Interviews
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Interview: Judy Ironside, UK Jewish Film Festival founder
Judy Ironside is the Founder and Executive Director of UK Jewish Film, which explores Jewish and interfaith cinema with an annual two-week festival in London, as well as special events and screenings throughout the year. Rapidly increasing in scale and popularity, the 16th UK Jewish Film Festival will also be screening simultaneously in Glasgow, Leeds,…
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Interview: Olivier Nakache, Eric Toledano, ‘Untouchable’
Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano have been writing and directing films with each other since 1995. Their latest collaboration, French Oscar hopeful Untouchable (2011), has been a worldwide hit, breaking box office records and winning notable awards. The movie tells the story of the friendship between affluent paraplegic Philippe (François Cluzet) and his carer from…
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Interview: Karl Markovics, director of ‘Breathing’
This week sees the DVD and Blu-ray release of Austrian screen actor Karl Markovics’ assured and powerful directorial debut feature, Breathing (Atmen, 2011). The film follows Roman Kogler (played brilliantly by newcomer Thomas Schubert), a 19-year-old young man who has spent the last five years in a juvenile detention centre, until a job opportunity working…
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Interview: Dylan Southern, ‘Shut Up and Play the Hits’
Following on from 2010’s acclaimed Blur documentary No Distance Left to Run, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace return this week with Shut Up and Play the Hits (2012), a new project detailing the final days of James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem. Despite looking like similar projects on paper, the directorial partnership’s latest work is an altogether…
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Interview: Alice Rohrwacher, director of ‘Corpo Celeste’
Corpo Celeste (2011) is the assured debut feature from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher. Centring around a community in urban Italy through the eyes of the adolescent Marta the naturalistic and allegorical film examines this microcosm from an outsiders view, and in particular the role of the church in modern Italian society. With the film out…
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Interview: Miguel Gomes, director of ‘Tabu’
This Friday sees the UK cinema release of Miguel Gomes’ bewitching black and white master-stroke Tabu (2012). We met up with Gomes at the Edinburgh International Film Festival earlier this year to discuss the film and his own nostalgic approach to cinema further. An ex-film critic known for his playful personality, it would be fair…
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Interview: Karl Urban and Alex Garland talk ‘Dredd 3D’
Native Kiwi Karl Urban has been lucky enough to be a part of many popular movie franchises during his 20-year career, including The Lord of the Rings and, more recently, J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. Next year, Urban will return to the Enterprise for the eagerly-anticipated sequel, but this month audiences will get to see…
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Interview: Maryam Keshavarz, ‘Circumstance’
American-Iranian director Maryam Keshavarz is a woman who doesn’t fear courting controversy – a fact very much apparent in her first feature, Circumstance (2011), which claimed the Sundance Audience Award back in 2011. The film follows two wild-spirited teenage girls living in Iran (Sarah Kazemy and Nikohl Boosheri) who, tired of the rules and religious…
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Interview: Joe Cole and Malachi Kirby, ‘Offender’
Ron Scalpello’s debut feature Offender (2012), released in UK cinemas this week, is a gritty, ultra-violent tale of life inside a young offenders institute. Taking the lead as damaged protagonist Tommy is 23-year-old Joe Cole, a regular TV actor having appeared in the popular teen drama series Skins and crime mini series Injustice. Accompanying Cole…
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Interview: Malik Bendjelloul, ‘Searching for Sugar Man’
Sixto Rodriguez, the Detroit-born, Mexican folk singer who never quite made it in the States during the 1970s, is the humble star of Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man (2012). The film tells the incredible story of how a bootleg copy of Sixto’s album Cold Fact arrived in apartheid South Africa and became a massive…