“Seduction: the Cruel Woman Was Banned for 18 Years”: Monika Treut on her Queer Trailblazing Career

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since I last interviewed queer film pioneer Monika Treut. At the time trans identity was just starting to become tentatively accepted. Fifty Shades of Grey (a story centered around two straight, white, privileged cisgender protagonists into BDSM) had been released earlier that year, and was well on its way to becoming a glitzy Hollywood franchise. In other words, marginalized subjects the German filmmaker had been deeply and cinematically exploring for over three decades — Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Verführung: Die grausame Frau) hit screens in 1985! — were just beginning to enter the mainstream consciousness. Which inevitably proved to be both a blessing and a curse. And that’s why it’s an honor to catch up once again with Treut, whose eclectic oeuvre also includes docs like 2001’s Warrior of Light, a portrait of the human rights activist Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, and 2012’s The Raw and the Cooked, a dive into Taiwan’s culinary traditions, just prior to the Anthology Film Archives run of “Female Misbehavior: The Films of Monika Treut” (October 11-19), a seven-film retrospective of the icon’s recently restored early works.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

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“A ‘Classic’ of a Film You Never Knew Existed”: Aaron Brookner on His NYFF-Debuting Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars

While many (likely most) maverick artists have at least one unrealized moonshot project, few have a record of the high stakes drama of development behind the scenes of that lost dream. And even fewer have a record that’s as cinematically riveting as Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a fascinating look at the titular theater legend as he goes about crafting — artistically, managerially, financially — the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, his massive, multinational, 12-hour opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. And far fewer documentarians have a nephew like Aaron Brookner, who’s spent the past dozen years painstakingly restoring his uncle Howard’s long-unseen film. Premiering at this year’s New York Film Festival, the newly restored version (from a surviving 16mm print) is a deft interweaving of clips of Wilson’s outsized stage works with up-close interviews with both collaborators and the surprisingly transparent theater titan himself, sometimes in laidback settings, such as squeezed between former neighbors on a couch in his childhood hometown of Waco, Texas. Indeed, it’s Howard’s truly intimate access -— an overused term when it comes to docs -— to his lead character that humanizes this abstract avant-garde world. You really get the sense that Wilson’s just hanging out unfiltered with a friend who happens to have a camera, which was probably the case. There’s Philip Glass, who in response to Howard’s questions about Einstein on the Beach, says that it’s hard to describe something with words that wasn’t based on language to begin with. And Wilson’s partner on the German script, Heiner Müller (disciple of Brecht and member of The Berliner Ensemble), who aims to create a “theater of experience,” not a “theater of discourse” – one in which “you might only understand what you saw weeks later.” At one point Wilson even confesses that the older he gets the more he realizes that he has to make compromises, an unexpected admission coming from a detail-obsessed man for whom paring down seems an utterly foreign concept. Just prior to the Lincoln Center debut (September 29th) of Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, Filmmaker reached out to Aaron Brookner, who we last caught up with to discuss his Locarno-debuting Nova ’78). In addition to pursuing a home for his uncle’s archives, Brookner is now also busy developing his own films and series as co-director of Pinball London.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We Put All the Magical Emphasis on the Stork World”: Tamara Kotevska on Her Toronto (and Venice) debuting “The Tale of Silyan”

The Tale of Silyan is the latest painstakingly crafted cinematic endeavor from Tamara Kotevska, co-director of the 2019 Sundance-winning (in three categories) and 2020 Oscar-nominated (in two) Honeyland; it’s a film certain to continue the awards-nabbing streak. Set in the village with the greatest number of white storks in Macedonia, the title refers to a 17th century folktale featuring a rebellious boy named Silyan whose father curses him for wanting to flee the hard work on the family farm — turning him into a stork, condemned to a life of eternal migration. The title also refers to one of the real-life protagonists of the documentary, a white stork with “strong black wings” and eyes “reminiscent of Egyptian pharaohs” (per Silyan’s participant bio) who’s been injured and abandoned by his family at a landfill. The white stork is subsequently rescued and rehabbed by a human named Nikola, whose own loved ones have left him and their farm to work abroad. It’s an ingenious interweaving of ancient myth and modern-day reality, a melding of past and present seen and heard through nonintrusive cinematography and a soundtrack heavily reliant on nature’s own ambient score. And a beautifully subtle reminder that through protecting our ecosystem we can actually heal ourselves as well. The week of The Tale of Silyan’s Toronto premiere, following on the heels of Venice, Filmmaker reached out to the globetrotting North Macedonian director (who studied documentary filmmaking in Chattanooga on an exchange student scholarship in 2010), currently in post on her fiction debut Man vs. Flock; and who is set to follow Dolgan mammoth tusk hunters all the way to the northernmost area of the Siberian tundra for her next nonfiction foray.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“A Form of Primal Theater”: Federico Cammarata and Filippo Foscarini on their Venice-debuting Waking Hours

