“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.

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A Conversation With Rex Miller (HARLEY FLANAGAN: WIRED FOR CHAOS)

Rex Miller’s Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos, which premiered at last year’s DOC NYC, centers on the titular frontman of the NYC hardcore band Cro-Mags, who began his punk rock career at the unlikely (very unhealthy) age of 11, beating drums for the Stimulators (founder and guitarist Denise Mercedes is Flanagan’s aunt). Indeed, to say that Flanagan grew up too fast is a vast understatement. Not so much raised as allowed to run wild on the gritty Lower East Side of the 70s and 80s – the pioneering musician’s free-spirited “Warhol Factory “it” girl” mom believed children were better off sans parental guidance – Flanagan was surrounded by sex, drugs and rock and roll pretty much from infancy; and also by a who’s who of downtown artists, musicians and writers. (His mother’s close friends included Allen Ginsberg and Lucy Sante – who appears throughout the doc.) It’s a heck of a life, made all the more palpable by Miller’s deft use of archival footage from the era, along with more recent interviews with the bassist-vocalist’s eclectic array of notable friends and fans – everyone from Flea, to Ice-T, to Michael Imperioli and the late Anthony Bourdain. Surprisingly, Flanagan, now in his late 50s, still performs – and still practices the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu for which he earned a black belt. He’s also the happily married father of two sons – perhaps the forged-by-fire survivor’s most remarkable accomplishment of all. The week of the film’s streaming debut Hammer to Nail caught up with Miller, who’s also a veteran DP and producer, to learn all about capturing such a tumultuous life – and making sense of the chaos.

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

“The Greatest Gift We Have is Community, Which is Such an Integral Part of the Human Experience”: Ebs Burnough on Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation

Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation is a smartly unconventional look at the 1957 novel that captured a counterculture and continues to resonate with outsiders and inner journey seekers to this very day. Directed by Ebs Burnough (The Capote Tapes), the peripatetic doc includes “never-before-seen material” from the personal archive of Jack Kerouac (born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac to French-Canadian immigrants in the small town of Lowell, MA) along with images that provide much-needed context to the sexy author’s postwar milieu. But rather than centering the mythologized man or his alter ego Sal Paradise, Burnough instead takes the inspired decision to focus on the much bigger picture of legacy. And beyond interviewing the requisite academics and surviving friends (David Amram) and lovers (Joyce Johnson), Burnough gives equal weight to today’s no name “on-the-roaders” that we tag along with, and a diverse slew of big name Kerouac fans that sit for the director’s lens. That includes everyone from Josh Brolin and Matt Dillon, to W. Kamau Bell and Natalie Merchant, to Jay McInerney and Kim Jones – the designer who paid tribute to On the Road with his Fall 2022 collection for Dior. (Kerouac admirer Michael Imperioli also makes an offscreen appearance as the ear-catching voice of Jack.) Interestingly, Burnough, a Black gay man who grew up in the South, has an outsider’s perspective on this quintessential outsider’s life that allows him to prompt some truly revelatory insights. In one wonderfully telling scene Johnson recalls how Kerouac encouraged not only her writing but also for her to get out and take a solo road trip of her own — an insanely clueless suggestion considering the risks to a single woman on the road. Not only might she die at the hands of a predator, she could lose her life if she needed an abortion. When Burnough asks what the consequences were for men at the time, Johnson seems startled before firmly declaring, “None.” (Stand-up comic and On the Road fan W. Kamau Bell, a Black man raised in the South but also in Massachusetts, finds the book fascinating almost as an anthropological study, pointing out that it’s an exclusive journey made possible by white male privilege.) Just prior to the doc’s August 1st theatrical premiere, Filmmaker reached out to the multi-hyphenate director, currently the CEO of Hatch House Media, a visiting scholar at Oxford, and a former Senior Advisor to Michelle Obama who served as the Deputy White House Social Secretary.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.