If you've heard of verticals, you've probably also heard criticisms of verticals. They're highly addictive feature-length stories, cut up into episodes of about two minutes, with a heavy emphasis on relationships and romance.

They don't generally pay creators well, but they do keep them working. As Hollywood executives try to track industry trends to save their jobs (and those of many others), verticals are providing at least a stopgap for some cast and crew, albeit one that nobody seems to love.

Yet.

Barnes sees plenty of room for improvement, and upside. He sees a wide-open niche for an approach to verticals that he hopes will be rewarding for creators, audiences, and sponsors. His Pixie USA makes verticals designed to showcase businesses looking for new ways to advertise their brands and win audience loyalty.

Everyone has a phone in their pocket or purse. Which means everyone is seconds away from watching a vertical, if it's done right.

Pixie USA's Jonas Barnes on the Power of Verticals

Barnes first realized the power of shorts as a UC San Diego student. His story starts with the fact that he's not short: At 6'8, he played basketball for the university team.

He recalls that his coach would try to steer him and other players toward easier classes so they could focus on the sport, and that one of his classes involved attending different arts events around town — plays, concerts, ballet. At one point, students were assigned to create something that combined several of those art forms.

"So I was like, 'Music... acting... that's a movie!' So I made this little two-minute movie. And it did very well. People were like, 'Dude, that was awesome.' Probably because it was two minutes and everyone else had a 20-minute presentation," says Barnes. "It was my first lesson in 'Shorter is better.'"

When a broken ankle took him out of basketball, he decided to pursue a film career. He went to the San Diego film commission and learned that he could list himself as a local hire in several departments. Almost no one else had.

He started getting crew jobs, and in the late '90s moved up the coast to Los Angeles. He began working for Neal Moritz, who was in the process of becoming one of the most successful Hollywood producers of all time. (His run of hits includes the Fast & Furious and Sonic the Hedgehog franchises.)

Barnes spent two decades working with Moritz, first as a writer and producer on films including 2017's S.W.A.T.: Under Siege. He began to focus on brand integrations, wherein brands would pay for product placements within films.

Last year, Barnes launched Pixie USA with a plan to build entire micro-drama productions around brands.

While he can't discuss some of his projects due to NDAs, his biggest launch so far is The Golden Pear Affair, a 55-episode micro-drama produced with Procter & Gamble's Native brand.

He was attracted for verticals in part by the fast turnaround time.

"I was looking at the model, and then I realized, 'Oh, this is kind of perfect for brands. It has a three-month turnaround. You know you're recouping within six months. Your money's back in your pocket."

About Verticals, or Micro-Dramas

Verticals have not has the easiest rollout.

They had a much-hyped debut with Quibi, a short-lived streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and led by Meg Whitman. Offering stories in both vertical and the traditional horizontal format, it raised more than $1.75 billion from investors, with the promise that it would occupy audiences looking for short-form entertainment as they took buses and trains, or sat in waiting rooms.

Quibi has the misfortune to debut during pandemic lockdowns, when few people were going out in public to wait for public transportation or appointments. The company also spent splashily on high-profile payments to A-list creators, which created too much overhead. (Antoine Fuqua, for example, had a deal to produce a $15 million project.) The Quibi library sold to to Roku for less than $100 million.

Today's verticals are much different: A project's entire budget is often $250,000 or less, and the productions, including the actors, are usually non-union — which means no household names. They're made up of feature-length stories broken down into episodes of about two minutes. You can watch a few for free, perhaps on TikTok or Instagram, and then watch the rest of the story behind a paywall.

The biggest vertical producers include the Chinese company ReelShort and Holywater Tech, which was founded in 2020 by two Ukrainian entrepreneurs and includes the vertical platform My Drama. It received an investment last year from FOX Entertainment.

Verticals have plenty of critics, especially among people who object to the low, non-union wages and fast pace of production on most micro-dramas. When the popular industry trade TheWrap shared a story last month on X calling verticals "the future of Hollywood," the backlash was passionate and swift. People complained about the non-union sets, and perceived poor quality of the medium's quickly produced stories.

Barnes sees opportunities for improvement.

How The Golden Pear Affair Is Different From Other Verticals

Though viewers can watch excerpts of The Golden Pear Affair on TikTok or Instagram, fans are encouraged to watch on the project's own website, TheGoldenPearAffair.com.

Like most successful verticals, The Golden Pear Affair spells out the stakes and central conflict very quickly. It begins with the protagonist, Sophia, wearing a wedding dress, and saying in a voiceover: "I'm about to marry a man I've never met. And if I don't do it, my twin sister dies."

The product integration of Procter and Gamble's Native line of personal care products is campily funny. At one point a character applies deodorant while getting out of the shower, thinking to himself, "This Japanese Golden Pear Native smells amazing. I need to remember to pick this up next time I'm in the U.S."

The site makes money at least two ways. First, after watching seven free episodes, fans can pay $9.99 to watch the whole series. There's also a shopping section where fans can buy products including, yes, the Japanese Golden Pear deodorant stick. And the hope is that fans fond of the series will remember their positive feelings next time they're picking up body wash or deodorant at the grocery store.

Barnes doesn't disclose exact numbers, but says The Golden Pear Affair has had millions of viewers. It also provides a potential template for similar branded shows, with other major sponsors.

And Pixie USA is working on building its own app, which could compete with the likes of Reel Shorts.

One the frequent complains among verticals naysayers is that they don't know anyone who watches them. It's something Barnes often hears when he pitches men on the merits of micro-dramas.

"They'd be like, 'Why have I not heard about this?' I just say, 'Go home and ask your wife.'"

Women over 35 are among the biggest consumers of verticals, Barnes says. He says the audience for verticals is somewhat akin to the audience for romance novels: vast, but not necessarily vocal.

"It's not something you tell your husband about, right? You don't tell your husband you're reading steamy novels," he says.

The market also has huge room for growth, he says, especially given that most people spend more time with their phones than looking at a TV or film screen. Fifteen years ago, the idea that Mr. Beast would spend millions on YouTube videos would sound insane — but so would his 475 million subscribers.

"It's the beginning of an entertainment business," Barnes says. "People are seeing it a lot for what it is now, and not what the future of it."

Main image: A horizontal version of The Golden Pear Affair stars Nick Ritacco and Alyona. Pixie USA.

He has a theory about why: “James Bond can destroy everything,” Petzold muses, “and he doesn’t have to clean it up.”

Petzold’s latest film Miroirs No. 3 is — like all of his films — about the clean-up. The German filmmaker has spent two decades of arthouse filmmaking examining his country’s fractured relationship with its brutal history. 

Barbara (2012), for which he won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival, told the story of an East German physician trying to flee West while being tailed by the Stasi. Transit (2018), another darling of the Berlin International Film Festival, starred Franz Rogowski as a refugee in a present-day fascist state.

The darkness of these movies might make you assume Petzold will conform to the stereotypes of the serious European director. But, like his films, the writer-director brims with warmth and generous curiosity. We’re barely into our conversation before he’s offered me part of his raisin scone — “Betty might have made this!” he comments as he breaks it in half.

Betty is a character in Miroirs, a film that examines the existential questions Petzold has long  explored. He is interested in how people, especially women, survive in quietly dire circumstances. 

It stars Petzold’s frequent collaborator, Paula Beer, as Laura, a young piano student who survives a car crash in the German countryside. Rather than return home to Berlin, she decides to recuperate with Betty, a kind stranger played by Barbara Auer. The two form a surrogate mother-daughter relationship as they restore Betty’s charming, if slightly dilapidated, home. 

Miroirs No. 3 Director Christian Petzold on Two Types of Cinema

Miroirs studies the silent maintenance that women do to keep things together — Petzold’s rejection of the inherent wastefulness of capitalist consumer culture — and how quickly a home can fall apart in the shadow of tragedy. 

“We have two types of cinema now,” Petzold says. “Cinema that desires dystopia, and cinema that desires repair.”

Miroirs belongs to the second cohort. After the film’s premiere at Cannes, some journalists were surprised by what they perceived as a detachment from contemporary politics. But Petzold has grown weary of didactic films that lecture audiences about things they already agree with.

“After 1945, the English and the Americans came to Germany with a mission to reeducate us.” Petzold explains. “That heritage lasts through today — we have movies where, from the first moment, you know who’s bad, who’s good. The characters say sentences that feel written by journalists.”

Still, it would be a mistake to call Miroirs apolitical: The past is felt painfully in each frame. History resides in the unspoken trauma that lingers in Betty’s house, and in the rusted tractors of the car repair lot where Betty’s husband, Richard (Matthias Brandt) and son, Max (Enno Trebs) work. 

The men earn money by removing the GPS trackers on luxury vehicles, and conduct their business with a tight-lipped secrecy that recalls Petzold’s previous films about survivors of police states.

“The old structure would have been the father and son.” Petzold explains. “Something from the Bible. But Laura and Betty have rebuilt their world, and it’s all food, culture, books, nature. You never see Betty and Richard’s room. The house has no male traces.”

Miroirs’ predecessor, Afire (2023), is another domestic drama, in which an idyll is overshadowed by forest fires that blaze around a seaside town, and the knowledge that summer vacation can’t last forever. 

Petzold has a history of working within duologies and trilogies, which he attributes to an unshakeable Protestant work ethic: “Protestants can’t enjoy anything. Each day making Undine was great, and after we edited the movie, I said to myself, ‘You can’t enjoy it now. You have to work.’ So I said, this is just the beginning of a series.”

It was Barbara Auer who said on the tenth day of shooting that air, not fire, was the main element in Miroirs. While wind can be a destructive force, it’s also regenerative: The German word lüften refers to “airing out a house” and is a collective practice across the country. 

Petzold was inspired by a wind-blown scene in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree (2018), even going as far as to rent wind machines. He didn’t need them, thanks to a cooperative natural breeze. 

But air isn’t the only element. As in most of Petzold’s movies, rivers and bodies of water play a significant part.

“I grew up between two towns that have rivers of their own, Dusseldorf, the Rhine, and Wuppertal, the Wuppa,” Petzold says. “The Rhine is a big river with ships you can travel down. It’s like me with my bicycle, it represents a desire for the world. But the Wuppa is a winding river. There’s a sentence in German — über die Wuppa gehen. It means ‘to cross the Wuppa,’ but it’s also an expression that means to die.”

Call Me Huck

Fans of Petzold’s previous work will notice a small continuity between Miroirs and Barbara — in both films, a maternal figure relays a story from Tom Sawyer to a younger woman. 

“There are three or four books in my childhood that changed my life, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were two of them. I wanted to be Huck. When I was seven years old, I made my brother call me Huck,” Petzold says.

“Both rivers, the Rhine and the Wuppa, are in Twain’s books. When Huck is rafting with Jim, it’s the Rhine, the river of adventure that can bring you far away. But there’s also the possibility that the river could be the river of tragedy, the Wuppa.”

The opening image of Miroirs of Laura standing at a Wuppa-like river was inspired by the young people Petzold saw wandering the streets of Berlin alone during Covid lockdowns. 

“There were so many students from the U.S., from Spain, from France, living in Berlin during the pandemic, who were living here, but had no connections or social contacts because there was no university. When I was writing the script, I was always thinking about these students. And I wanted to make a movie that offered comfort,” he says.

Perhaps that’s why, despite the dark tragedies that haunt the main characters, Miroirs feels like the warmest of Petzold’s films. As our conversation draws to a close, Petzold expresses one last frustration with the current state of the world and its reflection in cinema. 

“I must say. I’m through this shit Trump fascist thing. I can’t stand their words or their dystopian movements anymore,” he says. “To show just four people who can repair something — that is the only thing we can wish for. To repair, and to live on.”

Miroirs No. 3 is now in theaters from 1-2 Special.

Main image: Paula Beer as Laura in Miroirs No. 3 by director Christian Petzold. Photo courtesy of 1-2 Special.

Once a Week for Life, is a New York crime drama that nods to its influences while carving out a voice of its own. The cast includes The Sopranos alums Robert Funaro, Al Sapienza, and John Fiore, as well as Armen Garo (The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street) and John Kapelos (The Shape of Water).

Zouvelos stars as volatile NYPD lieutenant and Navy SEAL veteran Adam Glanis, who battles PTSD and addiction while leading a fugitive task force. When a botched sting resulting in the death of his partner ignites a dangerous chain reaction involving a mob crime family and City Hall power players who want him dead, Adam faces an impossible choice: die, or survive by becoming something worse.

Zouvelos calls the character “a moral masochist” — “a guy who has to either atone through ruin or live by his own code.”

Once a Week for Life Is a Story Told Through Personal Damage

Zouvelos — an-award-winning actor, writer, and director, and filmmaker, employs a deliberate visual strategy. Desaturated tones dominate Adam’s drug-addled point of view, while scenes outside his consciousness appear sharper, more vivid.

“It’s not a mistake—it’s a creative decision,” says Zouvelos. “Adam is telling the story backwards, and he’s high, he’s drunk. When you’re in his head, things aren’t vivid. Outside of him, the world sharpens.” 

The film's title reflects the rhythmic nature of the dangers, betrayals, and ethical choices Adam faces in his line of duty.

That subjectivity extends to the narrative. Zouvelos avoids telling audiences what to think, instead offering fragments of perspective.

“I don’t make declaratory statements,” he explains. “I want the audience to decide who they trust. I’m not spoon-feeding anything. I’m breadcrumbing.”

Zouvelos takes a restrained approach in which violence and sex are implied rather than shown, and the emphasis is on aftermath: addiction, guilt, destroyed marriages and the erosion of a life out of balance.

“There’s no need for gratuitous violence or arbitrary sex,” he says. “The story is about what’s happening in their heads.”

Adam, perpetually intoxicated and haunted, becomes less an action hero than a cautionary figure. “He doesn’t even get the satisfaction at the end,” Zouvelos notes. “That’s life sometimes.”

George Zouvelos on Coffee Cans and Creative Control

The origins of Once a Week for Life are as authentic as its sensibility. Zouvelos, who grew up in Astoria, Queens, and has worked as an EMS and with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, draws heavily from real-life encounters across New York.

He spent years jotting thoughts and experiences onto scraps of paper, storing them in coffee cans – distilling an archive of memory and experience he still mines.

“There’s a lot of pain in there,” he admits. “That’s where the work comes from.”

Authenticity is the film’s backbone.

“I write about things I know—real people, real suffering, real humor,” Zouvelos says.

That approach extends to the cast. Some performers draw directly from their own backgrounds, including a retired NYPD detective who appeared in the film and insisted on keeping her unfiltered delivery intact. 

‘Actors Are Diamonds’

Zouvelos’ directing philosophy is simple: create space for character, not performance. “Actors are diamonds,” he says. “They don’t shine—they reflect.”

He often lets scenes roll before and after “action” and “cut,” capturing something less rehearsed and more organic. “I don’t want acting,” he adds. “I want behavior.”

The approach resonated with his cast, including Kapelos, who was struck by the film’s dark comedic tone. 

“It was much funnier — much more humorous and much hipper than I was expecting,” Kapelos says. “There was a texture to the movie… a Sidney Lumet-type quality.”

Common Ground

Though steeped in crime, the film carries an undercurrent of social commentary, one Zouvelos is careful not to turn into preaching.

“The film says something about where we are without saying it outright,” he explains. “We focus too much on differences. Left, right — it doesn’t matter. We’re all people.”

Zouvelos says the film was influenced by the political climate in New York. 

“The city is constantly shifting with the current polarizing from the left and right. Extremes are dangerous,” he says.

“I am somebody who likes to play both sides, because I don't agree with either. We are people. There's blood running out through our veins - we should celebrate our commonalities and stop focusing on our differences.”

He added, “And that's what New Yorkers do. Whether you're left or right, whether you like Trump or hate Trump, love or hate the mayor…It's irrelevant. What's relevant is, let's focus on our commonalities.”

Zouvelos is more skeptical of performers as political arbiters, arguing for storytelling that reflects human complexity rather than prescribing ideology.

“Actors are not supposed to be giving political or social commentary. Actors are supposed to be entertaining people, and that's what we forget,” he explains.

“For some people who reach a certain status in Hollywood, it feels that it's their moral obligation to tell the rest of us how to feel. Yeah, some of it is virtue signaling.

“The audience should be entitled to feel any which way they want without being vilified.”

Advice for a Fellow New Yorker

Which brings us to Timothée Chalamet. Zouvelos sees the dustup over the New York City-born actor’s recent comments about opera and ballet in the context of his own belief that we should all embrace imperfection, own our mistakes, and keep moving forward.

“If I were his publicist?” Zouvelos says. “I’d put him in tights and a tutu, have him take ballet lessons, make him dance down Fifth Avenue.

"Have him appear with the New York City Ballet, fall on his butt and show how difficult that art form is.

“Timothée should be humble. Do a satire about himself and turn it into something real.”

He continued, “If I had flubbed like that, right away you’d see my body look like a sausage in tights.”

It’s all about honesty, Zouvelos says.

“You fall, you get up,” he adds. “You keep going. Because the cemetery is filled with unfinished business.”

Once A Week For Life, produced by Fiat Lux Film Studios NYC and Nicholas Levis, is now in select theaters and available on VOD starting April 14.

Main image: George Zouvelos at the Once a Week for Life premiere at Cinema Village on March 19, 2026 in New York City. Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Jane Owen Public Relations

Co-created by Christoph Jorg, the three-part doc centers on two men: Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire who amassed his fortune via fertilizer and spent a year in prison on murder charges of which he was later cleared; and Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer who built an empire creating art freeports, or high-security warehouses where the mega-rich can store and sell assets while avoiding paying duties or taxes.

Together, the men assembled one of the greatest private art collections in the world. Rybolovlev used a portion of his $6.7 billion to acquire iconic works by Rothko, Modigliani, Klimt, Picasso, and da Vinci. Bouvier brokered the sales for a fee.

Everything went splendidly between the two for over a decade: Rybolovlev spent an estimated $2 billion on art because, according to the series, owning masterpieces set him apart from his fellow billionaires, like, say, Elon Musk.

Then, in 2105, a war between the duo began when Rybolovlev accused Bouvier of secretly overcharging him to the tune of $1 billion. Bouvier insisted that he did nothing wrong.

Who was right or wrong isn't at the center of The Oligarch and the Art Dealer. Instead, Dalsgaard focuses on legal documentation — emails, text messages, financial statements - that were made public during litigation that reveal how the .00001 percent live. The series is a peek inside the rarefied world of billionaires, which makes for a fascinating, infuriating, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it three-hour watch.

In the series, Bouvier sits for on-camera interviews, while Rybolovlev is represented through lawyers and his former financial director. Journalists and art dealers who worked with Bouvier put the legal documents in layman's terms, effectively pulling back the curtain on the secretive world of the ultra-wealthy.

Dalsgaard was in Denmark to screen all three episodes of The Oligarch and the Art Dealer at the 23rd edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX). The series' first episode premiered at Sundance.

We asked Dalsgaard about making a series without a hero and why The Oligarch and the Art Dealer is Shakespearean.

Director Andreas Dalagaard on Making The Oligarch and the Art Dealer

MovieMaker: Was it difficult to create a series around two characters you don't necessarily trust?

Andreas Dalsgaard: For me, as a storyteller, that was what was really interesting, because here it was, a story with billions at stake. But at the center of it is an unreliable character, Bouvier, and also his opponent, Rybolovlev. They have so much at stake, they can't speak the truth. We, as filmmakers, but also you, as the audience, are pawns in that game because it's not just a game that's fought out in courts. It's not just a game that's fought with lawyers. It's also about controlling the narrative and bending the narrative. I found it very interesting to tell the story in a way, so the audience becomes part of that game and understands what the game is and how to navigate it themselves.

