Sam Feder Takes a Revealing Look at Transgender Depiction in Hollywood in Disclosure

Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen offers an eye-opening look at the history of transgender depiction in two universal media: film and television. The story is told through the perspectives and memories of trans people in the entertainment industry — Laverne Cox (also an executive producer of Disclosure), Lilly Wachowski and Jen Richards among them — and features clips and images that shed light on how American culture has dehumanized and made assumptions about the transgender community.

Writer/Director JD Chua & Producer Juan Foo on Singapore’s First Creature Feature Circle Line

JD Chua had the distinction of being director Michael Mann’s only intern when he was in Hollywood, the man who made, in a seven-year period, three of the best films of the 1990s—The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), and The Insider (1999). As a child, one of Chua’s favorite films was Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. “I remember immersing myself in the laserdisc,”

Think Like a Dog Writer/Director Gil Junger on his Family Friendly Canine Comedy

Think Like a Dog is a warm-hearted fantasy adventure about a boy who invents a contraption that enables him to read his dog’s mind. It is reminiscent of Disney live-action classics like The Absent-Minded Professor and The Shaggy Dog. In an interview, writer/director Gil Junger talked about the pleasures of ignoring the show business adage about never working with children or dogs and how the film is a love letter inspired by his own experience of re-connection to his family.

Director Daniel Karslake on the Shifting Battle for LGBTQ Equality in For They Know Not What They Do

Documenting the contemporary gay and transgender experience of young Americans and their families through the lens of religion isn’t easy. First, there’s the matter of finding interview subjects. For the follow-up to his Oscar-shortlisted documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, which focused on the homophobia of the religious right, filmmaker Daniel Karslake met with about thirty different families before matching with the four subjects and their parents at the center of For They Know Not What They Do,

The Many Lives of Indonesian Director Kamila Andini

Talking with multi-award-winning Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini might lead one to believe that she either possesses the power of time travel or that she’s in some way leading parallel lives, such is her unbelievably heavy workload.

When Indonesia imposed stay at home restrictions, Andini had just arrived back from Melbourne, Australia, where she had staged a theatrical performance, rich in local Indonesian traditional dance, of her 2017 film The Seen and Unseen (Sekala Niskala).

Arielle Kilker On Assembling a Largely Female Crew to Create Her Netflix Series Cheer

Arielle Kilker brings pretty much everything she’s learned in her career to bear in her Netflix‘s Cheer, the series she co-created, co-directed, edited, and produced. That includes the Emmy-nominated work she put in as editor on Chef’s Table and a supervising editor on the Peabody nominated Last Chance U. She’s also edited and written crime docuseries on projects for MSNBC, A&E, and PBS. For Cheer, 

Director Josephine Decker on Capturing American Gothic Writer Shirley Jackson’s Complex World

Layers of creative output communicate the enthrallingly choleric New England household and inner world belonging to mid-century American gothic and horror writer Shirley Jackson in Shirley, which screened at Sundance and the Berlinale prior to its streaming release on June 5. Working with Sarah Gubbins’ script based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel of the same name, the filmmaker Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) catapults her audience into the dark Vermont home shared by Shirley (Elisabeth Moss) and her philandering professor husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and two young lodgers,

Judy & Punch Writer/Director Mirrah Foulkes Turns the Tables on Her Infamous Puppets

Judy & Punch kicks off with a male marionette thrashing a female doll-on-strings as a crowd of 17th-century tavern goers roars with delight. The camera soon shifts to witches, hangings, infanticide, beatings, magic brews, and lies as filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes bloodily re-imagines how the western world’s most famous pair of hand puppets got their start.

Set in and around an English village shortly after the Bubonic Plague, Judy & Punch (June 5,

The High Note Director Nisha Ganatra on the Importance of a Diverse Cast & Crew

As a worthy follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2019 comedy Late Night, director Nisha Ganatra brings us The High Note, which was released this past May 29 for digital download. The film stars Dakota Johnson as aspiring producer Maggie Sherwoode, who works as personal assistant to iconic performer Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross). It’s a dramedy about women supporting each other as they reach for their highest goals and dreams.

Director & Executive Producer Lesli Linka Glatter on Filming Homeland’s Series Finale

Lesli Linka Glatter has spent the last several years being alarmed by what she’s heard in intelligence briefings. This doesn’t just set her apart from many of the current apparatchiks in Washington, but also from many of her fellow directors. Not because her colleagues lack the capacity to be alarmed, but because her work as a director and an executive producer on Showtime’s Homeland would bring her, on an annual basis, to something that series creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa would call “Spy Camp,” in the D.C.

