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Exclusive Interview: "I wanted to break as many rules as possible" Isabel Sandoval on her early films Señorita & Apparition now playing on Criterion Channel

Exclusive Interview: “I wanted to break as many rules as possible” Isabel Sandoval on her early films Señorita & Apparition now playing on Criterion Channel

Filipina filmmaker and actress Isabel Sandoval caught the attention of international critics when her stunning third feature film—which she wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in—Lingua Franca premiered at Venice in 2019, making her the first publicly identifying trans woman of colour to screen work in competition at the festival. The acclaimed film, which immerses us in the life of an…

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[letterboxd]

Green-Light Yourself.

As Merawi Gerima’s debut feature Residue lands on Netflix, he tells Gemma Gracewood about being the son of indie film legends, duty of care as a director, and why Akira is his go-to comfort movie.

Sometimes it’s impossible to move forward with your art until you’ve taken a good look back. In Merawi Gerima’s impressionistic and hypnotic first feature, Residue, a young man, Jay, returns from college on the West Coast to find that his Washington, DC neighborhood has been hugely transformed within a few short years. A white neighbor barks at him to turn his car stereo down. Familiar faces have disappeared. The gentrification is debilitating, but Jay’s efforts to work out his disorientation and rage through art meets opposition with old friends.

Like his lead character, Gerima is both a DC native and a graduate of a West Coast college (USC’s School of Cinematic Arts), and was similarly confronted by change when he got home. Making Residue was “absolutely something that I had to do because that was the only positive direction to pour my energies into,” he says. “I think that there was a lot of destructive potential in my life at that point. The film really was the first moment when I started to feel that I perhaps was not powerless in this situation.”

Derron “Rizzo” Scott as Mike in ‘Residue’.

Gentrification as a form of structural racism has long impacted Black communities, and Gerima is not the first in his family to cover this ground. His parents are the LA Rebellion filmmakers Haile Gerima, whose work includes the Golden Bear-nominated 1983 slavery drama Sankofa, and Shirikiana Aina, who documented changes to their DC neighborhood in her 1982 non-fiction short Brick by Brick.

Residue was a family affair; the Gerima name is all through the credits. “My aunts were the chefs; my sister, she was, like, the head of the catering.” Although his legendary father managed to get off lightly with Costco runs, Gerima’s equally impressive mother ended up anchoring two of the film’s most affecting scenes, as Tonya, the Mom of Jay’s childhood friend, Mike (Derron “Rizzo” Scott).

“I had somebody else cast—she was a no-show. My mother was on set that day, just kind of helping feed people. I knew that she had what we needed, emotionally speaking. She was actually trying to drive away to go find the woman; I was like, ‘Nah, I need you right now’. She did it, but at a great cost.” The thing about filming in your own neighborhood, Gerima explains, where you’ve raised not only your own but also everyone else’s kids, with varying outcomes, is you end up bringing that lived experience to your scenes. “It’s very real for her. She’s not acting. I almost cried once we finished filming. Nobody spoke for a long time.”

The scene taught Gerima much about a director’s duty of care—particularly when he dared to ask his mother for a second take of a pivotal scene that takes place in a downpour. “In preparing to shoot in the rain we made a few mistakes, with the camera, the placement, there was miscommunication with me and the DP [Mark Jeevaratnam]. I, he, we both agreed that we needed another take. When I asked my mother for another take, she just looked at us like, it hurt, it was painful to ask. She did what she could, but you could tell that she didn’t have it in her.” As it turns out, the first take was the one. “I thought we ruined everything, but once I slowed down, I just saw what a miracle it was.”

It’s impossible to separate Residue from its limited budget and circumstances. Structurally rich and technically unusual, the film is a triumph of local knowledge, happy accidents, and “hood auditions”, where people were pulled straight off the street into the cast. It’s infused with an all-hands-on-deck spirit, constructed scene-by-scene during a home edit by Gerima himself.

“We shot the first draft of the script. You know what I mean? We didn’t have time to wait for a rewrite. We didn’t have time to wait for money. We didn’t have time to wait for anything. In many ways, it was the source of many of our problems, but it was also the source of a lot of our freedom, because we weren’t tied down by money. We weren’t tied down by a locked-in script.”

Mark Jeevaratnam, Merawi Gerima (with camera), and Obinna Nwachukwu on the set of ‘Residue’.