MovieMaker: There is no real hero to root for in The Oligarch and the Art Dealer. How did you approach that, and was it difficult?

Andreas Dalsgaard: Yes and no. It's a story about two middle-aged white guys with much too much money, and who cares who wins. But then at the same time, the series gives this unique insight into a world that we only get to watch superficially when we see yachts outside St. Bart's, Monaco or Miami from social media. But we can't really see what goes on, partly because there's this big service structure that services these very rich people, so that we don't get to see what actually goes on. When you look at the story also a bit at a distance, it's, it's almost Shakespearean.

MovieMaker: How so?

Andreas Dalsgaard: Shakespeare was telling stories about kings and dukes and how their greed or their very fraught human nature ends up becoming their undoing. [This series] is super relevant because it helps us understand what construes the world we live in today. And then it's also a very basic entertaining drama of lies and manipulation.

MovieMaker: Did you ever feel like Rybolovlev's and Bouvier's people were using you as a way to prove their case to the public?

Andreas Dalsgaard: They were definitely using us, and that's very much the case in many stories like this, where the media is a tool. Our job as filmmakers is to use that for the benefit of the film so that they actually get on camera, tell their stories, and then it's our job to balance it and balance it not only fairly, but also accurately. 

You can read more of our film festival coverage here.

Main image: The Oligarch and the Art Dealer.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image

The director, who won an Academy Award that same year for the documentary short “The White Helmets," took the book but didn't immediately read it.

"From my experience, when somebody approaches you cold at an event, it doesn’t normally end up being the story of your dreams," Einsiedel said. "But as soon as I started reading, I realized I’d been an idiot."

The book, titled The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled From India to Sweden for Love, tells the story of PK Mahanandia, a poor Delhi street artist, and Anne-Charlotte von Schedvin (Lotta), a Swedish tourist. For 10 rupees, in 1975, PK sketched a portrait of Lotta. The 10-minute encounter proved fateful. PK and Lotta fell in love.

Einsiedel was captivated by the story and the "rich tapestry of universal themes" that it covered. So, in 2023, he began working on The Cycle of Love, a 98-minute documentary that chronicles PK and Lotta's unlikely love story and the 6,000-mile journey through Iran and Afghanistan that PK embarked on in 1977 to reunite with Lotta two years after their first encounter.

Through old letters, pictures, and contemporary interviews with PK and Lotta, as well as reenactments with actors, the inspiring doc tells the epic true-life adventure of a man risking everything for love.

Einsiedel was in Denmark to screen The Cycle of Love at the 23rd edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX). The film premiered at Telluride.

We asked Einsiedel about directing actors, Priyanka Chopra Jonas' involvement in the doc, and why he thought CPH:DOX was a good fit for The Cycle of Love.

Orlando von Einsiedel on Making The Cycle of Love

MovieMaker: Your previous documentaries focus on hard topics, such as the rescue efforts of the Syrian Civil Defence in war-torn Aleppo ("The White Helmets") and the dangerous fight to protect Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Virunga). The Cycle of Love is a feel-good doc. What was it like to shift gears and take on a story like this?

Orlando von Einsiedel:  The short answer is that I might be getting old and soft. There are of course so many important and urgent stories in the world that deserve to be highlighted on screen. However I’ve been increasingly wanting to make a film that is unashamedly optimistic and brings feelings of joy and human connection — feelings which are often under celebrated but are so crucial to all of us.

MovieMaker: Was there any hesitation about making this doc since there weren't any old videos capturing PK's 6,000-mile cross-continental voyage?

Orlando von Einsiedel:  Yes, there was. I was really excited to tell the story after meeting PK and Lotta, but there were lots of challenges. In particular, as you note, limited archive footage from an event that happened more than 50 years ago. Sadly, PK didn’t have a documentary crew trailing his journey in the 1970s. However, as a filmmaker and storyteller, I loved how this pushed me and forced me to think in fresh ways.

MovieMaker: What was it like working with actors to make this documentary?

Orlando von Einsiedel: We had a brilliant theater actor, Chirag Lobo, improvising a younger version of PK, and we embarked on a journey following parts of PK’s original cycle route across Asia and Europe, meeting people along the way as he once did. We would street cast people on the day of filming, tell them that we were recreating PK’s journey 50 years later, and ask them if they would be open to a conversation with our actor.

The final form this all takes in the film stands on the shoulders of directors like Chloe Zhao, The Ross Brothers, Walter Salles, Michael Winterbottom, and Jonas Poher Rasmussen, and many others who have been experimenting and pushing documentary storytelling form and techniques.

MovieMaker: Did you ever consider making a narrative about this love story?

Orlando von Einsiedel:  Yes, at the very start of the project, when I couldn’t figure out how to do it in documentary form. PK and Lotta’s story is so dramatic that it’s almost unbelievable, and it also definitely has the kind of story arc that narrative films lean towards. However, since PK and Lotta are both very much alive, and so warm and charismatic, to me it felt wrong to not work out how to make this as a doc at this moment in time.

MovieMaker: How did Priyanka Chopra Jonas become an executive producer on this project?

Orlando von Einsiedel:  One of our EPs showed Priyanka an early cut of the film, and she responded enthusiastically. She had known about PK's story already, and she loved the way we brought it to life for a film audience. Like us, she felt PK’s story transcends borders and nationalities.

MovieMaker: Why was CPH:DOX a good fit for this film?

Orlando von Einsiedel:  To be honest, I was a bit nervous about how European audiences would receive the film. We have had some incredible responses at American festivals such as Telluride, The Hamptons, and Middleburg, but I didn’t know how it would translate on this side of the world. Thankfully, we needn’t have worried. CPH:DOX is such a brilliant festival, and audiences engaged with the film just as strongly as they had across the pond.

The Cycle of Love is seeking U.S. distribution.

You can read more of our film festival coverage here.

Main image: The Cycle of Love

If Serling had to do it, they said, could he do it without mentioning the South? Or Black people?

The ridiculousness of the experience was one of Serling's motivations to create The Twilight Zone, in which he shrouded stories of social justice within the protective cloaks of genre and metaphor. He couldn't talk about struggling immigrants on network TV, for example. But he could talk about aliens. Or even tell stories in which we were the aliens. The goal, always, was expanding empathy.

The entrancing new documentary Serling, which premieres Monday at SXSW, pulls off the cinematic miracle of having Serling narrate his own life story. Director Jonah Tulis came upon the idea when he realized what a wealth of audio recordings Serling left behind when he died in 1975, at only 50 years of age.

"Because of the extensive archive of recordings we uncovered, we were able to tell this story almost entirely in Rod Serling’s own voice. We didn’t use any AI to recreate his voice, and we didn’t bring in an actor to imitate his voice," Tulis tells MovieMaker.

The film uses hours of footage from Serling's TV appearances, including introducing each episode of The Twilight Zone. It also stages remarkably effective re-enactments that feel very much in the spirit of the beloved show, which ran on CBS from 1959 to 1964 and has thrived in syndication and streaming in the decades since.

"We shot visual atmospheric recreations — in 4:3, black-and-white just like The Twilight Zone — using an actor," Tulis adds. "But what you hear in the film is all Rod Serling, speaking in the moment. Allowing Rod to guide the audience through his own life felt like the most honest way to tell this story. And ultimately, who better to tell the story of Rod Serling than Rod Serling himself?"

We asked Tulis about Serling's striking relevance today, how Serling circumvented censors and critics, and making the film with Leonardo DiCaprio's productin company, Appian Way.

Serling Director Jonah Serling on Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone

MovieMaker: You've said that Leonardo DiCaprio and his company Appian Way were essential to this film happening — that they had been in talks with Serling's estate and helped find financing for the doc. Why did they tell you they thought you were the right director for it?

Jonah Tulis: We all knew that Rod Serling had an extraordinary life and career that deserved to be told on film, but the challenge was figuring out how to tell it in a way that felt fresh and cinematic. Many of the key figures from that era have since passed away, so the traditional talking-head documentary approach was never going to fully capture the energy of who Rod was.

I did some preliminary research and uncovered some truly incredible archival materials, much of which has never been seen or heard before. It included dictations from throughout Rod’s life including letters, script notes and personal reflections. It became clear that Rod had, in a sense, left behind his own narration of his life. I realized at this point that Rod’s own voice could tell the story. The idea then became: what if the film unfolded almost entirely through Rod narrating his own life?

When I shared this approach with Appian Way, the Serling family and our partners at Verdi Productions, they immediately understood the creative strategy. What they responded to most was the idea that Rod himself would guide the audience through the film. His voice, his thoughts, and his words would be the spine of the documentary. They felt that approach honored who he was as a writer and storyteller.

Ultimately, they told me they believed I was the right director for the project because I wasn’t just interested in making a biography, I was interested in building a cinematic experience that let Rod Serling speak directly to audiences again.

MovieMaker: What similarities and differences do you see between Serling's fights with TV executives — when he was trying to talk about racial justice and other progressive ideas — and the modern clashes between TV stars and their networks? I'm thinking especially of Jimmy Kimmel being pulled from the airwaves temporarily, and Stephen Colbert's show being cancelled.

Jonah Tulis: These similarities are actually one of the main reasons I think telling this story today is more important than ever. While Rod worked in a very different television landscape than today, those same elements of control and censorship exist across all media. Networks and platforms still operate within commercial realities, and creative voices sometimes clash with those boundaries.

The big difference is that today artists often have more outlets which allows for more freedom. The Twilight Zone was very much birthed from these boundaries though, as he used the allegory of science fiction to tell these stories of race, politics and humanity.  

MovieMaker: Why do you think Serling had such a strong sense of fairness and justice? He seems like one of the most outspoken white people of his era in favor of equality and Civil Rights. 

Jonah Tulis: Rod was deeply affected by his experiences in World War II and that shaped his worldview profoundly. Rod came back from war with a deep skepticism and a strong belief that society had a responsibility to confront justice wherever it appeared.  His work was initially very much a way for him to “get it out,” but it evolved into something bigger and more important to him.

Rod believed storytelling wasn’t just entertainment, it was a way to ask difficult questions about the world we live in. He seemed to feel that if you had a platform as powerful as television, you had a responsibility to use it.  

MovieMaker: Some celebrities avoid politics today out of simple fear of offending anyone and hurting their marketability. But others just don't want to lecture audiences or preach to the choir. Did people in Serling's time accuse him of whatever the early '60s equivalent was of being "too woke"? Did conservatives accuse him of being a communist, or whatever they said about people who supported racial equality? 

Jonah Tulis: Absolutely. Many of Rod Serling’s views on war, politics, and racial injustice were incredibly controversial for television in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sponsors and networks often pushed back on his scripts, and several of his early teleplays were rewritten or softened because executives worried about offending advertisers or viewers. In that sense, the tensions he experienced feel very familiar today. 

At the time, some television historians and critics even labeled him the “young angry man” of television. But that characterization misses the point. Serling wasn’t angry for the sake of being provocative, he was simply a writer who spoke his mind. His stories rarely delivered simple ideological messages and instead, they posed moral questions. They asked the audience to consider what it might feel like to be the outsider, the marginalized person, or the victim of injustice. 

Serling premieres Monday at SXSW and plays again throughout the festival. You can read more of our SXSW coverage here.

Main image: Rod Serling in a promotional behind the scenes image from The Twilight Zone. CBS

The film is written by her father, Mark Duplass, and directed by her mother, Katie Aselton, who tried through their daughter's childhood to spare her the near-constant rejection most actors face. But with Their Town, the couple gave her one of the most supportive possible projects in which to shine, and she does.

The 18-year-old is strikingly good as Abby, whose boyfriend drops out of co-starring with her in their high school's play. His last-minute replacement is a quiet stagehand, Matt (IT star Chosen Jacobs, also fantastic). As Abby and Matt wander around one night in their hometown of Bangor, Maine, they discover unexpected connections. The film's final moments are especially beautiful.

Aselton and Mark Duplass have worked together many times throughout their marriage, including in the 2005 mumblecore classic The Puffy Chair, which brothers Mark and Jay Duplass wrote and directed together, with Mark and Aselton playing the leads. Since then, all have made and starred in projects big and small, becoming models of indie filmmaking.

Their Town arrives at SXSW 11 years after Mark Duplass gave a much-celebrated speech at the Austin festival in which he advised indie filmmakers that "the cavalry is not coming" and urged them to lead their own projects.

His family's new film epitomizes that approach.

Katie Aselton, Mark Duplass and Ora Duplass on Making Their Town

Working with family is always hard, and the parents and teenagers of the world aren't known for getting along. Aselton says she was nervous about working with her daughter, who was 16 during filming. But the family did a lot of logistical and emotional prep.

"It was a lot of conversations with Ora, and my therapist, and with Mark late at night in bed, just being like, 'It's going to be so hard'," says Aselton. "But we did enough of the work in advance that when we got there, everyone was on their best behavior. Everyone knew what needed to be done, and I will credit Ora for being incredibly emotionally intelligent and knowing when she needed to step up."

She laughs: "And it was also only a 12-day shoot, so we really only had to hold on to these personas for 12 days."

Austin is an especially apt launchpad for the film because it was inspired in part by the city's greatest filmmaker, Richard Linklater. Mark Duplass grew up in New Orleans and remembers driving 80 miles to Baton Rouge to see Linklater's Before Sunrise in 1995, when he was about the age Ora is now. The film follows two young travelers, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, who forge an unforgettable connection over a single night in Vienna.

Mark Duplass remember being struck by "the dignity that I thought that they gave to the thoughts of people in their early 20s, and a sense of humor about it too. It didn't feel like Linklater was on a mission to, like, show me that these kids were deep. It was loose, it was casual, it was sweet."

The same is true of Abby and Mike's unforced dynamic in Their Town. Ora Duplass was struck by the emotionality of scenes that, on the page, seemed straightforward.

"You find these moments when you read the script, that you didn't think you would feel, when actually acting it out. Through performing, you feel these connections to your real life in a way that I didn't totally think I would. It really helped the emotion come through, but also personal growth," she says.

Mark Duplass wrote the script with his daughter in mind, drawing on her friendships and disappointments. Aselton, meanwhile, knew when to ask more of her, and when to back off. She drew on a familiarity that only comes from knowing someone for their entire life.

By keeping Abby and Mike in motion for much of the movie, the film frees them from the addictive doomscroll trap that brings so much anxiety and depression to the modern young. But the realities of modern life are always in the background, along with a nostalgia for the '90s, when Duplass and Aselton came of age.

"I think it's really important to show that these kids aren't clueless," Ora Duplass says. "They know what's going on in the world and it affects them."

When she was growing up with her parents and sister, Molly, Ora always wanted to someday star in a Disney show. But her parents urged her to enjoy childhood.

"I was very eager," she says. "And at five years old, when you're watching a show and you're like, 'Let me be an actor,' I think it's pretty fair for them to be like, 'Go play.'"

But last summer, she was cast in a project about as different as you can get from a DIY indie: She'll star in the new series Coven Academy, coming soon to the Disney Channel and Disney+.

"The truth is, Ora said, 'I'm going to be on a Disney show,'" Aselton laughs. "And the reality is, yeah, he was correct."

Their Town premieres Saturday at SXSW and plays again during the festival. You can read more of our SXSW coverage here.

Main image: Chosen Jacobs and Ora Duplass in Their Town. Courtesy of Duplass Brothers.

Evans has worked for The Onion and directed TV shows, as well as co-writing Amazon Prime's Merry Little Batman. But when he had several projects suddenly canceled, in a corporate cost-cutting measure that had nothing to do with their quality, he became determined to make something he and Noth could control.

Luckily, the pair had friendships going back to their days as students and then performers with The Upright Citizens Brigade in New York — a spawning ground of talent like Ghostbusters bad guy Neil Casey and Saturday Night Live star Bobby Moynihan, both of whom Evans and Noth enlisted for crucial roles in Micro Budget.

One casting led to another, and soon they had also drawn inSNL and Anchorman treasure Chris Parnell, as well as acclaimed comedian Maria Bamford.

The film, directed by Evans, stars Noth as a deluded first-time filmmaker named Terry who convinces his cast — including his much-put-upon, pregnant wife Erica (Emilea Wilson, the heart of the movie) — that he has convinced a major A-list star to appear in the very low-budget film. Terry promises this cameo will catapult his single-location disaster movie to success.

But that meant Evans and Noth had to actually cast a big name to play himself. And, somehow, they did.

Not to oversell it, but the person they landed — who will not be named here, to preserve the element of surprise — is one of the most recognizable people in the world.

Watching the film, you're impressed with all the actors — the terrific cast includes Nichole Sakura, Brandon Micheal Hall, Jordan Rock, Jon Gabrus, Mike Mitchell, Matt McCoy and Barney Miller himself, Hal Linden.

But then the A-lister shows up, and you wonder: How did they land him?

"We knew we needed a really big get at the very end, because Terry, the entire film, is teasing that there's some sort of celebrity cameo about to take place," Evans explains. He initially asked his then-representatives if they had any big names available, but none of the people potentially available felt big enough.

"I felt like, well, damn, we have Chris Parnell, we have Bobby Moynahan, we have Maria Bamford, we have Hal Linden. You know, these are some really big names. In my mind, it would be strange if somebody at that caliber of fame shows up in the end and is just playing themselves — that doesn't work for me," he says.

Evans' fallback plan, if he couldn't find an A-lister, was to have Terry book a celebrity impersonator, believing them to be the real celebrity. But then his producers came through in a huge way.

"Our producers, Rob Hatch-Miller and Puloma Basu, had just done a shoot with the manager of this A-list client, and reached out," Evans recalls. "We got a call that said that we had sealed the deal. ... I didn't think we would get, like, one of the most famous people I've ever met."

Morgan Evans on the Secret Weapon of Micro Budget

Given that Micro Budget really was micro budget, everybody in the cast was paid the SAG-AFTRA minimum, with everyone receiving the same pay under most-favored-nation status.

Did that include the A-lister?

"He got paid the exact same rate as everybody else on the movie," Evans says. "He just loves comedy. ... I
assume he read the whole script because he agreed to do the film. When he showed up, he knew his lines, was a total, total professional. I was very cognizant of trying to get him out of there as soon as humanly possible, to just be respectful of his time. So we just shot him out in two hours or something, pretty quick."

One of the other stars of the movie is the gorgeous Malibu home — complete with ocean view — where almost all of Micro Budget takes place. The film-within-the-film features the core cast hanging out in the home, waiting for the end of the world.

Evans was able to lock down the location, he explains, because of his girlfriend, Savannah DiMarco, owner of Los Angele’s Sorella Collective. Her grandmother received the home in a divorce from DiMarco's grandfather, recently departed Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall.

Marshall also made another huge contribution to Micro Budget before his passing last month at the age of 98. Evans was struggling to find an older actor who could play a very old-school agent in Micro Budget. He asked Marshall if he knew anyone who might be up for it.

"And I'll never forget this — Peter Marshall calls to his wife on the phone, and he goes, 'Laurie — who's my best friend?' And I hear her go, 'Hal. Hal Linden.' And he goes, 'Oh, yeah, Hal Linden.' And I was like, 'Hal Linden is your best friend?'"

He called the sitcom legend and explained himself. Though Barney Miller ran from 1975-1982, it has since enjoyed a long run in syndication, making Linden a very familiar face.

"Hal is very old school in the best way," Evans says. "He's an absolute, consummate professional. Like, if you pick up a cup in a scene, he knows what hand he picked it up with, he turns the exact same way every single time.

"And so he wanted to do things in a very old-school way — I printed out the script, I got it bound. I went over to his apartment, I met with him and we had lunch, and I explained to him the entire movie, and then he took a beat to read it, and then he contacted us and showed up," Evans recalls.

