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Rising stars: four emerging directors to watch out for
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Ramin Bahrani at work
New talent is always on the rise and today I’m highlighting four up and coming film directors who, by all appearances, will be leading the way into the future. Some of them are new to the scene, others have been plugging away quietly for years and are only just now emerging into the limelight, but all of them have already demonstrated considerable talent for their art and are well worth keeping an eye on. And without further ado:
Ramin Bahrani: An Iranian-American born in North Carolina to immigrant parents, Bahrani slipped quietly onto the scene in 2005 with his debut feature, Man Push Cart, a tragic story about a once-successful singer in Pakistan who has been reduced to selling coffee from a sidewalk cart in New York City. His second film, Chop Shop, about a Latino boy in the slums of New York, has garnered considerable praise and drawn many comparisons to the works of Vittorio de Sica, the great Italian neo-realist famous for his guerilla film making tactics. Now his third film, Goodbye Solo, about an African cab driver trying to help a faire he believes is suicidal, is set to go into limited release on Friday (no word yet on whether we’ll get it in Oklahoma City) and Bahrani’s accolades continue to grow. Nearly everyone who has seen his work (myself included) is convinced that Bahrani is well on his way to establishing himself as one of our greatest directors. Keep an eye out.
Martin McDonaugh: In the nineties, Irish playwright Martin McDonaugh made quite a name for himself as a brilliant new talent on the stage with a penchant for tight structuring, sharp dialogue and a superb blending of comedy and tragedy. Now he is bringing his talents to the big screen, having already made one and half films, the Oscar winning short Six Shooter, starring Brendan Gleeson as a grieving man who encounters a monstrous youth on a train ride, and last year’s Best Original Screenplay nominee In Bruges, with Gleeson and Colin Farrell as two hit men hiding out in the Belgian city of Bruges after botching a hit. No word yet on a new screen project from McDonaugh, but considering what a sleeper sensation In Bruges has been (currently #202 on IMDB’s top 250) I have no doubt we’ll be seeing something from him again in the not too distant future.
Jeff Nichols: The greenest of the directors listed here, Nichols to date has one film to his credit, the 2008 indie project Shotgun Stories. Unfortunately, very few people have gotten the chance to see it (though it is now readily available on DVD) but just about everyone who has agrees that it is a powerful and beautifully directed film. The story of three brothers raised in squalor in Alabama who find out the father who abandoned them has died and they crash the funeral, much to the chagrin of their half brothers, who were raised in better circumstances after their father quit drinking and found religion. Tensions boil over into violence as the two halves pour out the anger and resentment that has mounted between them over the years. It is a tragic and beautiful film about the consequences of violence and revenge and is the work of a substantial new talent who I expect we’ll be hearing a great deal more from in the years ahead.
Tarsem: A veteran of music videos and TV commercials, Tarsem made his film debut in 2000 with The Cell, a visually stunning but overall mediocre thriller that showed a lot more potential than it delivered. Seven years later, he returned to the cinema with The Fall, a passion project he financed entirely out of pocket and spent four years shooting exactly how he wanted it. The results show, as The Fall delivered on the promise The Cell only hinted at, and though it was not widely seen, The Fall turned enough heads in the studios to land Tarsem two pretty sweet studio deals, one for a film called War of the Gods, which will be an ancient Greek epic and is currently set for a 2010 release, and the other for The Unforgettable, a thriller about a cop hunting down a serial killer that we should be seeing in 2011. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on The Cell and anxiously await both projects.
I’ll return shortly to take a look at some up and coming actors who you can probably expect to see a lot more of in the future.
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