Cinematalk

Mike King talks to James Vaughan about FRIENDS AND STRANGERS. A fresh and entrancing take on the timeless subject of young adulthood, Friends and Strangers introduces a clique of Australian twentysomethings who are looking for their direction, but keep getting distracted along the way. Ray and Alice are on an impromptu camping trip in the Australian countryside, ensconced in their tent but not rea...

Kelley Conway talks to Jean Laurenz about DESCENDED. An abstract ghost story, based on the life and work of 19th century writer, Lafcadio Hearn, Descended is notable both for the uniquely committed lead performance by co-director Jean Laurenz as well as the intricate, trumpet-inflected score written by Maria Finkelmeier and performed in part by Laurenz, who is also a descendent of Hearns. (BR)

Ben Reiser talks to Maya Castronovo about RAH-RAH RILEY. A hapless freshman creates a video to explain why she deserves a spot on the women’s basketball team at Columbia University. (BS)

Kelley Conway talks to Chuko & Arie Esirie about THIS IS MY DESIRE. This stunning diptych brings us two street-level stories from contemporary Lagos, both featuring lead characters who hope to eventually emigrate to Europe. In practical terms, this means each must scrape by with multiple jobs and side hustles as they save up money and attempt to navigate Nigeria’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy in pursuit...

Ben Reiser talks to Bernard Friedman about N OF 1. An appliance repairman from Canada, an immunologist from Israel, and a transplant surgeon from England meet in a hospital in India. This might sound like the start of an elaborate joke, but it is actually a remarkable real-life collaboration established in an effort to save the life of 26-year-old Kayte, a young Florida woman dying of liver cancer...

Jim Healy talks to Brad Lichtenstein & Claude Motley about WHEN CLAUDE GOT SHOT. On the streets of Milwaukee, third year law student, father, and husband Claude Motley is shot in the face by 15-year-old carjacker Nathan King. Filmed over five years, When Claude Got Shot follows Claude’s life after the shooting and his struggles to recover mentally and physically. Diverted from a legal career, Clau...

Ben Reiser and Christina Martin-Wright talk to Jazmine Faries, Patrick Longstreth and Chad Faries about IRON FAMILY. The life of playwright Jazmine Faries is appropriately fraught with drama and tension. So many decisions to be made. Who will produce her work? (Herself). Who will play the autobiographical lead role? (Herself). Who will play her love interest, Matthew McConaughey? (Her brother). Th...

Ben Reiser and Pauline Lampert talk to Mark Street. So Many Ideas Impossible To Do All Mark Street’s mixed media experimental short meditates on the relationship between filmmaker Barbara Hammer and Jane Brakhage. Street combines footage shot by Hammer of an encounter she had with Brakhage along with excerpts from letters Hammer wrote to Brakhage. (PL)

Ben Reiser talks to Jo Ardinger, Rosalie Miller And Samantha Lee about PERSONHOOD. Passed in 1997, Wisconsin’s “Unborn Child Protection Act” protects a fetus in the event of substance or alcohol abuse by the parent. When Tammy Loertscher discovered she was pregnant, she decided to disclose her past drug use with her doctor. This alarming, exhaustively researched documentary tells the story of the...

Born and raised in Istanbul, Emir Cakaroz received his MFA in film from the UWM Peck School of the Arts, where is currently an Associate Lecturer in Film, Video, and Animation. In the PATHS TO HOME trilogy, Cakaroz casts his gaze on his family, and in particular, his mother and father, approaching their stories – emigrating from Bulgaria to Turkey, being treated as outsiders, suffering with illnes...

While our campus theatrical venues remain closed, the Cinematheque is continuing our series of movies you can watch at home for free with a triple feature by Midwest-based independent filmmaker Frank V. Ross: Audrey the Trainwreck, Tiger Tail in Blue, and Bloomin Mud Shuffle. The latter two titles were selections of past editions of the Wisconsin Film Festival. On this episode of our Cinematalk po...

As a supplement to our Cinematheque presentation of Liam Neeson in The Marksman, our special guest on this episode of Cinematalk is Danny Kravitz who co-wrote the screenplay forThe Marksman with Sun Prairie, WI resident Chris Charles. A former student of film within our Department of Communication Arts and graduate of UW Madison, Danny Kravitz spoke to us from his home in Chicago, where he teaches...