Waking Hours is the auspicious, Venice-premiering feature debut of cinematic collaborators Federico Cammarata and Filippo Foscarini, graduates of the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Palermo. With Cammarata handling camerawork, Foscarini on sound, the duo have been working as a two-man team since their 2020 award-winning, mid-length doc Tardo Agosto. And their less-is-more approach shows (and then some). The film stems from the simplest of premises: a group of Afghan smugglers who’ve set up camp along the border between Serbia, Croatia and Hungary spend their nights smoking and chatting by the fire (the only source of light) when not discussing prices and working out operational details over the phone. Shot from a respectful distance in near-total darkness, and with the ambient sounds of the forest serving as soundtrack, the doc forces us to adjust our eyes in order to see the shapes emerging from the blackness onscreen; and to witness a nocturnal existence in which time is suspended, the hushed tedium punctuated only by distant gunshots. In other words, to look and listen differently. Just prior to Waking Hours’s Critics’ Week debut (September 4th), Filmmaker reached out to the co-directors to learn all about crafting a doc that “proposes a poetic and civic counter-investigation, not seeking culprits but creating listening.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

A Conversation With Scott Cummings (REALM OF SATAN)

“Hey, this isn’t Ken Burns” – Scott Cummings on Realm of Satan. The feature-length directorial debut of veteran editor Scott Cummings, Realm of Satan is equal parts visually stunning and (no pun intended) wickedly funny. Not to mention remarkably different from Penny Lane’s Hail Satan?, the last US indie filmmaker-Satanist collaboration to premiere at Sundance (an observation screaming to be coopted by the Christian right). Politics-free and artistically rendered, Realm of Satan is basically a meticulously framed series of strange staged tableaus – from Satanists face-painting, to communally worshiping, to mundanely hanging laundry. (And also my hands down favorite, simply standing beside a lawn sign touting a reward for the arrest of the arsonist that torched the Church’s headquarters – to the tune of $6,660.) It’s all the oddball result of the director behind Buffalo Juggalos – Cummings’s first experimental nonfiction/fiction dive into a much-maligned band of outsiders – having spent 7 years getting to know the various members, including current leaders, of the Church of Satan as intimately as any nonbeliever might. (And for those nonbelievers who can’t keep your Satanists straight, I should clarify that the Church of Satan is Anton LaVey’s creation – not The Satanic Temple of Lane’s 2019 doc. That said, the grassroots political activist pranksters Lane portrayed do seem to share a similar penchant for approaching life with a theatrical wink.)

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

“The Nova Convention… a Free Artistic Experiment”: Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias on Nova ‘78

Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’s Nova ’78 centers around the Nova Convention, a late ’70s avant-garde extravaganza that took place at NYC’s now defunct Entermedia Theater (Second Avenue and 12th Street) in honor of William S. Burroughs’s return to the U.S. after living more than 20 years abroad. It was also a great excuse to gather a who’s who roster of counterculture icons to perform in the presence of the postmodern wordsmith who’d profoundly impacted them all. That would include Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, John Cage, Jackie Curtis, Robert Anton Wilson, Terry Southern, Frank Zappa and the list goes on. Quite the happening indeed! (Even without Keith Richards, who had to cancel at the last minute and was replaced with Zappa. Needless to say, no ticket-holders in the jam-packed audience took Smith up on her offer of a refund.) And just as remarkable is the fact that footage of the three-day event — shot on 16mm by Howard Brookner, Tom DiCillo and Jim Lebovitz with Brookner and Jim Jarmusch on sound — was only recently discovered in 2022 by an archivist at the John Giorno Foundation. Who then naturally placed a call to Aaron Brookner (Uncle Howard), who’s long been on a restoration endeavor, from 1983’s Burroughs: The Movie to 1986’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars (screening at the upcoming NYFF), to keep his late uncle’s all-too-brief body of work forever in the public eye. Soon after the film’s Locarno debut Filmmaker reached out to the Europe-based co-directors to learn all about Nova ’78 and the challenges of bringing a lost film to the big screen.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.