Tag: Oscar-nominated

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The Diary of Teenage Girl and 6 Other Directorial Debuts From The Past Year You Need To See

Some directorial debuts serve as calling cards for multi-million dollar franchises. Others disappear into obscurity, better best forgotten. To make an impact with your first attempt is a rare feat, but to sustain that success is even rarer…

To celebrate The Diary of a Teenage Girl winning Best First Feature at the 30th Independent Spirit Awards, I’ve scoured IMDb for shining examples of a directorial debut in the past year.

Marielle Heller worked on adapting the project for 8 years before shooting the film in San Francisco.

THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL

DTGAn audacious, provocative depiction of teenage sexuality, The Diary of a Teenage Girl has made quite a splash.

From newcomer Bel Powley’s astounding performance, to the support of seasoned producer Anne Carey, Marielle Heller’s dazzling debut is a testament to the talent of women both above and below the line. Despite its 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and critical acclaim across the board, this is the kind of success story we hear all too infrequently.

In an interview for Vogue, Heller highlighted the disparity of opportunities for male and female directors. “There’s this feeding frenzy when a man makes a good first feature. Like, let’s scoop him up! We have to give him some giant franchise. And there’s this sense with women that you have to prove yourself so many times over before that same feeling happens”.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl – with its whimsical aesthetic and candid outlook – represents exactly the kind of unique voice that women can offer cinema…

Watch the film plus behind-the-scenes extras here.

APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR

ABPremiering at Sundance in 2014, Appropriate Behaviour is the bold, brash and downright hilarious debut that has everyone wondering what writer, director and star Desiree Akhavan (as seen in Girls season 4) is going to do next.

Part biopic, part homage to Annie Hall, Appropriate Behaviour sees Iranian-American Shirin navigating bisexuality, break-ups and familial tradition with varying success. Akhavan’s keen eye for observational comedy and willingness to push every boundary offers up a film as poignant as it is pertinent.

Watch the film plus behind-the-scenes extras here.

 

JAMES WHITEjames-white

James White might be his first feature, but director Josh Mond cut his teeth producing projects such as Indie Spirit Award nominee Martha Marcy May Marlene.

It’s the kind of practice run – if you will – that no doubt spawned this spiky and spectacularly intimate drama. Christopher Abbott (of Girls fame), is the sole caregiver to his dying mother (Cynthia Nixon, transformed). He’s also a slacker. A liar. A reckless thug. And a lost soul.

Every scene crackles with volatile energy, an atmosphere harnessed by Mond’s rugged, handheld filmmaking. But the malevolence is also punctuated by moments of profound tenderness. It’s unlikely you’ll see a more touching mother-son relationship depicted onscreen this year.

 

THE WOLFPACK

Walking down First Avenue in the East Village, Crystal Moselle encountered the subjects for her first documentary feature. 5 years, and 500 hours of footage later, she had an extraordinary debut film.

By getting to know the Angulo brothers and the unbelievable circumstances of their upbringing, what could’ve been exploitative or sensationalist in lesser hands, emerges as an affectionate – if no less bizarre – portrait of manhood, brotherhood and adulthood.

As the six brothers adjust to life in the outside world, Moselle shows a gift for allowing their eccentricities and expressions to float to the surface. Her film, perhaps, begs more questions than it answers and its scope is indeed narrow. But its sincerity won’t fail to charm you.

Prior to The Wolfpack, Crystal Moselle had worked on short documentaries and commercials.
Watch the film plus behind-the-scenes extras here.

EX-MACHINA

ex machinaAlex Garland knows how to handle the sinister undercurrents of the sci-fi genre. He’s the mind behind 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Never Let Me Go, after all. With Ex-Machina he continues to prove his expertise in telling intelligent stories with a spine-tingling edge, confirming that his eye for detail is as razor-sharp as his imagination.

Domnhall Gleeson’s Caleb finds himself trapped down a murky rabbit hole of robotics and ethics. What begins as ‘The Making of a Robot’, soon escalates into a menacing power-play between egotistical engineer Nathan (Oscar Isaac) and steely AI Ava (newly Oscar-winning Alicia Vikander), both of whom have agendas of their own.

Scooping an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, Ex-Machina is Fincher-esque in its meticulousness. Whether soaring through remote Alaskan vistas, or navigating Nathan’s claustrophobic laboratories, Garland is quite the engineer. Guiding his audience through a maze-like set and a complex story to pulse-quickening effect, Ex-Machina is one of the most exquisitely-designed and electrically performed debuts since Duncan Jones’ Moon.

mustang-toh-exclusive-posterMUSTANG

Like The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Mustang is a story of burgeoning female sexuality and empowerment wherein voyeurism is avoided by firmly locating the narrative’s perspective as female.

Groomed for arranged marriages and conventional futures, a group of sisters growing up in a Turkish village find their freedoms increasingly curtailed. Filmed with a hazy sensuality that has drawn comparisons to The Virgin Suicides, you could be forgiven for not expecting the furious sense of resistance that bubbles beneath it’s quaint surface. Not dissimilar to Diary, the film serves as a call-to-action to allow – and encourage – the free-spiritedness of teenage girls, in whatever form that may take.

Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s brilliant, and bracingly-perceptive debut deservedly picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

THE SURVIVALIST

Akin to Marielle Heller whom penned upwards of 80 drafts of The Diary of a Teenage Girl prior to shooting, The Survivalist’s director Stephen Fingleton has long been preparing for his feature debut.