"And every time we looked at him on set, he would just be studying his lines. And then he improvised a bit in it, too. And the day we shot with him, he actually turned 94, which was incredible. And so he brought some of his family out and we had a birthday party for him with cake and stuff like that. So, so that was, like, a really good, really, really cool thing. "

Main image: Brandon Micheal Hall, NIchole Sakura, Emilea Wilson, Jordan Rock in Micro Budget.

Editor's Note: This story was originally published during Micro Budget's festival run, and has been updated with the film's release on VOD and Tubi.

They don't really love the word "vigilante," and would probably prefer "hero." But the film leaves it up to viewers to decide whether they're driven by heroism, altruism, ego, insecurity, or some combination of them all. Sometimes it looks like they're having a lot of fun, and other times they seem as haunted as Batman.

Reports of Phoenix Jones' late-night Seattle patrols started in 2010. The city is an intriguing backdrop for the doc, especially as it becomes a frequent focal point for demonstrations and protests, including against traditional law enforcement.

At times it seems like Phoenix Jones (our editorial policy is not to reveal secret identities) may be able to be a champion for the people in ways that police can't. At other times, the people view him with skepticism, or as an agent of the powers that be. And at still other times, he himself has issues with the law.

Joonam went all in on understanding Phoenix Jones, spending years with the costumed crusader and witnessing acts of quiet heroism that never made the news. We asked him about what it's like to get to know a real-life superhero — and the man behind the mask. We asked him about his research, Jones' curious origin story, and how to be a hero today.

Director Bayan Joonam on the Quest to Make Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero

MovieMaker: You previously made QAnon — The Search for Q. Are you especially interested in secret identities?

Bayan Joonam: Ha, I never actually put that together before. I think great documentaries generally focus on a specific question.

With Phoenix Jones, his real identity was never the mystery. I already knew who was behind the mask. The question was: What kind of person decides to become a superhero in the real world? I am exploring the psychology of someone who chooses to live inside a self-created myth. 

But the connection between the two projects really comes down to curiosity. I’m drawn to people who are shaping culture in unusual ways. Also, as someone who has loved the superhero genre as long as I can remember, I came to see this film as my contribution to it.

MovieMaker: How much time did you spend with Phoenix Jones, and over what time period? 

Bayan Joonam: We spent about six years creating this project. Over that time I’d estimate we spent roughly six months together in total. For about a month of that, he actually lived with me in the Airbnb I was renting in Seattle, which gave me a much deeper window into who he is when the cameras aren’t rolling.

MovieMaker: How did you feel when parts of his backstory started to seem inconsistent? Was it more "this is bad for the doc" or "this is great for the doc"?

Bayan Joonam: His ability to spin a yarn is second to none, which is part of what makes him such a compelling subject. During interviews, I took mental notes on details that needed investigation, then built timelines to corroborate or challenge those accounts with other participants.

Like most good fabrications, there is usually a grain of truth somewhere inside the story. So separating fact from fiction became a central task in making the film.

To be fair, in many cases the stories actually turned out to be true, like the one he told about meeting Bill Clinton. That tension between myth and reality became one of the most interesting parts of the documentary.

MovieMaker: Watching this, I thought about how hard it is for anyone to be a public hero today, because any good deed will be seen as virtue signaling, or too good to be true. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Bayan Joonam: That’s a great takeaway, and I think you’re right. It’s incredibly difficult for anyone to maintain “hero” status in today’s environment because the internet eventually exposes every contradiction. And the reality is that none of us are perfect.

Superheroes work in movies because the narrative is clean. Real life isn’t. People are complicated, and the moment someone is elevated to hero status we immediately start looking for the flaws that bring them back down to earth.

At the same time, I think the best superheroes reflect our national identity. Phoenix Jones is not a superhero that could be engineered in a writers room, but he is undeniably the superhero that our society has shaped into existence.

MovieMaker: Do you think Phoenix Jones genuinely wanted to do good? Or to gratify his own ego? Or both?

Bayan Joonam: I think it’s both.

You have to ask yourself what conditions create a person who decides to dress up like a superhero and partol the streets looking for crime. Central to his story is the fact that he was given up for adoption at birth, which I think connects to his creation of a larger-than-life persona as a way of proving his value to himself and the world.

But in his daily life, when he's not wearing the suit and sees someone with car trouble on the side of the road, he pulls over to help. He does a lot of things that never make the news or social media. I genuinely believe he wants to help when he sees someone in need.

Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero plays Friday and Monday at SXSW. The film is currently seeking distribution.

Main image: Phoenix Jones in Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero.

Sarıbacak had a hard time adjusting to his new life, but Yakup has an even harder one: He has left his wife and daughter behind, and works tough under-the-table jobs, far removed from his old career as a music teacher. Sarıbacak and Gazelle co-writer Ayhan Hulagu, who also emigrated from Türkiye to the U.S. and also acts in the film, drew on their own challenges and the even more intense struggles of fellow Turkish-American immigrants.

Gazelle is one of the highlights of the stellar Sedona International Film Festival, which begins this weekend. Though it unsentimentally tracks every aspect of Yakup's life — his claustrophobic sleeping arrangements, hidden cash, and frantic phone calls home — it also tells a universal immigrant story with no sugar coating. It settles into the grit of its northern New Jersey and New York City setting, and a world that feels at once too small and too big.

The film, co-directed by Samy Pioneer, is too respectful of the audience to spell things out. But its relevance is obvious in the modern United States, even if you aren't familiar with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's crackdown on his critics.

Gazelle has earned many accolades on its festival run, including an Audience Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival, which, like Sedona, is one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. Ahead of the film's Sedona screenings, we asked Sarıbacak and Hulagu about the experiences that informed Gazelle, valuing truth over fantasy, and the allegory that gives the film its title.

Nadir Sarıbacak and Ayhan Hulagu on Making Gazelle

MovieMaker: I love how you use the allegory of the gazelle to suggest hope even when all seems lost. How did you come upon that symbol? 

Nadir Sarıbacak: The first few years after I came to the United States were very difficult for me, as they are for many people. During that anxious and depressive period, I came across this story. Interestingly, this seemingly simple story helped heal me, at least a little. As a human being, there comes a point when you feel you can’t carry certain things anymore, and the burdens I had taken on felt too heavy. I kept this meaningful story in the back of my mind and told myself that if I ever made a film, I would build it around this story. When the time was right, I shared it with Ayhan. 

Ayhan Hulagu: This gazelle story was a small social media post. In that video, an African-American imam was telling the story of a pregnant gazelle trapped in the forest, feeling helpless and cornered. My own father is also an imam, and when we were children, he used to tell us moral stories. This story spoke not only to my childhood but also to my present situation.

At the time, I was working in different jobs outside my profession and felt emotionally stuck and helpless. The way the gazelle ignored everything around her and focused only on giving birth felt deeply meaningful and poetic to me. Once she focused on that, things slowly began to fall into place. I tried to carry that lesson into my own life. Just as the gazelle’s story inspired us, it eventually formed the backbone of Gazelle. 

MovieMaker: This film is sad almost from beginning to end, though there are glimmers of hope. Were you ever tempted to make the story happier for the sake of pleasing audiences, even if it may have made the story less true? 

Ayhan Hulagu: When we were writing the film, our motivation was never to make an “immigrant film” or a “social issue film.” What excited us was writing a psychological drama centered on a human being—something people from different parts of the world could watch and see a part of themselves in. When the Canadian audience in Vancouver gave the film an award, that meant a lot to me in that sense.

Since the camera moves closely with Yakup, we do tire the audience by placing them inside that atmosphere — I accept that. I personally enjoy films that make me actively follow the story rather than passively watch it, and perhaps that’s how we built the world of this film. Could there have been more hope? Of course. That would have made me happy too. 

MovieMaker: Both of you, like your protagonist, moved from Türkiye to the United States, though of course I have no idea if you were forced to flee because of political repression or were separated from your families. How autobiographical is this? How much did you draw from people you know? I have read that Nadir was censored for expressing concern about Türkiye. 

Nadir Sarıbacak: Ten years ago, I came to the United States for a vacation with my children, but because of the political chaos in Türkiye, I was unable to return and had to urgently decide to build a life here. Thankfully, unlike Yakup, I did not leave my family behind. 

However, as an immigrant, I experienced serious psychological challenges and traumas of my own. Some friends around me, unfortunately, went through very painful situations and deep anxieties regarding their families. Compared to what they were going through, I often felt it would be disrespectful to voice my own complaints. When Ayhan and I began writing the screenplay, we built it mainly on their stories, blending them with our own struggles to create this film. 

Ayhan Hulagu: I came to the United States in 2017, and after receiving an artist visa, I decided to stay permanently. I founded a theater company and began performing solo plays. I’ve taught as a guest lecturer at universities such as Princeton, Cornell, Stanford, and Harvard. That process made my own mental transition as an immigrant much easier.

I didn’t live through what Yakup experienced, but I witnessed many similar stories in my social circle. The stories I heard affected me deeply. I knew how difficult it was to adapt as an immigrant, but when family becomes part of the equation, the process becomes far more complicated.

The interviews we conducted, our observations, and the emotional experiences shared by people around us gave us a great deal of insight into understanding Yakup. We gathered pieces from real life and assembled them like a puzzle to create the full picture. 

MovieMaker: Ayhan, you were a puppeteer — how does that affect your writing? 

Ayhan Hulagu: I see what we do as storytelling. Sometimes in the theater it’s just a handkerchief or a stick; sometimes in film it’s characters and an atmosphere we imagine. The form changes, but the essence remains the same. The relationship a puppeteer builds with a puppet doesn’t feel very different to me from the relationship an actor builds with a character. I’m moved by stories that activate the audience’s imagination, and I like creating work with that same sense of honesty. 

MovieMaker: Do you see similarities between the current situation in Türkiye and the U.S.?

Nadir Sarıbacak: Sometimes, when I follow daily political developments in America, I do feel concerned. On the other hand, the United States has a deeply rooted Constitution. I believe it protects individual rights and freedoms and will not be easily changed — and I hope and pray that remains true. 

Ayhan Hulagu: At times, when I watch the news, I feel a sense of déjà vu. I sincerely hope that everything evolves in a positive direction. 

MovieMaker: Finally, what are you looking forward to about playing Sedona? 

Nadir Sarıbacak: First of all, it will be my first time in Sedona, which is exciting in itself. Also, in Sedona, Gazelle will be watched mostly by American audiences rather than Turkish viewers. That excites me because I’m very curious about their emotional response. I truly wonder what kind of connection they will form with the film. 

Ayhan Hulagu: Unfortunately, because of my theater performances, I won’t be able to be in Sedona. I hope it will be a wonderful festival for you and for my team. I’m very curious about how the festival audience will receive the film. Even though I won’t be there in person, my heart will be there.

Gazelle plays Tuesday and Thursday at the Sedona International Film Festival.

Main image: Nadir Sarıbacak as Yakup in Gazelle. Courtesy of Roaring Cat Films.

Standing in the way of their romance: a weirdo banker, a fear of change, and a runaway alpaca.

Love on Tap director Keagan Karnes — who shot the film in his native Las Cruces — has described the film as having "kind of a Hallmark plot" but with "alcohol and F bombs." There's plenty else that separates it from a typical rom-com, including a sharp metaphor connecting brewing and mourning, absurdist set pieces, and wry characters like an aspiring ninja (Jamey Maurice Clay), very indecisive employee (Zoe Colletti), and a cop who supports the brewery perhaps too enthusiastically (Caroline Kingsley, who is married to Moffat).

McMann, best known for starring on the CW's Nancy Drew, appreciated the side-door approach.

"I love me a sickly sweet rom-com, but they're hard to really put yourself in the middle of because the fantasy is a bit too far from reality," she tells MovieMaker. "Something about stripping down the polish and letting some air in makes the feel-good bits so much more satisfying, like if everything were to align just right, it might actually happen. There's some really welcome surrealism throughout, too, that I find so at-home in this genre."

Moffat, a veteran of Saturday Night Live playing a leading man for the first time, is a little less reflective: "I mainly came aboard for the money," he jokes.

But seriously, folks: No one did it for the money. Love on Tap is an exercise in scrappy indie filmmaking driven by, yes, love. The film, written by Stafford Douglas and Mary Haarmeyer, is also using a DIY distribution strategy, rolling out at the Lumiere Cinema in Los Angeles on Valentine's Day and later in Brooklyn, New Mexico, Chicago, and Houston. Details are here.

We talked with McMann and Moffat about joining Love on Tap, Karnes' fun but efficient set, and "Drops of Jupiter."

Alex Moffat and Kennedy McMann on Love on Tap

MovieMaker: I really enjoyed this, and your chemistry was fantastic. You're both really magnetic in these roles. How did you both come aboard the film? 

Alex Moffat: Thanks! It was a gas. ... It was also a fun script and a new challenge for me. Also, I assumed I’d get to drink lots of free beer on set.

Kennedy McMann: The script hit my inbox like any regular audition! I'm always cautious with indie film because you never know what you're going to get, but I found the script so charming and funny that I was thrilled to give it a swing.

I read virtually for the casting director and then didn't hear anything for a good while so I assumed they'd gone a different direction, but in the middle of a crazy business trip in L.A. I got a text from my manager that they wanted me for a virtual chemistry read with Alex.

I remember quite literally running down the streets of L.A. back to my hotel after a meeting that had run long to make it in time for our Zoom — I think it helped shake the nerves out. We had a great chem read over Zoom, where my only hope was to seem totally chill doing improv comedy with an SNL star, and I got the offer a few weeks later. 

MovieMaker: Alex, was it freeing to play a romantic lead after all those years on SNL doing parodies of sincere stories? You kind of reminded me of Tom Hanks in your willingness to be a curmudgeon at times — which somehow makes you more ultimately likable.

Alex Moffat: Ha — I like that. And I liked that the character could be a bit of a crank at times, too. That’s always more interesting to me than some right-over-the-plate sweetie pie. And yes, it was fun to be part of a sincere love story. Who doesn’t love a good rom-com?

MovieMaker: Kennedy, you're so believable as this small business owner, Amber, who's juggling a million things, while grieving and potentially getting into a new relationship. How did you manage to maintain all those emotions and stay in the moment?

Kennedy McMann: I always joke that nearly every character I've ever played on screen has a dead parent to contend with, so I've had a lot of practice... but really more than anything, I think masking vulnerability and maneuvering through everyday life is very real and easy to relate to.

So much of the comedy and life in it comes from that raw, strange place where someone like Amber has nothing left to lose, and no point in keeping her walls up anymore, so it gives you a ton of permission as an actor to live super moment-to-moment since that's all the character can really manage anyway.

MovieMaker: What was the most fun part of filming? It looked from the outtakes like you had a good time making this. What was the biggest challenge?

Kennedy McMann: The whole thing was a blast. Genuinely a crew of very funny, very easy-to-work-with people. I must admit working with the alpacas (there were two!) did actually make me cry with joy, so that was a highlight. As for the biggest challenge... gosh, maybe the busy left turn driving to set? Too much good Mexican food? Tough call. 

Alex Moffat: Well, Kennedy was a total blast to work with. She’s so present and is such a fun scene partner. Also, Keagan Karnes made it set veritable Karn-ival. It was loose and encouraging but also somehow ran like a Swiss clock. And on top of all that, I got to play with my real-life wife in the movie. Caroline Kingsley, who plays, the cop, is so funny, and I had a ball choppin’ it up with her. That was the icing on the cake.

MovieMaker: How did you like shooting in Las Cruces, your director's hometown? I'm surprised it doesn't appear on film more often, because it's such a photogenic and cool place. Those skies are insane. 

Kennedy McMann: Absolutely loved it. I grew up in the Southwest, and live there again now, so the on-screen rep was very cool and I felt right at home. We definitely have the best skies. Las Cruces in particular is really special, and shooting somewhere of sentimental value to a director inherently imbues so much heart into everything you're doing. 

Alex Moffat: Those skies are insane. Yeah, we loved Las Cruces. We made a big family vacation out of it. And it was a bit of life imitating art, because we met Keagan’s family and friends and it felt like the town embraced us and took good care of us for the time we were there.

MovieMaker: The Train song "Drops of Jupiter" is surprisingly important to the plot. Was that always going to be the song? Do you know if Train was cool with Alex's character saying the song "makes no sense"?

Kennedy McMann: Ha — "Drops of Jupiter" was always the song in every version of the script I read, so as far as I know it was, and I couldn't really imagine it being anything else. To me it perfectly encapsulates the nature of the film... unexpected and delightful, but also really makes you feel something that maybe snuck up on you. I can only hope Train understands. 

Alex Moffat: I love that song. I have wonderful memories of visiting my sister, Kristen, in San Francisco, and sitting in her emerald-green SUV, both of us belting that song with her two dogs in the back seat looking at us like we were insane. So, I was psyched.

Main image: Kennedy McMann, Alex Moffat and an alpaca in Love on Tap. Inspirado

Editor's Note: Corrects spelling of McMann.

But Saga.xyz, a Silicon Valley business that started out as a protocol for scaling blockchains, is taking its technology to AI and pursuing a new approach it believes could satisfy everyone: It seeks to supplement, not replace, the storylines in films, TV shows and video games. And it aims to do so by creating AI agents based on very well-known characters, without cheapening their respective canons.

Saga.xyz will soon announce major licensing deals that will allow fans of major IP — including several characters who are global household names — to interact with AI agents based on popular characters during the long stretches between official releases. 

Instead of waiting three years for a new movie starring Superhero X — a made-up name we’re using for the sake of simplicity — you’ll be able to interact with him daily. He’ll remember key details about you, including your likes and dislikes. And unlike a romantic-companion AI, for example, he’ll push back or disagree, from time to time, just like a human friend would.

Saga.xyz hasn’t yet announced who the characters are, but we can assure you: They’re very well-known IP, and belong in the same conversation as the Disney properties recently licensed to OpenAI. That deal will allow fans to use OpenAI’s Sora to make videos with Pixar, Disney, Star Wars and Marvel characters.

“The goal is to originate the agents with the studios so all of our agents are trained on the lore, the background, whatever content the studio hands us, so that it has a really solid creative foundation,” Saga.xyz CEO Rebecca Liao tells MovieMaker. 

“And the studio continues to be involved as we continue to fine-tune the agent. So if the agent starts to go off in a certain direction, and the studio believes, ‘Oh, we need to rein it in a bit, in order to stay within the brand guidelines’… we can do that.”

Intriguingly, Saga.xyz doesn’t plan to announce any near-term deals with major film or TV studios. Instead, it is making deals involving the video-game incarnations of beloved characters.

Liao says game studios are presently more open to AI agents based on characters than traditional studios are — even if the characters span films, TV shows, games and other mediums. 

Liao’s hope is that the AI agents will feel so authentic that fans won’t notice much difference between the AI agents based on their game versions and the way the characters behave in film and TV. 

And of course the interaction between a fan and Superhero X won’t change the Superhero X canon — just as fan fiction, or a child playing with an action figure, doesn’t alter canon. 

SAGA.xyz’s Rollout Plan for New AI Agents

One of the first places fans will meet Saga’s new AI agents is on social channels. Superhero X could be deployed across Reddit, X, Instagram, TikTok and Discord, offering tips on a game or simply striking up a conversation with a user. All Saga.xyz agents will be designated with official handles.

The agents will be able to interact with millions of fans at once, remembering data about all of them, like where they are in a game. Fans can interact with them through DMs, WhatsApp chats, video calls, and more. The studio guardrails are intended to ensure that Superhero X behaves like a hero, not a villain.

The intention, Liao says, is to “form that meaningful relationship between a character that you love and the user,” with an eventual eye toward helping studios promote their games. 

