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Talkhouse

Penny Lane has been making award-winning, innovative nonfiction films for more than a decade. Her latest documentary,&nbsp;Hail Satan?, about the The Satanic Temple, premiered at Sundance and is being released in select theaters by Magnolia from April 19.&nbsp;Her previous documentary features include&nbsp;The Pain of Others (2018),&nbsp;Nuts! (2016) and&nbsp;Our Nixon (2013). She&nbsp;was named one of Filmmaker magazine&#8217;s &#8220;25 New Faces of Independent Film&#8221; in 2012.&nbsp;Lane is currently an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University, where she lives in a very old house and shows movies in her barn. And yes, Penny Lane is her real name.

Penny Lane

Film

I Finally Made a “Normal” Documentary. Here Is What I Learned.

Brandon Colvin is a filmmaker, scholar and educator. He has written, directed and produced two features, Frames (2012) and Sabbatical (2014), and served as a producer on Tears of God (2015). He is currently a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Brandon Colvin

Caveh Zahedi is an autobiographical filmmaker whose body of work attempts to tell the story of his life as it unfolds. His latest film, <a href="https://www.roxycinemanewyork.com/screenings/tripping-with-caveh-getting-stoned-with-will-oldham/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Getting Stoned with Will Oldham</a>, a follow-up to his cult classic Tripping with Caveh, 20 years on, has its world premiere on October 19 at the Roxy Cinema in New York City. His feature-length films include The Sheik and I (2012), I Am A Sex Addict (2005), In The Bathtub of the World (2001), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), and A Little Stiff (1991). His short films and other series include Getting Stoned with Caveh, Bob Dylan Hates Me, Tripping with Caveh, and I Was Possessed by God. A box set of his films is available from <a href="http://www.factorytwentyfive.com/caveh/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Factory 25</a>.

Caveh Zahedi

Frankie Latina is an Italian-American independent writer-director born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who began using his uncle Dave&#8217;s Super 8mm camera to make movies when he was a teenager. He studied film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he learned how to make 16mm movies, and made his feature debut in 2009 with Modus Operandi. It was released theatrically by Kino Lorber in 2010 and is now available on VOD. <a href="http://www.frankielatina.com/" target="_blank">Latina</a> is currently making his second feature, Snapshot.

Frankie Latina

Jeff Reichert is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and critic based in Brooklyn.

Jeff Reichert

Joel Potrykus resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he works with a filmmaking band, Sob Noisse, including long-time collaborator Joshua Burge. His latest feature, <a href="https://tribecafilm.com/films/vulcanizadora-2024" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Vulcanizadora</a>, makes its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2024. His films Ape, Buzzard, The Alchemist Cookbook and Relaxer have premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, and have screened at the Lincoln Center and the MoMa. He teaches filmmaking at Grand Valley State University.

Joel Potrykus

Writer and director Nick Simon grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to attend the American Film Institute Conservatory. Upon graduation, Simon co-wrote and directed his first thriller, Removal. During the next several years Simon continued to write and direct for TV and film. Sticking within the horror and thriller genre. With films like The Girl in the Photographs, The Pyramid, and Cold Comes the Night”. Working alongside film legends like Wes Craven and Dean Cundey.  Simon is also pizza connoisseur, rescue dog enthusiast and lover of team-of-expert-movies.

Nick Simon

Riley Stearns is the writer-director of Faults (2014), The Art of Self-Defense (2019) and his new film Dual, starring Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul, which is available on digital, on demand and AMC+ on May 20. He lives in Los Angeles. You can visit his website <a href="http://www.rileystearns.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>.

Riley Stearns

Rodney Ascher is a filmmaker known for working in the spaces between documentaries, collage, and genre films. His feature debut, Room 237, managed a theatrical release despite the fact that it was made on a home computer in his living room. Other projects include The Nightmare, Primal Screen, Haunted, Horrifying Sounds From Beyond the Grave, and as editor, Andy Kaufman’s posthumous (?) comedy album, Andy and His Grandmother. A Glitch in the Matrix, his latest, explores Simulation Theory and, knock on wood, will premiere later this year. He lives in a fast-gentrifying corner of Los Angeles with his talented family and their beautiful cat. (Photo by Joseph Cultice.)

