#filmaker

Ida Lupino born February 4, 1918 in Herne Hill, London, United Kingdom

🎞 English-American film actress and director, and a pioneer among women filmmakers.

As rigid and tough-minded as Bette Davis, Lupino would often refuse to play a Davis hand-me-down role and was often suspended by Warner Brothers for doing so. It was during those breaks that she learned the craft of directing.

She has directed two films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Outrage (1950) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953).

Although accomplished as both a director and an actress, she preferred to keep these two functions separate, with The Bigamist (1953) being the exception in which she both starred and directed.

Widely respected as a pioneer for women filmmakers, Lupino was the second woman to be admitted to the Director's Guild, and was awarded 2 Stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Motion Pictures at 6821 Hollywood Boulevard; and for Television at 1724 Vine Street in Hollywood, California.

*Throughout her 48-year career, she appeared in 59 films and directed eight.

Chantal Akerman !

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian filmmaker who was born in Belgium in 1950 and died in Paris in 2015.

She has had an absolutely insane influence on cinema, most recently when her film "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles", was named best film of all time (which honestly is very fair, this movie is a damn masterpiece).

She was a lesbian, though she didn't talk about it much and didn't want to be reduced to a "lesbian filmmaker". She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton, a cellist. Female homosexuality is a recurring theme in her movies - with sometimes long and explicit sex scenes between women, not at all created for the male gaze.

Chantal Akerman comes from a Polish Jewish family. Her grandparents and her mother, Natalia, were deported to Auschwitz, and only her mother returned. Her relationship with Judaism has had a profound influence on her cinema.

She studied briefly at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle in Paris, before going to New York, meeting some other filmmakers, and making some short movies, movies and documentaries. But her huge international success came in 1975, with Jeanne Dielman.

"I was tossing and turning in bed, worried. And suddenly, in a single minute, I saw the whole of Jeanne Dielman..."

I'm going to try and keep it professional when I talk about Jeanne Dielman, but it's going to be hard, because I LOVE this film.

It's a three-hour film that follows three days in the life of a widowed housewife, Jeanne Dielman, who lives with her son, spends her time doing household chores and prostitutes herself to survive. The film is shot in the illusion of real time: if Jeanne spends 30 minutes cleaning her living room, you'll be watching her do it for 30 minutes. (Obviously none of the scenes are that long and there are ellipses but that's to illustrate my point). It's revolutionary. A poignant film about the condition of housewives, alienation, the way we make sure we're busy all the time so we don't have to think about life or death. The tension escalates little by little until the deeply disturbing end of the film, when everything comes crashing down. A masterpiece. Everyone should watch it. It's long but it's worth it! (Plus the main actress is incredible, both as an actress and as a person).

This film was a huge success, and she continued to make others, with recurring themes of the status of women, mother-daughter relationships, lesbianism, death, mental health, alienation, boredom, the need for freedom, solitude, the passage of time, inner suffocation...

More generally, women are at the heart of his work. Women, their inner lives, their identity as women, their experiences...

Chantal was also a great feminist. She defended women's rights in her words, her actions and her films, and was keen to put women in the spotlight. She even surrounded herself almost exclusively with women to create her films.

Suffering from manic-depressive psychological disorders and deeply affected by the death of her mother Natalia a year and a half earlier, she decided to end her life at the age of 65 on 5 October 2015 in Paris.

She is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery.

She is remembered today as an extraordinary filmmaker and a true innovator. Her films, long, emotionally chanllenging, psychologically and philosophically profound, are quite simply splendid. Check her work!!!

Chantal had a unique and magnificent style, and many more people should watch her films and documentaries.

Happy Birthday the Scottish actor Peter Mullan born 2 November 1959 in Peterhead.

I love Peter's work and rate him as highly as Brian Cox and If ever there was a story of rags to riches it is Peter Mullan, born in Peterhead the family later moved to Mosspark in Glasgow.

