In the last decade twin sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska have doggedly pursued film ventures in the horror genre. Armed with ingenuity, a DYI ethos and a pledge to frighten honest, hard-working people, the Soskas have acted in, directed, screenwritten and produced movies that would give Lloyd Kaufman and Eli Roth a run for their money. The Soskas have directed such films as “Dead Hooker in a ... more >
INTERVIEWS
Once upon a time, the twisted twins Jen and Sylvia Soska – INTERVIEW
"Follow your stupid fucking dreams" (Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska)
Talking with Sky Bergman. Her short “Mochitsuki” screens at SBIFF on Sunday
"What’s happening in your everyday life that you care about, that helps you learn, that’s making you grow?"
Sky Bergman is a filmmaker and teacher based in San Luis Obispo, California, a university town known for being the home of Cal Poly (California Polytechnic State University). In 2017 Bergman brought her documentary “Lives Well Lived,” which shared the wisdom of a group of gloriously happy senior citizens, to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. It’s a wonderful film—which I hasten to ... more >
INTERVIEW: CAMILLE BROWN, director of “A Christmas Winter Song”
[Drama / 90 mins]
Ashanti, Stan Shaw and Sashani Nichole
Camille Brown recently achieved a distinction, one that has become a tradition. A female-directed film on Lifetime seems like a rite of passage for any woman behind the camera. Yet a Christmas movie makes it all the more special. “A Christmas Winter Song” aired throughout the month of December, is currently on-demand and will likely remain part of the network’s future holiday line-ups. I was ... more >
INTERVIEW: Burk Sharpless, Matt Sazama and the cast of “Lost in Space 2”
"We can all relate to this family"
The producers and showrunners insist they didn’t plan for the second season of “Lost in Space” to debut Christmas week, but a yuletide story element in the first episode of Season 2 made it a rather fortuitous happenstance. “We heard that Netflix put us in their Christmas window, because they were so excited about the audience we might get,” said series co-creator and executive producer Burk ... more >
Mark Landsman: “We have a tabloid president. That’s a very disturbing thing”
"Scandalous: the untold story of the National Inquirer"
Distributed by Magnolia Pictures
Directed by Mark Landsman
Current events overtook documentary filmmaker Mark Landsman even as he was working hard on his film about the National Enquirer and its controversial parent company, AMI. “We had already gotten our seed money together and were out filming when the Ronan Farrow stories broke in the New Yorker” about President Trump’s alleged connections to Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s attempts to “kill” ... more >
Former Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, at the center for “The Report,” tells us about the torture report the CIA didn’t want you to see (INTERVIEW)
"I [...] get emotional about it because it just is so upsetting that we tortured people"
Adam Driver and Annette Bening
Directed by Scott Z. Burns
Daniel J. Jones worked tirelessly in a nondescript Washington, D.C., room for the better part of a decade, trying to connect the dots between the CIA’s detention and torture of terrorist suspects at black sites and the Bush White House. The Senate staffer, whose work was passionately backed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), not only had to contend with members of the Senate who would rather ... more >
INTERVIEW: Mati Diop, director of “Atlantics”
Distributed by Netflix and Ad Vitam
Mame Bineta Sane, Ibrahima Mbaye Sope and Traore
The Arab Spring events of 2011 got filmmaker Mati Diop thinking: What if that search for a better life were told from the viewpoint of a teenage girl in Senegal who stayed behind as her sweetheart crossed the seas in search of new opportunity? “We could say the film is following the ‘spring’ of a young woman in terms of the season from… dark to light, and it’s like an openness blooming,” said ... more >