Directors Notes

It’s little over three years since director Denise Hauser joined us for an interview about her mixed-media short Copy City, so it’s a long overdue pleasure to welcome her back to DN for a discussion about her mail order boyfriend short Return to Sender. It’s kind of a bit like MacGyver style, you just work [...]

Return to Sender (2011) A female scientist lives a lonely and isolated life on the coast of Greenland studying ice crystals. She is looking for the perfect partner to keep her company under such harsh conditions. One day, she discovers a website which enables her to design her perfect match. She places an order and [...]

Director Nickolas Duarte joins us today with What You Need, his film about a boy out of step with the world around him. We discuss how the idea for a 15 second animated logo morphed into a four minute melancholic short and why the monkeyboy you see downtown may not just be in your head. [...]

What You Need (2011) A little boy who is half-monkey wanders through his benign life as both a hermit and an explorer. He cares little for school and his human classmates, oftentimes opting to pick on the homeless folks downtown. Unsure of his purpose, the little monkey-boy hangs on to misplaced frustrations like keepsakes in [...]

In their experimental documentary Tempest, Rob Curry and Anthony Fletcher reimagine and repurpose Shakesphere’s play as a commentary on the lives of modern day South London youths. They join us this week to discuss pushing the format to another, challenging level and why not all inner-city documentaries need to be voyeuristic exposes aim at middle-class [...]

Tempest (2012) Tempest is both a celebration of contemporary urban youth culture, and a 21st Century re-imagining of Shakespeare’s last great play. 17 young actors from South London struggle to put on a production. Their story unfolds alongside Prospero’s as The Oval is transformed into Shakespeare’s magical island and the outcast Duke conjures the spirits [...]

Every time director Ben Wheatley puts out a film it invariably makes its way onto my top ten list for that year (2009, 2011), so it’s pretty clear he’s a filmmaker whose work strikes a cord with me. Given that his third outing Sightseers, written by and staring Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, had its [...]

Ever since I (and 9 million+ others) saw Argentinean director Carlos Lascano’s A Short Love Story in Stop Motion I’ve been dying to get him onto DN for an interview. It may have taken four years, but Carlos finally made it on to discuss his newest piece A Shadow of Blue, a beautiful mix of [...]

A Shadow of Blue (2011) A touching story in which fantasy and reality merge to make dreams come true. How determining can reality be, and how can fantasy unleash an unexpected freedom? Can a fragile world of lights and shadows show us more than a silhouette drawn against the sunlight? I hear that if you [...]

Self financed, shot at weekends with a skeleton crew and released online for free, Brad Bores’ Wishful, Sinful could be said to be the definition of the indie feature. Brad joins us this week to discuss finding your film cinematically during the production process and the need for honest festival feedback. You just wanna know [...]

Wishful, Sinful (2011) A brutally honest and sometimes humorous view of two small town guys failing at mediocre lives. You can watch the full 72 minute Wishful, Sinful feature for free over on NoBudge now.

Chris Shimojima’s JT vs. the Good Guys turns the tables on what we’ve come to expect from the high school bully narrative. We speak to Chris about confounding audience expectations and why your mom might be the best location manager you can find. I wanted to tell the audience; Can you feel sympathy, can you [...]

JT vs. the Good Guys (2012) A group of high school kids meet to play Frisbee. One is JT, whose attempts at being a tough guy fail miserably. He’s losing the popular girl to the quiet guy, and worse, the others seem glad about it. But JT does not step down without a fight.

Freshly returned from an inspiring trip to SXSW, director Carlos Lopez Estrada quickly gathered a team to create the stylised animation / live action piece BEAR. Carlos joins us to discuss the satisfaction to be had when you leave an audience with enough narrative room to interpret your story. I just felt like I needed [...]

BEAR (2012) A fable about change.