Directors Notes

Joining DN for our final podcast episode of 2019, Argentinian Director Lucio Castro’s debut feature End of the Century reunites two men for a one night stand whose seeds were sown two decades earlier. In our interview, Castro and I get into his use of performance rather than prosthetics to donate different time periods, the flexibility of shooting with a skeleton crew and the importance of walking your actors through the mechanics of sex scenes.

Two men meet by chance while in Barcelona. What seems like a one-night encounter between two strangers becomes an epic, decades-spanning relationship, in which time and space refuse to play by the rules.

Many times in movies I see the sex is almost too pretty or too perfect and sex in real life is not like that.

Marking her move into fiction filmmaking, Italian Director Maura Delpero’s Maternal (Hogar) is an enthralling exploration of the meaning of motherhood set within the confines of a religious Buenos Aires refuge for young unmarried mothers. In our chat Delpero shares why she believes personal stories make universal cinema, how the tools of her documentary background provided an elucidating view of the lives she wanted to dramatise on screen and her methods for building cohesion between the performance styles of the film’s professional, non-professional and child actors.

Lu and Fati are teen mums living in a religious shelter in Buenos Aires. Sister Paola arrives from Italy to take her final vows. Approaching the girls’ motherhood she’ll face a challenging situation.

https://youtu.be/UyBuJwq0_BM

It’s difficult for women to confess they have difficulties about motherhood, you always have to be the perfect mother.

During our time at this year’s London Film Festival DN took the opportunity to sit down with Eryk Rocha the Brazilian director of Burning Night (Breve Miragem de Sol) – a film which depicts the isolation and economic struggle of a Rio de Janeiro taxi driver as he works the city’s late night streets. In our discussion, Rocha reveals the ways in which his documentary background brought an authentic reality to this fictional story and how the film’s themes of hardship and separation mirror the current crisis in Brazil.

Down on his luck and recently divorced, Paulo has begun driving a cab around Rio, hoping he’ll make enough to send his ex money to support their ten-year-old son. He mostly works nights, so in addition to his encounters with a colorful variety of customers, colleagues, cops and others, he must cope with loneliness, fatigue and new faces in his life.

Through this man we are talking about the crisis that we are living in the city of Rio de Janeiro but also in the country of Brazil.

If you live in the UK then you’ll be all too aware of the shocking amount of youth on youth violence which has plagued the country in recent years. Less often reported is the fact that these attacks are often fuelled by the activities of criminal gangs who recruit vulnerable children as expendable foot soldiers in a cross-country drugs distribution practice know as ‘County Lines’. In his forthright British feature debut County Lines, New Zealand born director Henry Blake draws on his first hand experience as a London youth worker to expose the human cost of this despicable practice. In our interview, Blake discusses the many ways in which his proof-of-concept short paved the way for the feature and why he felt compelled to address this growing national emergency on screen.

Fourteen-year-old Tyler Hughes has the weight of the world on his shoulders. He attends a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) in East London where he is isolated and bullied by his brutish classmates. There is no relief at home where he looks after his younger sister Aliyah as his mother, Toni, who works nights, is preoccupied and neglectful. When Toni loses her job she thrusts the family into a desperate financial situation, leaving Tyler vulnerable to Simon – a “recruiter” who targets and grooms children to promote his drug dealing enterprise out of the City.

We were always serving the idea and the core idea of the film is that vulnerability is almost extinguished entirely because of exploitation.

Returning to the narrative roots of her well received debut feature Thirst, Svetla Tsotsorkova’s Sister (Sestra) is a self proclaimed “confession of love to those who live a seemingly unnoticeable life”. The story of compulsive tall tale teller Rayna, Sister follows the defiant teen as one of her fanciful stories threatens to tear her family apart. In our interview, Tsotsorkova reveals how her time at film school built the foundations of her filmic voice and the power of lies on and off the screen.

A small town in present-day Bulgaria. A mother and her two daughters are struggling to survive. The dreamy and distracted younger daughter often invents stories in order to make life more interesting. Unwittingly, she eventually gets caught in the trap of her own lies and destroys her older sister’s well-ordered materialistic world. While struggling to get to the truth, the two sisters find out the truth about their mother.

Because of those two teachers I am what I am and who I am. They formed my personal taste in art in general.

