The Film Comment Podcast

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Berlinale 2023 #6, with Frédéric Jaeger, Giovanni Marchini Camia, and Victor Guimarães Feb 24, 2023

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This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently winding down. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editor Devika Girish is joined by critics Giovanni Marchini Camia (Fireflies Press), Victor Guimarães (freelance), and Frédéric Jaeger (critic.de). Before getting into a broader conversation about German cinema at the Berlinale, the four discuss some of the highlights from the festival’s waning days, including Music by Angela Schanelec, In Water by Hong Sangsoo, Bad Living and Living Bad by João Canijo, Ramona by Victoria Linares Villegas, and Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything by Emily Atef. Stay up to date with all of our Berlin 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/berlin/berlin-2023/

Berlinale 2023 #5, with Edo Choi, Inney Prakash, and Caitlin Quinlan Feb 22, 2023

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Michael Cera and Dustin Guy Defa on The Adults Feb 21, 2023

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This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-deputy editor Clinton Krute sat down with writer/director Dustin Guy Defa and actor Michael Cera to discuss The Adults, which just had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale. The film tells the story of Eric, a youngish man returning for a quick visit to the upstate New York town where he grew up. As he struggles to reconnect with his two sisters, played by Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis, his obsession with poker, and his drive to beat every player in town, keeps prolonging his stay. The nuanced performances of the three leads, along with Guy Defa’s precise dialogue, pull the film off center, destabilizing what might otherwise have been a fairly familiar drama of family reconciliation. Instead, The Adults is something far stranger and resonant.

Berlinale 2023 #3, with Antoine Thirion and Jean-Michel Frodon Feb 20, 2023

Show notes

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by curator and critic Antoine Thirion and critic (and former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma) Jean-Michel Frodon to discuss some recent viewings from the festival's mid-point: Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy, John Trengove’s Manodrome, Bas Devos’s Here, Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower, Margarethe von Trotta’s Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert, and Manthia Diawara’s AI: African Intelligence. Stay up to date with all of our Berlin 2023 coverage here.

Berlinale 2023 #2, with Ela Bittencourt and Jonathan Ali Feb 19, 2023

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This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Hong Sangsoo, James Benning, and many more. On today’s episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by FC contributor Ela Bittencourt and Jonathan Ali, Director of Programming at the Third Horizon Film Festival. They discuss some of the recent premieres at the Berlinale, including Claire Simon's Our Body, Moyra Davey's Horse Opera, and Aaron Kaufman and Sean Penn's Superpower; Turkish retrospective selection Black Head (1979), by Korhan Yurtsever; as well as films from the Berlin Critics' Week's "Artistic Differences" program, which included Lavra dor (1968), O tigra ea gazela (1977), The White Death of the Black Wizard (2020), and The Secret Formula (1965).

Berlinale 2023 #1, with Erika Balsom and B. Ruby Rich Feb 18, 2023

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Cinema of Care, with Claire Denis, Abby Sun, and Marek Hovorka Feb 17, 2023

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This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection. A couple days ago, before the festival kicked off, FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish attended the opening conference of the Berlin Critics’ Week—an autonomous sidebar to the Berlinale, organized independently by a collective of German critics, including Amos Borchert, Elena Friedrich, Petra Palmer, and Dennis Vetter. The topic of the conference was “Cinema of Care - Who Looks After Film Culture?” which included a panel discussion moderated by Devika, and featuring a stellar lineup of guests: curators Abby Sun and Marek Hovorka, and the filmmaker Claire Denis. The four had a provocative, in-depth conversation about what care looks like on the level of aesthetics, in filmmaking, and in film programming, and how we might build a sustainable and collective film culture. We’re very grateful to Berlin Critics Week for letting us share the conversation on the podcast.

Sam Pollard and Samantha N. Sheppard on Bill Russell: Legend Feb 07, 2023

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With an award-winning filmography that includes the epochal Civil Rights series Eyes on the Prize, 2020’s MLK/FBI, and 2021’s Citizen Ashe, among many others, documentarian Sam Pollard has changed the way we read history. Pollard is also an editor and producer, working with filmmakers like Spike Lee and Bill Gunn. Simply put, the guy is a legend. Which brings us to his latest film, the new two-part documentary Bill Russell: Legend, which digs deep into the life and career of one of the greatest basketball players of all time. The winner of a record 11 championships with the Boston Celtics from 1956 to 1969, including two as a player coach, Bill Russell broke many boundaries, both on the court and off. Pollard’s film is a remarkably nuanced portrait of a complex figure who, as a record-breaking athlete and active participant in the Civil Rights movement, stood at the intersections of sports, celebrity, and race in America. FC co-deputy editor Clinton Krute invited Pollard on the podcast to discuss his new film with scholar Samantha N. Sheppard, whose 2020 book Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen is an expansive analysis of sports documentaries and representations of Blackness on screen. We discussed the intensive research process behind the film, how the genre of the sports documentary can be used to rewrite history, and the legacy and life of Russell, who passed away in July 2022.

Sundance 2023 #8: New Frontier with Deborah Stratman, Mary Helena Clark, and Mike Gibisser Jan 31, 2023

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On our final podcast from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, FC co-editor Devika Girish talks to filmmakers Deborah Stratman, Mary Helena Clark, and Mike Gibisser about their fantastic new films, which premiered in the festival’s New Frontier section. Stratman’s Last Things explores the history of our universe through the point of view of rocks. She combines stunning images of rocks with interviews with a geoscientist and excerpts from various sci-fi texts—read by the filmmaker Valerie Massadian—to craft a narrative of the past and the future that decenters humans, and invites us to think beyond ourselves. Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser's A Common Sequence, explores how our ideas of the commons have changed in our capitalistic, tech-driven present. The film uses three case studies: the first focuses on efforts to conserve and study the achoque salamander in Mexico, known for its regenerative properties; the second explores the use of artificial intelligence in apple picking and harvesting; and the third digs into the ways in which genetics is fast becoming a prime site for data mining. The filmmakers joined for a wide-ranging conversation about the ideas behind their films, how they approach questions of time and perspective, and what it felt like to be an experimental filmmaker at Sundance. It turns out that Clark and Gibisser were once students of Stratman’s—so the three had much to say about each other’s work. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2023/

Sundance 2023 #7, with Dessane Lopez Cassell, Poulomi Das, and Jessica Kiang Jan 27, 2023

Show notes

The Sundance Film Festival triumphantly returns to in-person screenings this year, which of course means that your intrepid Film Comment crew is once again on the scene in snowy Park City, bringing you dispatches and podcasts covering all the highlights of the 2023 edition. On today’s podcast, Dessane Lopez Cassell (SEEN), Poulomi Das (The Playlist), and Jessica Kiang (Variety) join FC’s Devika Girish for another round of Sundance conversation. This time around, the critics discuss festival selections Passages, Shortcomings, A Thousand and One, and Milisuthando. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2023 coverage here: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/category/festivals/sundance/sundance-2023/

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