.
“Having both lost our dads, We wanted to explore the fictions and fantasies that often follow loss and allow us to bear disappointment – both as individuals and as a public in times of national decline.” – Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez
About the Filmmakers
Courtney Stephens is a Los Angeles-based writer and director. The American Sector, her documentary (co-directed with Pacho Velez) about fragments of the Berlin Wall transplanted to the U.S., was named one of the best films of 2021 in The New Yorker. Her essay film, Terra Femme, comprised of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art and toured widely as a live performance. She is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship to India. Invention is her first fiction film.
Callie Hernandez is an actress, writer, filmmaker and producer with work spanning over a decade. She was recently awarded Best Performance at Locarno in Concorso Cineasti de la Presente for Invention in August 2024. After starting out in music as both a cellist and in experimental punk bands in Texas, she found herself acting in her first role in Terrence Malick’s Song to Song. Later acting work includes Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, A24’s Under the Silver Lake, Pete Ohs’ JETHICA among others. In 2022, she founded Neurotika Haus Films, an in-house film studio, which yielded INVENTION, and longtime collaborator Pete Ohs’ upcoming dark comedy Untitled Tick Movie produced with Jeremy O. Harris. Her upcoming project is an Untitled Erotica Anthology.
Film still from Invention (2024).Courtesy Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez
The Interview
Kouguell:Invention is credited as “A film by Callie Hernandez and Courtney Stephens”: you wrote the script together. Tell me about your writing process and your collaboration.
Hernandez: The process was very collaborative. We were into the idea of making a film together. And it really all began when it felt right to make a “dead dads” film. Making a film about my dad’s niche medical realm, the machines he collected and his VHS archive was something I’d wanted to make. So eventually, our film became more in line with that idea as we developed it.
Stephens: When we started talking about it, the project was going to be much more of a straight fiction, exploring the aftermath of losing a father. Then Callie shared elements of her own dad’s world, which was fascinating and specific, and I was drawing from the process of dealing with my own dad’s failing business affairs after he died, and this kind of composite of our experiences took shape to form the fiction elements of the film.
Kouguell: Particularly striking is the film genre; it successfully serves this unconventional (experimental) narrative film. Would you define it as a fiction and documentary hybrid?
Hernandez: The narrative is definitely fictionalized and there are a lot of true elements. My dad didn’t invent a medical device — he collected them. This film is an experiment, maybe. It premiered at Locarno as a fiction and much of the narrative is highly fictionalized, but there are a lot of very close, true elements in the film. For example— my dad did not invent a medical device, but the electromagnetic healing machines are definitely something he collected and became central to the narrative. It’s a deeply personal fiction, I suppose.
Kouguell: Courtney, you’ve worked in both narrative and documentary. As the co-writer and director on Invention did your approach to the project change as it evolved?
Courtney Stephens Courtesy Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press
Stephens: I think it meandered further into non-fiction as we worked, but it was exciting to work backwards: starting with the idea of fiction and then kind of documenting the creation of that fiction and drawing real stories out as we went along. I have an MFA in screenwriting from the AFI, but had gone on to make more experimental and essay films, so it was interesting to apply lessons learned in those realms to fiction.
In the film, we were working from an outline rather than a fixed script, with the exception of a few scenes. So there was definitely an element of working out these kinds of testimonies with the actors about who Carrie’s dad was, knowing they would be puzzled together into something that feels like this fractured portrait.
Kouguell: Callie, you have an extensive background as an actress, and you also starred in this film. How did this inform the writing process, and the incorporation of archival footage of your late father, promoting and discussing his inventions?
Hernandez: Yes, so, as I mentioned before, my dad did not invent these types of machines, but he had dozens. With some of them, one must be licensed by the inventor in order to purchase and use the machine. They range anywhere from $2k-$17k. So, my dad was an MD turned holistic healer in the early 90s. He was a hypnotist at one point, a monk in Bhutan at another point. After he died, my sister and I sort of re-discovered all these beautiful machines that we’d been privy to growing up with him, of course.
I knew his archive existed, but was surprised to find it all in one place in a storage unit. I shared these VHS tapes with Courtney and, then, slowly it felt like — ‘OK, yes, this is the film we’re making.’
Yes, acting has been my bread and butter for the most part for about a decade. I was acting in a TV show right after my dad died. In fact, I went straight to work after his funeral. I didn’t tell anyone. My dad’s death in combination with a mounting curiosity about making my own films led to my renting a house in Massachusetts with the intention of making my own films. As my good friend Pete Ohs put it, I was done with only acting.
That said, I studied doc photography and journalism in college, so these things are probably engrained. Making films and writing have always been every day for me — I’ve always done it since I was in my teens. I really just like making films in general. It’s all intertwined for me.
Kouguell: This footage is both powerful and humorous, subtly underscoring mythology and the American Dream, Anything is possible or is it? There is a layered tone of hopeful optimism and disappointment when it comes to Callie discovering who her father was and wasn’t. Please talk about this.
Hernandez: There’s a lot of mundane tasks involved when dealing with a death. Many of the characters in the film are very similar to interactions my sister and I have had with people surrounding my dad’s death.
But I think this speaks to a larger idea of conspiracy as a form of grief. We wanted to explore conspiracy and its origins. There’s both hopefulness and hopelessness, and a desperation in both.
Carrie faces a very fragile reality. She’s pulled toward her dad because he’s gone. She’s left with this essence of irrevocability and unanswerable questions. So her skepticism, over time, gets braided into a sense of hope or lack thereof. It’s about irreversibility, I suppose. This is what interested me most in making the film. Irreversibility and the things we try to change in real time that we absolutely cannot. But, for whatever maddening reasons, we do try.
Stephens: Yeah, we were thinking a lot about the nature of belief and especially how porous that becomes when one is in crisis. My sense is that America is on that same kind of shaky ground, in which something was promised, and people feel let down. It’s often so much easier to find a story in which things are not what they seem, or there is some secret adversary or obstacle, than it is to process the fact that you’ve been let down, that there’s nothing but disappointment.
Kouguell: Grief, one of the themes of the film, is something you both experienced, losing your respective fathers. It’s the catalyst of the plot yet you don’t fall into predictable tropes or a neat and tidy ending.
Hernandez: We exchanged books in the beginning. I gave Courtney Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, and Courtney gave me Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig. We found that the books were pretty eerily similar; women inventing – or maybe not at all inventing – wild circumstances during a time of foundational loss. There’s something primordial about this state of mind. There’s a push and pull as you un-become yourself, in a way. You are suddenly, without consent, fundamentally different than you were before. We both lost our dads pretty suddenly. You’re very quickly haunted when this happens. So, this was also a part of why we wanted to make the film together, I think. This shared understanding.
Stephens: In a sense the construction of the film – and this word Invention – are, in a positive sense I think – exploring ways of changing the shape of grief through fiction. Maybe it goes back to the question of genre and the self-reflexivity of the film. The encounters in the film are building the character of the absent dad in ways that are contradictory, and that’s OK within the space of the film for these contradictions to exist, because we’re always acknowledging that they are these fictional propositions, so it’s an exercise in character. But in life, we want it to all add up, and it often doesn’t, it’s just layers upon layers, and that’s what we hoped to depict, rather than a linear process.
