Directors Notes

The relaunch of the Directors Notes Podcast is a multi-faceted episode with a variety of voices where we bring you a roundup of our activity from the 2024 BFI London Film Festival . I dove into the proverbial trenches of the festival, immersing myself in as many films as possible and catching up with filmmakers both old and new to the site as I trod the well trodden paths between Picturehouse Cent...

Joining DN for our final podcast episode of 2019, Argentinian Director Lucio Castro’s debut feature End of the Century reunites two men for a one night stand whose seeds were sown two decades earlier. In our interview, Castro and I get into his use of performance rather than prosthetics to donate different time periods, the flexibility of shooting with a skeleton crew and the importance of w...

Marking her move into fiction filmmaking, Italian Director Maura Delpero’s Maternal ( Hogar ) is an enthralling exploration of the meaning of motherhood set within the confines of a religious Buenos Aires refuge for young unmarried mothers. In our chat Delpero shares why she believes personal stories make universal cinema, how the tools of her documentary background provided an elucidating v...

During our time at this year’s London Film Festival DN took the opportunity to sit down with Eryk Rocha the Brazilian director of Burning Night ( Breve Miragem de Sol ) – a film which depicts the isolation and economic struggle of a Rio de Janeiro taxi driver as he works the city’s late night streets. In our discussion, Rocha reveals the ways in which his documentary background b...

If you live in the UK then you’ll be all too aware of the shocking amount of youth on youth violence which has plagued the country in recent years. Less often reported is the fact that these attacks are often fuelled by the activities of criminal gangs who recruit vulnerable children as expendable foot soldiers in a cross-country drugs distribution practice know as ‘County Lines’...

Returning to the narrative roots of her well received debut feature Thirst , Svetla Tsotsorkova’s Sister ( Sestra ) is a self proclaimed “confession of love to those who live a seemingly unnoticeable life”. The story of compulsive tall tale teller Rayna, Sister follows the defiant teen as one of her fanciful stories threatens to tear her family apart. In our interview, Tsotsorkov...

A film which left this year’s Tribeca on a wave of plaudits – not least because this debut feature made history when 19 year old filmmaker Phillip Youmans became the youngest and first African-American director to be awarded Best Narrative Feature at the festival – Burning Cane tells the story of an ageing mother struggling between her religious convictions and the love of her al...

We kick off our 2019 season of podcasts with an interview recorded at the London Film Festival with Director Hari Sama , who talks to us about heading back to a Mexico City of 1986 and the character defining post-punk days of sexual liberty, outsider art and drugs which helped shape him, in his vibrant semi-autobiographical feature This Is Not Berlin ( Esto no es Berlín ). This Is Not Berlin (2019...

An assured debut feature which despite its frank depiction of sexual violence never slips into the male gaze and in fact, purposely turns the tables on the long problematic trope of the femme fatale, Holiday from Swedish Writer/Director Isabella Eklöf , uses the life of glitzy excesses experienced on the Turkish Rivera by a newly minted gangster girlfriend as an indictment of ultra-liberal capital...

Our penultimate interview from this year’s London Film Festival , DN speaks to veteran French Director Philippe Faucon about his story of economic separation and loneliness, Amin . Shot in Senegal and France, and featuring a predominately non-professional cast, Philippe discusses why working with non-actors is an integral part of his process and the power of cinema to enable audiences to con...

During our time at the London Film Festival DN took the opportunity to speak to Director Sara Colangelo about her adaptation of Nadav Lapid’s critically acclaimed 2014 feature The Kindergarten Teacher , starring Maggie Gyllenhaal in what has been heralded by many as a career-best performance. In the following interview, Sara discusses the advantages of a Netflix release, how she deployed thr...

DN heads back to the London Film Festival for an interview we recorded with Director Christina Choe whose feature debut, the psychodrama Nancy , picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance earlier this year. In our interview we speak to Christina about the difficulties of securing financing for films led by complex female protagonists, gathering a more than enviable cast of well respe...

A rightfully grueling and all-encompassing viewing experience, Erik Poppe’s Utøya: July 22 depicts in real time the violent tragedy of the 2011 Utøya summer camp massacre in Norway, which saw a heavily armed right-wing extremist take the lives of 69 youths over the course of a relentless 72 minutes. We spoke to Erik at the London Film Festival about why it was important to tell this story fr...

LFF Female Filmmaker Panel (left to right) Jessica Hynes, Sara Blecher, Arantxa Echevarria, Dyana Winkler, Soudade Kadaan & Sam Baker Today on the podcast we bring you audio from the London Film Festival’s Female Filmmaker Panel chaired by The Pool founder Sam Baker and comprising filmmakers Arantxa Echevarria (Carmen and Lola), Sara Blecher (Mayfair), Dyana Winkler (United Skates), Soud...

10 years in the making and spanning three decades in the life and career of underground DJ, music producer and record label owner James Lavelle, feature documentary The Man from Mo’Wax provides a compelling look at the foundation and implosion of one of the 90s most influential record labels and the driven man behind it who made careers, hits and a fair amount of enemies along the way. I sat...