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Talkhouse

Walker Kalan is a filmmaker based in New York. <a href="https://www.inylseries.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">I Need Your Love</a>, the comedy series he co-created with pop singer Camille Trust, premiered at Tribeca, won a jury award at Slamdance, and is now available on YouTube and Spotify. Walker’s previous work has won jury awards at Brooklyn Film Festival, HollyShorts, and Ventana Sur. He’s currently developing a drama series set at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships and training his rescue hound, Snoopy, for her on-camera debut.

Walker Kalan

Film

How to Bribe a Priest, and All the Illegal Things We Had to Do to Make Our Series

Marilyn Fu is the screenwriter of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rosemeadfilm/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rosemead</a>, a feature film starring Lucy Liu and based on the award-winning Los Angeles Times article by Frank Shyong. The film earned her a 2025  nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Golden Horse Awards, one of Asia’s highest honors in cinema, and is currently playing in theaters in New York and opens in Los Angeles on December 12. She is a writer on Peacock’s espionage thriller series, The Copenhagen Test, executive produced by James Wan and starring Simu Liu and she wrote the pilot for the Will Packer/Roma Downey-produced The Baxters on Amazon Prime. In features, she wrote The Honor List, released by Lionsgate, and The Sisterhood of Night based on a Steven Millhauser story, for which she won an award at Tribeca. Earlier in her career, she was a writer/reporter for over 40 publications under Time Inc. She earned her degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she became the first recipient of the William Goldman Screenwriting Fellowship and later returned to teach television writing. She lives in New York with her husband, actor Graham Sibley and their sons, Lyon and K.P. (Photo by Joe Turner Lin.)

Marilyn Fu

A Life in Movies: From Eat, Drink, Man, Woman to Rosemead

Marie Losier’s latest documentary, <a href="https://filmmovement.com/press/film/peaches-goes-bananas" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Peaches Goes Bananas</a>, about the singular artist and musician Peaches, is out now in theaters through Film Movement. She has worked in New York City for 23 years, making film portraits on avant-garde directors, musicians and composers, such as the Kuchar brothers, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman, Tony Conrad, Genesis P-Orridge, Alan Vega, Peter Hristoff and Felix Kubin. Whimsical, poetic, dreamlike and unconventional, her films explore the life and work of these artists. Losier’s films have been shown at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlinale, Rotterdam Film Festival, IDFA, the Tate Modern, Le Palais de Tokyo and Le Centre Georges Pompidou. She had a retrospective of her films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2018, and a retrospective at Le Jeu De Paume, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris in 2019. (Photo by Antoine Barraud.)

Marie Losier

A Playground Where Everything and Everyone is Free

Writer-director Xaque Gruber’s first feature, <a href="https://sallywoodmovie.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sallywood</a>, an autobiographical comedy starring the late Academy Award-nominated actors Sally Kirkland alongside Jennifer Tilly, Eric Roberts, Michael Lerner and Keith Carradine, is out now on digital through Buffalo 8. Gruber also directed the short films The Pistol and THE. In the 2000s, he wrote for TV while running Michael Levitt Productions in Hollywood. His TV credits include Hell’s Kitchen, The Michael Jackson Memorial Service and launch of The Oprah Winfrey Network. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing from Pratt Institute as well as two graduate degrees: Tufts University in Art Education, and Boston University in Television Production.

Xaque Gruber

Remembering Sally

Writer-director Carmen Emmi’s award-winning debut feature,<a href="https://www.magpictures.com/plainclothes/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Plainclothes</a>, starring Tom Blyth, Russell Tovey, Maria Dizzia and Amy Forsyth, premiered at Sundance in 2025, was released theatrically by Magnolia and is out now on digital. Set in 1997, the film follows a promising undercover officer assigned to entrap gay men, who defies professional orders when he falls in love with one of his targets. Emmi is a filmmaker with deep roots in Syracuse, New York, where he grew up in a family of farmers. After graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Carmen began his career as an independent Director of Photography, contributing to a range of projects, including short films, commercials, and feature-length productions. (Photo by Lindsy Avritch.)

Carmen Emmi

The Music of Plainclothes

Shannon Plumb has shot over 200 short films, which have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and on international screens. She started by shooting herself as various characters, acting out three-minute situations using humor and silence as her vehicles for storytelling. In 2013, her first feature film, Towheads, premiered at MoMA as part of New Directors / New Films; it is now streaming on the <a href="https://www.criterionchannel.com/towheads" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Criterion Channel</a>. You can see her short films at <a href="http://shannonplumb.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">shannonplumb.com</a> and Towheads is available on Netflix and iTunes. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, director Derek Cianfrance, and their two sons.

Shannon Plumb

“Godard Sucks!”