Mullans father was a drunken violent man but despite this Peter did well at school, at least till the age of 14 when the climate at home forced him out onto the streets and into a gang, spending less and less time at school. In his own words he was aggressively lobotomising himself but admitted he kept up his reading on the sly "You couldnae tell the gang you were reading Carl Jung." he said.

I'm not sure his heart was in the gang culture as he says he was "kicked out" after a couple of years, he returned to school and sailed through his Highers and started at Glasgow University at 17. His dad died of lung cancer on his first day.

Mullan studied economic history and drama and despite suffering a nervous breakdown in his final year still managed to graduate. He went on to teach drama at Borstals, prisons and community centres while becoming involved in the left-wing theatre movement that flourished in Scotland in the 1980s. In 1987 he made his professional acting debut with the Wildcat theatre company in a political pantomime.

Bit parts in Scottish films and TV series followed, The Steamie, Taggart, of course, and Rab C Nesbitt, as well as The Big Man and in Braveheart, he uttered the words, "We didn't come here to fight for the" Danny Boyle, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting were another two films that Mullan served his apprenticeship in.

The breakthrough came when Ken Loach chose him in the title role of "My Name is Joe" he gave a brilliant portrayal Jekyll-and-Hyde character , a recovering alcoholic whose humanity and warmth masked a frightening capacity for brutality. He won his first award at Cannes as Best Actor for the role.

Around the same time Mullan was starting to get into directing, three surreal comic dramas set in the Glaswegian working-class world and then his first full length film, he not only directed but wrote the excellent Orphans an odyssey of four working-class siblings roving round Glasgow in the 24 hours after their mother dies. Channel Four, who funded the film chose not to distribute it as they didn't think it would attract a large commercial audience.

The film however was shown at Film festivals around Europe and won numerous awards, in interviews, Mullan has said that once Orphans started winning awards Channel Four apologised and asked if they could distribute it, an offer he refused.

Since then Peter Mullan has not looked back, directing and penning The Magdalene Sisters and Neds as well as starring in amongst others, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, War Horse, Hector and Tommy's Honour, on the small screen he was one of the main characters in ITV series The Fixer, The BBC Two drama Top of the Lake, and in the excellent drama series Gunpowder.

Peter appeared as Jacob Snell in the first two seasons of the Netflix series Ozark, all three series of the BBC Two sitcom Mum and a recurring role in the popular TV reboot of Westworld. He has also starred in the Netflix fantasy drama Cursed. Mullan starred alongside Colin Farrell and Tom Cortney in the BBC series The North Water.

Peter Mullan was also one of the participants of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Scenes For Survival project, which features talents from the country’s arts industry making lockdown-related short films as a response to the country’s theatres having to close during the coronavirus pandemic.

His film, Fat Baws, is an 18-minute monologue filmed in Peter’s Glasgow home describing a surreal, hilarious and slightly disturbing showdown with a wideboy jackdaw demanding he puts out more of his favourite food, the eponymous fat balls.

Mullan has been busy in the past few years, appearing in TV shows Liaison, Payback, After the Party and LOTR: Rings of Power, as well as the film, Baghead a Horror film which has average reviews on IMDb. Outlander fans look out for him in the spin off series Outlander: Blood of My Blood, a prequel to the popular Starz show, it follows the parents of both protagonists from the original series. Tony Curran is also cast as a younger Lord Lovatt. 

He starred in the ITV mini series called The Bombing of Pan Am 103

which focused on the investigation into the crash on both sides of the Atlantic and the devastating effect it had on the small town and the families who lost loved ones.

Rest in peace David Lynch.

January 20th, 1946 - January 16th, 2025

The iconic René Clair 🌹

He was a French filmmaker and writer who first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mixed with fantasy!

Rest in Peace 🕊️🙏🏻

Rob Reiner is remembered as a bold, outspoken filmmaker and activist who held leaders accountable. He was horrifically stabbed to death at his home in L.A , along with his wife, Michele Singer. Their son, Nick, 32, was arrested and booked by police, with a bail set at $4M.