At Slamdance this past January, Residue won the audience award, and an acting prize for its star, Obinna Nwachukwu, whose story is a lesson for other aspiring actors. He was right for the role (“He fit the bill in terms of, he knows DC lingo, he knows the culture, he’s from the area, which was incredibly important”). More importantly, he was available. “The fact that we didn’t have resources, we needed somebody like him. He wants to act. He designs his life in his way where he was able to give us two weeks without knowing much about us. Once we got him, everything else became a lot easier.”

After Slamdance, of course, 2020 took a bit of a turn. Residue was shortlisted for Cannes, but that was cancelled and in May Gerima told his college paper: “I think that the festival prospects for the rest of this year are getting dimmer by the day.” When we speak, however, he is in Venice, where his debut feature has just screened in the independent Venice Days section of La Biennale di Venezia. It turns out that Cannes Directors’ Fortnight head Paolo Moretti had put in a word with Venice Days. As 2020 goes, this is as good as it gets for new filmmakers—and is a beautiful demonstration of how the global festival community has pulled together to make something good out of the mess we’re in.

Likewise, Gerima is grateful to Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY Releasing, who made the Netflix deal. He notes that a Black-led distribution company is a luxury his parents never knew. “I think if Ava did not exist, our film probably would not have distribution. The broad imagination necessary to see the commercial potential of Black films is still not there. I’m often sad thinking about the fact that my parents had no such opportunity.” Like a scene straight out of Dolemite is My Name, Gerima describes how his folks would book their own theaters across the US and use the African diaspora to help fill them, “proving the commercial nature of these films, in communities that hungered for real Black stories”.

Merawi Gerima directs Jacari Dye on the set of ‘Residue’.

Gerima’s film appetite is wide, and he’s often looked outside the US for inspiration. Some of the most crucial films in his development as a director have been the 1968 post-revolutionary Cuban films Lucia and Memories of Underdevelopment. He is also a fan of La Lengua de las Mariposas (‘Butterfly’, 1999, José Luis Cuerda), which has “one of my favorite endings in film, period”. Japanese influences include Akiro Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island (1960) and he also looks to Chilean legend Miguel Littin and Soviet directors Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein and Nikita Mikhalkov. His go-to comfort film? “Akira. I don’t know if it’s comfort, but I watch it all the time! I just think it’s one of the best films ever made.”

On the home front, an “incredible, important” American film is Ivan Dixon’s 1973 action drama The Spook Who Sat by the Door, while the movies that “really put me onto talking to girls” are Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love & Basketball and Rick Famuyiwa’s The Wood. “These are the types of films, circulating within the Black community [that] we memorize the lines to. That set the sexual compass of Black adolescents, you know what I mean?”

‘Sankofa’ (1993), written and directed by Haile Gerima.

His parents, however, remain Gerima’s greatest influence. “Sankofa was made without arbitration. Black stories that have no minders like that, nobody to answer to, often are far and away, the most honest types of Black storytelling that we see in film.” For other storytellers yet to take the first step, he offers this: “My best lesson from this film has been to always and at all times green-light my own self, my own actions, because that’s the only thing that I can control—and to not wait for conditions to be right or perfect.”

Acknowledging the privilege of being born into a filmmaking family, Gerima adds: “That may not apply to everybody. There are many, incredible things which prohibit action at times. But I think that there are many incredible conditions under which people can take action with the camera. I think that it’s really just a matter of how urgently that story burns within you. I can only say for myself, that’s the way the film got made. Without that, it would have been literally impossible.”

When asked who we should watch next, Gerima recommends 200 Meters, written and directed by Palestinian filmmaker Ameen Nayfeh. (“He’s an incredibly poised and principled filmmaker.”) The film won the audience award at Venice Days. He also recommends Really Love by Angel Kristi Williams, which won a SXSW Special Jury Recognition for acting, and will feature as a Special Presentation at AFI Fest next month.

‘Residue’ is in select US theaters and on Netflix now. Follow Gemma on Letterboxd.

[letterboxd]

Life in Film: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers & Kathleen Hepburn.

“We didn’t want it to be about the one-take, so we were actually kind of hesitant to speak about it before we released the film, because it wasn’t a gimmick.” The co-writers and directors of Canadian break-out feature The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (now streaming on Netflix) talk single-take filmmaking, Indigenous representation, and identifying with Edward Scissorhands, as they answer our life-in-film questionnaire.

