By the Time It Gets Dark, Anocha Suwichakornpong

SERIES
Reverse Shot 15: Filmmakers on the Rise

Ongoing

The film journal Reverse Shot, the official house publication of Museum of the Moving Image for four years, has been in existence since 2003. To celebrate its 15th year, editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert invited contributors to take part in “15 Rising,” an anniversary symposium that pays tribute to exciting new filmmakers who are just emerging on the international scene. Each writer selected a recently rising—or still underseen—filmmaker from anywhere in the world; the filmmaker could be a creator of anything from narratives to documentaries to experimental works. The only rule: the filmmaker should have made five or fewer features (but more than one). The resulting essays are diverse: Brazil, Canada, China, France, India, Japan, Pakistan, Thailand, and the United States are all represented, giving a good indication of where some of the most promising cinematic artistry is taking place. In this series, the Museum is pleased to present a selection of film by these rising artists. Most programs will be organized as double features to showcase each filmmaker’s developing body of work.

“We've been publishing Reverse Shot for 15 years, and when it comes to maintaining our optimism and enthusiasm for the medium we all ostensibly love, we've had our ups and downs,” write Koresky and Reichert in the introduction to their new symposium. “But things feel hopeful as of late, both in terms of filmmaking and in film criticism. There's a panoply of exciting new artists out there, from all over the world, and there is an ascendant generation of film lovers and writers who are there for it, willing to engage and wrestle with form, with politics, with the meaning and power of the image. It feels like a lot of ideas are percolating around movies, and as big-budget blockbusterdom is increasingly endangered, financially and intellectually, makers of true cinema are only gaining in power.”