I happened to watch my first Hong Sang-soo movie right before his new one premiered, won the Golden Leopard and was featured on Cinema Scope’s front page, which gave me more emotional investment in all this. Before recently he was just a name – a repeatedly championed name, but still. So I’ve made a list of other currently-working(?) filmmakers whose names come up in magazines and festival reports but I’ve never checked out – including a few lingering overlaps with the 50 Under 50 list (Rodrigues, Alonso, Pereda) and a few overlaps with a similar list I made five years ago (Suleiman, Iosseliani, Lee). The goal: to watch at least one film by each, so next time I see their name I’ll have some context.
Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, Los Muertos, Liverpool, Jauja)
Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust & Bone, Dheepan)
Marco Bellocchio (Good Morning Night, Vincere, Blood of My Blood)
Rachid Bouchareb (Days of Glory, Outside the Law)
Jean-Claude Brisseau (Exterminating Angels, Girl From Nowhere, Secret Things)
Antonio Campos (Afterschool, Simon Killer)
J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, All Is Lost, Margin Call)
Isabel Coixet (Elegy, Secret Life of Words, My Life Without Me)
Anton Corbijn (Control, The American)
Lav Diaz (Norte, From What Is Before, Century of Birthing)
Mati Diop (Atlantiques, Snow Canon, A Thousand Suns)
Jacques Doillon (Just Anybody, Ponette, Le petit criminel)
Xavier Dolan (Mommy, Tom at the Farm, Heartbeats, I Killed My Mother)
Bruno Dumont (Lil Quinquin, Hors Satan, Hadewijch, L’Humanite)
Pascale Ferran (Bird People, Lady Chatterley)
Bahman Ghobadi (Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, Turtles Can Fly, Half Moon)
Amos Gitai (Kadosh, Kippur, Free Zone)
Philippe Grandrieux (Un Lac, A New Life, Sombre)
James Gray (Two Lovers, The Immigrant, Lost City of Z)
Eugene Green (Portuguese Nun, La Sapienza, Le Pont des Arts, Toutes les nuits)
Jose Luis Guerin (Memories of a Morning, Guest, In the City of Sylvia)
Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Innocence, Evolution)
Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years)
Mia Hansen-Love (Father of My Children, Goodbye First Love, Things To Come)
Otar Iosseliani (Adieu plancher des vaches, Jardins en automne, Chantrapas, Winter Song)
Benoit Jacquot (School of Flesh, A Single Girl, A Tout de Suite, Diary of a Chambermaid)
Jiang Wen (Devils on the Doorstep, Let the Bullets Fly, The Sun Also Rises)
Miranda July (The Future, Me and You and Everyone We Know)
Naomi Kawase (The Mourning Forest, Shara)
Andrei Konchalovsky (The Postman’s White Nights, Inner Circle)
Nadav Lapid (Policeman, The Kindergarten Teacher)
Pablo Larrain (Tony Manero, Post Mortem, No, The Club)
Lee Chang-dong (Poetry, Secret Sunshine, Oasis, Peppermint Candy)
Sergei Loznitsa (Maidan, In the Fog, Austerlitz)
Jodie Mack (a bunch of shorts)
Lech Majewski (Onirica, The Mill and the Cross, Glass Lips)
Brillante Mendoza (Captive, Kinatay, Serbis)
Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball, Foxcatcher)
Lukas Moodysson (We Are The Best, Hole In My Heart, Lilya 4ever, Container)
Darezhan Omirbayev (Student, Kairat)
Ruben Ostlund (Force Majeure, Play, Involuntary)
Nicolas Pereda (Summer of Goliath, Greatest Hits, Minotaur)
Nicolas Philibert (To Be and To Have, Nenette, In the Land of the Deaf)
Joaquim Pinto (What Now? Remind Me, Fish Tail)
Rafi Pitts (The Hunter, It’s Winter)
Joao Pedro Rodrigues (Last Time I Saw Macao, To Die Like a Man)
Ira Sachs (Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On, Little Men)
Ben & Joshua Safdie (Heaven Knows What, Good Time)
So Young Kim (Treeless Mountain, In Between Days)
Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, This Must Be The Place, The Great Beauty, Youth)
Elia Suleiman (The Time That Remains, Divine Intervention)
Bertrand Tavernier (Coup de torchon, Sunday in the Country, Life and Nothing But)
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (Mary is Happy, 36)
Tran Anh Hung (Norwegian Wood, Cyclo, Scent of Green Papaya)
Joachim Trier (Oslo August 31)
Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Incendies, Prisoners, Sicario)
Peter Von Bagh (Socialism, Helsinki Forever) edit: R.I.P.
Oh man, this list is longer than I thought it’d be.
I may have no choice but to tackle ’em film-fest style.
A festival of filmmakers who show up regularly at festivals… a FESTIFEST.
EDIT Dec. 2015: I still like the FESTIFEST idea, and am keeping the name, but when this season’s Sundance slate was announced I changed focus from the above list. Now when a new film is announced by a director I’ve heard about but never seen, I’m prioritizing watching one of his/her previous films. For example, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine was announced, and I haven’t seen anything by Greene as director, so I watched his Actress from last year. Don’t think I’ll add those to the bottom of this list as the year goes on, because I have enough trouble keeping track of things.