By Sean Axmaker
March 1, 2006 - 3:43 AM PST

Gavin Hood's feature debut got him named one of "Ten Directors to Watch" by Variety. Then, In Desert and Wilderness. Then, silence. For four years. He was working all that time on Tsotsi, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Sean Axmaker talks to the South African director about the influence of varied cultures of a vast continent on his widescreen tale.

By Sean Axmaker
February 20, 2006 - 1:34 PM PST

"Pablo Berger's Torremolinos '73 is one of the funniest and slyest satires ever to come out of Spain," writes Sean Axmaker, who talks with the director about the political, cultural and sexual repression under Franco - and how his characters find ways to indulge ravenously anyway.

By David D'Arcy
January 5, 2006 - 1:41 PM PST

David D'Arcy follows up on his Tirana dispatch at GreenCine Daily with an interview with Fatmir Koç/font>, best known for his award-winning Tirana Year Zero. What sort of films could a young aspiring filmmaker see in communist-era Albania - and how's the country's film industry faring now?

By Jonathan Marlow
December 18, 2005 - 12:25 PM PST

Veit Helmer has just been named one of twelve finalists in the running for the 2006 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards. A perfect opportunity to run for the first time a conversation Jonathan Marlow had with Helmer last year about his work with Wim Wenders and his own films, Tuvalu and Gate to Heaven.