Kouguell: The actual invention or one of them, is about healing ‘energy’ – can you delve into this more?
Callie HernandezCourtesy Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press
Hernandez: There’s a great deal of specifics in terms of electromagnetic frequencies, energy and lasers, etc that are commonly argued as scientific approaches in the medical industry. It varies in terms of meaning. I think the term “healing” has developed its own, vastly varying implications.
My dad didn’t invent this (or any) machine (to my knowledge), but he had dozens. He believed in electromagnetic healing and lasers and frequencies. He was a big believer in energy, and even more so a believer in general. In reptilians. In parallel universes. Energy was always his core belief, both as a doctor and as a person. At one point, he lined the perimeter of our house in copper. We had copper pyramids in our backyard.
Then, of course, his interest in hypnosis, devices, etc. It’s true that, by the end of his life, he was selling these types of energetic healing devices for a company out of Utah. He really did use them demonstratively on feral cats in an attempt to show their increasing domestication. He was living with his girlfriend in their trailer in Texas and they had 17 cats at one point — all with names that began with ‘B.’ All of this to say, this type of medical technology is pretty niche, but varied. At the same time, there is a unique point where all these very specific interests intersect.
Kouguell: You shot on Super 16 on a shoestring budget. I imagine this also informed specific choices you made during the filming – both positive and negative.
Stephens: Trying to work out improvisational scenes while burning through limited rolls of film – I don’t recommend it! But it forced us to shape the scenes there and then rather than just exploring out loud with the hope of finding the film later on, a process which would have yielded something more impressionistic. The visual language of the film is quite direct and almost old-fashioned, and I think this helps given the abstract nature of some of the things we were exploring.
Hernandez: Definitely. I think we couldn’t imagine shooting this on anything but film. There was a moment we considered otherwise, but it didn’t feel right. And, of course, we knew the limitations of using film, which gives you an engine to keep pushing through with these limited resources. You have a limited amount of film and time to hone in on what’s important. But, yes, there are definitely pros and cons. A shoestring budget indeed. All out of pocket. We were the crew. It’s simpler, but not easier.
Kouguell: Final thoughts on your film that you would like to share?
Stephens: Thanks for the great questions! In film school, they will tell you “Raise the stakes!” Our film is small and kind of gentle, but the stakes for us were really high— our dad’s who we loved and these really difficult experiences in our lives. So the nice reception to the film gives me faith in what can be transmitted through cinema without too many resources.
Hernandez: I actually shot four films in this same house that I’d rented in Massachusetts with the intention of making micro-budget films that no one would ever really ‘allow’ us to make. This film idea was the one that felt closest to the things that I hope to continue making films about. Again — making films this way is simpler, not easier. But I like hard work.
Invention probably wouldn’t exist without this partnership between Courtney and myself. Yes — the responsibility I felt in terms of my dad, incorporating his VHS archive and machines and the overall essence of the film was huge. My sense at the beginning was that Courtney was the right person to collaborate with. And I think this instinct was right.
With hundreds of films, 11 sections, 3 competitions and 20 awards given, the 2024 Locarno Festival did not disappoint. While it was impossible to watch every film, here are some highlights of the 11-day event.
Locarno77, Conversation with Jane Campion (Pardo d’onore Manor), Moderated by Marcello PaolilloLocarno Film festival / Ti-Press
Academy Award-winner Jane Campion received the Pardo d’Onore Manor, the award for outstanding achievement in cinema. When discussing Peel (1986), which won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes (one of my personal favorite short films), Campion expressed her initial frustration with her teacher who advised her to cut it down. When she took a step back from the project and implemented the feedback, it led to the film’s success. She added that she was unable to enjoy the success when the film first premiered as she and the producers were convinced they were not going to win and went to dinner instead. On the walk home from the restaurant, they were surprised when people kept stopping them to congratulate her on the film’s Palme d’Or award.
Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón received the Lifetime Achievement Award at Locarno. Cuarón, known for diverse films ranging from Roma, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to Gravity, expressed his vulnerabilities particularly about his anxiety around the writing process, as well as the importance of challenging oneself as a filmmaker and how he continues to reinvent himself as a filmmaker.
Stacy Sher received the Raimondo Rezzonico Award for her achievements as a visionary producer. Two-time Oscar nominee (Erin Brockovich and Django Unchained) embodies – and expresses the importance of perseverance, as seen by her long slate of films she produced, working in both the independent and studio system.“The more Greta Gerwigs and Sofia Coppolas and Kathryn Bigelows and Celine Songs we have, the more young girls are going to think, ‘There’s a job I could do.’”
Notable Features
Locarno77, Red Carpet, Mohammad Rasoulof, Alfonso CuarónLocarno Film Festival / Ti-Press
On the Piazza Grande The Seed of the Sacred Fig written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof was greeted by exuberant standing ovations. Rasoulof, on stage with a translator, in a moving speech stated: “I had to choose between prison and leaving Iran. With a heavy heart, I chose exile.”
Director Mar Coll’s featureSalve Maria won the Special Mention prize for her gripping drama. Coll states: “In my film, I explore the troubling figure of the regretful mother. Trapped in relentless guilt and social misunderstanding, she faces the fear of her own monstrous condition, through a chilling tale unleashed by her imagination.”
Lithuanian director Saulė Bliuvaitė won the Pardo d’Oro Akiplėša (Toxic) for her ‘striking vision of the teenage female body as a battleground’. Powerful and unrelenting in its portrayal of two 13-year-olds, the film digs deep beyond the surface of the struggles of body image and survival.
Short Films
Locarno77, Palmarès, Pardi di Domani, Medien Patent Verwaltung AG Award, The Form by Melika PazoukiLocarno Film Festival / Ti-Press
The Form written and directed by Iranian filmmaker Melika Pazouki received the Medien Patent Verwaltung AG Award. In this moving coming-of-age drama, the universality of teenage vulnerability is explored with honesty and a distinct vision.
My Life is Wind (a letter) written and directed by Iranian-American Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, successfully breaks the rules of incorporating voice-over in her moving and visually captivating film about a young refugee torn from her Middle Eastern home, who resettles in the American Midwest.
American writer and director Claire Barnett received the Concorso Internazionale Special Mention prize for her film Freak, which asks: What is your deepest, darkest fantasy? Pushing the boundaries of traditional filmmaking techniques and storytelling.
In The Nature of Dogs directed by Pom Bunsermvicha (based in Thailand), defies storytelling expectations; in what at first appears to be a traditional narrative film about a family of four, subtly shifts to a more poetic experience.
October 15, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Interview with Constance Tsang, Writer and Director of ‘Blue Sun Palace’
Susan Kouguell speaks with writer-director Constance Tsang about her poignant first feature film ‘Blue Sun Palace’ premiering at the Cannes Film Festival for Script Magazine.
As I watch Blue Sun Palace now, I have come to terms of what it means to me – a letter to the ghosts of childhood, to my parents who came to America with one dream and settled for another, to my father who I now understand, and to myself as I come to terms with redefining loss in my life.
– Constance Tsang
It was a pleasure to speak with Constance Tsangabout her poignant first feature filmBlue Sun Palace, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine de la Critique; it is the only US film selected.
