Issue 06: International Directors A–Z
It's Friday night and your dinner plans have suddenly been cancelled because your friends got last-minute tickets to the opera (thanks, Millennials). You're feeling adventurous—you had been planning on going to that new Moroccan-Japanese fusion place in that up-and-coming part of town, after all—and you've recently cleared out your Netflix queue of all the Oscar fare and blockbusters you had been meaning to watch, so you decide to watch something foreign tonight. But…what to watch?
Netflix is something of a repository for bad foreign films, so it can be difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, as the saying goes. Without making any claims to completeness, here's an alphabetical guide to some of the most acclaimed international directors working today to get you started. There's something here for every taste and genre preference, from smart comedies to weepy melodramas to avant-garde experimentalism.
A is for Aki Kaurismäki. When was the last time you watched a movie from Finland? Probably never, because Kaurismäki, the only Finnish director of any sort of renown, makes movies in French half of the time (the European Union is funny that way). Kaurismäki has an unmistakably droll sense of humor and a genius for photography, but unlike so many directors of his generation he isn't above a happy ending. [Sample films: Le Havre, La vie de Bohème, The Man without a Past]
A is also for Asghar Farhadi, Abderrahmane Sissako, Abdellatif Kechiche…narrowing this down was difficult.
B is for Bertrand Bonello. There's a very particular circuit of movie lovers who have warmed to Bonello's slow, sexy, ponderous style of filmmaking over the years; outside of them and the Cannes Film Festival, which regularly plays host to his newest works, you're unlikely to have heard of him otherwise. His most recent outing was marketed in the U.S. with the pullquote, “If Scorsese directed Proust, this would be it,” and who doesn't want to see that, honestly? [Sample films: Saint Laurent, House of Tolerance, Tiresia]
C is for Céline Sciamma. On shoestring budgets, crews you could count on both hands, and production schedules of just a few weeks, Sciamma is one of the greatest beneficiaries of the digital filmmaking revolution. Her movies celebrate girlhood and girl power and all the joys and doubts of being a young woman in the 21st century. [Sample films: Tomboy, Girlhood, Water Lilies]
D is for Claire Denis. Denis’s youth in Africa informs her work, a strange and harrowing body of films that scrutinize masculinity, colonialism, and modern alienation. Provocative and perplexing, her filmmaking aggravates even the most die-hard of movie lovers at the same time that it enthralls with its anarchic unpredictability. [Sample films: Beau Travail, White Material, 35 Shots of Rum]
E is for Edward Yang. The world lost Yang too soon, in 2007. His chronicles of Taiwanese families and society have earned him canonical status as one of the world's best directors, although his movies’ length and home-video elusiveness has long kept him from American audiences. [Sample films: Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day]
F is for François Ozon. If there exists such a thing as a mainstream auteur in France, Ozon is it. While his early features and short films were groundbreaking in the fairly niche realm of queer cinema, his recent output of mind-benders and gender-bending provocations makes for an accessible lot. [Sample films: In the House, Potiche, Swimming Pool]
G is for Miguel Gomes. Austerity measures in Portugal haven't slowed the country's filmmakers as they have the economy. It's hard to pin down Gomes’ style of filmmaking since it's constantly leaping from branch to branch. Within the course of the same film, he can wheel out everything from a mid-movie silent film to a full-out documentary. But for all his whimsical formal choices, his politics are dead serious. [Sample films: Tabu, Our Beloved Month of August, Arabian Nights]
H is for Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Hou is slow. Know that before you go into any of his films, which altogether form a curious tapestry of Asia's past and present. That said, far more than even Terrence Malick, his moviemaking invites meditation and reflection. If you're willing to engage with his scrupulous style of endless long takes and carefully-curated production details, you'll find the spiritual and aesthetic results tremendously rewarding. [Sample films: Millennium Mambo, Flowers of Shanghai, A City of Sadness]
I is for Im Sang-Soo. South Korea has produced its share of crossover hits recently, from Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy) to Bong Joon-Ho (Snowpiercer). Im Sang-Soo has yet to break out in a big way stateside (and I, admittedly, still need to catch up on him), perhaps because his thrillers are more distinctively Korean than those of his contemporaries. [Sample films: The Housemaid, The President's Last Bang]
I also just realized that this list doesn't include any Italians, possibly because Italian cinema has been somewhat lackluster in recent years; nevertheless, Paolo Sorrentino is Italian and you've probably all seen The Great Beauty by now so I don't need to say any more on that subject.