A film which left this year’s Tribeca on a wave of plaudits – not least because this debut feature made history when 19 year old filmmaker Phillip Youmans became the youngest and first African-American director to be awarded Best Narrative Feature at the festival – Burning Cane tells the story of an ageing mother struggling between her religious convictions and the love of her alcoholic son. Arriving on Netflix today, we spoke to Youmans about the necessary ‘mind-split’ when taking on multiple production roles on an independent feature and why his natural affinity for handheld camera work was a welcome boon for the time and resource strapped production.

Burning Cane tells the story of a deeply religious woman’s struggle to reconcile her convictions of faith with the love she has for her alcoholic son and a troubled preacher. Set in rural Louisiana, the film explores the relationships within a southern black protestant community, examining the roots of toxic masculinity, how manhood is defined and the dichotomous role of religion within the African-American community.

It can be difficult when you’re focussing on the intention of a shot but also the technical aspects of the shot and being mindful of performance.

We kick off our 2019 season of podcasts with an interview recorded at the London Film Festival with Director Hari Sama, who talks to us about heading back to a Mexico City of 1986 and the character defining post-punk days of sexual liberty, outsider art and drugs which helped shape him, in his vibrant semi-autobiographical feature This Is Not Berlin (Esto no es Berlín).

1986. Mexico City. Seventeen-year-old Carlos doesn’t fit in anywhere: not in his family nor with the friends he has chosen in school. But everything changes when he is invited to a mythical nightclub where he discovers the underground nightlife scene: post-punk, sexual liberty, and drugs that challenges the relationship with his best friend Gera and lets him find his passion for art.

Vulnerability really can be an empowering thing if you use it right and that’s what the film’s about.

Subscribe to the Directors Notes podcast to hear more of our LFF filmmaker interviews. You can also catch up on all our coverage from the London Film Festival here.

An assured debut feature which despite its frank depiction of sexual violence never slips into the male gaze and in fact, purposely turns the tables on the long problematic trope of the femme fatale, Holiday from Swedish Writer/Director Isabella Eklöf, uses the life of glitzy excesses experienced on the Turkish Rivera by a newly minted gangster girlfriend as an indictment of ultra-liberal capitalism – where beneath the veneer of wealth and beauty lies the dark reality of a world in which violence rules and money talks. DN spoke to Isabella at the London Film Festival about our problematic attraction to power, the importance of trust when staging a rape scene and why she took the long way round to feature directing.

Young and beautiful Sascha discovers her dream life of luxury, recklessness and fun comes at a price when she is welcomed into the “family” of her drug lord boyfriend at his holiday villa in the port city of Bodrum on the Turkish Riveria. Physical and psychological violence are a way of life for this gangster family, but when the velvet veneer is stripped raw to the bone, Sascha’s eye drifts towards the “normal” life she is leaving behind – is it possible she could still be accepted by polite society?

I suffered from being a woman and also difficult, I feel like you can choose one or the other.

Our penultimate interview from this year’s London Film Festival, DN speaks to veteran French Director Philippe Faucon about his story of economic separation and loneliness, Amin. Shot in Senegal and France, and featuring a predominately non-professional cast, Philippe discusses why working with non-actors is an integral part of his process and the power of cinema to enable audiences to connect with lives outside of their day to day experiences.

Amin came from Senegal nine years ago to work in France, leaving behind his wife Aïsha and their three children. His work is his life, his friends the men who live with him in the social home. Aïsha sees her husband only once or twice a year, for a week or two, sometimes a month. She accepts this situation as a necessity: the money that Amin sends to Senegal provides for several people. One day, Amin meets Gabrielle and a relationship starts between them. At first, Amin is reserved. There is the language barrier, his modesty. So far, separated from his wife, he has led a life devoted to duty and knew he had to remain vigilant.

Cinema can express things in a way no other art form can.

Subscribe to the Directors Notes podcast to hear our LFF filmmaker interviews. You can also catch up on all our coverage from the London Film Festival here.

During our time at the London Film Festival DN took the opportunity to speak to Director Sara Colangelo about her adaptation of Nadav Lapid’s critically acclaimed 2014 feature The Kindergarten Teacher, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal in what has been heralded by many as a career-best performance. In the following interview, Sara discusses the advantages of a Netflix release, how she deployed thriller stylistic traits to convey the inner psychology of her troubled lead and why directing is less being an onset dictator and more about facilitating conditions which enable cast and crew to perform at their peak.

When a Staten Island kindergarten teacher discovers what may be a gifted five-year-old student in her class, she becomes fascinated with the child – spiralling downward on a dangerous and desperate path in order to nurture his talent.

I don’t think I would have taken on an adaptation had I felt that I couldn’t give something unique to it.