Tsang, a Chinese American writer, director, and educator based in New York, received an MFA in Screenwriting and Directing from Columbia University. Her award-winning short film BEAU is a Vimeo StaffPick and her previous short film, CARNIVORE, was a 2018 AT&T Hello Lab project. Her work is supported by Starlight Stars Collective and Tribeca Film.
About Blue Sun Palace: Within the confines of a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens, Amy and Didi navigate romance, happiness, and the obligations of family thousands of miles from home. Despite the physical and emotional toll their work demands, the women have fortified an impenetrable sisterhood, which tragically collapses when disaster strikes on Lunar New Year.
Still from Blue Sun Palace (2024).Courtesy A Big Buddha Pictures & Field Trip Media Production
Kouguell: Let’s begin with talking about your writing process.
Tsang: Itstarts with a feeling that I can’t escape. From there, I begin with constructing the story structure and what it looks like. And I do that with Post-its, I put inspirations, feelings, and thoughts on the Post-its, and the Post-its become the story, and the story becomes the outline, and then I start writing the screenplay. It’s low risk; you can put a character point or plot point on a Post-it and you can move it around or throw it out.
Kouguell: The tone, mood and atmosphere you created in the visual storytelling and pacing is captivating. What were some of your influences?
Tsang: The films of Chantal Akerman. I read Harold Pinter. I’m interested in how silence is used and ways spaces can linger.
Kouguell: The inspiration for your script came from losing your father as a teenager.
Constance TsangPhoto by Daniel Zvereff
Tsang: At the core of the film is grief. It is something that drives a lot of decisions the characters make. It took me a long time to understand my own grief. I still have a hard time actually verbalizing it, and that difficulty to express grief was a thrust for this movie too through this process of writing and discovering these characters.
Kouguell: Tell me about the transition from making short films to Blue Sun Palace, which is your first feature.
Tsang: I made a couple of shorts in grad school, and it was a transition to jump in and understand the craft of it all. Moving to the feature space meant being able to be vulnerable; I couldn’t always do that in my shorts. It demanded more of me, and my understanding of the film’s emotional life. It’s almost as if things I was too scared about myself I had to let that go.
Kouguell: How did it all come together from script to screen?
Tsang: It took a long time, I had been writing this for five years. In the beginning, the first couple of drafts were not great, it was not the truest form. It took time to really understand what the story meant and what it meant to me.
Kouguell: It’s interesting that your two main actors Lee Kang ShengandKe-Xi Wuare also screenwriters and directors.
Tsang: They came to the story with such intelligence and understanding, it was amazing. They gave so much and were able to make the characters their own.
Kouguell: What’s next for you?
Tsang: I’ve started to write my next film about my mother.
Kouguell: Final thoughts?
Tsang: Especially since this article is aimed towards screenwriters I will say, write what you know. It’s very true. For me, it was a lot easier when writing a first feature to take from personal experiences.
Blue Sun Palace won the French Touch prize at the Semaine de la Critique, Cannes Film Festival.
June 23, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan Kouguell Interviews ‘Green Border’ Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland for Script Magazine
Agnieszka Holland discusses the inspiration behind the film, her collaboration with screenwriters Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, the creative decision behind filming in black and white, and more.
I had the pleasure to speak with Polish director and writer Agnieszka Holland about her latest feature film Green Border. A three-time Academy Award nominee (Angry Harvest, Europa Europa, and In Darkness), Holland, in addition to her numerous award-winning features, has also directed episodes of many notable television series, including Treme and House of Cards.
About Green Border
In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so-called “green border” between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa are lured by government propaganda, promising easy passage to the European Union. Unable to cross into Europe and unable to turn back, they find themselves trapped in a rapidly escalating geopolitical stand-off.
Winner of many international awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Green Border underscores the themes of ‘there are two sides to every story’ and the moral choices characters must face.
A scene from GREEN BORDER. A Kino Lorber release.Courtesy Metro Films
Kouguell: What was your initial inspiration for the film?
Holland: Reality was the inspiration. I made several films about the Holocaust, and Mr. Jones, about the crimes of Stalin and a Welsh journalist no one wants to listen to. In 2015, during the big crisis of refugees from Syria coming to Europe, people were afraid of the newcomers from those countries. It was easy to manipulate those fears with dictators like Putin, and the local extreme right and nationalistic movements. That’s why I wanted to tell that story, to humanize those who have been dehumanized by the propaganda and give them voices and faces.
Kouguell: The screenplay centers on three very different perspectives and viewpoints; the Syrian refugee family, a young border guard, and a middle-aged female activist. Tell me about your collaboration with your co-writers Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz.
Holland: The film is based on real facts. I decided to try to make the film a few weeks after the crisis on the Polish border started. First, I did extensive research with everybody who knew something about the crisis or who was living through it and had a distinct point of view. I contacted two friends, one an experienced screenwriter who happened to be an activist and knew a lot of activists who were working on that border. And the second (screenwriter) was a young woman, who was pregnant when we were writing it and her sensibility was very important. Her husband is a doctor, an anesthesiologist, and he created a group of volunteers who went to the border and tried to help, and saved several lives.
My co-writers had experiences about the border, about the situation, about the logic of the activists and refugees. I talked to activists and refugees and collected recordings of conversations with them. At the beginning we thought people would be too afraid to talk to us, but by the end, even the border guards contacted us. It was important because it confirmed what the other side was saying and it confirmed the psychological aspects of what they were going through.
Agnieszka HollandCourtesy Agnieszka Holland
Then we had to decide our approach. We had two different opposite concepts; one was to find the moment, place and person and focus on that, or make it more epic and give multiple points of view. I decided to go for the second because I knew how much the migration crisis is present now for years although it’s not very well known. I wanted to show the complexity of the situation and show it through different eyes and different perspectives.
Kouguell: How did you structure the interweaving of these narratives?
Holland: We divided the storylines and everyone wrote their storylines based on their experience and research. After that we put it together, correcting and improving each other’s story and deciding on how they will be told in all, to find the emotional moments and the dramaturgy.
Kouguell: The film is shot in a quasi-documentary style.
Holland: We wanted that immediacy of that style and the camera in motion. In fact, it was impossible to shoot in a different way because we had such a short time and so many scenes and so many actions. I was very in sync with my cinematographer, and also the two women who were shooting the parallel units. There was a lot of footage, and after that, a lot of things were decided upon in the editing room.
Kouguell: Why did you choose to film in black and white?
Holland: I wanted a metaphorical quality and timelessness. You see the cell phones but at the same time it could be 1942. For the local people, a lot of imagery was striking especially in that area because of the tragic situations that took place there. During the Holocaust, it was close to the death camp where there was the uprising of the prisoners who were hiding in the same forest. There are a lot of hidden memories in that forest. To see these similar images in the film shows that it can come back.
Kouguell: The film received strong criticism from Polish politicians. Your reaction?
Holland: I expected it to some extent but I didn’t expect the hate campaign would come from the highest authorities and it would be so violent. Somehow it helped for the publicity of the film. People were very curious and went massively to see the film in Poland.
Courtesy Metro Films/Kino Lorber
The new government is practically doing the same things and pushing the nationalist fear and the fear and hate of others. They’re using the migration crisis for their own means. I’m pessimistic about that but I’m very glad that we made the film and it is very important to many people.