J is for Joshua Oppenheimer. Twice Joshua Oppenheimer has been nominated for an Oscar, and twice he's lost out to a populist music documentary. Ask anyone in the world of documentary filmmaking who the most exciting and important director working today is and the U.S.-born, Denmark-residing Oppenheimer will be the reply. With his films about the Indonesian genocide and its unconvicted perpetrators, he's managed to both bring an overlooked atrocity to the world's attention and to revolutionize documentary filmmaking in the process. [Sample films: The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence]
K is for Abbas Kiarostami. Iranian cinema has a long and rich history, one that Kiarostami helped reinvigorate despite the country's strict censorship laws on entertainment. The great-uncle of contemporary Persian film, Kiarostami is best known for his Movies About People Having Conversations In Cars, although he's also up for adventurous experimentation—casting the real-life subjects of a court case in a reenactment of their lives, for example, or making a movie out of a theater full of Iranian actresses (and Juliette Binoche) watching a movie. [Sample films: Close-Up, Shirin, Certified Copy]
L is for Lucrecia Martel. Everybody has a “new wave” nowadays, including Argentina, whose film schools produced Martel in the early 2000s. Though she's been MIA for eight years, Martel finally has a new film slated for release in the next year or so, welcome news to anyone familiar with her sultry brand of South American soundscapes and intriguing female characters. [Sample films: La Ciénaga, The Headless Woman]
M is for Michael Haneke. When people talk about austere, Eastern European art films in generalized terms, Haneke is to blame. The Austrian septuagenarian takes a relentless approach to deconstructing and, at times, dehumanizing the bourgeois ranks of European society. Also, he names the main characters in all of his movies some variation on “George” and “Anne”. [Sample films: Caché, The White Ribbon, Amour]
N is for Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The other director that springs to mind when talking about austere, Eastern European art films is Ceylan, whose roots in photography and theatre are obvious in his loooooooong, sloooooooow, and woooooooordy—yet unmistakably beautiful—movies. His latest won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, thus cementing his place in the canon of master directors. [Sample films: Distant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia]
O is for Olivier Assayas. If Michael Haneke likes to scrutinize the bourgeoisie to the point of torture, Assayas at least likes to have some fun with them. Uniting the best of the theatre with shades of Ingmar Bergman (at least in the one film of his I've seen), Assayas movies sound on paper like they could exist as other media, until you add in the layers of cinematic self-reflexivity characteristic to his work. [Sample films: Irma Vep, Carlos, Clouds of Sils Maria]
P is for Pedro Costa. I have not yet stomached a Costa film so I will take it on authority that his artistic inclinations are capital-c Challenging. The Portuguese director is known for his long, quasi-documentary films shot in the poorest quarters of his country and frequently headlined by the singular face of the actor known only as Ventura. Try to contain your excitement, I can feel it through the screen. [Sample films: In Vanda's Room, Horse Money]
Q is for Katell Quillévéré. I don't actually know anything about this director, but I needed a “Q” so now I get to learn something too! Quillévéré is a young (36) director who seems poised for a big breakout, so when the wondergirl from Ivory Coast makes the big time you can thank me for introducing you to her first. [Sample films: Suzanne, Love Like Poison]
R is for Carlos Reygadas. Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro aren't the only directors from Mexico worth writing home about. Reygadas has been called in some quarters the Terrence Malick of Mexican cinema (although Cuarón and Iñárritu have also garnered those comparisons, so perhaps there's just something in the water) for his sprawling, meditative, and, frankly, oftentimes bizarre work on community, religion, and family. [Sample films: Silent Light, Post Tenebras Lux]
