Since 1997, Variety has been selecting an annual list of 10 helmers who stand out from the crowd, breakthrough storytellers we expect to go far.
Past honorees have won major studio productions (Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan), Oscars (Barry Jenkins, Steve McQueen) and even the Cannes Fest Palme d’Or (Ruben Östlund, and most recently, Titane director Julia Ducournau).
Of the emerging talents selected for this year’s list, five will premiere their first or latest features at the Sundance Film Fest later this month.
Another, French director Audrey Diwan, will screen her Venice-winning abortion drama, Happening, at the festival.
These 10 directors would have been honored in person at the Palm Springs Festival, which was cancelled due to the pandemic.
Aitch Alberto
Aristotle and Dante Discover Secrets of the Universe
When Alberto read Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s YA novel “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe,” she knew that the story of two awkward teenage boys who fall in love in 1980s El Paso, Texas, had the makings of a great movie.
“It spoke to me on a visceral level,” Alberto says. “It’s a brown story about brown people that was nuanced and presented us as fully realized human beings. There’s such a void of our stories. We tend to be stereotyped and put in boxes. It became my life’s mission to get the movie made.”
Alberto wrote an adaptation on spec and flew out to Texas to persuade the author to give her the rights. After dazzling Sáenz with her pitch, the filmmaker focused on trying to enlist Lin-Manuel Miranda (who’d read the audiobook) as a producer via Twitter.
“Twenty minutes later he responded, and the rest is history,” says Alberto. “I really had no business doing any of the things I did, but I was not going to wait for permission from anyone in Hollywood to tell me what I can do.”
Aristotle and Dante feels like a fresh way into a familiar story of young love.
“Everyone in front of the camera is BIPOC, including the extras,” says Alberto. “It was a minority-heavy cast and crew, which was particularly important. I want people to watch this movie and not only connect emotionally to the main characters but to see themselves reflected in all the colors of the world.
As a trans director of Latino descent, there are few of us out there, and big part of my holdback on my journey was not seeing myself represented behind the camera. I want to change that.”
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe wrapped this fall and had an offer for prominent slot at Sundance, but Alberto opted to wait to debut the film in festivals later in 2021 in order to continue fine-tuning the movie.
“It was a difficult decision to make,” Alberto admits. “But I want to get it right, and I’m more concerned with making a great film than I am with where we premiere.”
Source: Variety
Mariama Diallo
Master
When Diallo was 15, she stopped at her local Blockbuster, which was going out of business, and bought “Annie Hall,” “Y tu mamá también” and “Morvern Callar” — an eclectic selection for the curious teen.
“I just kinda selected at random,” Diallo recalls. “I thought, like, ‘Oh yeah, this has the look of something very intellectual and serious about it.’”
But the self-identified theater kid really was determined to become a filmmaker after watching her purchases. The Yale graduate’s first two shorts, “White Devil” and “Hair Wolf,” won major festival awards, and the filmmaker now bows her feature debut, horror movie “Master,” at Sundance. “Master,” which stars Regina Hall, imagines a witch terrorizing a Black student and dean at an Ivy League-style school.
“There’s a very direct moment of inspiration for ‘Master,’” she says. “Ultimately, it’s a cumulative effect of many years of my life, but it really grows out of the time that I was an undergrad at Yale,” where each residential college had a “master” (although they are no longer called that).
The idea for the film crystallized after Diallo ran into her old Yale college master. “As I was walking away, I just thought to myself, ‘This is crazy. This many years having a “master,” and I haven’t interrogated it and what does it mean?’” she says with a laugh. “I knew almost immediately that I wanted to follow the story of a Black woman placed in that role and all of the nuances of being given that kind of title and how she responds from there.”
Using horror to tell the story was always part of the plan: “I love horror. This is the way that the story came to me and the way that it wanted to be told. I’m less interested in horror as a kind of didactic tool to conceal a social message.”
As for Regina Hall, Diallo says, “I think that one of the many things that initially really drew me to Regina was how she’s able to really balance a lot of different tones.”
An admirer of Michael Haneke, Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Kubrick’s The Shining, Diallo says, “my goal and ambition as a filmmaker is to tell personal stories to push myself, to challenge myself and to challenge the medium.”
Source: Variety