Kouguell: Final thoughts?
Holland: At a Q & A after the film was shown in France, one young woman asked me if the film can change the world. I said, ‘No, I don’t think so, the world is too deeply in trouble.’ The woman said, ‘Maybe you didn’t change the world but you changed my world.’ That is the biggest satisfaction I can have.
Green Border opens in theaters in New York on June 21, 2024 at the Film Forum and on June 28, 2024 in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal.
June 13, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan Kouguell’s Interview With ‘Vulcanizadora’ Writer/Director/Editor and Co-Star Joel Potrykus, Producer Ashley Potrykus and Star Joshua Burge at the Tribeca Festival
This dark comedy highlights Potrykus’s distinct vision with a gripping dramatic pulse, and unrelenting tone and atmosphere. Familiar themes in Potrykus’s work emerge again in ‘Vulcanizadora’: nihilism, isolation, loneliness, society-rejected outsider, however this time he digs further, tackling new territory about fatherhood and father/son relationships.
Written, directed, edited, and co-starring Joel Potrykus, Vulcanizadora, centers on two friends who trudge through a Michigan forest with the intention of following through on a disturbing pact. After they fail, one of them must return home to deal with the legal and emotional repercussions.
Joel Potrykus is a Michigan-based independent filmmaker, specializing in screenwriting and guerilla style production. His films have screened internationally and are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. His screenplays are part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science Permanent Collection, and the George A. Romero Archival Collection. He received an MFA in Writing for Film and Television from Emerson College and is an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University.
It’s been over ten years since I first met husband and wife team Joel Potrykus and producer Ashley Potrykus at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival where I interviewed them about their award-winning film BUZZARD,starring long-time collaborator Joshua Burge. In 2012, their film APE, which also starred Burge, premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival, taking the Best Emerging Director – Filmmakers of the Present award and a Best First Feature – Special Mention.
Vulcanizadora,Potrykus’s latest feature,world premiered as part of Tribeca’s US Narrative Competition and this time I met with Joel and Ashley Potrykus in New York City now joined by stars Joshua Burge and Solo Potrykus, Joel and Ashley’s 6-year-old son.
This dark comedy highlights Potrykus’s distinct vision with a gripping dramatic pulse, and unrelenting tone and atmosphere. Familiar themes in Potrykus’s work emerge again in Vulcanizadora: nihilism, isolation, loneliness, society-rejected outsider, however this time he digs further, tackling new territory about fatherhood and father/son relationships.
Joshua Burge in Vulcanizadora (2024).Courtesy Sob Noisse
Kouguell: The three of you have been collaborating for a long time along with your filmmaking team Sob Noisse.
Ashley Potrykus: I joined the Sob Noisse band for their first feature and Josh before that with Coyote. When I first joined, film was not my area at all and with each movie, it was another stepping stone and as that happened, our Sob Noisse band got bigger.
Joel Potrykus: At some point, I realized I couldn’t make a movie without Ashley; she’s the other half of my filmmaking brain that keeps everything organized and clears my thoughts.
It is like a band, and we call it Sob Noisse; I look at it like a musician band would be and everyone has the instrument they play. Josh is definitely like the lead singer, he’s the voice of what we’re trying to say and what people should be looking at. He’s got a certain face, persona and rhythm.
Joshua Burge: I never had any intention to be an actor, I went to school to be a filmmaker and to write. I got bit by the music bug while I was there and started performing, and Joel was a fan and then asked if I could be in one of his movies. The first one was Coyote and at that point, I didn’t really understand what acting was, and then with the first feature, Ape, I felt I was part of the Sob Noisse band.
Ashley Potrykus:Ape was the first time, at least for me, and I think for you, Josh, that we felt that we each came into our own role a little bit more.
Joshua Burge: When we started, everyone was wearing all the hats.
Kouguell: This is another low-budget feature for you.
Joel Potrykus: It’s the biggest budget we ever worked with but still a vastly low budget. We shot on 16 mm. I think it’s less rare that these micro-budget features are breaking out and we are now in the norm. We’ve shot on 16mm before but never a feature. We didn’t think it was financially feasible but it is. If you shoot the way we shoot, efficiently and economically and not burning through twenty takes, you can totally do it.
Kouguell: The script definitely does not follow a traditional 3-act structure. Just when I thought the plot was going to turn one way, it shifts. Yet, all these twists and turns are earned; they have been subtly set up. At times it also felt a little improvisational. How scripted was it?
Joshua Burge: It was very scripted. The only exception was sometimes we had an idea before we’d start rolling and we might try another line or an extra tack to bring something home. But for the most part, it was all on the page.
Joel Potrykus: I’ve always wanted to be an improv-style director so I was like, let’s start with an outline, we’ll shoot from an outline, but then it turned into a real script with real dialogue. We didn’t have the luxury to improvise when we were shooting.
Kouguell: How long was the shoot?
Joel Potrykus: We scheduled it for 10 days, which was really bonkers, but somehow we got it done in 8 days.
Ashley Potrykus: And we had a big location move, which was a two-hour drive with all of our gear and our crew, and closing up Airbnb’s within that time frame.
Joel Potrykus: We are a band, we know the rhythm, we know the beat.
Kouguell: How much input on the script did Ashley and Josh have?
Joel Potrykus: I’m a control freak so I wrote on my own. It was about the tone, and I know that Josh knows how to play that tone. We’ll all read it and then talk about it, and I’d take those ideas and incorporate it into a new draft.
Kouguell: In the opening scenes of your film, the music choices set an unsettling yet somewhat comedic tone and atmosphere. Let’s talk about the tone of the film.
Joel Potrykus: The three things Josh and I would say before the film were: “Sad, funny, scary.” We got to hit those.
Kouguell: We’ve been talking about the consequences of the characters’ actions. For Joshua’s character, seeking redemption is complicated and defies expectations for the viewer.
Joel Potrykus: It was the chance to see his character’s guilt and shame and remorse; he’s terrified of that redemption and what that means, and the repercussions of redemption.
Joshua Burge: I think my character is settling for relief, maybe not redemption.
Kouguell: Josh, the scenes you had with Solo were very powerful.
Joel Potrykus: What was it like to play Jeremy, Solo?
Solo Potrykus: Practice, practice, practice.
Ashley Potrykus: He didn’t love rehearsals, but one day he looked at us and said, “Mom, Dad, don’t worry, I got this.”
Joshua Burge: Solo nailed every line, he was so well-prepared and so professional.
Kouguell: Your script subverts the traditional screenwriting rules by breaking them and successfully defying the expectations for the viewer.
Joel Potrykus: I teach screenwriting and we use Save The Cat and I drill the 3-act structure. The more that I teach, the more confident I am subverting that 3-act structure because I know what audiences subconsciously expect these moments to happen; and so when they don’t happen, I feel like a lot of audiences will have a hard time following along with the structure so it’s my job to put in these little pieces that keep you holding on to the next scene. I like this script because there’s not even a midpoint, there’s a two-thirds point. I’m curious what the reaction will be because it’s not giving audiences what they are expecting.
Vulcanizadorahad its World Premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival in the US Narrative Competition.