S is for Aleksandr Sokurov. The great Russian mastermind behind Russian Ark and friend of Andrei Tarkovsky is interested in art and history and the intersections of the two. Most of his films are formally rigorous and intellectual and unabashedly Russian, making them perfect candidates to premiere at the Venice Film Festival to great fanfare, rarely to reach theaters in the Western hemisphere. [Sample films: Russian Ark, The Sun, Faust {yes, that Faust}]
T is for Takashi Miike. Ha-HA! You thought this was going to be a list full of stodgy, boring directors, didn't you? Meet Miike, whose insanely prolific output has produced no fewer than thirteen films in the last five years. Most of his films fall under the obvious umbrella of mainstream Japanese blockbusters, and chances are if you've seen a samurai slasher flick in the past year, it was his doing. [Sample films: Thirteen Assassins, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, Yakuza Apocalypse]
(…I have it on authority, however, that the real ballistic artistry these days is being done at the workshop of poet-filmmaker Sion Sono, but I already had an S and needed to get a Russian on here. [Sample films: Why Don't You Play In Hell?, Tokyo Tribe])
U is for Cristian Mungiu (well why don't you try and find a director whose name begins with “U”?). Mungiu has only made 2 major films since he materialized out of seemingly nowhere in 2007, but BOY have they ever made an impression. When you hear people on twitter or at East Village cocktail parties (do people have cocktail parties in the East Village? As you know, I am not a New Yorker.) talking about harrowing Romanian abortion dramas…*points an accusatory finger at Mungiu* [Sample films: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Beyond the Hills]
V is for Thomas Vinterberg. Occasionally a foreign-born director will achieve an unexpected success Stateside. That's precisely what happened with Vinterberg, who had a smash hit on his hands with The Hunt, the movie also responsible for launching Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal career. Vinterberg has since dabbled in English-language features, as many European directors find themselves doing in cinema's globalized age. [Sample films: The Hunt, Far from the Madding Crowd]
W is for Wong Kar-Wai. The man in shades from Hong Kong may be past his heyday—he was huge in the late nineties/early 2000s—but the impact he left on the world of movies will be felt for a long time. I dare you to watch any romantic drama with artistic aspirations from the last 10 years that hasn't been influenced by Wong's moody, sensuous, and downright stylish filmmaking. [Sample films: In the Mood for Love, Happy Together, Chunking Express]
W is also for Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but you can call him Thai Joe. [Sample films: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Tropical Malady]
X is for Xavier Beauvois (it's also for Xavier Dolan, but I talk enough about him as it is already). Beauvois is one of the few directors on this list who's also dabbled in acting; they don't make ’em like Charlie Chaplin anymore. He seems to have earned the eternal goodwill of movie watchers of every stripe with his stirring drama about Trappist monks in the Algerian War; though his follow-up feature didn't make quite the same splash, any time there's a new movie with his name affixed on the director's chair, people take notice. [Sample films: Of Gods and Men, The Price of Fame]
Y is for Yorgos Lanthimos. You thought I was going to get this far without bringing any Greeks into the conversation? Oh, ye of little faith. Count yourself in Lanthimos’ company; though the Greek Orthodox church has a pervasive influence on the country's culture, Lanthimos is far more intrigued by transgressive satire and black comedy than Orthodox piety. He's also making the crossover into Hollywood, so watch out, because soon nobody will be safe from his pyromanic magnifying glass. [Sample films: Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster]
Z is for Zhang Yimou. Before he directed the 2008 Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing, before he wowed American audiences with his obscenely colorful wuxia movies—before any of the international fame, Yimou was renowned in China and in art house circles as a director of powerful melodramas with actress Gong Li as his perennial muse. Though the quality in his recent output has dipped off a bit, he's still left us with a legacy of rapturous filmmaking that stirs all the senses. [Sample films: Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Hero]
[Articles, news, interviews, and posters will return in the next issue.]