“So then the agent becomes a game guide, for instance,” she said. “It'll give you tips on the game. It'll help you move through levels in the game.” 

It can also serve as a “brand ambassador and a salesperson” for film and TV projects associated with the character.

“Because there's cross-pollination here, it can also help promote anything coming out in terms of content,” Liao said. 

The hope is that film and TV studios will allow Saga.xyz more and more access to their characters as the company demonstrates the trustworthiness and value of its AI agents.

Liao, an attorney as well as Saga.xyz’s co-founder and CEO, notes that fans will eventually be able to use the AI agents to represent them on social media and in games. Studios are only likely to intervene, she says, if the agents behave badly or start making money on the studios’ IP.

But she says no one wants that.

“If they make an agent that is more empathetic, more entertaining, cuter than the agent that we've come up with — you know, hopefully it's not the case,” she laughs. “But if it is the case, I think the studio's best interest is to work with that talent, as opposed to, like, prosecute them.” 

Protecting Users

Having an AI agent memorize your gaming preference — or tastes in superheroes — could offer a gold mine of customer research, starting at whatever age a user starts interacting with the agent. The company that owns Superhero X, for example, could use data gathered through user interactions for very targeted consumer marketing, for killer fan service, or in a litany of other ways.

Liao notes that the same data protection rules that apply in other circumstances also apply to AI agents. But she isn’t fond of a laissez faire, anything-goes approach to technology. In addition to ethical concerns, she says, it’s bad business.

“Brand perception among users is the most important thing,” she says. “So if users perceive, ‘Hey, I’m being manipulated,’ oftentimes that's a hit to whether they want to continue working with that brand.”

Saga.xyz also sets boundaries on its AI agents: They aren’t designed to be romantic-companion bots, for example. 

Saga.xyz and Scale 

Saga.xyz’s overall focus is on scalability, Liao says, whether that means scaling in blockchain or AI agents.

“We started off scaling crypto and blockchains, and then we realized that the technology could be leveraged really well to scale AI and particularly AI agents,” she said. 

The company is also trying to reduce the costs of acquiring new users — by using characters who seem as familiar as friends.  

“AI agents that are based on personas or based on characters, just take up a lot of computing space, particularly when you want these agents to have persistent memory,” Liao notes.

“If you deploy the same agent across, say, multiple social media platforms, or multiple e-commerce websites, then they need to remember what you've done on all those other platforms. So the idea is to develop an agent that truly has a personal relationship with you… kind of like a friend, they remember details about you. They are curious about things that are going on in your life.” 

What’s next for the company depends on how well Saga.xyz’s rollout of its AI agents go: When people see Superhero X on Reddit, will they keep scrolling? 

Or DM?

The British writer-director’s debut feature tracks the relationship between Colin, a timid traffic warden played by Harry Melling, and Ray, the enigmatic and impossibly handsome leader of a gay motorcycle club, played by Alexander Skarsgård. 

The hyper-dominant Ray takes the inexperienced Colin as his live-in submissive, and their pairing poses questions about the lines between control, devotion, and the possibility of real love. The film is based on Adam Mars-Jones’ celebrated novel Box Hill.

“‘Pillion’ means the passenger seat on a motorbike,” says Lighton, who made several acclaimed short films prior to Pillion. “Amongst bikers, it’s used as a term for the person who sits on that seat. Amongst gay bikers, if you’re a pillion, there’s a submissive charge to it.” 

To understand the dynamic, Lighton cites a well-known kink maxim: “The sub holds the power.” 

But the film lets the audience decide its central question: “Does Colin find liberation with Ray, or is it out of the frying pan, into the fire?” asks Lighton.'

Harry Lighton on Planning the Pillion Sex Scenes

Lighton worked with intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt to shape Pillion’s raw, explicit sex scenes — including an unforgettable wrestling-turned-sex scene and a sprawling outdoor orgy. 

Taylor Hunt made sure the actors’ boundaries were established, Lighton says, including those of men in the gay biking community who were cast in the film without previous acting experience. 

“From there, the entire cast, whether the core duo or the nine participants in the orgy, could collaborate to infuse the scenes with life and texture,” Lighton says. 

Lighton worked meticulously with Taylor Hunt to create realism: “It always annoys me in films, in gay sex scenes specifically, when you see a dick be inserted or pulled out and you don’t feel that on the bottom’s face,” he notes. 

So in such scenes, Skarsgård would give Melling a subtle touch cue to signal the moment for him to simulate the sensation. 

The film keeps aspects of Colin and Ray’s dynamic ambiguous by pointedly avoiding moments when the characters verbally negotiate consent. Instead, their communication plays out in a nuanced arena of gestures, commands, and conditional compliance. 

“One kink community member said they appreciated that I didn’t show contracts or protocols — that it would strip the eroticism from Ray’s character,” Lighton says.

The director says he is well aware that in real life, “setting boundaries is vital to avoid abuse.”

But he adds: “Fiction lets us explore the messy grey areas where consent can be intuitive, layered, and yes, sometimes risky.”

Lighton says he has never had a relationship like Ray and Colin’s, but knows people who have. 

“I can’t imagine surrendering my agency for so long,” he says. “But I understand the freedom some find in choosing submission.”

Pillion arrives in theaters Friday from A24.

Main image: Harry Lighton, center, with actors Harry Melling, left, and Alexander Skarsgård. A24.

Editor's Note: Corrects byline.

The film couldn't be more timely: It premiered last week just four days after the ICE killing of Alex Pretti, and 21 days after the killing of Renee Good. Their killings have been a tipping point in the national debate about masked ICE agents raiding homes, businesses and other locations in the name of national security, clashing with immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

In the Pollokshields protest, agents of the Home Office, the British equivalient of the Department of Homeland Security, seized the two men on the first day of Eid al-Fitr, a Muslim holiday that marks the end of the month-long, dawn-to-dusk fasting during Ramadan.

Through text and WhatsApp chains, people immediately took to the streets. One anonymous protestor, who became known only as Van Man, positioned himself beneath the van in which the two Sikh men were held, which prevented authorities from taking them away.

Local police gathered to stop the protesters, but they were vastly outnumbered. And — don't read the end of this sentence if you don't want to know what happens in Everybody to Kenmure Street — the Home Office officials released the two men.

The film's director, Felipe Bustos Sierra, had thousands of hours of phone footage from which to assemble the film, but didn't want to be held at a digital distance. To better understand the events of the Eid raid — which took place on May 13, 2021, he went for long walks with many of the people involved, trying to understand both the logistics and emotions behind the protest.

Bustos Sierra is intimately familiar with repressive governments: His father was a Chilean journalist exhiled to Belgium after Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973 and became the leader of a brutal right-wing regime. The Chilean-Belgian filmmaker now lives in Scotland.

Over the weekend, Everybody to Kenmure Street won Sundance's World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Civil Resistance. We asked Bustos Sierra about how the Kenmure Street protest was similar to and different from anti-ICE protests, historical context for Everybody to Kenmure Street, and some interesting celebrity cameos in the film.

Everybody To Kenmure Street Director Felipe Bustos Sierra on ICE, the Home Office, and 'All of Us'

MovieMaker: Do you see this method of protest — basically overwhelming immigration agents with sheer numbers — as a potentially effective strategy for demonstrators in the United States?

Felipe Bustos Sierra: There's a choir song in the film during a key turning point of the protest. It's composed by Barry Burns (of Mogwai) and performed by one of the oldest existing gaelic choir in Scotland. They repeat two sentences in Urdu and Gaelic: "We go together" and "It will take all of us." 

Critical mass is key, I think, along with recording and sharing quickly, ideally for the purpose of attracting more people to join the protest.

MovieMaker: I was struck by how calm the Scottish police seem compared to, for example, the ICE agents who recently shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti here in the United States. Is this a cultural difference, or a matter of training? The police even ultimately decide the two men should be released in order to de-escalate.

Felipe Bustos Sierra: Their reaction, calm in comparison to ICE in the U.S., still felt like an over-escalation and out of step with the situation. The main difference is that the police doesn't carry guns in the UK and this remove the fast track to violence that feels so readily available in the US. 

There wasn't much cooperation from the police or government bodies for this film. I wish we could have found at more about the final dynamic of powers that day and who took the decision to end it. I suspect overtime pay would have been a factor, another hour would have made the day's budget balloon and difficult to justify publicly. 

We might know more one day, but after nearly five years of work, it didn't feel essential for our film, which is more of a sensory experience about being part of a protest.

MovieMaker: I loved the surprising turn toward explaining how Glasgow and the UK in general benefited from slavery. Why did you want to include that background in a film about a protest against immigration raids?

Felipe Bustos Sierra: Many people turned up to their very first protest that day. They recognised the injustice in their neighbourhood. A recurring element during those conversations was the frustration for many with it happening on their doorstep and the feeling that no one had ever done anything about it. 

In a way, it doesn't matter what brought them to the street — it was vital that they did turn up — but of course, what a fallacy. People have done or tried to do something about it for decades, centuries, particularly in the southside of Glasgow. 

The city benefited so quickly, almost abruptly, from the Transatlantic slave trade and its legacies, creating a new hierarchical class and with it, great injustices. Whether it had to do with universal suffrage, emancipation, civil rights, workers' rights or migrant rights, certain people over generations have continuously been able to recognize those injustices and taken steps or, at least, attempted to rectify them. 

As someone says in the film, "we're all part of a continuum."  Kenmure felt to me like the latest iteration of an invisible injustice made visible by Glaswegian bodies and I loved making those connections through time. 

MovieMaker: Everybody to Kenmure Street suggests that staging the raid during Eid, which marks the end of the Ramadan fasting, was an act of provocation by the Home Office. Yet it backfires, because many of the protestors have spent the last month in fasting and self-reflection, thinking about how they can become better people. And then they're presented with this opportunity to stand up for their captured neighbors. Can you talk about the remarkable timing of this event?

Felipe Bustos Sierra: I can't speak to their intentions, as we did not have meaningful conversations with the Home Office or the police. From interviews with people who did make contact on the day or had conversations with those institutions, there appeared to be a mixed bag of intents and perspectives on the day as it unfolded. 

It was suggested to me that some were chomping at the bit to intervene more aggressively, while others questioned their own presence there. Pollokshields is Scotland's most diverse community. While it was irrelevant to the protesters, the Home Office turned up fairly late for a dawn raid on the day of Eid a few doors up from the local mosque to detain two men of color.   

It also appeared that the raid was prompted by a deliberately spiteful report, rather than an accurate one.  Do they always act on such thin information?  Is it on purpose?  Was it incompetence?  Was it cruelty?  Is it part of the Hostile Environment policy?   Without them coming forward and meaningfully participate in the conversations, it's up to the audiences to figure it out based on the footage we had available.

MovieMaker: What was the process of acquiring and editing so much cell phone footage for Everybody to Kenmure Street? 

Felipe Bustos Sierra: The protest happened during lockdown and so did much of the initial research.  Instead of filming, I would go for a walk around Queen's Park in our neighborhood with a different participant every other day.  This helped get a sense of how the protest evolved, and built trust about the project. 

People shared their own footage and pointed me in the direction of others. We amassed so much footage in this way, while also putting regular callouts on social media, but it also got us to more elusive characters like Van Man and the nurse. 

Colin Monie, the editor, and I worked on the film in batches over four years, often dictated by chunks of funding trickling in.  Footage on social media had provided early a spine for the timeline of the film, but these conversations and the fragments of images that came with each new participant gave it more detail and intimacy. It was a long process, and required some great aftercare in post to conform the different formats, codecs and frame rates.  

MovieMaker: There are some surprising moments in Everybody to Kenmure Street where a celebrity appears, reading real words from people who were involved in the demonstration. Why include the famous? Is there a benefit, in terms of marketing the film? Were you worried that they could take people out of the reality of the moment?

Felipe Bustos Sierra: It was a creative decision to get key testimonies into the film where the real participant preferred to remain anonymous, each for different reasons. I felt I couldn't document what had happened without them, while also finding a way to mirror their own conviction, defiance and humor. 

In Glasgow's history of civil disobedience, there has been some big swings to catch the public's eye and I enjoyed attempting to match that.  It works on different levels for me: it's often been women and migrants at the heart of resistance movements, doing the unseen hard graft.  It felt like poetic justice to gender-swap Van Man (with his consent too).  It also brings an element of surprise to the film that, again, felt appropriate to the the protest itself in the way people kept finding ways to disarm the situation.

MovieMaker: I understand your father was a Chilean journalist who fled the Pinochet regime in Chile. Did that give you an affinity for underdogs, and standing up to oppression?

Felipe Bustos Sierra: I grew up with Chilean documentaries, who across a couple of decades, either documented their repression or articulated different ways to express solidarity. Much of that made a deep impression on me and has been part of my own moral compass, although I did have to relearn a lot of it while making this film, as I didn't turn up on the day of the Kenmure Street protest, despite living only a few minutes away from it. 

I didn't see the hope that morning and missed out on a collective experience I never got to feel in my whole life.  I'd forgotten that hope is an active and communal thing.  Thinking about it maybe a warming exercise, but it only truly comes alive when you take that step outside to join others.

Main image: Everybody To Kenmure Street by Felipe Bustos Sierra. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

You can read more of our Sundance 2026 coverage here.

What unfolds is a mix of narration, poetic imagery, historical b-roll and classic film clips plucked from Vivien Hillgrove’s 50-year career as a sound and picture editor to craft a directorial debut made all the more impressive by the fact that she could barely see the dailies while shooting it.

“Losing sight is a great plot,” Hillgrove says. “It’s really extraordinary. But life does not leave you when you lose your sight.

“I got the most wonderful chance to deal with it as a creative expression,” she continues, “which was so amazing — that there were people to support the making of the film from the beginning.”

Among those people is Deann Borshay Liem, a documentary filmmaker who produced Vivien’s Wild Ride after working with Hillgrove as an editor on several features of her own. 

“What was amazing was seeing her lose her eyesight and yet turning that around and making it into a very visual, beautiful film,” Liem says. “The way that Viv ended up manifesting what she was seeing in her mind’s eye, and how she made that happen in spite of her vision being impaired, was just amazing to watch.”

Though the premise of Vivien's Wild Ride is particularly alluring for those working in film — perhaps because it sounds like a nightmare scenario — the payoff is actually much deeper, diving into a fascinating life marked by tragedy and triumph. 

Hillgrove’s first act includes a teenage pregnancy in the early ’60s, when her parents forced her to give up the baby for adoption. It’s a major loss that haunts her for decades, and one that feels connected to her more recent loss of sight, which has only progressed since completing the film. 

The macular degeneration of her eyesight began with a blur: Letters were missing from words, details faded from objects, and then faces were lost. 

The condition is diagnosed in over 200,000 people a year, and affects them all differently. 

As one sufferer explains in a therapeutic support group documented for the film, it’s hard for friends and family to understand how macular degeneration impacts day-to-day life, and to comprehend that it doesn’t get better. That was a major motivation for Hillgrove to commit to depicting her experience on the screen.

“The one thing I wanted so much to do is — if there was a way to communicate this to the folks who either deal with or care for people who are losing their sight — give them a visual reference point of understanding that,” she says.

“I’ve gotten many calls like, ‘All of a sudden, my family understands what I’m seeing when I see things on macular degeneration.’ If it changes or emboldens or communicates one thing, and that is macular degeneration, I’m happy.” 

Vivien Hillgrove on the Community Behind Vivien's Wild Ride

So how does a vision-impaired director make a film? 

“I was like two inches away from the monitor. Hopefully I didn’t do any brain damage,” she says with a laugh. “And then my editor helped me, because he would play things over and over again that I was unsure about.”

Her photographic memory, sharpened by making dozens of movies, was also essential in the process. 

“I memorized the film when I could see better than I could towards the end,” she says. “But you definitely memorize the dailies, and that’s just a gift of editing.”

Hillgrove began her career in the late ’60s, doing sound mixing and editing on industrial and educational films in San Francisco. She even cut a few adult films under the pseudonym Lorraine Sprocket before being pulled toward the free-spirited experimental film movement that was blossoming in the Bay area after the psychedelic-fused Summer of Love. 

She says LSD and other hallucinogens “opened my eyes and my feelings about community, and a community became very important, rather than one person’s suffering.”

She says the experience instilled in her a desire to communicate a range of feelings on film that might not have been so broad, “had I not taken psychotropics at that particular time in my life.”

Her big break came after she rented a room at Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope to edit low-budget family films. She was surrounded by mavericks, like Philip Kaufman and Walter Murch, and then began working alongside them. Hillgrove edited dialogue on Kaufman’s 1983 The Right Stuff andMiloš Forman’s 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus. She worked with Murch editing Kaufman’s 1988 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, then was one of the editors on Kaufman’s 1990’s Henry & June. 

Then, through a crisis of conscience, she shifted focus to editing documentary films, entering into a long partnership with acclaimed Mexican documentarian Lourdes Portillo, who she calls “one of the bravest people I’ve ever seen in my life.” 

As Hillgrove was parting ways with her vision, she began fine tuning her hearing, and noticing the mental imagery it can create. 

“The audio taught me a lot,” she says. “About 70% of the film, if not more, is audio. It tells you and expresses a huge amount of things about what you’re looking at.

“When I heard the audio in my mind’s eye, I saw the picture,” she continues. “If I were given a solution to blindness tomorrow, I don’t know if I would take it, because the gifts of losing my sight have been a phenomenal insight.

“I don’t feel like I’m disabled. I feel like I just have a different point of view. I have a different way of looking, literally looking, at stuff through this strange world of audio, sound effects, music, and all the things that go into a film audio mix.”

Many fellow artisans were essential in helping Hillgrove shoot and assemble her Wild Ride. 

Editor, co-producer and cinematographer Eric Ivey shot one of the most vulnerable scenes in the film: Hillgrove trying to navigate the bustling city of San Rafael with a walking cane.

“In that particular scene, I almost get run over by a car, and a bicyclist,” Hillgrove remembers. “And so I just thought, ‘Well, I’m taking my life in my hands, but I’m pretty sure that Eric will save me.’ So, I wasn’t really alone, but it still was really scary.”

The film hinges on Hillgrove being open, honest and candid about the fullness of her human experience — embracing her homosexuality, dropping acid, working in a male-dominated industry, and the traumatizing process of losing her child and then reconnecting with her decades later. 

So to effectively recount her life on camera, she needed a good dialogue coach.

“Deann was so helpful in this,” the filmmaker says. “If I was pulling back or had a rote answer to something, she would push me in the direction of getting down to the honest, painful part.” 

Vivien’s Wild Ride is a colorful portrait of a life well lived — a detailed picture of each phase of Hillgrove’s life and loss that also shares an illuminating lesson she learned from those psychedelic adventures in the ’60s. 

“I remember one time just hearing the voice: ‘Look at the hard times; look them directly in the eye and they disappear,’” she recalls. 

“So, this sense of healing was always with me after taking my first psychotropic. And I think it really aided the film in saying: ‘Oh, we can do this.’”

Viven’s Wild Ride is now playing on PBS’s Independent Lens.

It's also a strikingly relevant look at the making of our modern world.

As a "born and bred New Yorker," Smith grew up with the bold, raucous, unpredictable, sometimes beautiful and sometimes ugly material that pervaded New York City's Manhattan Cable Television, which began allowing pretty much anyone who turned in a tape to start showing their work in the early 1970s. Their programming ranged from talk shows to spontaneous interviews with average New Yorkers to hangouts to naked people dancing, and more.

"What happened here was particularly boundary pushing at a time when New York was a vital forefront of music, art, sexual politics and free-for-all experimenters," Smith told MovieMaker. "A show like TV Party would have Basquiat in the control room and Blondie answering calls. Warhol's crowd saw it as another space to play in. 