Upcoming Tribeca screenings:
Tuesday, June 11 – 2:30 pm EST at Tribeca Film Center
Thursday, June 13 – 8:45 pm EST at AMC 19th St. East 6
June 13, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan Kouguell’s Interview with ‘Treasure’ Writer and Director Julia von Heinz at Tribeca Festival
Award-winning German filmmaker Julia von Heinz talks about her latest film ‘Treasure,’ from the adaptation process, dealing with transgenerational trauma as a theme, and what she hopes audiences take away from seeing the film.
I had the pleasure to speak with award-winning German filmmaker Julia von Heinz about her latest film Treasure, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival.
Award-winning director and screenwriter, von Heinz won the German Film Award for Best Children’s and Youth Film with her debut, Nothing Else Matters, her 2020 film And Tomorrow the Entire Worldcompeted at the 77th Venice Film Festival and was nominated for Best Film at the German Film Awards. She earned her doctorate at the Film University Konrad Wolf in Babelsberg and teaches directing at the University of Television and Film in Munich.
About Treasure: Set in the 1990s, Lena Dunham plays Ruth, an American businesswoman who takes her father Edek (Stephen Fry), a charmingly stubborn Holocaust survivor, on a road trip through Poland to make sense of her family’s past. Treasure is the third part of von Heinz’s Aftermath Trilogy, which deals with the repercussions of the Holocaust in Germany and globally.
Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry in TREASURE (2024).Courtesy of Bleecker Street and FilmNation
Kouguell: The script is an adaptation of Lily Brett’s best-selling autobiographical novel Too Many Men. Tell me about the adaptation process and working with your co-writer and husband John Quester.
Julia von Heinz: This is the fifth project I have co-written with my husband. Sometimes it’s very difficult because we sleep with the characters and wake up with the characters and we are in love with the characters. It keeps the relationship alive.
I like the process of working together. We’ve known each other for 25 years, and have been through a huge pool of events together. We both loved the novel. My mother gave it to me in the late 90s. (Like Lily Brett, von Heinz’s mother is the daughter of a Jewish survivor and part of that “second generation” to which Lily had given a voice.)
Photo by Peter Hartwig
It’s a 700-page novel with a lot of side plots that you don’t see in the movie. It took us a long time to get to the core of the father and daughter story. (von Heinz describes their relationship as a “love story” between two individuals who could not be less alike.)
Kouguell: How much input did Lily Brett have during this process?
Julia von Heinz: Lily was at our side. She was so interested in the process and read from the very first draft to the last draft. It’s such a personal story for her.
Kouguell: Tell me about taking this script to the screen.
Julia von Heinz: Once we had the script I felt I could rely on it when we started filming. When we were on set and working closely with my cinematographer, I knew I could fill in the voids of elements that were not in the novel and bring my energy to make it flow. It’s the most challenging film in my career thus far.
Kouguell: You spent three days shooting at Auschwitz.
Julia von Heinz: Thefirst time I went was in 2016 and it was a shock to experience. I returned many times after that. We were allowed to film outside the fence and in the parking lot along the border because we couldn’t interfere when visitors were there and film crews are not allowed inside. Our crew was permitted to take photographs near the barracks and our visual effects team could insert images behind the two actors in post-production.
Kouguell: The film centers on the theme of transgenerational trauma; father and daughter deal with their respective traumas quite differently. How did you approach this in the script and then onto the screen?
Julia von Heinz: In Lily’s book, there was so much inner monologue with the character always questioning herself and we couldn’t adapt that for the script. We didn’t want to use voiceover.
For example, we needed to find a way to convey the self-harming that is in the novel to the screen. In the novel, it is portrayed with her dieting and the difficulties about her mother. In the script, we conveyed her self-harming by her tattooing. We discussed this with Lily and she agreed that this was a good action to show.
Courtesy Bleecker Street and FilmNation
Kouguell: What is your reaction when people dismiss Treasure without seeing it by saying it’s just ‘another holocaust film’?
Julia von Heinz: I heard that a lot. There isn’t a film about the second generation, and this is a generation that we need to tell stories about. We know that this trauma exists, and even exists in the third generation. I feel we should tell these stories, and I feel very confident about this.
Kouguell: What do you want the audience to come away with after seeing this film?
Julia von Heinz:I want to tell my audience to call your mother, father, children – and share stories that might not be easy to share and build a bridge. Share stories that are not only related to the Holocaust. There are so many important stories to share, especially with a father.
Treasure opens in Theaters nationwide on June 14, 2024.
Treasurehad its International Premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival in the Spotlight Narrative.
June 13, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan’s Interview with ‘The Freshly Cut Grass’ Filmmaker Celina Murga, Presented by Martin Scorsese at the Tribeca Festival
Celina Murga discusses the scriptwriting process, the major themes of gender roles in the workplace and at home, and the conflicts and repercussions of the actions of the male and female professor in each of these environments.
Premiering at the Tribeca Festival in the international narrative competition The Freshly Cut Grass directed by Celina Murga, and written by Murga, Juan Villegas, and Lucía Osorio, is executive produced by Martin Scorsese.
About the Film
A male professor at a university is in conflict with his own roles as husband, father and teacher. The eventual relationship with a female student highlights his crisis. As in a mirror, a female professor, also in crisis, has an eventual relationship with a male student. The duplicate story questions the power relations between genders.
I had the pleasure to speak with Argentinian writer, director and producer Celina Murga during the Tribeca Festival about The Freshly Cut Grass. We discussed the scriptwriting process, and the major themes of gender roles in the workplace and at home, and the conflicts and repercussions of the actions of the male and female professor in each of these environments.
The parallel storylines are thought-provoking, and avoid cliche and predictability.
Still from The Freshly Cut Grass (2024).Courtesy Barraca Prods.
Kouguell: Let’s start with the evolution of Freshly Cut Grass from script to screen.
Celina Murga: It was a challenging process from the beginning because we knew that the possibilities of telling the two stories about human relationships are complex. It was challenging to mirror the stories.
We worked a lot with the actors. We shot first with Joaquín [Furriel] and then the Marina [de Tavira] story to mirror the story on a set. We worked hard to try to find a way to connect with their situations and to build these characters, knowing the complexities they are immersed in.
Kouguell: Tell me about your screenplay collaboration with your co-writers Juan Villegas, and Lucía Osorio.’
Celina Murga: I always like to be involved in the writing process and write stories I care about. I like to work with others who give their point of view to what I’m doing. It’s a very democratic process. Sometimes in the beginning, Juan and I wrote one character, I wrote about Natalie and he wrote about Pablo and then we switched characters.
We were going to shoot in 2020 but then there was the pandemic. During this time we kept reflecting about the story and characters. We showed the script to others we trusted because it was important to figure out if the situations were subtle enough.
Kouguell: In his executive producer role, what input did Martin Scorsese have on your film?
Celina Murga: He allowed us to reach more producers. In a more creative way, he read the first version and saw one of the first edited versions. He was part of the creative process, and very supportive and generous with me. He’s someone who likes to be there and be part of it, and at the same time aware of me as a woman director and not someone to push the story he wants to tell on me. In that deeply profound way, he is a true mentor in allowing me to find my own voice.