In my interview with the Irish filmmaker, he conceded that he treated his shorts films (two of which can be viewed here) as precursors to the main event and a way to smooth out any kinks in the process.

It’s a process he’s honed to near-perfection, and which saw his nomination at this year’s BAFTAs for Outstanding British Debut. With The Survivalist, Fingleton serves up Ray Mears by way of The Hunger Games in this sparse and unsparingly gritty apocalyptic thriller, that see loyalties tested and a primitive ménage à trois go awry. It’s a lean and assured debut that will leave your hands clammy from tension.

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Irish filmmaker Stephen Fingleton earned a BAFTA nomination for his work

Watch the film plus behind-the-scenes extras here.

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6 Films To Watch After You’ve Seen The Survivalist

Originally published on We Are Colony.

In The Survivalist, BAFTA-nominated Stephen Fingleton creates an intensely realistic vision of a post-collapse world. The loss of modern luxuries and amenities force three survivors to collate all their wits and resources to avoid encroaching danger.

To celebrate its release in cinemas and on VOD, I recalled six other films that pit their protagonists against extreme circumstances and make you more than glad to be inside watching them…

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Mad Max: Fury Road (DIR. George Miller, 2015)

A post-apocalyptic movie on steroids, Mad Max is arguably last year’s most talked about film. Where The Survivalist is sparse and introspective, Fury Road is a ferocious whirlwind of CGI spectacle. Still, there’s a reason Indiewire labeled Fingleton’s debut “Mad Max in the countryside”. Each bring a vivid sense of detail to the ‘end of the world’ scenarios they have created to startling effect.

“The Survivalist revels in the muddy minutiae of a post-collapse environment.”

Snowpiercer (DIR. Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

Set on a train trapped in an infinite loop around a frozen planet, the world’s dwindling resources inspire a group of ‘third class’ passengers – among them Captain America (Chris Evans), Billy Elliot (Jamie Bell) and the Elephant Man (John Hurt) – to overthrow the oligarchs that power the engine.

Refreshingly different in its take on disaster, Snowpiercer is an absurdist piece of cinema. Visually it might not have much in common with The Survivalist, which revels in the muddy minutiae of a post-collapse environment, but it’s a stellar example of how to inject a bit of humour into what’s typically a sombre genre.

Equal parts suspense and horror, Snowpiercer is contemplative yet entertaining and where both films excel is in their ability to tell an expansive story in a small space.

The Road (DIR. John Hillcoat, 2009)

Speaking of sombre, John Hillcoat’s The Road is the often held up as a litmus test against which apocalyptic films are inevitably compared. As Viggo Mortensen shepherds Kodi Smit-McPhee across a ravaged, cannibalized America, it’s hard to recall a film that has so frighteningly depicted austerity.

The result is something remarkable and haunting, but which, at times, feels excessive. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s elegiac score orchestrates certain moments to detrimental effect and there are sequences where silence alone could be more fitting. The Coen brothers, in their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, left the soundtrack devoid of music, a choice which subsequently maximizes tension.

Indeed, where The Survivalist is most effective is in its absence of music; when pregnant silences and the threat that fills them, linger.

“Cuarón and Fingleton exhibit a flare for kinetic filmmaking, utilising tracking shots to explore a primitive landscape with poetic flourish”.

Children Of Men (DIR. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)

The world is a battleground in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and Clive Owen must act as bodyguard to society’s last hope at regeneration. Now twice Oscar-anointed, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki demonstrates striking visual prowess. His recreation of a war-torn dystopia, where characters live in perpetual fear of being struck by a bullet or a bomb is astounding.
The Survivalist employs a similar aesthetic of dirt and drizzle, and both embrace a costume and production design that feels chillingly plausible. Likewise, Cuarón and Fingleton exhibit a flare for kinetic filmmaking, utilizing tracking shots to explore a primitive landscape with poetic flourish.

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The Rover (DIR. David Michôd, 2014)

Australian director David Michod’s follow-up to Animal Kingdom sees Robert Pattinson and Guy Pearce exchanging blows against the backdrop of a desolate, dystopian society.
Perhaps most similar to The Survivalist, what separates both these films from the lesser iterations of their genre is the focus on the human condition as opposed to the context. The reasons for economic and societal collapse are for the foremost left a mystery, and in a world where supplies and a sense of order are scarce, The Rover and The Survivalist question what’s left of mankind when civilization and its organizing principles disappear.

“An immersive, intimate experience against the backdrop of a sublime and primal landscape”.

The Revenant (DIR. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015)

The film that might finally secure Leonardo DiCaprio his long awaited Oscar, sees him take on a bear, a perilous journey and a Tom Hardy with an agenda. To say it’s deserving is an understatement.

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Whilst The Survivalist’s scale might be smaller, both films test the endurance of their protagonists as they are confronted by punishing situations that push their bodies and psychological strength to the limit.  In a world that is as exquisitely beautiful as it is brutal, the imminence of death seems omnipresent.

With little dialogue, our only window into the pain that DiCaprio’s vengeful frontiersman Hugh Glass suffers is the nuance of his performance and he more than delivers. In The Survivalist, Irish actor Martin McCann likewise has to experience the woes of maggots and using fire to self-heal, though he’s spared the grizzly encounter. In each film, the result is an immersive, intimate experience against the backdrop a sublime and primal landscape.

The Survivalist, alongside two exclusive short films, is now available on We Are Colony with behind-the-scenes extras: http://www.wearecolony.com/the-survivalist