“I am a proud Gay, Polish/Mexican-American writer and director of (pretty exclusively) dark fantasy tales. From a military family, moving state to state in my formative years, there was continuous opportunity/necessity to reinvent myself. Storytelling was a social-survival tool for me.”
Read More“I was lowkey a child actor and also grew up making short films with friends in high school. I eventually took a break and pursued music, tried juggalo stuff, but inevitably returned back to it. When I moved to LA from NY I helped start an experimental cinema space with my friends called Now Instant Image Hall.”
Read More“I was born in Taiwan, and I immigrated to Canada when I was 13. When I was a kid I always liked theatre, music and storytelling. One day my mom explained to me there’s a job called “film director,” that’s when the seed was first planted in me. But to be honest, I never knew what filmmaking was really about until I made my first film…”
Read More“The initial idea was let’s see what we can do with this camera and a handful of video 8 tapes. Myself Freddie and Markus knew that we’d be spending a lot of time together, they wanted to record some music and I wanted to experiment with camera techniques.”
Read More“Looking back, I tend to think that the development of my identity or my psyche was deeply intertwined in filmmaking, in the act of framing my world, controlling it, saving it, living in the memory… I still haven’t decided if I think this is a healthy or unhealthy thing, but it’s most certainly helpful as a filmmaker.”
Read More“I’ll Be Here For a While was initially inspired by a news article about identity loss. Our own experiences then began to influence the project. We used the news article to explore our personal understanding of how family can present pressure, and how in specific scenarios that pressure can force us to walk the line between love and resentment.”
Read More“[Georgia is also] originally from the UK so we hit it off and kept in touch. Several months later she had a dramatic injury and was forced to stay homebound and do almost nothing for about 4 months. For a dancer, their body is their whole life. I was fascinated about how an enforced period of stillness would change her relationship to movement.”
Read More“I was born and raised in a young coastal city in China. As a kid, I always wanna make stuff. But I never succeeded in finishing any assignments for our paper-folding class. One day a gleam of inspiration hit my daydreams, and I decided on filmmaking. Now I am pursuing my MFA in writing/directing at NYU Tisch.”
Read More“My family is very stoic, and watching movies provided a shorthand, a gateway into a shared emotional language that brought us together. I think that’s where the desire to make films came from. My dad is a very stoic guy. But the joke is that he’s always crying in movies. So you get the idea.”
Read More“I’m Nigerian American so my background childhood is split between Brooklyn, NY and Lagos, Nigeria. I first got interested in filmmaking the summer before my first year of High School. I just became a cinephile, watching every movie at blockbuster and wondering how I can tell a story in this way but with people that look like me.”
Read More“I can’t remember when I started wanting to make films, I just always remember going to the movies was such an event growing up. Even as a kid it was sort of how my friends and I played at school, we would come up with ideas for movies and act them out. I suspect there’s a common progression for film-makers.”
Read More“We were shooting on a busy Saturday in February in Soho with no crew (literally, it was Ellie, me, and our DP Alex) in what felt like 15 degrees. Our faces started to tense up from the cold so we’d have to take breaks and only got a handful of usable takes before it got dark. Luckily we were really happy with one of them.”
Read More“Peter Vack (the film's producer) was a regular at the coffee shop that I worked at. We ended up becoming friends, and he encouraged me to make a short. I came up with the idea of a person who fools himself into thinking that he's in a relationship, but who is actually perceived as an irritant by the person he is infatuated with.”
Read More“Pham is from documentary world, and I’m from fiction land. I think usually we would have had more pre-pro time to be on the same page, but the necessity to keep ourselves busy to reduce stress during these times was king. But because we are different, I think the final piece turned out super unique.”
Read More“I'm fascinated by the way technology has rapidly begin to envelop us and I wanted to make something that made people question the idea of giving your destiny over to a machine intelligence. If an AI knew you better than you knew yourself and was gently guiding you towards the best version of you, would you listen to it?”
Read More“When covid happened I thought it would be interesting to sort of revisit that character as they do a stand up act virtually. I guess I kinda wanted to point out how strange virtual comedy sets are. The performer is just so disconnected from the audience, and it just feels sad in a way.”
Read More“For every project, I like to assess the resources at my disposal and let the strongest ones sing. This time around the strongest resource was Kate Adams. Imagining her as a snobbish actress consumed by self-tapes and Instagram posts during a pandemic and political revolution was a splendid bend to my reality.”
Read More“I’ve been so depressed in quarantine, the only movies I feel like watching are like delightful, structurally perfect classics. For whatever reason, the thought of anything even mildly experimental/challenging threatens to unsettle what little stability I feel, so it’s been nice to just enjoy a really great plot.”
Read More“We decided to splurge on professionally made ball & socket armatures for the puppets (I usually make my own out of aluminum wire) in the hopes that the puppets would be sturdier and easier to animate. Those armatures did not work out... The main puppet kept breaking so two days before I was set to start animating I had to remake her from scratch.”
Read More“I was living out of my van in Northern California with my wife at the time when the film was about to go into production and I felt the urge that I wanted to be a part of it in some way. When I got the thumbs up, I charged my batteries, packed up my VHS camera and booked a flight to the greatest city in America, Allston Mass.”
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