New Canadian feature film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, which landed well at Berlin and TIFF and was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing, follows two Indigenous women with very different stories who come into each other’s lives on one fateful afternoon in Vancouver.

When Áila (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) encounters the pregnant Rosie (Violet Nelson), bruised and barefoot on a damp footpath attempting to evade her abusive boyfriend, Áila whisks her away to her apartment and encourages her to seek help. But Rosie is paralyzed by a dearth of realistic options.

Tailfeathers, who also co-wrote and co-directed the film, is Blackfoot from the Kainai First Nation (Blood Reserve) as well as Sámi from northern Norway. Nelson is a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation (Kingcome Inlet, Quatsino).

With cinematographer Norm Li (who filmed Beyond the Black Rainbow) shooting in real time over a series of extra-long takes on Super 16mm, The Body Remembers… is designed to appear mostly as a single-take film. The supposedly hidden cuts are “impossible to spot”, writes Sean Baker. “This is absolutely not ‘just a gimmick’,” agrees Olivier Lemay. “The feature-length shot worked wonders at taking us on this real-time journey with the characters that became uncomfortably immersive.” The result is a grounded and intimate portrait of two unique members of a group vastly under-represented in cinema. “It feels based deeply in character and never exploitative,” writes Milly Gribben.

Sitting down with Tailfeathers (who goes by ‘Máijá’) and her co-writer and co-director Kathleen Hepburn, we wanted to know more about their filmmaking technique, and the films that have inspired them.

Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (Áila) and Violet Nelson (Rosie) in ‘The Body Remembers…’.

What was the impetus for telling this story? Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers: The film is inspired by an experience that I had in East Vancouver, where the film takes place. Like in the film, I encountered a young woman who had just fled her abusive partner and she was literally standing barefoot in the rain and was very pregnant. I spent a few hours with her and it was a transformative experience. Sometimes we are lucky enough to have these encounters with strangers that fundamentally alter us. I carried that experience with me for a number of years wondering what to do with it, wanting to honor her story, and just kind of was left with the question of what happened to her because I never saw her again. Ultimately, I decided I wanted to turn it into a feature film and honor her experience and our experience and what happened in that short time we’d spent together.

Most of my experience with directing has been through documentary, and then my experience with narrative film has been through acting. Knowing that I wanted to make a feature in real time, having never made a narrative feature before, I figured it would be a good opportunity to collaborate with someone with more experience. And the way that I learned as a filmmaker has always been through collaboration. Kathleen has been a friend for a number of years and I so deeply admire her work and just her as a person. Her feature debut Never Steady, Never Still, it’s a phenomenal film. I reached out to Kathleen and proposed the idea of co-writing and co-directing and doing this together and that’s how it happened. Kathleen, how did you respond to Máijá’s proposal? Kathleen Hepburn: It was a very immediate response. She told me what had happened in the real life experience. It just felt like such an important, rich story, very complex and also artistically quite challenging to tell a real-time story. We decided to do it in one continuous take. It felt like a really wonderful honor to be a part of this project and an amazing challenge that I was really excited to participate in.

Co-writer, co-director and actor Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers.

This film is putting characters on screen that haven’t seen a lot of representation. Was that part of the motivation? E-MT: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the two women you see in the film are so familiar to me as an Indigenous woman. I know these women, so in so many ways they’re by no means unconventional. They’re just very real people who exist who, like you said, haven’t been represented on screen very often.

In terms of Indigenous cinema and Indigenous representation, there’s this long history of misrepresentation and people who aren’t Indigenous telling our stories and getting it fundamentally wrong. This was an opportunity to explore a very simple story that embodies all of these larger themes in such a nuanced way. It was an opportunity to speak about issues of class and various forms of privilege that exist within the Indigenous community based on lived experience. It was also an opportunity to, yeah, explore these larger systems of oppression that impact Indigenous in very different ways on a daily basis in Canada. There’s so much richness to both of these characters and so many opportunities to explore these larger themes through their lived experience on screen.