Rodney Ascher

Terence Nance is an Artist, Musician, and Filmmaker born in Dallas, Texas in what was then referred to as the State-Thomas community. Nance wrote, directed, scored, and starred in his first feature film, <a href="http://ofherbeauty.com">An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,</a> which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically in 2013. In 2014, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In the summer of 2018, Terence’s Peabody award-winning television series Random Acts of Flyness debuted on HBO to great critical acclaim, and was renewed for a second season by the network. His latest release as a musician, Vortex+, came out in early 2025.

Terence Nance

Zach Clark is the writer-director of The Becomers, Little Sister, White Reindeer, Vacation! and Modern Love is Automatic. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Zach Clark

Zack Parker is a Midwest-based independent filmmaker. His features include the horror/thrillers Inexchange, Quench and Scalene. <a href="http://twitter.com/PROXY_Movie" target="_blank">Proxy</a>, his latest, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013, and will be released on Blu-ray and DVD by IFC Midnight August 12th.

Zack Parker

“It Got One Star, for the Cat”: Filmmakers Choose More of Their Favorite Negative User Reviews

Richard Shepard’s first documentary feature, <a href="https://filmforum.org/film/film-geek" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Film Geek</a>, premiered at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles this past fall and is screening for two weeks at Film Forum in New York City starting May 17. He is an Emmy- and DGA-winning director/writer whose feature films include the Golden Globe-nominated The Matador, starring Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear; Dom Hemingway, starring Jude Law and Richard E. Grant; and The Perfection, starring Allison Williams and Logan Browning. In his career, Shepard has directed 10 television pilots to pick-up including Criminal Minds; Ugly Betty, for which Shepard won the Director’s Guild award and Emmy award; the Golden Globe- and Emmy-nominated Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist; and Acapulco for Apple, now in its third season. Through its six seasons, Shepard directed 12 episodes of the Golden Globe-winning HBO series Girls, including the controversial “American Bitch” episode, for which Matthew Rhys received an Emmy nomination, as well as several Emmy-nominated episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale. He recently directed the final two episodes of the multiple Emmy-nominated Welcome to Chippendales, a Hulu limited series. Shepard’s HBO documentary I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale was nominated for an Emmy award.

Richard Shepard

With a strange mix of underground horror shock and existential atmosphere, Calvin Lee Reeder made a name for himself with short films like Piledriver and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDFaLFA5VBY" target="_blank">Little Farm</a>. His features films <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWJiYebSQYM" target="_blank">The Rambler</a> (Anchor Bay Films) and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE7lxnhqYJ8" target="_blank">The Oregonian</a> (Factory 25) divided and excited Sundance audiences just as his shorts had before them. Reeder specializes in turning lo-fi splatter pics into art films by meshing high-concept thought and design with genre storylines. Follow him <a href="https://twitter.com/CalvinLeeReeder" target="_blank">here</a>.

Calvin Lee Reeder

David Lowery is a filmmaker from Texas. His work as a director has been shown at Sundance, SXSW and the Cannes Film Festival, and includes Pioneer, St. Nick and Ain&#8217;t Them Bodies Saints. As an editor, he has cut such films as Bad Fever, Sun Don&#8217;t Shine and Upstream Color, for which he received an Independent Spirit Nomination. As of this writing he is working on a movie about a dragon.

David Lowery

Robert Greene’s critically acclaimed films include Bisbee ’17 (2018), the Sundance award-winning Kate Plays Christine (2016) and the Gotham Award-nominated Actress (2014). He has edited many others, including Her Smell (2018), Golden Exits (2017), Queen of Earth (2015) and Listen Up Philip (2014) by Alex Ross Perry and award-winning documentaries such as Approaching the Elephant (2014). Robert was an inaugural Sundance Art of Nonfiction fellow in 2015. He writes for Sight &amp; Sound and is the Filmmaker-in-Chief at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. <a href="https://www.impactpartnersfilm.com/films/bisbee-17" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bisbee ’17 </a>begins its theatrical run at Film Forum from September 5.

Penny Lane

I Finally Made a “Normal” Documentary. Here Is What I Learned.

“It Got One Star, for the Cat”: Filmmakers Choose More of Their Favorite Negative User Reviews

Talkhouse Film Contributors Talk Sundance Recommendations

Penny Lane (Our Nixon) Talks James Manera’s Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?

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