Ava DuVernay Wants Her Film “Origin” to ...

Julio Torres got his big break as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” and went on to make the cult favorites “Los Espookys” and “Fantasmas” for HBO. He also wrote and directed the film “Problemista,” about a toy designer facing deportation. There’s a particular kind of surrealism ... Show More

The staff writer Jon Lee Anderson has reported from Cuba for many years, and recently wrote about the deteriorating economic conditions on the island. His newest piece for the magazine dives into the potential outcomes of Donald Trump’s desire to pursue regime change. Anderson ex ... Show More

Chloé Zhao became only the second woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, for 2020’s “Nomadland,” and she is nominated once again for “Hamnet,” starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, the film follows a young William Shakespea ... Show More

Elizabeth Reich is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College in New London. Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2016) examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic ... Show More

What is the history of equal rights in Hollywood? In A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood (Columbia UP, 2019), Eithne Quinn, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, explores the transitional years following the civil ... Show More

Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls (Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of African-descended women and girls in twentieth and twenty-first century filmmaking. Topics include a discursive analysis of stereot ... Show More

In this episode of Kawalis, we welcome Farah Nabulsi, the acclaimed director and writer behind films like "The Teacher" and the BAFTA-winning and Oscar-nominated "The Present." Nabulsi shares her powerful journey from her career in finance to filmmaking, highlighting her profound ... Show More

Award-winning TV writer/producer turned novelist Georgia Jeffries spoke with me about why Cagney and Lacey was her film school, teaching screenwriting at USC, and the ghosts, grief, and grievance in her debut novel THE YOUNGER GIRL. Georgia Jeffries is the Emmy-nominated TV write ... Show More

Being a director, winning the Angénieux Encouragement Award at Cannes, navigating the film industry, and differences between working on ads, TV and cinema: award-winning Egyptian director Haya Khairat gives us an insider view on life behind the camera. In conversation with Mikey, ... Show More

In 2022, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. But she wasn’t the first actress of Asian origin to be nominated. In 1935, Merle Oberon was nominated for Best Actress for the role of Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel, only her second fi ... Show More

<p>The campaign for an Oscar is just that: a campaign. In the weeks and months leading up to the ninety-sixth Academy Awards, actors and directors have been hard at work reminding voters and the public alike of their worthiness, P.R. agencies have churned out “for your considerat ... Show More

Mark Harris has enjoyed watching horror movies since the age of about 10 or 12. Growing up in the 1980's with so few Black characters on TV or in movies, he always noticed when there was a person of color onscreen. It stood out even more in horror, and the Black character would i ... Show More

The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood (Beacon, 2020) by Naomi McDougall Jones is a brutally honest look at the systemic exclusion of women in film—an industry with massive cultural influence—and how, in response, women are making space ... Show More