Although this breaks a lot of new ground, were there cinematic precedents that you had in mind? KH: One film we looked at in the writing process was Frozen River. In terms of style and tone, we were also looking at Andrea Arnold, Fish Tank. Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s film. But in terms of representation…

E-MT: I think Frozen River kind of set a precedent in terms of Misty Upham. She’s also Blackfoot. I’m a Blackfoot. She passed away very tragically, but seeing a woman like her on screen in a film that American audiences gravitated towards was pretty transcendent. Knowing that a character like that could hold space on screen in a way that drew American audiences in, I think kind of set maybe a bit of a precedent for this. Because we wanted Rosie’s character to be raw and real and vulnerable. When we found Violet Nelson, she embodied all of that and we wanted to present the world with a complicated individual who you would believe the world has not been kind to. Violet was all those things and she just delivered such an incredible performance and she was kind of like the light of our film. She carried so much of the film.

What precedents did you have in mind when you were thinking about shooting these long, real-time takes? E-MT: There were a lot of things to consider. One thing I think that was obviously most important for the process was supporting Violet’s performance, and coming from an acting background I really appreciate the rehearsal process, especially with theater. You get to sit with the work and be with it for weeks before you go to the stage. There’s a really incredible momentum that builds and being able to do the performance from beginning to end in one go on stage.

And there’s kind of this palpable energy that builds also with the audience because it’s an experience you’re all having. We wanted to bring that energy and that process into the film. We rehearsed for four weeks, and also rehearsed with our crew for five days and carefully choreographed everything. Our cinematographer, Norm Li, and the rest of our crew, were all just fully on board for this wildly experimental challenge.

KH: I mean, obviously we were inspired by films like Victoria, but I think for us, we didn’t want it to be about the one-take, so we were actually kind of hesitant to speak about it before we released the film because it wasn’t a gimmick. It was more to give the audience the same emotional experience as the actors.

We’d like to ask you about your life in film. What movie made you want to become a filmmaker? E-MT: I think for me it was Alanis Obomsawin’s Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance. It’s kind of her most seminal work. She’s the grandmother of Indigenous cinema in Canada and also kind of around the world. She’s Abenaki, she’s 85 years old and she’s still making films. She just had a film at TIFF. She’s made over 50 films. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is about the Oka crisis that happened in the early ’90s in Canada. It’s one of the most important works of cinema in Canada, and just knowing that an Indigenous woman made that film, that still is so incredibly important. I think that was the one that kind of motivated me to make movies.

KH: I think In the Mood for Love was probably the film where I was actually like, “Oh, okay, this is what filmmaking is like and can be like”.

Kathleen Hepburn, the co-writer and co-director of ‘The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open’.

What’s your go to comfort movie? E-MT: I could watch Moonlight over and over and over and over again. I don’t know if it’s a comfort movie, but there’s just something so splendid and beautiful about that experience and I actually crave watching that film. I probably watch it once a month. I’ll just sit down and watch a section of it.

KH: This is a more recent film, but one that I just loved so much is Toni Erdmann. Just everything about it is so inspiring. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking. But I don’t watch it once a month.

What movie, or movie scene, makes you cry the hardest? KH: Oh, I know this one. My Girl. When Macaulay Culkin dies, the funeral scene. “He needs his glasses. He needs his glasses.”

E-MT: God, that’s going to make me cry.

As a teenager, what movie, or movie character did you feel closest to? E-MT: For sure, Now and Then. That was something I connected with, but that’s when it was twelve years old or something.

KH: I was a tomboy growing up, so there was an Elijah Wood film called The War. For some reason, that one always stuck with me. I don’t know. I wanted to be those little boys, I think.

E-MT: Edward Scissorhands. I so connected with Edward. It’s just such a wild, bizarre, beautiful story of this outsider, but no, I’m not a fan of Johnny Depp now.

What film do you have fond memories of watching with your parents? E-MT: Oh man. Growing up we didn’t have a lot of money, but something that my parents always did was take us to the cinema and my dad, especially. On the weekends we would go and see double bills, sometimes not paying for the second movie. My dad was such an action movie guy. I grew up going to action movies with my dad. I remember, actually, my mom is the biggest Jackie Chan fan. Rumble in the Bronx, I think, holds a special place in my heart. It’s set in the Bronx, obviously, but it’s shot in Vancouver.

