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.
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