Kouguell: You mentioned that the story developed from two characters in crisis, and that this idea proposed a very particular structure that restricts and provokes certain ideas of mise en scène, and aims to be a mirror in which two very similar stories take place. How did you develop the script’s structure?
Celina Murga: When we started writing this film in 2018, in Argentina we were in a big movement regarding families and we were talking about these ideas of how men and women are sometimes different and many times are also equal.
In the story we wrote, we knew that these two characters were going to be in a middle-age crisis and in a particular moment in their lives, asking about themselves as fathers, mothers and teachers. An important part of the process was to find the scenes where they were similar and at the same time not literally similar, and that was a really beautiful process to find a way that each character has their own particularities.
It happened in the script but also in the editing room process; the editing room is another way of rewriting the script and it’s very important.
Kouguell: Although the film is set in Argentina, the story feels universal.
Celina Murga: Argentina is where I was born and my home, a place where I know and am interested in talking about human behaviors. And it is very universal. For me, the film is about how we relate to each other and what it is to be a family, and what it is to be in a marriage of many years. It also questions how society and culture have made us a part of these systems. My main goal is to find more honest ways of being together in this world.
The Freshly Cut Grasshad its World Premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival in the International Narrative Competition.
Upcoming Tribeca screenings:
Thursday, June 13 – 3:00 pm EST at AMC 19th St. East 6
Friday, June 14 – 3:15 pm EST at Village East by Angelika
May 10, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan’s Interview with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter about their Documentary ‘Occupied City’
In a deeply personal conversation with filmmakers Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter, they discuss the recurring themes of time, memory, and history in their respective work and in their collaboration on ‘Occupied City,’ as well as breaking the rules of traditional documentary filmmaking.
About Occupied City: The past collides with our precarious present in Occupied City, informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by Bianca Stigter. McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest.
Steve McQueen is a British film director, film producer, screenwriter, and video artist. His film 12 Years A Slave received an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and in 2016 the BFI Fellowship. McQueen’s critically acclaimed and award-winning films also include Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), Widows (2018) and the anthology series Small Axe. Past documentary works include the BAFTA-winning series Uprising (2021). For his work as a visual artist, McQueen was awarded with the Turner Prize, and he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He has exhibited in major museums around the world. In 2020, McQueen was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for his services to the Arts.
Bianca Stigter is an historian and cultural critic. She writes for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and published three books of essays. Stigter was an associate producer on 12 Years a Slave and Widows. In 2019 she published the book Atlas of an Occupied City. Amsterdam 1940-1945. In 2021 she directed the documentary Three Minutes – A Lengthening, which premiered in the Giornate degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival and was selected for the festivals of Telluride, Toronto, Sundance, as well as IDFA and DocA- viv. It won the 2022 Yad Vashem Award for cinematic excellence in a Holocaust related Documentary.
There is a haunting quality to Occupied City, hearing the emotionless voiceover text about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam over images of contemporary life in Amsterdam. With encouragement from McQueen and Stigter I began this interview on a personal note, recounting when I saw the film at a recent press screening. Images of the neighborhood Apollolaan where my mother grew up, and the text about the Hunger Winter, the countless atrocities, including the many Jews forced into hiding, and the specific identification cards with the letter J stamped on it. My grandmother was among those in hiding, and she too had these documents, which I shared with McQueen and Stigter. I thanked them for allowing me the time to share this with them and expressed that this interview is not about my story, but about their film.
Still from Occupied CityA24
McQueen: It’s all of our stories. I don’t think you should leave yourself out of this interview; it would not be in service to your readers. It’s important to have this transparency. To be honest with you, it’s wonderful to add your experience into the interview because you’re a survivor of this situation.
Kouguell: Steve, in your interview with curator Donna DeSalvo in 2016 at the Whitney Museum, you discussed your installation piece End Credits about the Paul Robeson FBI files. The idea/theme of words being redacted, brought to mind not only the obvious government censorship but the idea of the literal erasure of history.
There is a thematic correlation between this work End Credits and Occupied City, and Bianca’s documentary: Three Minutes: A Lengthening Trailer. These works are historical investigations, which address the erasure of history, and the fragility of memory and time.
Bianca StigterCourtesy Bianca Stigter/A24
Stigler: What they also share is that you can find new forms to deal with the past and you don’t necessarily have to stick to the strictly well-known feature film or documentary genre, you can try to find a new way to convey history and the erasure of certain histories. And, also to make it more of an experience than a history lesson. There’s certainly common ground there.
McQueen: Both of us are very much about the audience and how things can sink in. With End Credits, it’s much more sculptural than Occupied City and Three Minutes, it’s for an art space due to the nature of its presentation.
Kouguell:Occupied City’s length of 4 ½ hours including an intermission requires a type of commitment from an audience. If it was two hours, for example, I don’t think the film would have the same impact. Steve, you mentioned that the film had to have the weight of time, the weight of recounting history, and to give the viewer time to reflect.
McQueen: Once people see the film, the length is never discussed. If anything, when it comes into discussion people wish it was longer.
Stigter: People said they lost any track of time. You enter a different zone of time, you don’t feel the clock ticking and you are transported somewhere else. One thing is for sure; you hear so many individual stories and you see so many people that you realize you can’t hear everyone’s story, then the film would have to be 100,00 times longer. It gives you a certain tension that no matter what you do, you can never know it all.
Steve McQueenCourtest Steve McQueen/A24
McQueen: It’s about the practice. It was the whole idea of using Bianca’s text, which occurred over 19-20 years of research, and projecting on that the every day. We never contemplated it to be shorter. When I was shooting it, I didn’t know what it was going to be, I had to find it through the process of filmmaking.
Kouguell: Bianca, in your film Three Minutes: A Lengthening,you made the decision not to show any contemporary faces except at the very end. We only see the three minutes of footage repeatedly shown and freeze frames of a home movie in 1938 Nasielsk in eastern Poland months before they were deported to ghettos by the invading Nazis.
With Three Minutes: A Lengthening and Occupied City you both made some unconventional choices in conveying your narrative, such as avoiding talking heads, and not including or only including archival footage from the past.
Stigter: In Three Minutes, it exists only out of archival footage from 1938. Doing things in this way makes you think about time more. With the other forms of documentary, people almost forget there are also forms; here you are asked to think about it.
Kouguell:Occupied City was shot over the course of 2 ½ years on 35mm film, and you had 34 hours of footage. With the exterior shots, did people know you were filming them?
McQueen: Most of the time people knew because the camera was there but sometimes not. It was the case of getting the everyday and wanting to be spontaneous.
Kouguell: Was anything staged? I’m thinking about the scene where the bicyclist hits a woman towards the end of the film.
McQueen: It just happened. Sometimes you have to predict the unpredictable.
Kouguell: There is a huge responsibility to the history of Amsterdam, the people of the past, and the present. Obviously you cannot include it all so the choices then become what to include or embrace, what to honor, what to leave out. How did you arrive at these decisions in Occupied City?
McQueen:We shot everything in Atlas of an Occupied City – over 2,100 addresses. When we had the footage, it was a case of certain things being repeated so therefore we could leave that out, and then we decided what was the best for that particular version. What flowed and what didn’t. We were fortunate to have this rich footage and situations to make this movie.