"The vibrant LGBTQ community seized on it as a place to be seen and heard," Smith adds. "Times Square filtered into your living room. Public access truly reflected the id of the city.  So many of the characters we meet are truly 'only in New York' kinds of people, Brooklyn accents and all."

Smith, who started out in broadcast journalism, made the film by culling through endless hours of forgotten shows, some of which haven't been seen for decades. He and his executive producers — including Benny Safdie, Wren Arthur and Steve Buscemi — would sometimes go down rabbit holes based on something they vaguely remembered seeing in their youth.

The resulting film is a one-of-a-kind portrait of New York City at its most vibrant, alive, and uncontrollable, with fascinating dives into subjects as far ranging as the AIDS epidemic and the rise of teenage public access phenom-turned-MTV performer Jake Fogelnest.

But it also presents a world that will seem awfully familiar to anyone who's spent any time online.

We talked with Smith about growing up in NYC, controlling who sees what, and how public access TV just may have saved lives.

David Shadrack Smith on His Sundance Doc Public Access

MovieMaker: There are so many parallels between early public access TV and the internet — including the freedom that came from no gatekeeping, and the sudden rise of adult content, and questions about if and how to regulate it. Were you struck by how much history repeats itself?

David Shadrack Smith: When we started the project or started thinking about it, I definitely saw those parallels as front and center.  Growing up pre-internet but experiencing Public Access I immediately thought: Wow, this was like the internet before the internet.  It was really the first time people could make their own content and broadcast it.  The confluence of technology and an ethos of democratizing media made it possible.

Fast forward to now, when the film is coming out, and those parallels have become more urgent than we even imagined. How do we protect these spaces of self-expression from forces that want to co-opt, control or silence them?  How do we ensure access to diverse voices? Who gets to decide what is okay and what is not?  

The whole world is public access now. And many of the same challenges exist around harmful material and its ability to reach people, now on a global scale.  But I also started to see the differences between then and today. 

Today, algorithms control who sees what. Technology controls and monetizes the content and is making decisions about what is okay or not.  The courts increasingly are okay with limiting free speech.  These are not truly "public" services mandated to be inclusive on an equal basis.  

The film doesn't try to answer the question directly. But in the words of one of the early idealists who helped start New York's public access channels: It makes you humble to realize you can't decide what's good or bad for the world. I hope our film spreads some of that humility around and reminds people that these spaces of self-expression are fragile. 

MovieMaker: This film is built around some rare and truly jaw-dropping archival footage. How did you access it, and decide what to ultimately use? 

David Shadrack Smith: The archive is the star of the film.  We felt like archeologists uncovering a lost world so foundational to our own. But the process of finding and choosing our stories was as hard as it was exciting. Some footage was kept and maintained by the creators. Some lived in archives but maybe had never been unboxed and digitized. Some was lost forever, especially in the early days. As we started to dig, we might have a show in mind, something perhaps I remember seeing as a kid or one of our EPs recalled. Everyone we spoke to pointed us to someone else and an amazing new path of inquiry would open up.  

And then it was a puzzle: Do we have the footage we need and a person who can speak about it? Was this show a significant milestone in the arc of the public access story we wanted to tell? We ended up with literally hundreds of hours — over 2,000 assets — to work with. Some absolute gems were left out, which is heartbreaking. 

We always had to ask, does this story tell us something critical about the medium itself and the journey of this amazing utopian becoming altered by its real world application?  

The ultimate final test was: Is this fun to watch?  If we found ourselves laughing out loud or especially moved by a story, we knew it had a place. My deepest gratitude remains to all those creators who dared to put themselves out there... and saved their tapes! 

MovieMaker: I kept thinking there could be at least five documentaries made from the material in this film — especially the segment about how cable access became one of the rare, real sources of good safe-sex education in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Do you anticipate more projects growing out of this film?

David Shadrack Smith: My background is in television series, so early on we talked a lot about whether this should be a film or a series. Every story could spin out into its own, with these incredible characters and how they refracted and impacted the world around them. 

The story of how public access became a vital outlet for information about AIDS when it was so shut out by the mainstream is one of our most beloved examples of the power of the medium. And there was so much more to say about that.  There was so much more to say about every story. But we wanted people to have an immersive experience akin to watching public access in its time, wondering what was that I just saw and then it was on to the next thing.

I think we ultimately saw this as a curated mixtape of discovery for audiences. That said, I remain open to the possibility of it getting expanded and serialized and goodness knows we have the material to do it.  

MovieMaker: Watching old Saturday Night Live sketches — you include a clip of "Wayne's World" — you're reminded that there were lots of public access stations in the '80s and '90s. Was the programming of Manhattan Cable Television, the focus of your film, any wilder or daring than that of other communities? Did NYC's artistry and tumult lead to especially remarkable cable access shows?

David Shadrack Smith: That's a great question and an early decision we had to make in order to contain the story.  Public access existed and still exists around the country. Los Angeles had some incredible shows back then. Cincinnati embraced the LGBTQ programming, most of which started in New York but was shared by VHS tapes being passed around. ... Miami, San Francisco, Austin: Each one had its own outlet that reflected its place and time. 

I've heard that SNL writers were obsessed with public access and drew source material from it. MTV started here and was influenced by it.  Comedy Central. It was in the air and that filtered out from New York to the world.  

MovieMaker: I loved what a time capsule of NYC your film is — it felt like we were getting the perspective of regular New Yorkers, and not just the famous people who were on the other channels. Did you learn a lot about the city that went against your expectations?

David Shadrack Smith: I think everyone who grew up or has lived in New York has their version of the city.  Many of these stories and the corresponding archive took me to times or corners of the city that were brand new to me.  Some were more familiar and, for better or for worse, guided what I wanted to show about New York. 

I think from my limited kid perspective at the time, I didn't appreciate how all these disparate communities could overlap and co-exist, often influencing one another or just existing. I loved seeing those again or for the first time.

New York is a character in the film because it had to be. Its creative spirit but also its desperate and broken self, its yearning and hunger. I caught glimpses of that growing up and it influenced me entirely. I knew some of these people. I was in those spaces. I remember the sights and the smells and the sense of danger and openness.  

The film is very personal for me — my love letter to my city — and a lot of the references in it harken back to experiences I had growing up and being inspired to try and live a creative life.  That was the spirit that New York had — probably has always had and I hope always will — in spades.  

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker? You've done a lot of work on cable documentaries, and this was a passion project. What made it so different from your past work, and how did your past work inform it?

David Shadrack Smith: I started my career in broadcast journalism, first overseas in Beijing for many years and then as a producer on staff at National Geographic, which was an incredible adventure, it goes without saying. As my career moved ahead and television experienced a golden period of non-fiction series, that canvas was an incredible opportunity to create shows that could reach engaged audiences and have real impact. 

The work I was involved in took shape around trying to both entertain and inform simultaneously.  The craft of the storytelling evolved to try and make stories of all kinds connect with viewers. So that experience definitely came to bear in making this film: How do we make this world engaging and entertaining while still raising vital and urgent questions about our world?  

At the same time, making an indiedoc turned me back into a first-time filmmaker in ways I didn't expect.  Working solely with archives, working without voiceover, working with only our small team to guide us, these were all new challenges. At times I wanted to forget everything I had learned so I could push past my own comfort zones and limitations. 

Our great EPs, Benny Safdie and Wren Arthur and Steve Buscemi, challenged us to go further at critical moments. In the end, I feel like the film is a mix of everything I had learned and everything I didn't know but had to learn for the first time.  

MovieMaker: Can you talk about your memories of growing up with public access TV?

David Shadrack Smith: Yes, my encounters with public access at a young age are seared into my brain.  I actually grew up in Brooklyn, which for most of my childhood, did not have cable or cable access TV. Every Friday I would go sleep over at my grandmother's apartment on the Upper West Side and after everyone went to bed, I would sneak into the library and stay up watching public access. 

Some of the most risqué and out there shows came on at those hours so there was a sense of the forbidden and disbelief. It had the feeling of a secret. Like, did anyone else see this?  Who are these people and how is it they inhabit the same city but in such a different reality? 

In a sense, it made me feel less alone — the power of the medium — to know that there were so many different communities out there and I could one day go find them. Back long before the internet, it was definitely the punk and sex shows that blew my mind. 

But then, there were all these call in shows that regular people like myself could interact with. When before that moment could you talk to your TV set?! The whole thing felt like, I need to go out here and explore and find these people and find my community.  And it was thinking about that time in my own life that inspired me to want to make the film. 

Public Access premieres tonight at the Sundance Film Festival and will screen again several times during the festival.

Main image: A still from Public Access by David Shadrack Smith, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by David Shadrack Smith.

Trying to piece together what had killed Wyatt, his mother, Patti Wheeler, found that he had been taking kratom, a substance from a tree native to Southeast Asia. She remembers him telling her it was just a supplement.

Kratom is easy to get: A compound within it called 7-OH, or 7-hydroxymitragynine, is used to make various products sold in vape shops, gas stations and elsewhere, and millions of Americans use it as a stimulant, or to relieve pain, perhaps as an alternative to opioids.

Kratom is not regulated by the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Food and Drug Administration. The DEA says that its leaves produce stimulant effects in low doses and sedative effects in high doses, and that it "can lead to psychotic symptoms, and psychological and physiological dependence." The FDA says that it "is not lawfully marketed in the U.S. as a drug product, a dietary supplement, or a food additive in conventional food" and warns against its use for any kind of medical treatment until agency scientists can better evaluate it.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan last summer to restrict access to some kratom products, citing safety concerns.

But the Holistic Alternative Recovery Trust, which represents 7-OH makers and consumers, has argued that the compound does not meet the statutory criteria for prohibition, and has value as "a potential harm-reduction tool that warrants responsible regulation, not prohibition."

In remembrance of Wyatt, Patti Wheeler sought to educate the public about kratom, and enlisted an old friend — producer Joanne Rubino, who years before had worked with her and her sons on a planned TV project based on a series of books about their globetrotting adventures.

Rubino put Wheeler in contact with filmmaking twins Jamie and Jason Neese, certain that they would feel an affinity for a mother of twins. Patti Wheeler hit it off quickly with the filmmakers, whose extensive credits include co-executive producing the Emmy-nominated Netflix series The Umbrella Academy.

Patti Wheeler is the executive producer of the resulting documentary, Kratom: Side Effects May Include, which plays Sunday at Dances With Films New York.

“Being a parent is the most important and amazing role in one’s lifetime. You do everything to keep them safe and then they walk into a gas station and buy a little bottle on a shelf, and are gone at 27,” Patti Wheeler said in a statement. “This unthinkable tragedy is a deep pain that will never go away and the driving force behind my determination to bring change, justice and do something that saves lives." 

Joanne Rubino produced the doc, and emailed with us about the future of kratom, and conducting the painful interviews for the documentary, which is now seeking distribution.

Joanne Rubino on Making Kratom: Side Effects May Include

MovieMaker: I understand that Patti wanted to make this film to spare others from what she's experienced. How does it affect the documentary when the executive producer blames kratom for such a terrible loss? Does it affect how the film presents kratom?

Joanne Rubino: We feel strongly that we gave everyone a voice and invited all sides to participate. It's really more about the kratom industry and the lack of regulation and transparency as a whole.

MovieMaker: Some of the kratom users interviewed in the film — who advocate for its use – still support some kind of regulation. And you show that many users want to make sure it remains available. Do you want a ban on kratom, or just regulation?

Joanne Rubino: We do not want to ban kratom. We want the industry to take responsibility for the products, as they are selling to the tune of billions of dollars. We have spoken to numerous experts who all agree that it may have benefits but there needs to be much more research and reclassification of the products if they are currently calling it a food.

MovieMaker: How much faith do you have in RFK and legislators who are looking into greater regulation? 

Joanne Rubino: We are pro any regulation, wherever it comes from. This is not a partisan issue. It's a human issue, and we are hoping our film unifies and brings awareness to the masses and ultimately saves lives.

MovieMaker: Finally, what was the greatest challenge in making the film, and how did you overcome it?

Joanne Rubino: The greatest challenge of making the film was hearing these heartbreaking stories of sons, daughters, sisters, brothers — so many people whose lives have been lost or destroyed. And the numbers continue to climb.

You can read more of our Dances With Films New York coverage here.

Main image: Kratom: Side Effects May Include. Dances With Films.

The film, which just had its East Coast premiere at Dances With Films New York, follows a man named Pooya who is, like Iranikhah, Iranian-American. Otherwise, their lives differ significantly.

In the film, Pooya (a magnetic Hassan Nazari-Robati) grows up speaking Farsi but learns English from American TV. He wants people to call him "Peter." He grows up and follows his new wife to her home state of Missouri, where he struggles with America suddenly "being weird" around 2017. (The film has a way with understatement.) He struggles as an adult to re-learn Farsi with help from his maman, or mother — but then things take a tragic turn.

Iranikhah, on the other hand, is an award-winning actor, writer and director who made "Farsi With Maman" as his intermediate project at Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, one of the best film schools in the country.

Despite dealing with seriousness and tragedy, "Farsi With Maman" has wit abundant and irrepressible energy. It sails along. Iranikhah takes several big creative risks that pay off with some of the funniest and most moving scenes in the film.

Iranikhah told us about using humor to tell serious stories, having his lead actor play Pooya as both an adult and child, and how teaching is like filmmaking.

MovieMaker: First, as of this writing, you're both working on your next film — in the Mojave desert — and watching the Iranian protests from afar. How are you feeling?

Omid Iranikhah on 'Farsi With Maman'

Omid Iranikhah: I’m watching what’s happening in Iran with the same mix of heartbreak and confusion that a lot of people in the diaspora must be feeling right now. I’m aware of how privileged I am to be in the United States making a film. However, at the same time, I’m seeing our own country move in similar authoritarian directions. Oddly enough, the film I’m currently shooting comes directly out of that tension.

MovieMaker: "Farsi With Maman" is so beautiful — filled with pain, and yet so understated, and funny, and not at all morose. It's impossible not to be charmed by it. How do you keep smiling, tonally? Did the understated, humorous approach take time to hone?

Omid Iranikhah: I tend to use humor to process difficult things so it felt natural to tell a personal, sometimes painful story like “Farsi with Maman” in a more humorous way. As long as the emotion of a given moment in the film felt honest to me, I knew it would work tonally for the overall piece.

MovieMaker: How autobiographical is "Farsi With Maman"? Did you move to Missouri, for example? And try to re-learn Farsi there?

Omid Iranikhah: I would say the film is more personal than autobiographical. I have never in my life stepped foot in the state of Missouri. ... I never went around calling myself “Oliver” or anything like that. But what Pooya feels over the course of his journey was the personal part.

MovieMaker:  I love the decision to have your main actor, Hassan Nazari-Robati, play Pooya as both an adult and child. It's one of the ways you add levity to a sad situation — as you see other kids throw things at the child, there's still a laugh in the fact that it's an adult playing a child. How did you arrive at that decision?

Omid Iranikhah: The decision to have the wonderful Hassan Nazari-Robati play Pooya as a child as well as an adult just came from my own weird way of processing my memories. When I remember myself as a child, I’m only able to envision myself at the age I am now, but in the clothes of a child.

MovieMaker: I saw on The Black List that you have experience as a teacher — did that help you in making the film?

Omid Iranikhah: Yes, I do indeed have experience as a teacher. I’ve worked as a private essay tutor and as a substitute teacher for K-12 classrooms. Those jobs, more than anything else, taught me how to wrangle and manage a bunch of vastly different personalities and adapting to their needs in order to reach a goal.

You can read more of our Dances With Films New York coverage here.

Main image: Hassan Nazari-Robati in "Farsi With Maman."

Editor's Note: Corrects link.

When filmmaker Mark Hoffman read the book, it reminded him of a quote from transcendentalist author Henry David Thorough: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it."

That quote begins A Simple Machine, Hoffman's adaptation of Schneider's book, which continued its film festival run Friday with a very warm reception at Dances With Films New York. The film, co-written by Schneider, stars an excellent Richard Blackmon as a version of Nick Allander, the protagonist of Schneider's 2011 novel. Gabriela Quezada plays his girlfriend, Marie, who wants Nick to grow up, but is uncomfortable with the extreme measures he undertakes to pay off $100,000 in debt, mostly from student loans.

The film fascinatingly addresses, with precision and detail, something that most movies gloss over: the finances of its protagonist. Nick's biggest early move is to sell his car in favor of a bike, which becomes a metaphor for self-sufficiency.

When he read the novel, Hoffman was struck by how personal it seemed to be. It was especially relevant in Portland, a city with a strong history of social justice, bicycling, and DIY culture. And it's relevant to almost everyone in America, as affordability becomes one of our biggest worries.

"It was more like a journal of the author — it was pretty autobiographical as well — a young guy trying to figure out what he wanted in life with all these other things going on," Hoffman said at a post-screening Q&A Friday. "But it was very much focused on mathematically, how your things and stuff equal the freedom spent."

He added: "It really struck me that we live in a free market country and the capitalistic system, and there's good and bad that comes with it — but how does the individual survive in that framework?"

Hoffman worked with Schneider to adapt the book into a film, but "at some point he let me just keep going with it," Hoffman said. His changes included focusing more on the dynamics between characters.

Schneider turns up in A Simple Machine as an angry driver who yells at Nick for riding his bike in the road — an especially fun moment if you know of Schneider's devotion to cycling.

Mark Hoffman on Shooting A Simple Machine in Black and White

The film is set in the days soon after the Covid lockdowns, and is shot in black and white in part to freeze it in the past. (Kevin Fletcher handled the beautiful cinematography.)

"We wanted it to always sit in that time period, so making it black and white was a reason for doing that," said Hoffman. "And also, Portland's a very noir feeling city, and I just thought it would stylistically be cool to have a Portland film that was black and white. There've been a lot of great indie films out of Portland, but none that I know of that are black and white."

The stellar cast also includes Brad Carter, who plays Karl, an unhoused man who becomes a kind of bicycle-repair guru.

Blackmon played college football before turning to acting, and has the kind of magnetism that could easily translate to film stardom. Because he came to acting relatively late, Hoffman said, "he just brings so much life experience."

Hoffman and A Simple Machine producer Mike Lay said at the Q&A that the film will remain on the festival circuit for a few months, and then they hope to tap into cycling communities to spread the word about it. They're considering self-releasing, and hope to start their theatrical run in Portland.

It's a film worth giving up 98 minutes of your life, which is required to be exchanged for it.

You can read more of our Dances With Films New York coverage here.

Main image: Richard Blackmon in A Simple Machine.

"Instead I learned that I was the kid who celebrated the different holiday, and very few knew the game," says Schloss, a Boston-based filmmaker who says the experience helped inspire his Hannuhah-themed horror short "Gimme. It's playing Saturday at Dances With Films New York.

Scloss wrote the film, which recently won Best Horror Short at Filmquest, with producer Aidan Payne. It tells the story of a young girl named Lev (Taylor Pezza) and her grandfather Papa Alan (Paul Kandarian) as they cope with the loss of the girl's mother around Hannukah. A mysterious dreidel seems like a way to connect with her, but things go badly.

Schloss is also an executive producer of the New England based production company Hot Brick Entertainment. His previous shorts “Katie’s Skin” and “Writer’s Block” have earned him a reputation for skillfully made, uncompromising horror.

"Gimme" has already been picked up by Screambox for distribution in December 2026 — just in time for next Hannukah.

We talked with Steve Schloss about the audience for Jewish horror, not settling for the easy version of "Gimme," and how if you do the thing you love, you'll never work a day in your life.

Steven Schloss on Making 'Gimme'

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker?

