Directors Notes

We last sat down for an interview with Crown Chimp Films founder Nickolas Duarte back in 2012 for his simian schoolboy short What You Need. Today Nick and I discuss his new documentary Jay, which began life way back then as a quick 3 minute profile piece about Jay Kyle Petersen a man who paints soul energy, only to become an epic five-year exploration for the correct cinematic form in which to tell the harrowing story of Jay’s early life as an intersex man forced to grow up as female, whilst suffering horrific abuse – aspects of Jay’s life only revealed to Nick during their first interview.

A story about Jay Kyle Peterson, a man who paints. Except it’s not that simple. At all. It’s about something much more complicated and strange and haunting and life-affirming. The film is a glimpse into the extraordinary and complex life of this abstract artist and his even more abstract past.

The last thing I would want is the person who this project is about – who I genuinely feel is a kind, good, loving man – to have negative feelings about our collaboration.

An invitation to explore the darker edges of the human mind, Jorge Riquelme Serrano’s psychological thriller Chameleon follows in the footsteps of some of cinema’s most disturbing uninvited guest narratives, to remind us that home and our most intimate relationships are only a safe haven when we’re careful about who we let in. I spoke to Jorge (with the tireless help of Daniel Diaz’s live translation) at the London Film Festival about the ethos of his Chilean filmmaking collective Laberinto, and how he used structured improvisation to complete his debut feature shoot in a mere four days.

Chameleon is a psychological thriller following a day in the life of couple Paula and Paulina in their summer home. The arrival of an unexpected guest interrupts their intimate day together, triggering a shocking transformation that reveals the darkest recesses of the human mind.

In order for this to be authentic, the actors had to live as these characters – so on location for 4 days, they live, eat, breath as these characters – thus eliminating any margin of error.

Producer of the 2008 Oscar winning exposé of the American military’s use of torture Taxi to the Dark Side, Eva Orner’s new film as director, Chasing Asylum, brings to light the repugnant and inhumane ways the Australian government treats asylum seekers hidden away on the offshore islands of Manus and Nauru. This latest piece had me (and many others) in tears as I left the cinema, mortified at the unspeakable ways in which some humans treat others, and conversely, impressed with the way Eva and her fellow whistle-blowers risked their own freedom to stand up for the rights of others. Sitting down with Eva at the London Film Festival to discover what inspired her to embark on such a perilous project and the risks she endeavoured to unearth one Australia’s most grotesque undertakings was a huge privilege and deeply inspiring.

Chasing Asylum exposes the real impact of Australia’s offshore detention policies and explores how ‘The Lucky Country’ became a country where leaders choose detention over compassion and governments deprive the desperate of their basic human rights. The film features never before seen footage from inside Australia’s offshore detention camps, revealing the personal impact of sending those in search of a safe home to languish in limbo.

The world has changed and it’s kind of shitty. I think it’s really important for people to stand up and say “This can’t be happening!”

Utilising exquisite black and white cinematography, rich sound design and a disturbing expression of the extremes of loneliness, Nicolas Pesce’s horrifying first feature The Eyes of My Mother, expertly hijacks your imagination for its own ends, making you ‘see’ its most brutal moments deep in your mind’s eye. During our interview recorded at the London Film Festival, Nicolas speaks about being accepted into the Borderline Films brotherhood, his preference for grounded performances within a stylised aesthetic, and why he loves walkouts at screenings of his horrifyingly dark debut.

In their secluded farmhouse, a mother, formerly a surgeon in Portugal, teaches her daughter, Francisca, to understand anatomy and be unfazed by death. One afternoon, a mysterious visitor horrifyingly shatters the idyll of Francisca’s family life, deeply traumatizing the young girl, but also awakening some unique curiosities. Though she clings to her increasingly reticent father, Francisca’s loneliness and scarred nature converge years later when her longing to connect with the world around her takes on a distinctly dark form.

To me there’s no make up artist in the world who can do the horror that your own mind can.

Three years ago when I spoke to Tomasz Wasilewski about his sophomore feature Floating Skyscrapers, the Polish director teased a future project which would be a portrait of the lives of four women in the wake of the collapse of communism. That idea came to fruition as a story of lust, isolation and loneliness called United States of Love, and so Tomasz returns to the podcast to delve further into his rigorous approach to rehearsals and the new difficulty he found when it came to editing a story in which multiple interacting characters’ lives play out on screen sequentially but all share synchronous timelines.

