While the cast of Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is uniformly talented, Anamaria Marinca is utterly compelling in the role of Otilia, the young woman who takes on the burden of arranging the undignified, distressing back-street abortion for her friend Gabita. She tells us why it was so important for her to make this film.
Interview by Sarah Cronin

The expansion of ‘artists’ film’ has lead the Independent Cinema Office to put together a programme that re-assesses the influence of avant-garde, artistic cinema on the wider visual culture. ‘ICO Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema’ will be shown at a special preview weekend at Tate Modern in London from 18-21 January before opening across the UK from Friday 25 January. We talked to George Clark, one of the curators, about the selection of films and the objectives of the project.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

It’s been thirty years since the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof group Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe died in prison, and the ICA is marking the event by presenting a season of films that focuses on the role women have played in the revolutionary movement. We talked to Pamela Jahn, curator of the season, to find out more.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Thought-provoking, decidedly un-PC and formally inventive, Anders Morgenthaler’s first feature Princess mixes animation with some live action to tell the story of a young woman, Christina, who becomes a porn star under the name ‘Princess’. When she dies, her intense, guilt-racked priest brother August takes in her five-year-old daughter Mia and sets out to destroy all material starring his sister, which leads to a violent confrontation with unscrupulous porn barons. The Danish director discusses some of the most controversial aspects of the film and explains why he used animation to comment on sex and violence.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Director Mohamed Al Daradji had been living in exile in Europe to avoid persecution from the Baathist regime when the war broke out. In 2003 he went back to his country wanting to make a film about the plight of ordinary Iraqi people. He shot Ahlaam in Baghdad in extremely difficult conditions – not only did he have to work around curfews and electricity cuts but members of his crew were arrested both by insurgents and by the Americans, neither side believing that they were simply making a film.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy:

KM31 received its UK premiere at FrightFest in August on the same day as the Zombie Walk. When I arrived at the Odeon for the interview hordes of dazed zombies were still hanging around Leicester Square, blinking in the sun as though it hurt or crumpled on benches: the perfect setting for an interview with a director who is a horror fan through and through.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Asif Kapadia made his feature debut in 2001 with the stunningly confident epic The Warrior. Six years later, his second feature Far North is showing at the London Film Festival. Harsh and beautiful in equal measure, Far North confirms Kapadia’s unique talent and is one of the unmissable films of the festival. In the following interview, Kapadia tells us about living on a Russian ice-breaker for four weeks, old-fashioned filmmaking and seeing things with two different brains.
Interview by Virginie Sélavy

The Raindance Film Festival triumphantly opened last month with wacky stoner comedy Weirdsville. Ahead of the film’s UK release in November we talk to director Allan Moyle.
Interview by Alex Fitch

Lisa Williams talks to Garin Nugroho, director of Opera Jawa, who tells her how he coped with the making of a film that includes no less than 60 songs, 70 dance routines and seven art installations.
Interview by Lisa Williams

Following 2003’s acclaimed Tarnation, in which American filmmaker Jonathan Caouette turned the home-movies of his formative years into an introspective psychological examination of his life, a British director has now collated and edited her family’s history into an engaging tale of a bifurcated family separated by land and culture. Alex Fitch caught up with I for India director Sandhya Suri at the ICA in London and asked her about her project to turn decades of transcontinental communication between her émigré father and his family in India into her first documentary feature.
Interview by Alex Fitch