This is a list of 20 filmmakers to watch. Other than their relative youth — one turned 40 a few months ago, and several more will join him soon — they share little besides passion and promise. But bringing them together, and shining a light on their accomplishments and their potential, seems especially urgent as another new season of serious moviegoing gets under way. Here’s why: We are living in a time of cinematic bounty. In multiplexes and beyond, movie lovers have a greater, more dizzying variety of choices — and of screens, large and small — than at any time in history. The surplus of screen entertainment can be thrilling, but also daunting. The New York Times published more than 700 movie reviews last year and is on track to do so again this year. It’s no wonder that the big studios burn money trying to attract the attention of moviegoers, flooding the zone with publicity and marketing, and carpet-bombing theaters with releases. At the same time, smaller-budgeted movies made on the digital cheap are opening in theaters just long enough to rack up reviews before going onto a (theoretically) more profitable ancillary afterlife. Given this glut it’s unsurprising that even the most talented filmmakers, especially those outside the mainstream, are sometimes relegated to semi-obscurity. Their art sees the light of day without quite being noticed. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, despite occasional critical claims to the contrary, the quality of contemporary cinema is as exciting as the quantity is intimidating. Filmmakers around the world are making movies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, personal reflection and social advocacy, conventional narrative and radical experimentation. The oldest filmmakers on our list were born in 1973, on the eve of the home-video revolution, making them members of the first true on-demand generation. They have grown up with unprecedented access to movies from across the globe and from different epochs, an abundance of influences that informs their work and can make it difficult to pigeonhole them aesthetically or regionally. Sebastián Silva is a Chilean who lives in Brooklyn (Fort Greene), as do the Nashville-born Dee Rees and the Dallas-born Terence Nance (both Bedford-Stuyvesant). Benh Zeitlin is a native New Yorker living and working in New Orleans. Lixin Fan is a naturalized Canadian citizen who makes documentaries in China, the country of his birth. Sarah Polley is a well-known actress, with a long résumé of Hollywood and indie credits, who lives and shoots her movies in Canada. Na Hong-Jin is a South Korean who doesn’t speak English and whose last movie was partly bankrolled by an American studio. The sensibilities of these filmmakers are in some cases intensely local, but their work over all also reflects the cosmopolitanism of transnational financing, the international festival circuit and a shrinking world. This special package is part of our annual New Season issue, and while a few of the 20 have movies arriving in the coming months, others have not directed a feature in several years. Yet whether they have a new movie or not, they have remained busy writing, pitching and raising money to make their next feature. Some have also directed short films and commercials; others have rewritten and produced other people’s movies. Still others have traveled the world to publicize a movie that they may have finished years earlier. All of them rely on financial resources that are as varied as their approaches to narrative. Like most lists, this one is necessarily, and cheerfully, subjective. (We’re critics, after all.) The only rules we made are that the filmmakers had to be 40 or younger, and that both of us had to be enthusiastic about all the selections. We weren’t interested in promoting an idea of cinematic correctness or in fabricating an arbitrary new “wave.” We weren’t looking for diversity, even if we happily found it: 25 percent of our directors, for instance, are women, well above the American average. Fewer than half are North American. Male or female, black or white, Londoners or Brooklynites, these 20 do not represent a school, a movement or a generational cohort. What they do represent is the persistence of personal vision and the resilience of cinema, which in its second century remains a young art form with a bright future.
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 17:47:28 +0000