Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. One of my favorite films this year hands-down is Friends and Strangers, directed by James Vaughan. It’s about a timid twenty-something guy in Sydney, Australia, who goes on a camping trip with a woman his age. Skipping ahead a bit, he kind of goes nowhere fast and gets bogged down on a job with a wealthy loudmouth. The movie had its world premiere at the Rotterdam film festival, and during the festival’s June anniversary celebration, I had the chance to talk with Vaughan. Vaughan chose silent cinema for our subject and sent a list of films that he had freshly encountered over the past year. We settled on a few: G.W. Pabst's Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl, and The Love of Jeanne Ney; and from F.W. Murnau his spectacular retelling of Faust. But we also ended up talking about Eisenstein’s work, and got into how these movies have affected Vaughan’s thinking as a filmmaker. Friends and Strangers will be released in the U.S. down the road by Grasshopper Films so look out for it.

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Opening music: “Monserrate” by The Minarets

Photo by Steve Snodgrass