We Need to Talk About Oscar

Writer-director Liz Sargent built 'Take Me Home' out of the life she and her sister Anna have lived, expanding her Sundance short into a feature. Liz opens up about what it means for her work to sit so squarely inside her own family, and whether any line can realistically exist between directing a project and living it, between being someone's director and being their sister once the camera rolls.
The short still stands on its own, and Liz looks back on it now with the feature finished, considering how her feelings toward that earlier piece have changed and whether the longer process gave her new appreciation for choices she made the first time around. She also gets into how a feature schedule, so much longer and heavier than a short, reshaped her working rhythm with Anna, and what pulled her toward telling this as fiction rather than documentary.
Anna acts opposite a seasoned ensemble here, and Liz describes how she built a set where her sister felt secure and genuinely creatively empowered among them, along with the accessibility practices her crew adopted to make that possible for everyone. She closes on the film's ending and the hopeful world it imagines, and whether offering audiences that vision makes the current state of care systems land even harder for her.

Writer-director-star Greg Vrotsos shot 'Situations' entirely within Silver Lake, and considers how uncommon it's become for a film to present Los Angeles as itself rather than a stand-in for somewhere else. He also unpacks the space between what he anticipated directing would feel like and what actually filled his days on set, plus whether the experience reshaped opinions he'd carried for years as an actor working under other directors.
Several scenes place Greg's character, Nick, in conversation with himself, and he identifies who or what served as his counterpart in those beats. He addresses his instinct to withhold emotional explanation and let the audience fill in what a character feels, and describes how his eye as a photographer informed the visual distance he and cinematographer Trevor Wineman maintained between the lens and the people on screen.
Greg also reflects on what playing a man trying to climb out of a creative and romantic slump revealed about his own habits as a performer, including instincts he found he could finally drop. We wrap by considering whether completing a film rooted in frustration over the scarcity of stories about adults in their thirties and forties actually eased that frustration, or simply underlined how rare those human scale stories remain.
(Photo: Courtesy of Liam Brown)

Joe Swanberg sets his first feature in nearly a decade against the vast landscapes of Anchorage, Alaska, a marked departure from the cramped apartments and coffee shops that have long defined relationship dramas. Joe reflects on what it meant to trade those intimate confines for bush planes and sprawling terrain, and how directing on that scale changed his day to day approach behind the camera.
Known for building loose, outline-driven scripts that let dialogue emerge in the room, Joe considers whether a larger crew and the added complexity of shooting in Anchorage forced him to tighten his structure, or whether his cast still found room to reshape scenes on the fly. He also touches on returning to 35mm for this production, and what that format brought to a story centered on people navigating their messy thirties from a more reflective, slightly older vantage point than his earlier work, without slipping into easy nostalgia.
This marks Joe's fourth collaboration with Jake Johnson, and he weighs in on how their long partnership keeps evolving, particularly given how closely this story draws from his own life. Joe also opens up about directing Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith, who had no prior films of his to measure this experience against, and what that dynamic looked like without any shared history to lean on.
(Photo credit: Mitchell Hansen)

Orlando von Einsiedel, the Academy Award winning director behind 'The White Helmets' and 'Virunga,' turns to romance with 'The Cycle of Love,' recreating PK Mahanandia's 6,000 mile bicycle journey from Delhi to Sweden. A dedicated London cyclist himself, Orlando reveals whether he pedaled alongside actor Chirag Lobo during production, and considers which strict verité habits he had to let go of once staging unscripted, actor driven scenes became central to the process.
Real strangers encountered along the route add another layer of unpredictability, and Orlando explains how he steered those spontaneous exchanges whenever they risked pulling too far from the emotional heart of PK's original trip. With little archival footage surviving from the actual 1977 journey, he leaned instead on a collection of handwritten letters and keepsakes, pointing to the single object that resisted translation to screen more than any other. He also weighs whether spending years immersed in a story anchored by a childhood prophecy altered his own outlook on fate versus coincidence.
Having built a career largely around documenting conflict, Orlando discusses the different creative muscles needed to render pure joy on screen without tipping into sentimentality. We close on the film's handling of caste based discrimination, describing his work with Dalit advocacy groups and one piece of guidance from that partnership that changed either a moment on set or a choice made later in the edit.

Director Jess Zeidman previously wrote 'Tahara' for Olivia Peace to direct, and this time stepped behind the camera herself, working alongside cinematographer Leo Gallagher, who moved up from gaffer on that earlier project to DP here. Jess unpacks what shifted in her instincts now that every creative choice landed on her desk, while Leo identifies which lessons from his prior work translated most directly to this larger undertaking.
Built from more than 40 interconnected vignettes and a cast of over 20 named characters, the film demanded a different kind of groundwork than anything shorter form requires. Jess and Leo describe negotiating how self-contained each segment should feel against the urge to thread them together, and how they mapped out a shoot this sprawling in setting and tone without boxing themselves in too rigidly.
Filmed over roughly a year across real New York locations with a lean crew and actors dressed in their own wardrobes, the visual approach, including mounting the camera on a Lazy Susan, had to carry a lot of narrative weight, whether each vignette earns its own distinct look or the throughline comes from one unified way of observing all these different lives. Jess and Leo close by reflecting on how laughter, both from crew during production and later from audiences, became a kind of compass throughout the process, guiding what ultimately made the cut and confirming when a scene had found its truth.