Then there was this Canadian TV show called North of 60, which was set in the north in Canada in this Indigenous community. It was kind of this show that we tuned into every week. I would say Tina Keeper, she’s an actress and also she’s a producer now, but she played a cop, an Indigenous woman. For me as a young person seeing her on screen was pretty transformative because she was an Indigenous woman who held a position of power and was a real person and was complex and beautiful and not framed within this overwhelming trauma that you often see Indigenous people framed within. That was pretty important just for me as in terms of representation, and then also for our family, we just tuned in every weekend. I don’t know if it’s even a good show. I can hear the theme song in my head. It was a CBC show.

Violet Nelson plays Rosie in ‘The Body Remembers…’.

What filmmaker, living or dead, do you envy or admire the most? E-MT: Right now, Tasha Hubbard. She’s a Cree filmmaker from Saskatchewan and she made a documentary film called nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up. It was about the murder of Colten Boushie, a young Cree man who was murdered by a white farmer named Gerald Stanley. Gerald walked away from all charges and is a free man, and the film is winning all sorts of awards across Canada and it’s so brave.

Tasha grew up with a white family, she was adopted. She grew up in this white farming community and she’s an Indigenous person who has experienced both of those realities. Racism on the prairies in Canada is very prevalent and in-your-face and violent. As a person who comes from the prairies—and I have an intimate knowledge of that reality—just the courage that Tasha took to make that film and to fully invest herself in such a challenging process. Yeah, there’s no words to sort of describe the respect that I have for her and what she’s done.

If you were forced to remake any classic, which one would you choose? E-MT: Well, this isn’t a classic, but one film that I’ve watched recently that just blew my mind is Happy as Lazzaro, the Italian film. It has such a high level of understanding about the world and the complexities of society, but it’s also just this beautiful film that tricks you into coming to an understanding that you don’t realize you’re having as you go through the film. I don’t have that sort of mind that can handle that kind of structural complexity.

‘The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open’ is the fourth acquisition of 2019 for Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing, after acclaimed Ghanaian gem ‘The Burial of Kojo’, Hepi Mita’s documentary about his trailblazing Māori filmmaker mother, ‘Merata’, and Tribeca Film Festival award-winner ‘Burning Cane’ by nineteen-year-old Phillip Youmans. All are streaming on Netflix. ‘The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open’ is now in select theaters in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit.

[thenerdsofcolor]

NOC Exclusive: Trailer & Key Art for ARRAY'S 'WHO WE BECOME'

The past three years have been a troubling time for people. With the pandemic and the murder and hate crimes against Black and Asians, it can make or break you as a human being. In PJ Raval’s documentary WHO WE BECOME (previously titled KAPWA TEXAS), three young Filipino women grapple with the global pandemic while forging unexpected connections with their families as they deal with the unknown…

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[culturallyobessed]

Simon Frederick talks about new Netflix Docu-Series, They've Gotta Have Us

Simon Frederick talks about new Netflix Docu-Series, They’ve Gotta Have Us

Just in time for Black History Month, THEY’VE GOTTA HAVE US is a timely look at the impact of art, activism and race on Black Cinema featuring in-depth interviews with some of Hollywood’s most iconic voices, including Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll, John Singleton, Robert Townsend, David Oyelowo, John Boyega, Kasi Lemmons, Barry Jenkins, and many more! In the wake of the recent Oscar…

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[mocada-museum]

ARRAY Releasing has set a Fall 2015 special "double feature theatrical experience" that will include "Ayanda" and "Out of My Hand," kicking off on November 13 in Los Angeles and New York City, followed by a national tour to include Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Seattle, Houston and Boston. "Ayanda" is a coming-of-age story of a 21-year-old "Afro-hipster," who embarks on a journey of self-discovery, when she has to fight to save her late father’s legacy – a motor repair shop - when it is threatened with closure. "Out of My Hand" tells a story of a worker on a Liberian rubber plantation who wants to get away from a life overshadowed by civil war, and so moves to New York where he lives a new life as a taxi driver. For more information and dates: http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/exclusive-array-releasing-sets-theatrical-dates-for-2015-pickups-ayanda-out-of-my-hand-20151019

[prodigalpen]

You can still join the AFFRM REBELS movement. It's not too late to support good indie film. ANd increasingly "indie" just means "film for the rest of us"... Folks who aren't Hollywood elites who like something to balance out the box office blockbusters and really give us all a sense of story, diversity and humanity. In short: good stories.

ARRAY helps those films get made, distributed and released across platforms. So visit AFFRM and check em out. you can even joint the marketing crew and help promote the films ou wanna see and think everyone else should see.