Director Matt Wolf on His Uncannily Timely Documentary Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth tells the fascinating, timely story of eight men and women who, in 1991, stepped into a sealed replica of Earth’s ecosystem to live a fully sustainable life for 24 months. Their world was called Biosphere 2, engineered by inventor/investor John Allen, and the experiment in which they participated, deemed a global media phenomenon. Spaceship Earth is available now on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, FandangoNow, Vudu, DIRECTV, DISH, and longtime NEON partner Hulu.

With Her Amazon Directing Gig on Hold, Indian Filmmaker Tannishtha Chatterjee Embraces Other Creative Pursuits

It’s often two-thirty in the afternoon before actor, writer, and director Tannishtha Chatterjee finds time to turn her attention to creative pursuits. “Till lunchtime…I’m cooking, cutting vegetables, cleaning, dusting and bathing Radhika.”

Radhika is Chatterjee’s four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. For the last six weeks, it’s been just the two of them tucked away in her Mumbai apartment. “She’s actually become quite independent in the last one and a half months. She’s learned many new things.

How Filipino Filmmaker Keith Sicat is Using Quarantine to Help Fellow Filmmakers (And Entertain Himself in the Process)

“The beautiful thing is, you have to keep occupied right?” So says Filipino writer/director Keith Sicat, speaking from the six-week-long lockdown in Manila.

With three projects primed to go into production at the beginning of the year, Sicat now spends in time between project development, teaching filmmaking, and keeping his creative juices flowing on mini-projects with his young sons. “We started animating his toys, doing stop motion stuff around the house. It was something really fun and it was creative.

Black Panther Co-Writer Joe Robert Cole on Writing & Directing His New Netflix Feature All Day and a Night

“Great stories have great characters, and the key to great characters is empathy,” says writer-director Joe Robert Cole, whose latest film, All Day and a Night, is now streaming on Netflix. “Every film, television show, or story that I work on, I approach from character first and let that lead the way.” 

All Day and a Night is a young black man’s coming of age drama,

Director Martha Stephens on Her Timeless Coming-of-Age Drama To the Stars

Yearning, acceptance, identity, and female friendship and empowerment: They are all integral themes of director Martha Stephens’ coming-of-age tale, To the Stars. The film, which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, is available for digital download now.

Set in 1960s rural Oklahoma, To The Stars features Kara Hayward (Moonrise Kingdom) and Liana Liberato (If I Stay) as Iris and Maggie,

Stunt-Coordinator-Turned-Director Sam Hargrave on His Action-Packed Debut Extraction

If you’re searching for an edge-of-your-seat movie experience to escape the current COVID-19 reality for a couple of hours, look no further than Extraction, streaming on Netflix beginning April 24. The film stars Chris Hemsworth as Tyler Rake, a fearless mercenary who is called upon to rescue the kidnapped son of an incarcerated crime lord. The seemingly straightforward mission becomes complicated when Rake develops compassion for the kid and is intent on protecting him at all costs.

Never Have I Ever Director Kabir Akhtar on Filming Mindy Kaling’s New Netflix Series

When director Kabir Akhtar heard the news that producer/writer/star Mindy Kaling was, along with co-creator Lang Fisher, putting together a new series at Netflix that would focus on a first-generation Indian American teenage girl, he thought, I need to be a part of this.

“Just the idea that a show could be made about a first-generation South Asian American,” Akhtar says, a first-generation South Asian American himself, who grew up in suburban Philadelphia,

Writer/Director Eliza Hittman on her Bracing, Brilliant Film Never Rarely Sometimes Always

When Eliza Hittman, writer/director of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, took the stage after the premiere of her film at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24th of this year, she was greeted with rapturous applause. She and the stars of her film have gained critical acclaim for her intimate, powerful portrayal of one teenager’s perilous journey of the soul. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is about the challenges facing 17-year-old Autumn (Sidney Flanigan),

A Most Beautiful Thing Director Mary Mazzio Films a Miracle on the Water

Director Mary Mazzio was set to take her documentary A Most Beautiful Thing to SXSW this year. Then the spread of COVID-19 became such an undeniable reality in the United States that SXSW was canceled. The news of that cancellation came along with the shuttering of film and TV productions all across the globe. Once theaters started closing, world premieres were pushed back months, too.

“It’s a bummer,

Star Trek: Picard Director Hanelle Culpepper Makes History (And a Home in Space)

With news of rising numbers of COVID-19 infections and the economic fallout the disease destined to come with it, everyone is looking for watch lists for some quality home entertainment. Highly recommended by critics and viewers alike is CBS All Access’s Star Trek: Picard, which has been the most-watched original series to date for the streaming service. The first three episodes of the series were helmed by director Hanelle Culpepper,