Alex Schmider is an award-winning producer who also serves as Senior Director of Entertainment at GLAAD, known for helping shape authentic LGBTQ+ storytelling through acclaimed film, TV and documentary projects including Disclosure (Netflix), Changing the Game (Hulu), Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story (Netflix), Framing Agnes (Kino Lorber) and Chasing Chasing Amy (Level 33 Entertainment). Schmider was honored as part of this year’s <a href="https://www.out.com/out100/2025/educators/alex-schmider" target="_blank" rel="noopener">OUT100</a> as he continues to push representation in film and TV forward by amplifying LGBTQ+ stories. His latest project, KICK, is at DOC NYC this year as part of the festival’s PRO Pitch Day on November 13th. Alex was recently named one of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40.

Alex Schmider

Why Sports Documentaries Will Always Matter – To Culture, and To Me

Ramon Zürcher is a Swiss writer-director whose latest film, <a href="https://filmmovement.com/product/the-sparrow-in-the-chimney" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Sparrow in the Chimney</a>, is now on digital. His first feature film, The Strange Little Cat, premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2013 and was selected at over 80 festivals, including Toronto, Cannes, New Directors/NewFilms and Mar del Plata, winning numerous awards. His second feature film, The Girl and the Spider, also premiered at the Berlinale, where it was awarded the prize for Best Director and the FIPRESCI prize of the Encounters section. In Cahiers du Cinéma, the film ranked eighth on the 2021 Best of the Year list. The Sparrow in the Chimney is his third feature film and he is currently writing a youth drama with the working title The Young Woman with the Crowbar. (Photo by Iris Janke.)

Ramon Zürcher

The Ghosts of the Makeshift Apartment

Writer-director Rachel Wolther&#8216;s latest film, <a href="https://thefrenchitalianmovie.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The French Italian</a>, is available on VOD everywhere movies are rented and sold; you can follow the film <a href="https://www.instagram.com/thefrenchitalianfilm/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>. She is an alumna of the Sundance Screenwriter&#8217;s Lab, her work has appeared the Black List and in 2017 she was featured as one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Her first film was <a href="https://www.snowybingbongs.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone</a>, which she directed with Alex Houston Fischer.

Rachel Wolther

I Put All My Best Ideas into the Movie Itself, So Don’t Expect Much From This Essay

Julia Marchese is a filmmaker, actor, podcaster, cinephile and film programmer living in Hollywood, California. Her first film was the award-winning documentary Out of Print, about the importance of revival cinema and 35 mm exhibition to culture, and she is currently the co-host of the popular horror podcast Horror Movie Survival Guide. She recently crowdfunded on <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/i-know-what-you-need-a-stephen-king-adaptation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">IndieGoGo</a> for her forthcoming Dollar Baby short film I Know What You Need, based on Stephen King&#8217;s story of the same name from Night Shift. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @juliacmarchese.

Julia Marchese

Radish Rocks!

Leela Varghese (she/her) and Emma Hough Hobbs (she/they) are the writer-directors of the new animated film <a href="https://lesbianspaceprincessmovie.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lesbian Space Princess</a>, which is in theaters from October 31. Leela is an award-winning Australian filmmaker whose short film I’m The Most Racist Person I Know was selected SXSW Austin 2025, having its world premiere in the narrative short competition. She is also known for her work as a musical comedian, television presenter and voice actor. Emma is a queer artist from Adelaide who is a filmmaker, animator and production designer. Their award winning short On Film was in competition at SXSW Sydney 2023. As a props master, they have worked on projects such as A24’s Talk to Me and Gold, starring Zac Efron. (Photo by Kyahm Ross.)

Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs

Lesbian Space Anxiety

Amy Herdy’s new documentary, <a href="https://www.parrotkindergartendoc.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Parrot Kindergarten</a>, about an attorney and cult survivor who heals by teaching her parrot to read, is in theaters from November 3. She is president and co-founder of Covetower, an investigative production company dedicated to high-impact storytelling across film and television, and has helped create some of the most impactful documentaries of the past decade. She first entered the film world as an expert researcher for the Oscar-nominated, Peabody-winning documentary The Invisible War (2012), her first, which exposed the epidemic of sexual assault in the U.S. military. With Dick and Ziering, she then produced The Hunting Ground (2015), that ignited the national conversation about campus sexual assault and reshaped school policies nationwide; The Bleeding Edge (2018), which investigated corruption in the medical device industry, catalyzing removals of dangerous devices from the market; On the Record (2020), a searing exposé at the intersection of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo; and the four-part HBO series Allen v. Farrow, which was nominated for seven Emmys. Before entering film, Ms. Herdy built her investigative skills in television news and newspapers, reporting in Florida and Kentucky before joining The Denver Post.

film essay