Steven Schloss: The million dollar question. Truthfully, I think the desire and skillset of being a filmmaker has always been inside me, waiting. When I was little I would beg my dad to take me to Blockbuster a few times a week. Sometimes just to browse the horror aisle to look at the VHS cover art of the movies I wasn’t allowed to watch, yet. Growing up I was more interested in staying inside getting lost in video games, action figures and my evolving VHS/DVD collection than playing outside with other kids.

Unless it was competitive paintball, my first obsession prior to filmmaking that scratched my itch for creative problem solving and collaboration. Classrooms were tough for me, unless it was art class. When I picked up my first mini DV video camera in high school, it felt so natural with the whole run and gun aspect of it. Finally I found something in my education to chase. Somewhat by default, since I really did suck at school. That passion led me to Boston University where I studied film and TV, eventually interning with Richard N. Gladstein the producer of Pulp Fiction, Cider House Rules and The Bourne Identity to name a few. I’ve been using film as a medium to share stories since 2010 and most recently I’m leaning more into the realm of horror.

MovieMaker: Where did the idea for "Gimme" originate?

Steven Schloss: When I was 10 I brought a dreidel to school for show and tell. I was expecting the class to at least know what it was and comment on how cool it was but instead I learned that I was the kid who celebrated the different holiday and very few knew the game. I craved a Hanukkah horror movie when I was growing up as the holiday was greatly overshadowed by Christmas. I grew up in a non-religious, yet culturally Jewish family, and I’ve seen less pride in our identity lately, especially as antisemitism rises in the U.S. That’s one of the reasons I made "Gimme," a film rooted in Jewish culture that anyone can relate to. It’s the movie I wish I was able to watch during Hanukkah at 14.

MovieMaker: Are you surprised there isn’t more Jewish-themed horror?

Steven Schloss: Yes. When Eli Roth’s 2023 Thanksgiving was announced it felt to me like the world just skipped over Hanukkah. That’s when I started to develop this idea. I couldn’t help but ask why: Why isn’t there a carousel of Hanukkah movies on Shudder or Screambox like there is for Christmas? Do we not deserve it? Are there not enough metrics behind the concept to sell studios on?

I wanted to be the one to change that by making something bold, unforgettable and true to the themes of Hanukkah. A sinister dreidel that brings a family closer together through horror fit the bill.

MovieMaker: What was the biggest challenge you faced in making this film?

Steven Schloss: Telling the right story to represent the themes of culture, ritual and family
traditions around Hanukkah. "Gimme" went through two rounds of production. On the first round, the end held no merit. For me it was either reshoot the third act or let the project die, and I couldn't be happier with my decision to reshoot with the encouragement of fellow collaborators.

MovieMaker: I know you debated — spoiler alert — whether to have a child character be harmed in this film… why did you make the decision you did?

Steven Schloss: Yes, spoiler alert. I like to see the thing I don’t want to see in horror. That’s part of my attraction to the genre — it’s not safe. Thematically the story is about a dying family tradition so it’s only fitting that it ends with a female first born child. If I were to save the character it would be out of sensitivity and feel like the 2015 film Krampus. This was where I really wanted to be different while still feeling familiar in other areas.

MovieMaker: You also are a freelance cinematographer – how do you balance that with directing films?

Steven Schloss: Yes, that’s my livelihood and main funnel into raising enough money to make my own movies. It’s a lot of bright happy stuff so my escape is evidently in the darkness. Balancing is easy, I make my own schedule and since I’m not with a studio while I’m producing my films there is no deadline, so I really take my time with things. It’s also nice being able to still work in the same medium for my main job and passion.

MovieMaker: What’s next?

Steven Schloss: I hope to see "Gimme" evolve into a feature and believe the world would eat it up with a plate of Latkes and a side of apple sauce. Hold the sour cream, please.

"Gimme" plays as part of the Midnight Shorts Block 2 at Dances With Films New York at 9:30 p.m. Saturday. You can read more of our Dances With Films New York coverage here.

Main image: The dreidel in "Gimme," designed by Jordan J. Estrada.

Where are the men? That's part of the horror.

The film is strikingly succinct and efficient — it leaves lots of clues for the audience, but never overexplains. What it leaves us to imagine is worse than anything it could show.

The film, which plays Saturday at Dances With Films New York, comes from director and co-writer Vasilisa Kuzmina, a Russian-Iranian filmmaker whose feature debut Nika won Special Jury Recognition at SXSW 2022.

She co-wrote it with Daisy Anderson, and producer and American Sign Language consultant Douglas Ridloff helped connect Kuzmina with Deaf actors including Deanne Bray, who plays the leader of the community.  

We asked Vasilisa Kuzmina about avoiding needless exposition, shooting on a tight budget, and the rules of "Song of Silence."

Vasilisa Kuzmina on Her Short Film 'Song of Silence'

MovieMaker: How did you become a filmmaker?

Vasilisa Kuzmina: By accident and fate, I guess.

MovieMaker: What was the spark for this idea, and how did it develop?

Vasilisa Kuzmina: My co-writer and I had a very simple idea — a man returns home to a community now entirely of women. We knew that this was something we wanted to explore and from here the rest of story began to unfold. We started by thinking what his relationships upon turning home would look like, and that is when we decided to focus on his relationship with his mother.

This story is a love story between a mother and son under terrible circumstances.

MovieMaker: I loved how much you don't reveal — we have guesses about how these women survive, and guesses about what happened in the years before the film, but a lot is left to our imagination. It's very scary, suspenseful and thought-provoking. How much backstory did you develop for this world, and are there enough clues for us to decipher it if we really try?

Vasilisa Kuzmina: Initially we wrote a feature version of this film. it has different characters though, but similar premise. so the rules of the world were clear to us.

MovieMaker: What was your biggest challenge in making this film, and how did you overcome it?

Vasilisa Kuzmina: It was a really large scale project for a short film with a small budget. With huge numbers of extras and children, shooting on film, and multiple locations, we had to be constantly adapting our storytelling strategies to get everything we needed everyday. 

MovieMaker: Did you have any key references or influences? Or any first-hand experiences that were crucial to the story?

Vasilisa Kuzmina: Being a woman was definitely a first-hand experience that I drew on! Our film is a genre film, but the intense patriarchy and the need to survive at any cost is very real. What these women have experienced in our film is scarily close to what millions of women still experience today. 

"Song of Silence" plays Saturday as part of Shorts Block 5 at Dances With Films New York. You can read more of our Dances With Films New York coverage here.

Main image: Deanne Bray in "Song of Silence."

“As soon as I started to learn about people like Oonagh Guinness and how she lived, and Gloria Vanderbilt and Lee Radziwill… they were bucking the tradition of their aristocratic upbringing, which would have been, you know, heirlooms and antiques. No, they didn't want any of that. They wanted to be part of the modern world. They wanted to hang out with artists. They wanted to be bohemian and they expressed that, I feel like, in their personal surroundings.”

Hedda, an adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play Hedda Gabler, stars Tessa Thompson in the title role, with Nina Hoss, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, and Nicholas Pinnock in supporting roles. The film is all set in one location, Hedda’s majestic estate. Its look and feel are essential to reinforcing Hedda as a boundary pusher, and creating the transportive quality of the film. 

“We achieved that through just the layering that we did. We had this Italianate house that was built and cobbled together. They kept building it and building it, building it over decades, adding and adding so you have this house from the 1800s and then we put modern art in it, and then we brought in a lot of art deco silhouettes to furnishings, because that still feels so contemporary,” says Brower. 

“Because of all the layers that we have, it kind of makes it feel timeless. A lot of people have come up to me and said they wanted to know what country the house was in… and then they want to know what year it was set in. We wanted it to kind of feel timeless and transcend any specific year.”

Taking Liberties With Hedda

DaCosta took some liberties from the play, by moving the time period from the late 19th century and gender switching the role of Eilert in the play to Eileen in the film. Those liberties were important considerations for Brower and set decorator Stella Fox.

“I think for me, choosing the furniture and the pieces had more to do with the shapes and the proportions of the pieces. The shapes of the deco pieces and the shapes of ’50s pieces kind of mirror that very elegant, very shapely, just very sexy pieces of furniture. 

"And I think that when we were looking in auction houses we imported a lot of furniture from all over Europe antiques markets. It was more about just finding the perfect shape. But it just didn't matter to me and to Cara, whether it was, you know, ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, even ’60s. Like, there were some mid-century pieces that obviously would have been created after them. But it really, it didn't matter, because they had that freedom of slight wildness, I think, to them,” says Fox.

“We did a whole kind of board displaying leopard print, for example, and like it was so on trend in the ’50s… and (Nia) let us put leopard print carpet in the back hallway, and also a taxidermy jaguar on the staircase, just because,” says Fox. “I remember the first time we showed Nia the leopard print carpet. She literally laughed in our face. She was like, ‘Ladies, what are you doing?’ And then, OK, OK, I got it. I got it.”

How did ideas of gender, especially in this time period, influence the set decoration and production design?

“I really think it was just another example about how boundary pushing this person is, and how bold we could be with the furnishing, I think, and the production design, because she's clearly somebody who is not afraid... I really don't know how we would have made this film, or how special this film would have felt without that gender swap,” says Brower.

Hedda’s outward and inner lives are constantly at odds in the film, but the house does offer clues to who she might really be. 

“I feel like she is grasping at anything she can, and so maybe the house is a bit of a creative outlet where she can express herself. Even though she finds that unfulfilling,” says Brower.

“I was gonna say it's for her. It was the drama… It's the show of it, the pomp of it,” says Fox.

Hedda is now streaming on Prime Video.

Main image: Tessa Thompson in Hedda. Prime Video.

The new comedy, set in 1984, gets laughs from the embarrassments and frustrations that come from being a human — especially a teenage human — but not from the typical punchlines of modern-day movies set in the '80s, like campy callbacks or inside jokes about what we know now but didn't know then.

The film is playing Friday at Dances With Films New York, and it's a perfect fit for Dances With Films, a festival that specializes in well-made films that can be hard to pin down: The festival famously doesn't care about celebrity or industry connections.

And yet The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo director and co-writer Michael Walker has them anyway. His credits include directing the 2000 Jeff Daniels mystery Chasing Sleep and the 2012 Parker Posey comedy Price Check, as well as the 2022 Dances With Films winner Paint.

And while his three leads aren't big stars yet, all feel poised to be. Anna Mirodin has what should be a breakout role as Julie Gornick, an inexperienced high school student surprised to learn that her family will be hosting a male exchange student from Spain. Alexandro Byrd is fantastic as that student, Juan Jose, who can't help but attract seemingly every girl in school. And Cobra Kai actress Hannah Kepple is very funny as Julie's bolder best friend, Suzanne.

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo benefits from the fact that Walker was exactly the same age as his characters in 1984. His co-writer, actress Susan Gomes — the two are married — drew on her own experiences to make the film. We sent them a few questions ahead of Dances With Films New York, and Walker answered them with Gomes at his side, with both contributing to his answers.

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo Director Michael Walker on 80s Movies and His Breakout Gen Z Cast

MovieMaker: It’s very cool to see a teen movie set in 1984 that feels like it could have been made in 1984. But it has the perspective of a grown up with years of distance. I see that you were almost exactly the same age as your teenage characters in 1984 — how much did you tap into your memories?

Michael Walker: The film is based on Susan’s high school experiences growing up in White Plains, New York, and, even though I had a different high school experience, I grew up in the 80s. We spoke with a lot of her friends from growing up and a lot of the stories are in the movie.  The main story about a inexperienced girl who hosted a Spanish exchange student was based on a true story of Susan’s best friend back then.

But it’s also filled with a lot of little stories, like the Spanish teacher trying to improve the kids’ accents with a Cheech and Chong-like accent, that actually happened that were really funny and we wanted to put them in the film.

It was a lot of memories like that, but, like you said, it’s also done with the perspective of being older, so it was fun to remember what it was like to be young at that time.  Trying to remember how important a lot of dumb teenage shit can be to you when you’re that age — that feeling of being in love and obsessed, like, "I’m going to die if I don’t get with that person!” without even knowing what that means. The drama of everything, how everybody knows everybody’s business.  We also tried to keep the adults out of it.

MovieMaker: This reminded me of Savage Steve Holland crossed with Whit Stillman - I love them both but couldn’t imagine much overlap until this. And of course John Hughes is the king of '80s movies. What were your reference points, besides memory?

Michael Walker: Obviously we grew up on those movies. The biggest influence of the John Hughes movies was that he took his characters and their problems seriously.  Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a huge movie for us — it has a real female perspective and emotion and is funny as shit.  

We watched and rewatched a lot of '80s movies while writing and preparing for this, especially all the teen ones.  A lot of them are better than you think they’re going to be, like actually well-made movies.  And a lot are really bad. And then, just '80s movies in general, because our generation grew up seeing movies and we all had the same cultural references.  

MovieMaker: I don’t know if this is intentional, but you kind of flip an amusing subplot from Better Off Dead - a smart, cool, attractive French girl named Monique is trapped as an exchange student with the awful host Ricky. In your film, the exchange student is the very charismatic Juan, and host Julie feels unwanted. Were you thinking about Better Off Dead? Were there other movies you wanted to play with or subvert?

Michael Walker: We watched Better Off Dead after we wrote it but before we shot it.  I had forgotten what it was about, but it was still really funny. I didn’t want to make a broad comedy like that. I thought our plot was maybe closer to 16 Candles.  I just wanted to make it real. I just thought about a lot of '80s movies - I thought about An Officer and a Gentleman a lot.  Go figure.

MovieMaker: How did you recreate 1984 so accurately at what I assume was a tight budget? (It looks great, but most indies have tight budgets.) I was especially impressed with your version of 1984 Manhattan. 

Michael Walker: I think what makes it seem more accurate is that we tried to put a lot what it was like to live in the '80s into the script. Waiting for pictures at the Fotomat, letter writing, pay phones, phone cords. One of our pet peeves about other period movies (and TV) is that they spend all this money on these elaborate sets and create these incredible productions, and then everyone talks like they were born yesterday.  

We talked different back then. We used words we don’t use anymore. We didn’t swear as much. We weren’t snarky and ironic.  We spent a lot of time trying to get the dialogue to sound like it did then.

Kristy Tully, our DP,  tried to shoot it like an '80s film. She lit the film with lights from the '80s — and blew a few fuses in the process. We threw in '80s-style shots when we could — wetting down streets at night, or throwing some color in smoke. Our production designer, Annie Simeone, recreated porn theater Times Square 1984 outside a beautiful theater in Downtown Syracuse.  

Our movie takes place in the early '80’s, which is before the '80s really became what the '80s were remembered for, so we were careful not to just step into the cliches of “The '80s.” 

MovieMaker: One thing I loved is that the film doesn’t tone anything down — teen drinking, teens having sex lives, people saying very uncool things. It isn’t egregious or played for shock value, it’s just accurate. Were you ever tempted to sugarcoat things?

Michael Walker: We were trying to stay as accurate as we could. I don’t think you can make a movie about the '80s without some of those things, and I didn’t want to make a big deal about them either.  But we definitely thought a lot about whether or not to have the characters say and do certain things. Both Susan and I have Gen Z daughters and know that for this generation, anti-gay slurs/language is not tolerated, but in the '80s, those words were used constantly in polite conversation.  

Girls today have a different view of relationships than girls did then. We decided to keep it all in because it was real.  Nobody seems to be offended because they get it was a different time. 

MovieMaker: How hard was it to finance this? The soundtrack alone seems quite costly.

Michael Walker: It took a lot of time to find songs that we could afford that we wanted. These are pretty mainstream kids and they listened to mainstream music, which is expensive! Then again, I was surprised by some of the amazing music we did get: Rockit! Adam Ant! ABC! I had to write a few personal letters basically begging, “Dear Howard Jones…”  Our music supervisor, Peter Davis, was very patient with us and found us some great stuff.

MovieMaker: What are your distribution hopes/plans? This is such a cool and unusual film in that it’s extremely well-made but also tells a very small story - it’s not trying to save the world. It’s more like a very poignant and honest time capsule.

Michael Walker: I think you’re exactly right!  I wanted this to be a jewel box of a movie.  Distribution has always been the toughest part of making movies, and it’s never been tougher, especially for a film like this.  I know people connect with this film when they see it, but getting their attention to see it is hard.  Even in the festival world things are celebrity-driven, or issue-driven, so to be appreciated by a festival like DWF means a lot.  

MovieMaker: How did you find your awesome cast?

Michael Walker: We had the amazing Barden/Schnee casting our film.  Paul Schnee really loved the script.  We wanted to find new actors.  Our cast will be stars in the future, but they won’t get there without films like this.  We were lucky in that our finance wasn’t attached to us finding stars. Everything is so celebrity-driven, it’s really another thing that makes this film special.  

Anna Mirodin, who plays Julie, is in an amazing play, The Disappear,  in New York right now. Alexandro Byrd is a lead in the new Disney Descendants movie coming out in July.  So they are already on their way.

Also, we were really lucky shooting in Syracuse and having access to some of the theater students at Syracuse University. They really came through.  

The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo plays Friday night at 7 p.m. at Dances With Films New York.

Main image: Anna Mirodin and Alexandro Byrd in The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo. Pango Films.

Bah's escape from Gambia — and what happened next — is the subject of the new documentary Unbowed, by Mae Gammino and David Helfer Wells. It recounts how Bah started a new life in Rhode Island, and founded the Refugee Dream Center, a nonprofit dedicated to helping refugees find jobs, education, employment and housing — as well as a sense of community.

The film, which recently aired on Rhode Island's Ocean State Media/RI PBS and is also available on the station's site, follows Bah through a crucial year, and arrives at a perilous time for refugees and all immigrants to the United States.

Gammino, who previously produced the documentary Being Thunder, came to filmmaking after owning a manufacturing business and then becoming a photographer — skills that proved essential to making Unbowed. She realized Bah's story should be a film, and enlisted Wells, a photojournalist and filmmaker who had helped her when she was starting out in photography.

One of the biggest challenges they faced was just getting time with the very busy Bah — who in addition to his careers as an activist and journalist, earned a doctoral degree in neuropsychology in 2020, and ran for Congress in 2022.

We asked Bah, Gammino and Wells about authoritarianism, parallels between Gambia and the United States, and how sharing Google calendar access made Unbowed possible.

MovieMaker: Omar Bah became a journalist by walking into the office of a small newspaper in his native Gambia and offering to work there. Contrary to popular belief, high-stakes journalism is a skill with rules and best practices that most people can't just do, just walking in off the street. What are the remarkable qualities that enabled Omar to have an impact despite having no experience?

Omar Bah: At the time of walking into the offices of The Independent Newspaper, my only qualification was passion and vision for a free Gambia devoid of corruption, repression, and human rights abuses; a Gambia where everyone had a voice. I grew up in a small rural village. At the time, there was no running water, electricity, or school. I was one of the very few children who had access to education and had to walk long distances to get to the nearest school.

I am from a collectivist, extended family system where my father had three wives and about 20 children. My mother alone had eight children. Because my mother is the first wife, I am the second child for both my mother and father. This position in terms of child seniority comes with a huge responsibility. My older brother was battling with an epilepsy condition. By default, as a child, I had to step in to act as the first child.

As a result, I helped my mother with babysitting, pounding grains and wheat, running errands, fetching water, and almost every hard labor I could do. My mother was being subjected to domestic violence. I deeply sympathized with her and would cry along with her, and support her at every moment of distress. As a woman who was married as a young teenager, my mother went through untold suffering.

This experience imbued in me a strong sense of advocacy, a sense of justice. I did not want to see other young women like my mother marry in their teens rather than be in school. I did not want to see young women like my mother experience domestic violence and extreme levels of hard labor.

