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Jack Dunphy is a filmmaker, animator, actor and writer from Chicago whose short films Serenity and Chekhov have played at Sundance, AFI and festivals around the world. His latest short, Bob&#8217;s Funeral, won Best Nonfiction Short Film at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. His new podcast, Revelations with Jack Dunphy, premieres on October 15. His short film Revelations premiered at Slamdance and went on to play the Champs-Élysées Film Festival in Paris, France. His short film Brontosaurus played the True/False, Nashville, Florida, Philadelphia and Cucalorus film festivals. He starred in Assholes (directed by Peter Vack) which won the audience award at SXSW. He co-wrote Stinking Heaven, which premiered at the International Festival of Rotterdam, with Nathan Silver, and wrote, edited and produced Silver’s The Great Pretender, which played Tribeca, AFI and festivals around the world. (Photo by Shutterstock.)

Jack Dunphy

Film

Pink Elephants

Daisuke Miyazaki is a filmmaker born in Yokohama, Japan whose film <a href="https://metrograph.com/plastic/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Plastic</a> opens October 4 at Metrograph and through Metrograph At Home. After graduating from Waseda University and working under such directors as Leos Carax and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, he made his debut with End of the Night (2011). His directing credits include the 2015 anthology film 5 to 9 (co-directed with Tay Bee Pin and Rasiguet Sookkarn), his 2016 feature Yamato (California), the 2018 drama Tourism, the 2019 thriller Videophobia and the 2023 neo-noir #Mito, plus contributions to the anthology films Made in Yamato (2021) and 10 Stories (2023). His two-part installation Specters and Tourists opened at the ArtScience Museum of Singapore in 2017.

Daisuke Miyazaki

My Runaway Life

Rebecca Richman Cohen is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker who teaches courses on media theory and advocacy at Harvard Law School. Her film <a href="https://weedandwinefilm.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Weed &amp; Wine</a> is now available on VOD, and she is now <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1194067708/weed-and-wine-part-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">crowdfunding</a> a sequel on Kickstarter. Through her work, she has examined a range of topics, including the prosecution of war crimes in Sierra Leone, responses to sexual violence in the US, cannabis legalization, and biodynamic winemaking. Her most recent film, The Recall: Reframed (broadcast on MSNBC) is the first in a trilogy of short films about mass incarceration, sexual violence, and racial justice. Her SXSW and Tribeca-award winning documentaries have been hosted on platforms including HBO, Amazon, Netflix, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Al Jazeera, public television, and more. She has taught at RISD, American University’s Human Rights Institute, and Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, and has held fellowships with Open Society Foundations, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard’s Film Study Center, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her very good dog and some nice humans too.

Rebecca Richman Cohen

Weed & Wine & Kids & Time

Susie Moon and Eric Laplante&#8216;s (AI-free) debut feature, Darla in Space, played at festivals all over the US, including the famous (in certain circles) festival Slamdance, and opens at the <a href="https://quadcinema.com/film/darla-in-space/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Quad Cinema</a> in NYC on September 27.  Susie was born in Seoul Korea and grew up in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She currently resides in Houston, TX. Eric is a filmmaker based out of New York City. He has worked on a large number of narrative, documentary, and commercial projects. He DPed Sylvio, which debuted at SXSW. A short documentary he directed was a Vimeo Staff pick and his comedy content has been shared on many different online platforms. He has a real passion for pressure cooking and making bread (been keeping his mother alive since 2020) and lives with his wife and their Basset hound named Betty Draper.

Susie Moon and Eric Laplante

Grappling with Mind-blowing Kombucha Scoby Orgasms and the AI Conundrum

Julia Marchese is a filmmaker, writer, actor, podcaster, film programmer, VHS Vixen &amp; film critic. She’s known for directing the award-winning feature documentary Out of Print, an acclaimed exploration of repertory cinema culture and film preservation. She also adapted Stephen King’s short story I Know What You Need into an award-winning short film. Julia co-hosts the podcasts Horror Movie Survival Guide, The Loser’s Club and JodoWOWsky, reviews a VHS from her rainbow wall every day on her social media channels and writes about cinema for Talkhouse. Her work frequently explores nostalgia, genre cinema, physical media culture, and the communal power of moviegoing. She is @juliacmarchese on all platforms.

Julia Marchese

Lynchian Delights

Born in Texas and raised in New Mexico, Sheridan O’Donnell is a Korean-American filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His directorial debut, <a href="http://www.sheridanodonnell.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Little Brother</a>, which stars JK Simmons, Daniel Diemer (The Half of It) and Philip Ettinger (First Reformed) and took home the Audience Award at the 2023 Atlanta Film Festival, is out now in theaters through Gravitas Ventures. O’Donnell is currently directing a feature-length documentary as a follow-up to the Emmy Award-winning film Rising Phoenix. The new film, working titled Rising Phoenix: A New Revolution, will chronicle his own story as a disabled filmmaker and profile an international cast of entertainers, athletes, activists, and world leaders—in hopes of igniting a global conversation surrounding the disability movement. (Photo by Ryan Booth.)