Poland, 1990. The winds of change are blowing in Poland. The first euphoric year of freedom, but also of uncertainty for the future. Four apparently happy women of different ages decide it’s time to change their lives, fight for their happiness and fulfill their desires. Agata is a young mother, trapped in an unhappy marriage, who seeks refuge in another, impossible relationship. Renata is an older teacher fascinated with her neighbor Marzena – a lonely former local beauty queen, whose husband works in Germany. Marzena’s sister Iza is a headmistress in love with the father of one of her students.

It’s a film about four women but at the end it’s a film about one woman. That was very important for me to put one woman in the body of four.

Edoardo De Angelis’ thought provoking third feature Indivisible explores the lives of eighteen year old siamese twins, Daisy and Violet, as they are faced with the emotional decision of whether to be surgically separated. That daunting realisation of a previously unimagined future in which they could grow up independently inevitably leads the sisters to consider questions about identity and separation. I sat down with Edoardo at the London Film Festival to delve deeper into the emotional themes of the film and the methods of bringing those core contemplations to life.

Daisy and Viola are siamese twin sisters on the verge of turning 18, living in the suburbs of Naples. They are blessed with beautiful voices and thanks to their performances at weddings, communions and baptisms, they get the livelihood for the whole family. Kept isolated from the rest of the world by their own father, who just exploits them in order to make money, their life turns upside-down when one of them falls in love for the first time and they discover that they can be separated.

I wanted to make a movie about growing up, about separation, about the idea that you need to cut something of yourself if you really want to grow up.

Unfolding almost exclusively within the confines of a Brussels family home which has become a battleground for pent up resentments and socioeconomic accusations, Joachim Lafosse’s After Love begins 15 years after the happily ever after marriage of Marie and Boris, as the couple painfully move towards separation and divorce. I sat down with Joachim (my thanks to Juliet Dante for her excellent translation skills) during the London Film Festival to discover his methods for creating a family unit in slow disintegration and how the discovery of the Stab One gimbal, a lighter alternative to the steadicam system, enabled the production to fluidly capture the long sequence shots of domestic hostility the story required.

After 15 years of living together, Marie and Boris decide to get a divorce. Marie had bought the house in which they live with their two daughters, but it was Boris who had completely renovated it. Since he cannot afford to find another place to live, they must continue to share it. When all is said and done, neither of the two is willing to give up.

To live a love story, to be in love, one must always accept a certain amount of loss – we’re going to lose something as we love another person.

After Love is available in cinemas and to stream now at Curzon Artificial Eye.

Depicting the true accounts of inseparable brothers Elmer and Erik as they attempt to escape the wrath of their headmaster’s unrelenting tyranny, Jesper W Nielsen’s The Day Will Come brings us a painfully honest depiction of the boys’ lives in a 1960s Copenhagen orphanage. I was lucky enough to sit down with the sagacious Jesper at the London Film Festival, who spoke to me about translating the disturbing reality of institutional abuse into his harrowing new feature.

Inspired by true events and set in the blooming 1960s, The Day Will Come centers around two young brothers who are instantly robbed of their lives when they are placed in a boy’s home forgotten by time. Armed only with a vivid imagination and a fickle hope, the boys engage in the frightening battle against Headmaster Heck and his lethal tyranny.

I didn’t want to make a film about victims, I wanted to make a film about how people react under repression – the secret powers we have as human beings to survive these circumstances.

Whilst interviewing Director Alice Diop at this year’s London Film Festival I could feel passion emanating from her as she spoke of her new project On Call – a film which seeks to put names and faces to the asylum seekers suffering a life of loneliness and fear as they live in exile in Paris. Sneaking behind the curtain of their one on one consultations with doctors and psychiatrists who go far beyond the obligations of their roles, this documentary highlights those who attempt to help people find their footing in world where they have become purely a statistic.

The consulting service is located in the Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny. It’s an outpost at the end of a corridor. A large room where sick men show up, bearing physical scars, and whose pain seems closely linked to the suffering of exile. They keep coming back here because they still harbor hopes that this place will give them the means to stay afloat, to survive the turmoil of their lives hitting rock bottom.

It is political because it looks people in the eyes; this is a way to understand the violence and the difficulty the migrants have been through.

Creatively combining archival footage, firsthand accounts and rotoscoped animation, Keith Maitland’s feature documentary TOWER recreates the tense horror of America’s first mass school shooting – perpetrated in 1966 by a lone gunman from the observation deck of the University of Texas Tower over the course of 96 horrifying minutes. Directors Notes sat down with Keith at the London Film Festival to discover how he brought the tragic events of that day to visceral life for a new generation all too familiar with the spectre of senseless acts of public violence.

An animated and action-packed look at America’s first mass school shooting, when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others.

When in doubt, my goal was to focus on humanity over information and trust audiences to put the whole thing together.