Q&A – Page 5 – desistfilm

Q&A

DENNIS COOPER & ZAC FARLEY: “LANGUAGE, AND HOW IT’S USED, IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT IN PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT”

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Almost an underground legend by own merit, Dennis Cooper is not only celebrated today for his outstanding novels like Closer, Frisk and The Sluts, but also as a culture vigilante, famous for his ten-year blog of writings, which was temporarily deleted by Google in 2016. In his second venture with filmmaking, Cooper joins talented visual artist and long time friend Zac Farley for their second film Permanent Green Light, a raw yet poetic beautiful view on alienation and adolescence. We found Dennis and Zac online for an interview, in which we discussed their collaboration and everything about their latest films.

2018.11.14

Q&A

STEVE POLTA: “I THINK LIGHT IS KEY IN TERMS OF PRODUCING THE SENSUAL ENCOUNTER I’M AFTER”

By Ivonne Sheen

Steve Polta is one of the most interesting experimental filmmakers and film curators from the Bay Area, USA. Nowadays he works as the artistic Director of the San Francisco Cinematheque and curates the Crossroads Film Festival program. His film explores the expressiveness of light and soundscapes in super 8 format, which have been screened in alternative film venues and film festivals such as Anthology Film Archives, the Echo Park Film Center, The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-garde, SFMOMA, Pacific Film Archive, among others.

2018.10.22

Q&A

Q & A : ANDRÉA PICARD

By Mónica Delgado & José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Running one of the most interesting programs of experimental cinema around the globe is not easy feat. Andréa Picard has been in charge of Toronto Film Festival’s Wavelengths section for a while now, a task that is no extent of many challenges and keeps her in her toes with some of the more current tendencies of experimental cinema today. Here at Desistfilm we talked to her about the state of experimental cinema, the criteria behind a program like Wavelengths, the task of dealing with expanded cinema and more.

2018.10.03

Q&A

YANN GONZALEZ: “MY CINEMA STARTED WITH A FANTASY, OF IMAGINING THE FILMS I COULDN’T WATCH”

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

French auteur Yann Gonzalez is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. His unique blend of queer sensibility, vintage mise-en-scène, particular taste for surreal passages, and a unique eye for building a rich and stimulating ensemble of performers, runs the span of eight shorts and two feature films. After watching the remarkable Knife + Heart at the last Cannes, we met Yann online for a particularly entertaining conversation, in which he talks about his beginnings in cinema, his work as a curator and his particular interests as a filmmaker.

2018.06.25

Q&A

ROSE LOWDER: “I WOULD LIKE TO DISPENSE WITH THE FLICKER IN MY WORKS”

By Mónica Delgado

The great French-Peruvian filmmaker Rose Lowder was in Lima after almost sixty years to present a couple of programs and a masterclass in the latest Lima Indie Film Festival (8° Festival Internacional de Cine Lima Independiente). Her visit to Lima consisted in showing a wide panorama of her work as sort of an introduction, where her better known shorts such as Voiliers et coquilicots (2001), part of the now famous Bouquets were shown, as well as her creative procedures in paper, which she calls scores.

2018.06.15

Q&A

RHAYNE VERMETTE: “THE RUIN IS SOMETHING THAT IS VERY CENTRAL AND INTEGRAL TO EVERYTHING I DO”

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Canadian artist and filmmaker Rhayne Vermette moved out of academia to pursue her own artistic vision. Years later, we’re being witness of one of the most remarkable bodies of work in contemporary experimental cinema. Locked in the concept of the “ruin” and borrowing from contemporary art, architecture and her own process as a filmmaker, Vermette’s works are a unique blend of collage, animation, found footage and recorded images. What follows is a hour-and-a-half conversation with Desistfilm, about her work as a filmmaker, her place as a woman artist in Winnipeg, her influences and other topics.

2018.06.12

Q&A

SALOMÉ LAMAS: “I SEE MY WORK AS A GATHERER OR A COLLECTOR”

By Vladimir Seput

The 64th edition of Oberhausen International Short Film Festival dedicated one of its profile programmes to the work of Portuguese filmmaker and artist Salomé Lamas. In the last few years, her films are well known around the world and even though she reached the wider audience with her three feature films. She’s still working on short films as well as moving image projects in the gallery context. We sat down with Salomé in Oberhausen to talk about her latest feature Extinction .

2018.05.31

desistfilm

DAN BROWNE: “CINEMA PROVIDES A FOCUS FOR EXPLORING THE WORLD AND MY RELATION TO IT”

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

Canadian filmmaker and artist Dan Browne started working on analog film but promptly made the change to digital, a format in which he has excelled with outstanding works like memento mori or Palmerston Blvd. His films seem to be particularly involved with nature, exploring multi exposure, patterns and image composition. Here at Desistfilm we managed to steal a couple of hours of his time, which resulted in the following extensive interview.

2018.05.24

Q&A

Q & A: JOHAN GRIMONPREZ

By Mónica Delgado

In the recent edition of DocumentaMadrid, multimedia artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez presented his new documentary, Blue Orchids, an appendix about the global corruption and weapons trafficking, which forms a diptych with Shadow world, his previous documentary feature. In this film, the filmmaker returns to interview a strange and fascinating characters, and together he builds a tale about one of his conceptual motifs, the figure of the double and the media as simulacra and ideological trap. In this visit to DocumentaMadrid, Desistfilm talked to him about some political aspects of his most representative films.

2018.05.08

Q&A

Q & A: LAILA PAKALNINA

By Monica Delgado

We met Laila Pakalnina, recognized Latvian filmmaker with a special focus in this last DocumentaMadrid Film Festival. Her remarkable body of work is composed by short films, documentaries and fiction features, from The Linen (1991) to Hello Horse! (2017). In this dialogue we talk to her about the motifs in her films and her chosen style.

2018.05.07