Sheridan O’Donnell

My First (and Last) Film

Northern Ireland-born filmmaker Rodger Griffiths&#8216; new film, the taut family thriller Betrayal, is now available on VOD Saban Films. His short film directing credits include Peter’s Room, Wiped and Drinkypoos,and his proof-of-concept short Take the Shot screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Having finished his first feature film, Griffiths is seeking collaborators and investment in his next feature, Skimmer, a crime thriller in the vein of Uncut Gems and Animal Kingdom.

Rodger Griffiths

Storyboarding Stick Men to the Finished Product

Pascal Plante is a Montreal-based filmmaker whose third narrative feature, the psychological cyber-thriller Red Rooms, is out now in theaters through Utopia. His previous film, Nadia, Butterfly, premiered in the official selection of the 73rd edition of Cannes Film Festival in 2020. After his graduation from Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Pascal co-founded the production company Nemesis Films, with which he directed numerous short films including Blast Beat (Slamdance 2019), Blue-Eyed Blonde (Best Canadian Short Film, VIFF 2015), and Nonna (Slamdance 2017). His first narrative feature, a punk romance entitled Fake Tattoos, competed at the Berlinale, in Generation 14plus, in 2018. Pascal considers himself like a cinephile that became a narrative filmmaker with documentarian tendencies.

Pascal Plante

How to Create in Darkness and (Mostly) Stay Sane

Emily Packer is the director/producer of the new documentary, <a href="https://www.holdingbackthetidefilm.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Holding Back the Tide</a>, opens September 6 at DCTV&#8217;s Firehouse Cinema in New York City and October 4 at Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles, via Grasshopper Film. Emily’s directorial work has been screened at film festivals and theaters across the country, including at Anthology Film Archives, BlackStar, DOCNYC, and others. Emily’s short most recent film By Way of Canarsie, which she co-directed with Lesley Steele, is streaming on the Criterion Channel and was a part of POV Shorts Season 6. As an editor, Emily’s work has been featured in the New Yorker, PBS, and on Vimeo Staff Picks. Emily also serves on programming committees for film festivals in New York City, was a fellow in the 2018 Collaborative Studio at UnionDocs in Brooklyn, and is a proud alumna of the anomalous Hampshire College. Emily collects voicemails for future use; consider yourself notified.

Emily Packer

My Serendipitous Stint as Fishmonger-Filmmaker

Zia Anger is a filmmaker and music video director. Her debut feature, <a href="https://mubi.com/en/us/films/my-first-film" target="_blank" rel="noopener">My First Film</a>, is streaming globally on MUBI from September 6. In 2018 she began touring a new solo performance that traces the last ten years of her lost and abandoned work, titled My First Film. The performance was named by The New Yorker as one of the “Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking.” Her most recent short, My Last Film, premiered at the 53rd New York Film Festival. She has made music videos for various independent artists, including Angel Olsen, Mitski, Julianna Barwick, Maggie Rogers, and Jenny Hval; the latter of whom she also tours with as a performer. In 2016, Zia participated in the Sundance Institute&#8217;s Screenwriter&#8217;s Intensive, and in 2015 she was included in Filmmaker magazine&#8217;s &#8220;25 New Faces of Independent Film.&#8221; Find out more at her <a href="http://www.ziaanger.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">official site</a>. (Picture by Theo Anthony.)

Zia Anger

The Process

Nicole Riegel’s latest feature, <a href="https://www.ifcfilms.com/films/dandelion" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dandelion</a>, starring KiKi Layne and Thomas Doherty, is out now in theaters and on VOD. Her debut feature, Holler starring Jessica Barden, was a Film Independent Spirit Award nominee for Best First Feature and was named one of the Top 10 Independent Films of 2021 by National Board of Review. She was named one of Variety&#8216;s 10 Directors to Watch in 2020. She served in the military prior to filmmaking and graduated from UCLA’s MFA writing program. She was named one of Filmmaker magazine’s 25 Faces of Independent Film. In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Nicole served as a co-writer on many of Dandelion’s songs in collaboration with Aaron and Bryce Dessner, including “The Ghost of Cincinnati,” an original song for Dandelion, which was released as a single from Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Big Red Machine album on August 27, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Ana Lucia Espinosa.)

Nicole Riegel

Inside the Sound of Dandelion

Bradley Rust Gray (born 1971) is an American independent filmmaker. His feature Salt (2003), shot in Iceland, won the Calgary Film Prize at Berlin. The Exploding Girl (2009) won the Best Actress prize at the Tribeca Film Festival for Zoe Kazan’s performance and was released by Oscilloscope Laboratories. Jack &amp; Diane (2012) was released by Magnolia Pictures. <a href="https://strandreleasing.com/films/ill-be-your-mirror/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">I’ll Be Your Mirror</a> (aka Blood), his most recent feature, was awarded an award for Uncompromising Artistic Vision in 2022 at The Sundance Film Festival and opens at the <a href="https://www.ifccenter.com/films/ill-be-your-mirror/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">IFC Center</a> on August 23 and the <a href="https://www.laemmle.com/film/ill-be-your-mirror" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Laemmle Glendale</a> on August 30. Additionally, Gray has produced four films by So Yong Kim: In Between Days (2006), Treeless Mountain (2008), For Ellen (2012) and Lovesong (2016). He is a Fulbright scholar who has received graduate degrees from both USC and the British Film Institute in London.

film essay