This is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection screened to great critical acclaim at last year's Sundance and Venice Film Festivals and was also a selection of the 2020 Wisconsin Film Festival. On this episode of Cinematalk, writer/director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese talks with the Cinematheque's Mike King.

Our special guest is Litza Bixler, choreographer, filmmaker, movement director, visual artist and screenwriter. Her work in feature films includes contributions to three movies directed by Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead (2004), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), and The World’s End (2013). She also served as choreographer for the 2014 jukebox musical Walking on Sunshine and the 2014 salsa dance...

Our guest on a new episode of our official podcast is Nicolas Pereda, the writer, director, and editor of Fauna. His work has been the subject of more than 30 retrospectives worldwide in venues such as Anthology Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, Jeonju International Film Festival and TIFF Cinematheque. Fauna premiered at the 2020 Toronto Film Festival, and has gone on to play the New York, San S...

Cinematalk #30: A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX, with Rodney Ascher Our first episode of Cinematalk for 2021 makes a great supplement to the Cinematheque's showcasing of A Glitch in the Matrix. Glitch director Rodney Ascher talks with the Cinematheque's Jim Healy about how he put his new movie together and simulation theory’s relationship to cinema history and sci-fi literature. Rodney joined us in person...

After losing their mothers to Alzheimer’s disease, three Wisconsin women — determined to find a cure — volunteer their bodies and minds to a groundbreaking study taking place right here at UW Madison. Hailing from Milwaukee, Madison, and Spooner Wisconsin, respectively, Karen, Sigrid, and Barb face strenuous cognitive exams, exercise tests, and neural scans as part of the Wisconsin Registry for Al...

On this podcast, we welcome the husband and wife filmmaking team behind THE RABBI GOES WEST. Gerry Peary should be familiar to Wisconsin Film Festival audiences. In recent years he has been a guest of the festival twice, in 2013 as a cast member of Andrew Bujalski’s COMPUTER CHESS, and in 2016 to present his documentary feature, ARCHIE’S BETTY. Gerry received a Ph. D. in Communications from the Un...

Our returning guest this week is David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies right here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Bordwell has written about King Hu in his books Poetics of Cinema and Planet Hong Kong, both of which you can find at his website, davidbordwell.net, along with numerous blog posts about King Hu, and a wealth of scholarship covering every corner of...

As a bonus to the Cinematheque's presentation of The Twentieth Century, Mike King leads a lively conversation with the movie's ingenious creator, Matthew Rankin. Their talk touches on Canadian national identity, the real and fake Mackenzie King, "dollar store" production design, and much more. The Twentieth Century was an official selection of the 2020 Wisconsin Film Festival and Matthew Rankin's...

On this episode of Cinematalk, presented in tandem with the Cinematheque's free view-at-home tribute to Amos Vogel, Jim Healy speaks with film curator Tobias Hering, an independent curator, researcher and writer based in Berlin who currently directs the "re-selected" project at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. This is an ongoing series of programs based on the festival's analogue...

This week, we’re joined by the director of Filmfarsi, Ehsan Khoshbakht. He is the co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Italy and has authored and contributed to numerous books on cinema.

An informative supplement to the Cinematheque's on-line screening of Identifying Features, this episode features that film's director Fernanda Valadez and her co-screenwriter, co-producer, and co-editor Astrid Rondero. The two filmmakers have been collaborators on a number of short and feature film projects, including The Darkest Days of Us, a movie that marked Rondero’s feature directorial debut...

The Cinematheque’s series of free, view-at-home movies continues with Demons a 1980s cult horror movie that, among other things, plays with the notion of movie theaters as a source for viral infection…and demonic possession. On this episode of Cinematalk, our special guest is writer and cinephile Mike McPadden, author of two positively essential film guides, the recently published Teen Movie Hell...

This week on the podcast we welcome writer-director Xia Magnus, who has been wowing audiences at the Wisconsin Film Festival and beyond since 2016. We speak to Xia about his approach to storytelling, his horror film inspirations, filming in Texas, and working with his Mom. Think of this conversation as the post-screening Q&A we didn’t get to have at this year’s Festival.