This orientation took me to an undergraduate pre-law program because I wanted to be a lawyer to advocate for those who were experiencing struggles similar to those of my mother. Once I started these studies, and realized that the maximum I could study was two years for lack of a complete law program in the country, I devised a means to continue my advocacy and promotion voices of the people, and justice. This led me to walk into that newspaper office in the year 2000. 

Mae Gammino: I believe it was the conditions of Omar’s upbringing that shaped his need to help others have meaningful lives. Omar is highly perceptive, especially with understanding how systems work, any system. This, coupled with his superior intelligence, boundless energy, curiosity, empathy and equanimity, helps him devise strategies to achieve goals successfully.

And — two traits that don’t receive enough credit as important to success — Omar is sincere and earnest. So it’s no surprise to me that he had the self-confidence to walk into an editor’s office, as an inexperienced young person, and pitch himself for a reporting job, and then harness grit to learn how to do it to excel. He recounts this story in the film, and it’s one of my favorite scenes.

David Helfer Wells: I can’t speak for Omar, but I will point out that I did a somewhat similar thing to what he did when I started as a photo journalist four decades ago. I had the technical skills as a photographer, but I certainly needed to learn the basics of journalism, because I didn’t actually study those in college. I learned those things on the job at a small newspaper in Southern California, where I got my start.

I quickly realized that my primary strengths, which I think Omar also had, were curiosity, empathy, lots of energy, a willingness to listen to people, and a desire to share what I learned in that process. As I got to know Omar, I saw all of those things in him, so it wasn’t a surprise that he had succeeded as a journalist.

MovieMaker: Do you see parallels between what Omar dealt with in Gambia and what's happening in the United States now?

Mae Gammino: Omar can speak to this in a more informed way because he lived under a brutal and repressive dictatorship for about 22 years, and now has lived in the U.S. for 18 years, which included Trump’s first presidency. That said, I see a parallel in that we have a president, administration, and congressional majority that support the Unitary Executive Theory, which is being used with countervailing measures minimally present. Unless one feels protests and lawsuits have been effective, they’re pretty much continuing unimpeded. It’s mind-boggling. 

Omar Bah: I see parallels between what I dealt with in The Gambia and what is happening currently in the United States, although differently. Back home, in The Gambia, I was arrested and tortured by government forces on several occasions. I still have torture marks, and I still peel dead skin from one of the deep wounds I got from such tortures.

Media houses were firebombed, forcibly shut down and several journalists including myself eventually fled the country into exile. It is slightly different in the U.S. as one can argue about a hostile media environment where journalists have been disparaged and disrespected by members of the presidency. However, they still continue to separate freely and the extremes have not been realized yet. However, the signs are all there for a deterioration into a chaotic situation. 

David Helfer Wells: I certainly see parallels between what’s going on in this country and the anti-democratic political culture that Omar came of age in, and then that he eventually reported on the inequities of. 

MovieMaker: How did you all first meet?

Mae Gammino: I met Omar first in 2016 at a Refugee Policy conference in Providence — David was working overseas and could not attend. Trump’s language about immigrants and refugees was gaining significant press coverage. I wanted to learn more about refugee policy and what I could do in Rhode Island to help our local refugee community, though not as a journalist, as a private citizen.

Omar was a panelist, and his words were captivating. I was interested to know more about him, his wife, and the organization they had recently created, the Refugee Dream Center. I pitched David on the idea to do some sort of project about Omar, and then arranged for us to connect with him and his wife at their office. After this meeting, we discussed making a small profile piece that would involve a handful of shoots, but as we spent more time with them we realized a deeper story existed.

We filmed the majority of the footage over one year and then made a small profile piece for Omar to use on his website. We had intended to cut a longer film too, but other projects and work commitments put this plan on hold. However, we kept in touch with Omar and over the years filmed more, including some very recent footage after Trump was elected. Strangely enough, it the downtime of Covid that provided us time to revisit footage and make a plan to finish the film.

David Helfer Wells: I met him early in the development of the organization that he now runs, the Refugee Dream Center.  We initially were thinking of doing a short film/profile on him, but as we got to know him and learned about his life in the Gambia, the new life he was building in the U.S., and then when we met his family, we realized there was a much deeper and richer story there.

Omar Bah, Subject of Unbowed, on the American Dream

MovieMaker: As an immigrant who saw the United States as a place of refuge — and as the founder of the Refugee Dream Center — how does Omar feel about the recent ICE actions and the state of the U.S.?

Omar Bah: It has been 18 years since I arrived in the U.S., and still cannot fully believe that I am actually deserving and/or really that special to be given such a special opportunity. Imagine being a torture survivor, wallowing in distress in the stress of another country, Ghana, and then, out of all the countries of the world, and out of the millions of refugees displaced across the world, I was among few that got the once in a lifetime opportunity to be resettled in the U.S.

I have been particularly grateful for that. I am also particularly grateful for the opportunity for my children to be born in the U.S.A. That is why I started the Refugee Dream Center. To continue my lifelong passion and vision of advocacy and social justice, but also to imbue the sense of the American Dream of hard work and success on fellow refugees, hence the name of the center.

I believe this is my special way of expressing gratitude to the country, but also ensuring I contribute to the continued economic and social growth of our society. Thus, it pains me to see how ICE and our government has been scapegoating immigrants and treating them in a very dehumanizing way. 

Mae Gammino: Personally, I find their actions appalling and inhuman. I believe this administration’s objective is to control by promulgating fear and intimidation. 

David Helfer Wells: As someone who is now married to an immigrant, I find the entire anti-immigrant/anti-refugee political posture of the Trump administration to be appalling.

MovieMaker: What was your biggest challenge in making Unbowed? How did you overcome it?

Mae Gammino: This was my first go at making a documentary — David had made a few shorts before this experience. Personally, I was figuring it out as we went along. It was later in the editing process that I really understood and appreciated which of my inclinations, during production, had been correct and those which had not.

That said, the biggest challenge was getting time with Omar (I say this with true affection). He’s always in motion and does more in one day than most folks accomplish in a week. After becoming frustrated with trying to figure out how to get Omar to commit to filming, not because he was reluctant, he was just too busy to help us organize things, I realized that other than the product I was making — a film — my prior business experience had given me transferable skills to handle situations like this. Before becoming a photojournalist and filmmaker I owned a manufacturing company for  20 years.

I adjusted my thinking and reached out to his assistant to suggest I be added to his Google calendar, and presto — I was able to see his entire schedule months in advance. This allowed me to target specific events, and helped us have a complete picture of his activity, personal and business. Once the burden of having him help us schedule things was removed, it was easy to arrange what we wanted to film.

It was also the game-changer for us and Omar, especially because the more time we spent together he was increasingly less formal and began to notify us of things we might want to film.

The other impediment, which we could not completely overcome, was that David and I we making this film in our spare time, which meant we could not film as often as we needed and wanted. However, with these challenges met, the wonderful result for us and Omar was the warmly received international premiere in Nigeria last month. Their media celebrated it as story of triumph over repression and violence through an African’s magnanimity towards his fellow refugees prominently featured in an uplifting documentary. 

David Helfer Wells: We were able to film the situations we needed. In hindsight, we should've filmed even more of his life, because when it came to editing, we still came up short on B-Roll and on showing all the interesting aspects of his life.

MovieMaker: During Omar's 2022 run for Congress, he pledged not to attack or disparage any other candidates. How is that approach working for him? Does he remain committed to it? 

Omar Bah: I stayed through to my pledge, as I saw politics differently. Actually, my campaign slogan was to "Defend The Dream," and thus, my only objective was to contribute civically and socially to the augmentation of the lives of the people in my district and the country at large.

Thus, I was not interested in the disparaging tactics of the many political actors. I remained positive in my campaign. Despite not winning, I felt like participating in such a large political platform was a way of further expressing gratitude to the country, but also promoting equal opportunities for everyone who sees this country as a beacon of hope for all.

I do not see politics as a career, and thus, such a run was not meant to be a lifetime of candidacy. I am, however, glad I did pave the way for others and proved that anyone can be anything in this country. 

MovieMaker: Finally, Mae and David, can you detail how you became filmmakers?

Mae Gammino: I made a career change a little over a decade ago, from manufacturing business-owner to photojournalist, and film producer/director more recently. I’ve shot assignments as varied as a U.S. Joint Military Humanitarian Aid Mission in Indonesia to stills photography for a film in Utah, as well as assignments for local and national newspapers and magazines. My training involved some adult ed evening photography courses at RISD — I have no formal training in film and producing.

Over the years I gained exposure to the film industry as the staff festival photographer for the Provincetown International Film Festival and attending Sundance. I’d always had a desire to make documentaries but did not believe I could without attending film school. However, being around filmmakers at these festivals was the needed catalyst, and they became my film school though meeting filmmakers, attending panel talks, and simply being inspired and motivated by what I’d been exposed to. I even met the director of my first documentary, Being Thunder, on a shuttle at Sundance. 

I also can’t dismiss the importance of having had a full career before this as a manufacturing business-owner. It provided a perspective about business and practical skills one needs in any industry. 

I also was fortunate to find David. He was my mentor when I first started as a stills photographer, and through the years we’ve collaborated on commercial jobs and helped each other on some of our respective projects.

Even though I came into this business late in life, it’s not been an impediment, many of my initial film opportunities came from Get X and Millennial filmmakers. And, to date, I’ve been able to complete two films of my own, both of which I am very proud because they’ve introduced two remarkable Rhode Islanders to many people across the country and world. 

David Helfer Wells: I’m an award-winning visual storyteller based in Providence, Rhode Island, and my path to filmmaking grew naturally out of a lifelong commitment to visual journalism and human-centered storytelling. I began my career as a photojournalist, spending decades reporting deeply researched photo essays for publications such as National Geographic, Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

One of the most formative moments of my career was a Pulitzer Prize–nominated photo-essay on the pesticide poisoning of California farm workers for The Philadelphia Inquirer. That work, and many projects like it, shaped my belief that images can bear witness, demand accountability, and illuminate lives too often pushed into the margins.

Over time, still photography no longer felt sufficient to capture the complexity, silence, motion, and emotional rhythms of the stories I was encountering. I turned to documentary filmmaking as an extension of my visual practice, drawn to the way light, shadow, stillness, and movement could deepen narratives. My films champion intercultural storytelling and explore urgent social issues through an immersive cinematic language.

Unbowed airs Friday on Ocean State Media/RI PBS and will also be available on the station's site.

Main image: Omar Bah in a scene from Unbowed.

Editor Evan Schiff got hired on Frankenstein by putting himself out there: Though he hoped his representatives and his resume would be enough to capture the attention of writer-director Guillermo del Toro, Schiff also DM'd the director directly to tell him how much it would mean to him to edit his monster epic.

Del Toro remembered Schiff from his work as an assistant editor on the director's 2006 film Pan's Labyrinth and his 2008 Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Since working on those hits, Schiff had also become a high-profile editor of films including Nobody, Birds of Prey, The Marvels, John Wick: Chapter 2, and John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum.

"I think everybody is looking to help everybody else rise up the ladder, but if they don't know what you want, they can't help you do that," he says in our interview about hand-crafting the Oscar contender, which you can watch here or above.

After his extensive experience with action movies, Schiff was eager to work on an "epic drama — and a Guillermo del Toro movie on top of it."

While many editors shape a film after shooting, Schiff had a significant hand in Frankenstein even on the set. Del Toro likes to show his cast and crew scenes from the film very soon after he shoots them, which meant Schiff would routinely start editing the past days' footage four hours before the crew call, and del Toro would arrive after two hours to look over his edits.

"And we would spend those two hours, usually from like six to 8 a.m., refining the cut and getting into the state where it's actually pretty solid," Schiff recalls.

About three months into shooting, del Toro invited the entire cast and crew to start looking at edited footage each morning.

"The next day, there were like six people outside my office door at 6 a.m., and it was great," Schiff recalls. "And that lasted for like the whole next month."

Because Schiff edited so much on the Toronto and Scotland sets of the film, the film was fairly far along in the editing by the time it finished shooting. He edited on Avid Media Composer software, and praised his first assistant editor, Brit DeLillo, as "a genius."

Evan Schiff on Understanding Every Department on a Film

As the Syracuse native recounts on his website, EvanSchiff.com, he started interning at Stan Winston Studio (now Legacy EFX) at the age of 16. He later attended USC's film production program, where he developed his love for editing. Then he worked in VFX and became an assistant editor, which led to his work as an editor.

Understanding other departments helps him be a better team player.

"Working with sound crews and script supervisors and talking with DPs and things like that is all very informative to me as I start editing, because it allows me to not only have knowledgeable conversations with those department heads when I need something from them, but also to keep an eye out for things that they're sending my way that may need a little bit of love from me, in order to make them the best that they can possibly be," he says.

Early in his career, he learned a lesson from reading interviews with another of Syracuse's favorite sons, Tom Cruise. The actor talked about how when he first started working on film sets, he would talk to everyone about what they did, in order to better understand the entirety of filmmaking.

In 2011, Schiff worked on Cruise's film Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, and was dispatched on a secret late-night mission to Pittsburgh, as part of a team showing Cruise edits from the film.

"So that was pretty fun," Schiff laughs.

Frankenstein Editor Evan Schiff on the Limits of AI

Last year, as del Toro accepted the Vanguard Tribute for Frankenstein at the Gotham Awards, the director famously quipped, “F--- AI.” He noted: “I’d like to tell the rest of our extraordinary cast and our crew that the artistry of all of them shines on every single frame of this film that was willfully made by humans, for humans."

That's certainly true of Schiff's work. While he says AI might be capable to some elements of editing, it isn't capable of heart or the complexities of understanding what a filmmaker — or an audience — wants and needs.

"So much of my job is managing the politics of what goes on in my room, managing multiple interested parties, people who have conflicting notes," he says. "This is not Guillermo, but sometimes you get a director that doesn't know what they want, and you've got to kind of interpret the note behind the note. Or they just come in like, 'Something feels wrong here, but I don't know what it is.' And I don't think that artificial intelligence is that intuitive. It's also trained on past problems and past scenarios, and that, by definition, prevents it from coming up with something new."

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix.

Main image: Evan Schiff while editing Frankenstein. Courtesy of Evan Schiff and Netflix.

“In my twenties I didn’t understand the concept of gut and instinct because I hadn’t had enough life experience yet,” says the star of Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, The Chronology of Water.

Poots also believes actors face a false pressure to take jobs they think will lead to bigger and better roles in the future. But she says one thing she’s learned as an actor is that the only thing you really control is what projects you agree to do. 

“I work predominantly in independent film and that was always my dream,” she explains. 

One of her favorite parts of indie filmmaking is the element of risk.

“The cool thing about independent cinema is when you’re working with someone like Kristen and these other wonderful directors, you don’t know if it’s going to work or not but we all feel the same bone and dust. Our intentions are the same,” she continues. “You hope this is a long road and there are all of these pressures to ejaculate yourself, for lack of a better term, around the world and it’s very easy to let that happen when you’re younger, even if you feel something is not for you.”

If other actors have another approach, that’s fine with her. 

“You should go out and have fun and earn money, and take care of yourself and the people you love,” she says. “I just can’t do shit. I’d rather find another way to make money than do that.”

Imogen Poots on Her Emotional Investment in The Chronology of Water

Poots has played plenty of great roles — one of her most acclaimed films was for Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 horror film Green Room — but is on a career high thanks to roles in Nia DaCosta’s new Hedda and The Chronology of Water.

Based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir of the same name, The Chronology of Water is a story of trauma, healing, survival, pain, sexuality, queerness and art. Anything but chronological, the film is a scrapbook of raw emotions, and a story Poots has long wanted to tell.

She was attached to the film for roughly two-and-a-half years before Stewart was able to bring all of the pieces together to create the project she wanted to make, without concessions. 

Poots said she appreciated her director’s journey from acting in a massive franchise like the Twilight saga to making a very personal film, largely about interior emotions.

“To be seen by someone in this way and be given the chance means so much that I get emotional and it’s ineffable to talk about,” Poots says. “I’m very proud of this movie, and I’m very proud of Kristen, and it feels separate from other things I’ve done because of that emotional investment and love for the person I made it with.”

One of the greatest acting challenges is that she delivers most of her performance in silence. 

“You shouldn’t ever really play tone or images. It’s more like capturing the life of a person. I wasn’t thinking about fragments other than maybe abstract shots,” Poots says. “One of my favorite things about Lydia is that she can write and she’s thinking all the time. There is this idea that an introvert is not thinking at all, but of course an introvert is often thinking the whole time. You can mistake silence for not thinking, which in this day and age is a real problem.”

Audience members have been approaching her after screenings to share their own stories. Poots says Stewart was adamant that the character in the film isn’t Lidia the real person, but a fusion of that person, Stewart and Poots who is meant to reflect every woman. 

“It’s incredible to see those reactions happen but it’s also nice because there is nothing about this movie that feels indulgent,” Poots says. “We made this and people are having reactions to it in their bodies and finding release from it. When you go to the movies and spend your money, you want to see something that does something and matters to you. That this does that meant a lot. That’s cinema.”

Imogen Poots on Her Training to Play Lidia Yuknavitch

Shot on film by cinematographer Corey Waters, The Chronology of Water presents fragmented images and sounds, juxtaposed with memories and present-day reality. Poots’ character, Lidia, emerges in bits and pieces.

“One of the things that makes Kristen such a great filmmaker is she’s thinking about the edit,” says Poots. “It’s quite old-school; a lot of ‘70s directors were like that.”

To embody Lidia for the intense six-week shoot, Poots carved out a swimmer’s back through extensive training in New York City pools. She got a hernia, but feels grateful for the opportunity. 

She also read everything she could by Yuknavitch, and by the authors who influenced her. And she corresponded with the writer, though they didn’t meet before filming. 

“Her writing reads in quite a beatnik fashion, with a lack of punctuation,” Poots explains. “It was amazing to see she was telling the same story again and again. Like most writers are, she’s sort of orbiting the same themes, and she’s on a quest.”

Poots appreciates that the film puts audiences in sometimes uncomfortable positions, and asks questions, rather than recreating Lidia’s journey in a “tame and clinical” fashion. 

“It’s important these indie, independent films get made,” she adds. “It’s cool to give people a chance to be excited again and have the kinds of films we had growing up. Audiences are far more intelligent and imaginative than the current industry believes them to be.”

The Chronology of Water is now in theaters, from The Forge.

Main image: Imogen Poots trained to develop a swimmer’s back for The Chronology of Water. The Forge.

Blake Slatkin started performing Ed Sheeran and John Mayer songs on his guitar as a 10-year-old. Now he's in the Oscar conversation for "Drive," a song he recorded with Sheeran and Mayer for the soundtrack of Apple's Brad Pitt racing drama F1.

His advice for people who want to be musicians for a living?

"Just be a fan. Be the biggest fan of music, be a lover of music, and work harder than anyone," he says in an interview you can see above or watch here.

"The best advice I was ever given was by my mentor, and he said, 'You have to think of your career like a snowball, and you just keep packing on and packing on and packing on. And eventually it's big enough that it just has to roll down the hill.'"

That mentor was record producer Benny Blanco, for whom Slatkin worked as an intern before becoming one of music's most successful producers himself. He didn't play Blanco his music for four years, because he wanted to make sure it was good enough.

'Drive' Producer Blake Slatkin on What a Record Producer Does

Slatkin, who grew up in Los Angeles, started out as a fan himself — with aspirations to be more.

"I just wanted to be a rock star. And honestly, it was Ed and John and their music, who made me pick up a guitar in the first place. They both inspired me, and I used to cover their songs, and I learned guitar by copying them. ... I used to play on stage and sell tickets to my friends, my teachers and stuff, and do little gigs around town.