Stigter: When I was writing the book, the most harrowing part was when I couldn’t find any information about someone except that he or she was born and murdered, and that was all. If you can keep a little bit by telling about someone, there is at least something left instead of nothing. For me that was difficult to come to terms with; you can’t tell everything.
Kouguell: Bianca, I read that you referred to your book Atlas as “time machine on paper” – it’s a beautiful way to reference it.
Stigter: For me, it felt like that because you have a lot of history books that deal with the big picture or have the story of one person. What fascinated me was, could you imagine walking through a certain street back in that time so you knew things about the shops and the offices and the people that lived there; that you can get a sense of how something was in a different time and that fascinated me.
The strange thing about Amsterdam, in the city center, the canals, and so on, is that they are very much from the 17th and 18th century. You cannot see the Second World War and what happened there but you know it happened in the same spots where people were round up or executed, or took their own lives. The book and the film both try to cross that, while at the same time acknowledging that it is uncrossable. There are all kinds of tension between the past and present throughout the whole film.
Kouguell: What questions haven’t you been asked in previous interviews that you would like to address about Occupied City?
Stigter: The music; it’s very important for movies in general and in this movie, it is especially important.
McQueen: What composer Oliver Coates brought to the table was so transcendent; it brings another layer into the narrative, another echo in the audio sense.
Stigler: It makes it more abstract in a way but also grounds it very much.
Kouguell: What was then and what is now repeats for me. Ending with the bar mitzvah rehearsal and then the actual bar mitzvah was quite moving.
McQueen: We were invited to our friends’ son’s bar mitzvah. We thought it would be a good idea to shoot it. It was one of those things that everything in this movie is about our city; it’s about where we live, where our children go to school. We talked to the rabbi for permission.
In a way, it was to say that after all that, the Nazis didn’t win. There is a Jewish life that continues and exists in Amsterdam today. It was a very personal way to end the film. It’s about our family and our friends, and all of our futures.
Stigter: It’s beautiful and hopeful. It’s something fragile of course. We see and hear the boy’s voice trying to read the old words – it is very touching for me. It was also about not showing just the bad things but also the good things.
Kouguell: What has been the response to Occupied City from the Dutch audience?
Stigter: We had the Dutch premiere in the most beautiful cinema in the world, the Tuschinski theatre. The original owner was murdered in Auschwitz during the war.
McQueen: It was extremely special to have the premiere there and we dedicated it to him. It was a packed theater. You could feel the atmosphere was special to put this movie in this cinema.
Stigter: To see it in Amsterdam or another cinema, when you walk outside, I think one will have the feeling, I’ll look differently at my city now. In a funny way of course, people realize yes, that it’s very extremely local but it also has something universal. One can imagine this film in Paris or in London or New York. One can imagine the film anywhere.
Kouguell: Indeed. It is universal.
McQueen: Your background and history is amazing and thank you for sharing it with us.
Occupied Cityis in limited release in theaters and is available on most streaming platforms.
May 10, 2024 / sucity / Comments Off on Pulling the Curtain Back at Script Magazine with Editor-In-Chief Sadie Dean and Senior Contributing Editor Susan Kouguell
We each come from a unique position as filmmakers ourselves, which offers a shorthand, not to mention inspiration when interviewing screenwriters and filmmakers. They’re appreciative when we find nuances in their work that perhaps no one has commented on before and for us, it often gives us further insight into our own projects.
Canva
Susan: One of the most common questions that I get from my students and Su-City clients is the importance of going to film school. There is no one-size-fits-all answer; it depends on the types of films you want to make and your career goals.
After undergraduate school, I was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, which was a perfect match for my practice as an experimental filmmaker. Now decades later, many of us remain close. Having that community is invaluable.
You attended the American Film Institute in the screenwriting program. How was that experience?
Sadie: It’s a super intense program. You’re writing, producing, and just putting out work constantly. What’s so good about that program is that you are in this really great group of people who are fostering what you’re trying to do as a creative. You have all the support systems to make your projects, and if you fall down in terms of writing, they lift you back up in some way.
It’s all traditional narrative filmmaking and linear storytelling.
A lot of us came straight out of undergrad school and in our early 20s, and taking out an incredibly large loan, not realizing how that’s going to affect your future. You hope that you’re going to sell a big script and make it big, but that’s not the reality. Coming out of film school and not having that support system anymore is hard. You can’t just necessarily say, OK, I’m going to make this film, and I have these people and the money to do it, because the school’s basically giving it to you or giving it to you from your own tuition.
Sadie Dean
I think there is a benefit in going to a film school like that, because you’re going there not only to make movies and work on your voice as a storyteller, but you’re networking. The first day there I remember being told: ‘look to your left, look to your right, look in front of you, look behind you, you’re paying for your network, you don’t know if the person is going to be your agent, or your producer, or your director.’
You’re building that film tribe. You never know who they’re going to know and put you in touch with. But then after the program is over, there’s that feeling of where I find my people again. Some are smart and go in different directions.
Susan: Define smart.
Sadie: They’re not ‘just’ screenwriters. I feel like if you’re going into this business, and you want a career after film school, become an editor or cinematographer because there’s a lot more work there and not as much for a first-time screenwriter out the gate. Unfortunately, I wish there was.
There is just more accessibility, I think especially for editors. I know a lot of editors who say, ‘Yes, I’m on a reality show, but I’m paying my bills.’ They’re networking with other people who will bring them on to different shows or to a feature. You’re still working in the industry. Whereas for screenwriters, it’s a little tough particularly to be in the industry unless you’re an assistant or something and a lot of us don’t want to do that.
Susan: We’ve been talking about the benefits of producing. I associate produced two independent features. Honing that skill, knowing how to navigate getting a film made from script to screen, raising money, working with entertainment attorneys, agents, talent and crews, was invaluable.
Trajectories and Detours
Sadie: You came through a non-traditional way of filmmaking to find your way into the studio system.
Susan Kouguell
Susan: It was a confluence of things. I volunteered at the Independent Feature Film Market, working as a buyer liaison, putting filmmakers together with executives. This got my foot in the door. Soon I was hired as an acquisitions and talent consultant for Republic Pictures and Warner Bros., which led to working in various capacities at Paramount Pictures, Viacom, Punch Productions, and Miramax. With that experience combined with making my experimental short films, I worked with director Louis Malle on And the Pursuit of Happiness, which was a great experience.
Meanwhile, I had started my screenplay and postproduction consulting company Su-City Pictures East, was a writer-for-hire on a dozen features, and later began my teaching career. I’ve always been juggling and cobbling out different jobs so I could continue making my own projects.
Sadie: I’ve had a similar experience. I had a writing partner right out of grad school; we met at AFI. We did writing-for-hire projects and specs. We were planning to work as ghost writers or do punch-ups for other writers, but you know, life happens. I fell back on producing because that’s how I started in the business working on music videos and other projects. I’ve also written things for other people, done script consulting; all of this helps finetune your craft.
Susan: What was your experience with writing spec scripts?
