“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.