Interview with Fan Zhang, director of Nowhere Float What inspired you to tell the story of Xiaomei?Xiaomei is a Liuquin opera actress who escapes from her hometown Cangshan, doing house cleaning work in Shanghai. When she returns to Cangshan to her distanced relatives, her estranged husband and her mother with Alzheimer’s, she has mixed feelings. She wants to take her mother to live […]
Interview with Maisha Maene, director of Mulika What was the starting point of Mulika? The idea of Mulika came when I was questionning the future of Congo, a country with gigantic mineral deposits but with a population that does not benefit from them. As an Afrofuturist filmmaker I wanted to imagine a future for my country and create a way to escape the exploitation […]
Interview with Amos Holzman, director of Hafra’at Hitmotetut Hamoshava [Colony Collapse Disorder] Your film deals with two young Israelis, one trying to escape compulsory military service. Why did you want to tell their story?It’s easy to forget sometimes, that soldiers are teenagers. They get drafted at 18, and being expected to abruptly cut off their adolescence. I wanted to present the discord of the teenage […]
Interview with Salar Pashtoonyar, director of Koha wa Tapaha [Hills and Mountains] In Koha wa Tapaha, we hear the voice of the main character as she tells her story, but we don’t see her. What was your intent behind this choice? There are two reasons. One was a creative choice and the second out of a solution to an obstacle imposed on us. Creatively, […]
Interview with Julie Ecoffey, director of But What Does It Mean? Where did you come up with the idea for these two characters? My crew. I often find the banal conversations of those around me absurd and very funny, so I wanted to represent characters who were realistic in the way they spoke. Why do they speak in English? Why the “twist”? I used English […]
Interview with Eli Jean Tahchi, director of Des voisins dans ma cour What can you say about the wall that separates Mont-Royal, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Montreal, from Parc-Extensions, a neighborhood where immigrants and some of the city’s poorest people live? Since 1960, a fence made of chain links and steel rods, lining the Boulevard de l’Acadie—two meters high, 1.6 kilometers long, […]