Sadie: It was a whirlwind coming out of an AFI, getting approached by agents, managers, and production companies. I was a young 20-something kid who didn’t know what she was doing. Either I was overthinking these opportunities, or I would be scared of turning something in that I didn’t think was perfect. In hindsight, it was never going to be perfect. Just turn it in, they want to read it.
Susan: It’s hard not to get one’s own way. There’s also that important aspect of following one’s own gut. Do you have an agent now?
Sadie: Not at the moment. I had a talent manager who hip-pocketed me. He had brought me on for a project and I wrote a short film based on an idea he had, and I worked with him on developing projects as a vehicle for talent. I was at AFI at the time, and I had so much schoolwork that I chose AFI over going down that path. It was a great learning experience because I was writing stuff that was going to actors to read and getting feedback.
After AFI, I was a producer of an independent feature documentary, I put all my creative focus and energy into that for about six years and put everything else on the back burner.
Susan: How did you get involved with Script magazine?
Sadie: I was in a writers’ group, and a friend there told me about a sales associate job at The Writers Store when it was a brick and mortar. Years later, Jeanne, who had been running Script for almost a decade, reached out to me and said she was looking to move on to Pipeline Artists. I never saw myself writing articles, running an online magazine, and running the show in this way.
You wrote for the magazine when it was an actual physical publication?
Susan: Yes. And, for the Writers Guild publication Written By.
Sadie: How did that come about?
Susan: I had spoken on a couple of panels for the Writers Guild, and they asked me to write some articles for them, which led to other freelance writing gigs. I then wrote two screenwriting books. Like you, I never saw myself writing for publications, but personal circumstances prompted me to discover unexpected opportunities.
Film Festivals Pros and Cons and Choosing What’s Right for You
Sadie: What are some key things to really focus on when entering?
Susan: Obviously it’s more advantageous to have your work seen in person at a festival, but online festivals can also widen the viewership and draw attention to you as a filmmaker and continue that networking and word of mouth going.
If it’s a newer festival, I question if it’s worth the submission fee. I also look at who the judges are. Having been a judge at festivals over the years, generally, the first-round judges are students or interns and not necessarily the filmmakers and executives you hope will see your work.
I use FilmFreeway, as well as other lists that focus on experimental films. What about you?
Sadie: I used FilmFreeway for this last short. It’s great because it does give you many filters or criteria. But it’s also dangerous because they’ll spam your inbox, and it can get expensive quickly.
My criteria is not the prize money. I also look at who’s judging and if there are any judges, is the festival going to be in person, and how long has the festival been running? Do I know other filmmakers who have been to the festival? Is it worth going to?
Everyone wants to get into Sundance or South by Southwest, but it’s such a different ballpark. Generally, you need some money behind the film, and/or an A-list actor or someone with a name to really get you that visibility. There are a lot of great filmmakers out there who don’t have that access and I think they should all be included.
Susan: I agree. Why do you think things have changed?
Sadie: Some films are categorized as independent but then you look at the list of producers and there are big names or they’re affiliated with Netflix, for example,
I made my film We’re Goodduring the pandemic with an incredible cast and crew.It’s about a chronically content couple that realizes they have never had an actual argument and feel their relationship is lacking. A shocking turn in their evening leads to them exposing their secret feelings.
Courtesy Sadie Dean
I learned that my movie was too long at 14 minutes. It should have been 10 minutes or less because I want the actual opportunity to screen at a festival – they’re looking at programming running time. Programmers may say, ‘We liked it, but we just didn’t have room because we can put four other movies in the slot. And that’s just better for us. You know, but good luck with your movie.’
We got into the Austin Revolution Film Festival. One of my producers had screened there before and said you’re going to love it. It’s just a great atmosphere. Super independent. I thought, ‘Oh my God, these are my people.’ There are people from all walks of life, people who are working in the industry or not, and they’re making great art as filmmakers.
The festival director said it’s not about winning the prize, it’s the people you’re going to meet here and hopefully, walk away with. The biggest prize I got was meeting at least 10 new filmmakers that I’m now in touch with. I’m already helping produce a short film. I’m rebuilding that filmmaking tribe. And with these people, we can hold each other accountable.
Go to the festivals where you can find that community, who are like-minded and not there because they want to take a photo on the red carpet and with the hopes that they’ll win first place.
Susan: For us, it is a labor of love and our passion. For my recent feature-length documentary essay Inaugural, which received a SUNY Purchase Faculty Support Award, it’s challenging to find venues because it is a niche project; I was well aware of that when making it, but it didn’t stop me. It means hustling meetings and as in the studio system, it’s a revolving door of executives and curators.
Sadie: For a lot of people, they think finding success happens overnight. It’s ten years, if you’re lucky enough to get anything up and out and finding those eyeballs to see your work. There are so many opportunities, but there’s also the question of who do you go to and who do you trust? You don’t want to put all your eggs in the basket of one person who might be gone tomorrow.
The Day Job
Sadie: I find myself very fortunate that I get to work at Script and talk to filmmakers and still have my foot in the door, and being educated about what’s happening in the industry daily, and what films or TV shows are coming out and who’s who, and then the networking part of it. Talking about creative pursuits with other people and what they’re doing and their process, is all really inspiring.
Susan: For me, I’ve been fortunate that my steady job continues to be teaching screenwriting and film at universities. It’s also kept me in the film community, and it’s been wonderful to see many students find creative and personal success over the years.
Your editor-in-chief job encompasses a great deal!
Sadie: I have my editorial calendar, organizing what the contributors are doing, when it’s going to be turned in, and budgeting. I put the pieces in, edit them as needed. I get them into the system and schedule them. And then there’s the admin work behind the scenes. There’s also a lot of marketing that I do in terms of building our newsletters, talking to other organizations and fostering partnerships with them, and then also running The Writers Store. There’s a lot happening that feeds into what Script is doing.
I’m also conducting interviews, watching screeners, or prepping for an interview. And I’m dealing with publicists and scheduling interviews with their clients.
Susan: It’s a lot. There’s also the other element too, which is not only screening the films, but doing pre-interview background research about the filmmakers and their projects.
Who inspired you with the interviews that you’ve done for the magazine?
Sadie: One that definitely jumps out is Jonah Feingold who made Dating and New York. I interviewed him during the pandemic. I told him I wanted to get back into making films and he said in a nutshell, ‘Set a date, then start telling people when you’re going to make your movie, and then it becomes reality. Then these people are asking you next time they see you how your film is going. And then people with whom you might want to work you reach out to. They’re now holding you accountable for following through.’ I thought OK, I’m going to try that out. So, I set a date and started telling people I’m making this movie. And then I realized, I guess I have to do this thing. I took that to heart and ran with it.
Italk about the writing process with many filmmakers and try to apply it to my writing and see if that sticks. Monique Matthews had some great advice about approaching her writing routine. Which is she’ll stop writing a scene halfway through and save it for the next day – it’s a motivation to keep going the next day. It was a no-brainer. Why haven’t I thought of that? I’ve been doing that every morning, I have my next scene ready to go. I take these nuggets from other filmmakers that have helped a lot.
Sadie: For both of us we have that background of being through this pipeline and pulled in and pushed out in so many ways and learning from it, and we can speak to that. We have that shorthand with other filmmakers who are like, I see you, I get what you’re trying to do with your work, and let’s talk about it.