"And then when I found out what a producer was, and I found out that there are people making all of my favorite music that I didn't even know about, and they were behind the scenes, and they could, like, switch genres and do this for years and years — the second I even found out what that was, it was like, 'That's what I'm gonna do.' There's never anything else I wanted to do."

Being a producer has worked out very well for him.

Slatkin's collaborators have included Justin Bieber, Lizzo, Lil NAS X, Gracie Abrams, Omer Fedi, 24kGldn, The Kid Laroi and many more. He won a Record of the Year Grammy for Lizzo’s About Damn Time.

For "Drive," Slatkin assembled and played in a supergroup for the song that also included Dave Grohl on drums, Pino Palladino on bass and Rami Jaffee on keys.

Slatkin says the role of a record producer is simply "to make sure that the best song possible happens, by any means necessary to get there — whether that's by assembling the right group of people, whether that's doing it yourself, whether that's being a therapist to an artist and having a conversation so meaningful that they end up writing a perfect song all themselves."

He adds: "It's completely different with every artist I work with. And that's why I love my job, is because no day is the same," he adds.

Blake Slatkin on Making 'Drive' for F1

Making Drive started with just getting Sheeran and Mayer, longtime friends, into a room together. Their first efforts were pretty similar to what ended up on the record.

"Ed said, 'John, give me a rock riff.' The first thing John played on guitar was that riff," says Slatkin. "Then the first thing Ed sang into the little scratch microphone was the verse, and then he went into the hook, and and that's the demo that we came away with, with just the melodies and some scratch lyrics. Later, Ed and I finished the lyrics. John and I worked on the production."

The song closes out F1, and it's a clean, exhilarating anthem that feels like a wave of release and a fresh start, packed with promise and adrenaline. You can listen to it here.

"I try the hardest to make it sound like we don't try hard," Slatkin says. "That's the biggest thing — making it seem like it's like a magic trick.... making it seem so effortless and like everything just happens when you want it to. But getting to that point is hard. It's work."

Main image: Blake Slatkin. MovieMaker.

“It’s just one of those raw performance pieces I was craving at the time,” he says. “So I really jumped on it, terrified.”

The idea of working with director Gus Van Sant was serendipitous and a “no-brainer,” as Skarsgård had been a fan for years. Tackling the true story of Tony Kiritsis was something else though — the actor wasn’t sure he had it in him. 

In 1977, Kiritsis entered the offices of Meridian Mortgage Company in Indianapolis and took president Richard Hall hostage for 63 hours. He used a sawed-off shotgun that was wired to Hall’s neck, a device dubbed a dead man’s wire. 

Skarsgård was concerned he couldn’t play Kiritsis honestly because he physically looks nothing like him.

“The real guy was in his mid-40s and a foot shorter than me, but Gus wanted me and when I spoke with him about it, the script was great and the story was insane,” says Skarsgård, 35. “I used the real Tony as a spirit guide for the performance and I had so much fun on it.”

For the physical transformation, a wig and moustache helped. Skarsgård felt like Kiritsis was a guy who carried a lot on his shoulders, so he also played him as tense and rigid, and a little hunched over — “from carrying all of that weight.”

The actor also dug into the footage and recordings of Kiritsis available at the time for inspiration, noting that Austin Kolodney’s script included links to the situations he was recreating. Skarsgård also read Richard Hall’s memoir about the kidnapping and watched a documentary on the subject.

Skarsgård initially got so into the role that his performance felt too close to reality. Eventually, Van Sant convinced him to take a more character-driven approach.

“He told me to stop trying to do an impersonation of the real guy,” Skarsgård says. “So I let go and drew on his speech patterns and rage. The real guy had a tendency to get so angry, and then apologize right afterwards. He was so angry, but also kind of funny. There was something endearing about it. At one point I had 17 pages of dialogue, of ranting, in one day.”

In real life, Kiritsis was upset over a $130,000 mortgage he took out with Meridian. He accused the company of sabotaging him once it realized the property was worth more. So he took Hall, played in the film by Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things), hostage and forced him to walk through the streets until he commandeered a police car and forced Hall to drive to his apartment. He then demanded an apology, $5 million and a promise of no prosecution in exchange for Hall’s safe release.

The film follows those tense events, which means Skarsgård and Montgomery spent a lot of time together on set in Louisville, Kentucky, which stands in for Indianapolis.

Skarsgård says it was his co-star’s idea to lay out blueprints for the dead man’s wire in a pivotal opening scene, which set the tone for the film. They shot it on one of the first days of the 19-day shoot, with two handheld cameras. Van Sant gave them the freedom to improvise and allow moments to happen.

“Dacre and I are both high-energy, opinionated actors and we come with a lot of ideas,” Skarsgård says. “I sometimes describe Gus as this Buddhist, Zen-like energy in general, but also with his approach to filmmaking. He kind of watches and observes, and let me and Dacre yell out ideas until we ran out of steam. Then he gently shaped it in a way, while also letting the film shape itself.”

Skarsgård says there were plenty of spontaneous moments, including in a telephone call scene between him, Montgomery and Al Pacino, who plays Richard Hall’s father, M.L. Hall. The scene wasn’t in the original script, and came at Pacino’s suggestion. 

Skarsgård applauds Van Sant for allowing Dead Man’s Wire to become what it is, rather than forcing a vision on it. 

“Whenever moments like that happened we just worked off them, and a lot of the funny lines or off-beat moments are improv,” he adds. “They just happened when we were shooting in character and came up spontaneously. It’s lovely when that happens and when you can access it, because you can surprise yourself and find these little gems that you could never really plan for.”

He likens the concept of Dead Man’s Wire to one of his favorite ‘70s films, Mikey and Nicky, in which two long-time friends spend the night running from a mob boss.  

“The whole movie is improv between Peter Falk and John Cassavetes,” he says.

Bill Skarsgård on the Challenges of Dead Man's Wire

One of the challenges the Dead Man’s Wire team faced early on was the design of the titular contraption. Initially the wire was softer, so that it would be more comfortable around Montgomery’s neck. But the device kept falling off in the middle of scenes, so the film had to switch to something stiffer.

“A lot of the scenes are so long that you just don’t ever want to interrupt them,” Skarsgård explains. “And when you do interrupt them, you want to reset and do the whole thing again.”

The film is a tense 105-minute character study of an event that presaged the modern 24-hour news cycle. It takes place during a time of political unrest, economic anxiety and media disillusionment. So there are plenty of current-day parallels. 

“To me it felt very current, more current now than if we made the movie 10 years ago,” Skarsgård says. “There’s also this feeling of the little guy getting oppressed by a system and not having a fighting chance. Today, interest rates and skyrocketing costs of living are out of control when we have more billionaires than ever. There’s a lot of anger and it can be directed in any way.”

Dead Man’s Wire also touches on the idea of fame and getting your voice heard, particularly in a world that pre-dates social media. To spread his message at the time, Kiritsis made phone calls to Indianapolis radio star Fred Heckman. In the film, he’s been replaced by Fred Temple, who is played by Colman Domingo. Kiritsis’ phone interviews allowed him to tell his side of the story and turned the incident into a national event. At one point, Kiritsis gave a conference in front of live broadcasters that even interrupted an ABC feed of John Wayne presenting an award.

“I’m sure this story had an effect on the media landscape in some regard,” Skarsgård says. “If you look at the real footage of the press conference, you can see how excited Tony is that this show is all about him and for him. Here’s a guy who never had a voice, has had a tough life, has worked hard his entire life and never gotten a break from it. He feels betrayed and chewed up by the system. This is the moment for him to get that break and climb out of his social class.”

Skarsgård by no means endorses the actions Kiritsis took, but he certainly understands the rage the man must have felt. 

He believes audiences will also connect with it — which differentiates the role from some of the monsters he’s played in the past.

“I definitely don’t consider Tony a monster; he’s very human to me,” Skarsgård says. “I tend to try and make the monsters I play a bit human as well, or find something I can anchor them in so they’re not a one-dimensional villain. But when you’re playing someone like Tony, you feel some sort of affection for them.”

He adds that Kiritsis is a sad character who was a victim of his own circumstances, and who on top of that probably had mental health issues. 

“I spoke with Gus a lot about it, and Tony was absolutely no monster. And I hope when people see this movie, they don’t consider him that.”

Dead Man’s Wire launches a busy year for Skarsgård. Aside from just returning as Pennywise for HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, he stars in 2026’s The Death of Robin Hood alongside Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer, Emperor with Sophie Cookson and Adrien Brody, and Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl, based on the Buzz Bissinger book about a historic football game.   

Luckily, Skarsgård is feeling energized. 

“I came out of this film with more energy than I had going into it,” Skarsgård says. “Having to stay sharp and learn those lines and having fun on a difficult shoot feeds my energy. I wrapped Dead Man’s Wire excited and inspired and creatively fulfilled.”

Dead Man’s Wire arrives in theaters Friday from Row K Entertainment.

Main image: Bill Skarsgård as Tony Kiritsis and Dacre Montgomery as Richard Hall in Dead Man’s Wire. Row K Entertainment.

The Age of Disclosure director Dan Farah doesn't just contend that aliens are real. His film makes a fascinating case that the U.S. government has been covering them up for eight decades, in hopes of reverse-engineering their technology for the betterment of humanity — or at least the U.S. government.

Raise a theory about what might have really happened outside Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and Farah is happy to tell you.

"A couple of the intelligence officials I interviewed went on the record talking about the details of the crash that happened at Roswell, and how the technology — the recovered elements of the craft and the non-human bodies that were found at the crash site — were brought to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where at the time, the Army Air Corps had their their best reverse engineers," says Farah, whose film has broken Prime Video records and is taken seriously enough in political circles to have screened last month for members of Congress.

Dan Farah has a calm, unflappable affect, perhaps because he is well aware of the skepticism that comes with any serious investigation of UAPs — aka Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, and previously best known as UFOs.

He says he approached The Age of Disclosure as cautiously as possible, and makes a point, in interviews, of relying on what his interview subjects have told him, rather than sharing his own theories. You can watch our full interview with him here or above.

"I set off to make a serious, sober, credible documentary and stay away from sensationalism. I didn't want to do anything that was sensational," he says. "I've consumed every documentary, I've read every book on this topic. But I always wished that someone would make a very serious, credible documentary about this that only interviewed people who have direct knowledge of it, as a result of working for the US government."

Farah became interested in the idea of non-intelligent extraterrestrial life when he was growing up on Steven Spielberg films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. and watching TV shows like The X Files. He eventually became a film producer, and got to work with Spielberg on 2018's Ready Player One. While watching the master work, he began to think about someday directing his own film. And he remembered his idea about making a serious UAP documentary.

"I came to conclusion that if I was ever going to direct something like this, it should be this documentary that I wish existed, and I would go try to create the documentary that I personally wanted to watch," he says. The mission for me was to bring about the most credible, serious, non-sensational doc, that that only interviewed very credible people who have knowledge as a result of working for the U.S. government."

The Age of Disclosure isn't your typical basic-cable UFO doc with cheesy re-enactments and silhouetted talking heads speaking in scrambled voices. It includes 34 on-the-record interview with clearly identifiable current and former government officials including high-ranking members of the military and intelligence communities, and several elected officials.

The most recognizable is arguably Marco Rubio, the Republican Florida senator who was the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when Farah interviewed him. He was subsequently chosen as Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor for the second Trump Administration.

In the doc, he speaks bluntly about the need to understand UAP technology before the U.S.'s rivals do, as a matter of national security: "If their approach to it is driven by science and a desire to match what they think is ours, we'll wake up one day and realize, 'I don't know how they got there, but they got there ahead of us, and now we're screwed,'" Rubio says in the film.

The Age of Disclosure also includes interviews with a bipartisan list of lawmakers, among them Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Democratic Rep. André Carson of Indiana, and Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, all of whom call for greater transparency around UAPs. 

The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on The Age of Disclosure.

The Age of Disclosure and the 'Tic Tac' UAP

Among the mysteries the U.S. needs to understand, Farah contends, is the one surrounding the so-called "Tic Tac" UFO seen from the U.S.S. Nimitz off the coast of San Diego on November 14, 2004.

The film features a retired U.S. Navy fighter pilot, Cmdr. David Fravor, who says he was among those on board the Nimitz, a nuclear aircraft carrier, on strange day.

"I was the most senior person in the squadron flying. I had launched off Nimitz to do an air defense exercise off the coast of San Diego, California, and I ended up chasing a UAP known as the Tic Tac UAP. It was about 40 feet long, and just sitting there in space. You could kind of see it start to accelerate, and as it gets in front of us, it's gone. This thing was doing 32,000 miles an hour. So obviously that technology is not [from] the United States."

Similar accounts have come out before, including a 2017 New York Times report that quoted Fravor, and this PBS NewsHour interview with Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, who is also featured in The Age of Disclosure.

"We describe it as looking like a Tic Tac," Dietrich told PBS. "It looks like the little breath mint in larger scale, but white, oblong, no apparent flight control surfaces, no apparent visible means of propulsion. And it was maneuvering in a way that we didn't recognize, that we couldn't classify, we couldn't identify."

A 2021 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailed 18 incidents in which "observers reported unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics."

"Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion," the report says.

It concluded that "UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security."

The Age of Disclosure also features an interview with retired Air Force Col. James Cobb, a former vice director of operations for NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, who recounts an incident in which multiple pilots tried unsuccessfully to intercept a mysterious craft: "We were unable to maintain air sovereignty over North America," he says.

The film suggests that UAPs are monitoring our nuclear capabilities. Farah is ambivalent about where their origin may be: His interview subjects examine the possibility that they come from outer space, that they reside deep in the ocean, or that they may be from another dimensional.

"They talk about the possibility of them being extraterrestrial, and they talk about the possibility of being interdimensional. They talk about the possibility of them having been here all along with us, and of them being from here. A number of intelligence officials also make the point of saying it could be all of the above," Farah says.

Why Are There No Clear Photographs of UFOs?

One of the main reasons so many people are so skeptical of UFOs or UAPs is that no one has taken a clear photo of one. At a time when everyone has a phone in their pocket, you would think someone would manage to get a clear shot of an alien spacecraft.

But The Age of Disclosure has an explanation for why that isn't so.

Deep in the film, astrophysicist Eric Davis and electrical engineer and parapsychologist Harold Puthoff lay out the case that UAPs may operate within "warp bubbles," powered by intense amounts of energy." Davis theorizes that there would be "a different property of space time inside the bubble than on the outside of the bubble," which could explain some of the unusual movements of UAPs.

"It'd be like riding space time in the same way that a surfer would ride a wave in the ocean," Puthoff says. "Time is moving differently for people inside the bubble versus people outside the bubble. Whoever's inside the craft would feel like they're just cruising along. They wouldn't be feeling the effects of what looks like speeds and accelerations that would turn a human being into pudding. This one breakthrough can be the key to interstellar travel."

He adds: "We'd also have low observability, because the bubble acts as a barrier between two space time environments. ... This is why radar would have difficulty tracking a craft, because the signal from the radar would be distorted by the energy field."

The Age of Disclosure is now available on Prime Video.

Main image: Video of the 2004 U.S.S. Nimitz "Tic Tac" incident, released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

The Age of Disclosure director Dan Farah says he could feel Marco Rubio 's intensity as the current Secretary of State, who was a senator at the time, told him the dangers posed by UAPs.

Rubio was then the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and was one of many politicians on both sides of the aisle who Farah interviewed about UAPs — Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — which were once better known as UFOs.

"I'm sitting three feet away from him doing the interview, and I felt it — I felt how unbelievably seriously concerned he was," says Farah.

The film contends that the U.S. has had extraterrestrial technology in its possession since at least the 1947 Roswell incident, and that rivals like Russia and China possess such technology as well. Farah interviewed high-ranking officials who contend that the U.S. and its enemies are in a secret race to reverse-engineer the technology, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.

In the film, Rubio discusses, on-camera, the possibility that one of the U.S.'s rivals will crack UAP technology before the United States does.

"If their approach to it is driven by science and a desire to match what they think is ours, we'll wake up one day and realize, 'I don't know how they got there, but they got there ahead of us, and now we're screwed,'" Rubio says.

The film, which has broken Prime Video records, features Farah's interviews with pilots, members of the military and intelligence communities, and prominent lawmakers on both sides of the aisle about the mysteries surrounding UAPs. It has been viewed by members of Congress, and Farah believes President Trump is aware of it, as well.

"I think that the film sets the stage for a sitting president to comfortably step to the microphone and tell the world we're not alone in the universe — which, in my opinion, would be the biggest moment in the history of humanity, and hands down, the biggest moment a leader could ever have," Farah says. (You can watch our full interview here or above.)

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The film has gotten as much attention as it has because of Farah's understated approach — it consists mostly of interviews, eschewing cheesy re-enactments or any of the other tools of basic-cable UFO docs. The film makes the case that the effort to conceal UAPs has historically included attempts to dismiss and discredit anyone who takes UAPs seriously.

"I interviewed 34 very high-level military, government and intelligence officials who collectively break their silence to reveal that there's been an 80-year cover-up of the existence of non-human, intelligent life. And on top of that, they reveal that elements of the U.S. government are deeply involved in a secret, high stakes Cold War race with adversarial nations like China and Russia to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin. And as extraordinary as all that sounds, the people I interviewed are incredibly credible," he tells MovieMaker.

"I set off to make a serious, sober, credible documentary and stay away from sensationalism," he adds.

Democrats and Republicans Agree on UAPs, Says Age of Disclosure Director Dan Farah

Farah notes that Democrats and Republicans don't tend to agree on anything, but that many are united in a belief that we need more transparency about what the government knows about UAPs.

Besides Rubio, the film also features interviews with Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Democratic Rep. André Carson of Indiana, and Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, all of whom call for greater transparency around UAPs. And the film features archival footage of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling for more openness.

At one point in The Age of Disclosure, Rubio compares the possibility of UAP technology being reverse-engineered to the surprises of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks.

"Some of the biggest strategic blunders in human history — the foundation of those blunders were a lack of imagination, the belief that an adversary or whoever could not do something because it had never been done before," Rubio says. "The U.S. thought it was safe for those ships in Pearl Harbor because we didn't think that the Japanese could get there, much less have torpedoes that could... hit these ships, until they did.

"We never thought in our wildest dreams that terrorists would strike us in the homeland by training for a year to become pilots and then hijacking commercial aircraft and crashing them into buildings, and they did. The thing that always keeps me up at night — something in the human psyche that says I don't have time or energy to sort of prepare for the unforeseen or what I've never seen done before — and that leads to strategic surprise, and sometimes strategic surprises that change the course of human history."

Rubio left the Senate to join the second Trump Administration as Secretary of State, and was subsequently named acting National Security Advisor. Farah believes he became "extremely informed" about UAPs while vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"If you're the vice chairman or the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you're essentially aware of every piece of significant classified information," Farah says. "All the intelligence agencies within the intelligence community report to the Senate Intelligence Committee and make them aware of the most important matters at a classified level, right? And there's some stuff that only goes to the vice chairman or the chairman, so Rubio became extremely informed of the reality of this situation, and felt like it was important to make the public aware of the base facts that he was able to lawfully share in the film."

Farah adds: "Now he's in a very different position. Now he's the National Security Advisor, and presumably has been made aware of a lot more information on this, and his words now have a completely different, you know, global impact. And so think it's safe for everyone to assume that he has a different set of circumstances now — he has to be much less open with what he talks about, and and there are bigger repercussions. So we also have to assume that he's much more aware of the current reality of the situation."

The Age of Disclosure is now available on Amazon Prime.

Main image: U.S. Rep André D. Carson, then Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Mike Rounds, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Photo by Photo by Vincent Wrenn / Farah Films.