Hollywood is the zoo. World cinema is the wild.
33 countries. 33 filmmakers. STEPHANIE GARDNER’s CINEMA NOMAD brings the world of film to PBS
There’s been an awful lot of talk about eggs lately, but hardly a peep about chickens.
Most egg-laying hens live their entire lives indoors, under artificial light. The cycles of their existence - when they eat, sleep, lay - are calibrated for maximum output.
Sometimes, while sitting in an American movie theater, I feel like one of those hens: Raised under the soothing fluorescent glow of Hollywood, fattened on a rich but narrow diet of homegrown spectacle and sentimentality. Plump, passive, and perfectly content.
For those of us domesticated in the dream factory, the experience of a foreign film can be, at first, disorienting - full of puzzling rhythms, disquieting silences, and baffling ambiguities. But if you stay with it, the shock gives way to exhilaration. Like a cage-broken bird stepping into real sunlight for the first time, feeling the poke of grass underfoot, you realize: The world is weirder, wilder, and more alive than you were ever supposed to know.
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When Stephanie Gardner turned 33 years old, the New Mexico-based filmmaker set off on a journey so ambitious, it bordered on madness: to visit 33 countries, interview one 33-year-old filmmaker in each, and chronicle it all in Cinema Nomad, a 33-episode travel series.
Accompanied by executive producer-cinematographer Duprelon Tizdale, a seasoned journeyman who crewed on 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit, Gardner logged nearly 2.75 million miles. From the sun-bleached savannas of Zimbabwe to the dusty motorbike swarms of Cambodia, the duo explored each country through the lens of a local filmmaker. Many of their subjects live in places where free speech is not a right but a risk, yet they create films with startling clarity and defiance. “We are bombarded by messages to ‘fear the other’ in our own increasingly isolated societies,” Gardner explained. “These experiences have taught me to not take freedom of expression for granted.”
Premiering this week on PBS, Cinema Nomad has evolved beyond a TV series into an international film community. Gardner has connected filmmakers across continents, sometimes hiring them to edit each other’s episodes. “It is a support structure for these filmmakers, to encourage them to continue to produce,” said Gardner. And she’s not finished. The hope is that Cinema Nomad will keep expanding to become a living global network of storytellers.
I had the chance to chat with Stephanie Gardner about the making of Cinema Nomad, the joys of global cinema, the precarious state of public television in the United States, and more. You can watch the video here:
Where to watch Cinema Nomad
Rolling out on PBS stations starting May 1st. For more information, check your local listings or search here.
Follow Cinema Nomad on Instagram and check their site for updates and info.
News Reel
- reports on How Theatrical Re-Releases Could Save Movie Theaters (And Are Already Starting To): “When audiences come back year after year to view The Rocky Horror Picture Show around Halloween, they are celebrating something bigger than movies. It is a cultural event that brings a community together.”
- on the self-inflicted demise of Hollywood: “Hey, we all want to live on Easy Street. But real life in a creativity business is always hard work. And it can’t ever be reduced to formulas. The studio bosses forgot that. But the audience knows when it is getting robbed. Perhaps our only hope is that those same audience members push back—rejecting AI slop and the couch potato life.
And if, against all odds, they do turn the tide, Hollywood will deserve no credit—those movie-lovers in the cinema seats will be the actual saviors.”
The great
is back with one of his most provocative essays yet: “Cinema culture has become painfully movie-brained. When we only watch movies, they begin to remind us only of other movies.”“Men have become the tools of their tools,” Henry David Thoreau once said. Tom White has a fascinating piece on the history of automation and its implications for the future, The Inverse Mechanical Turk: Meat Puppets, Silicon Strings. “If nothing matters except what AI can do in seconds, then why should we humans matter at all?”
And now, this week’s Underexposed Movie Pick -
That Man From Rio (1964)
After two cheeky toe-dips into the New Wave (The Love Game, The Five-Day Lover), director Philippe de Broca - one-time assistant to Truffaut and Chabrol - took a hard left into Technicolor mischief with That Man from Rio, the gloriously ridiculous globe-trotting “screwball thriller” that inspired Spielberg to make Raiders of the Lost Ark and helped set the template for the modern blockbuster.
Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as Adrien, a French airman on leave whose girlfriend, the effervescent Françoise Dorléac, is kidnapped in Paris and whisked to Brazil by art-smuggling baddies. Adrien follows, and a madcap goose chase ensues.
Shooting on location in the retro-futurist landscape of Brasília (as it was being constructed) as well as in Rio and the Amazon, de Broca saturates the screen with color and commotion. The unrelenting balletic slapstick leaves me grinning like an idiot every time.
Nominated for the 1965 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a box office hit across Europe, That Man from Rio is a fizzy, feel-good favorite of mine - one that I had the pleasure of seeing again last week at the Quad Cinema here in New York, and that you can watch now for free on Tubi.
That’s all for this week’s free edition. Thanks for reading. VIPs, stick around - beyond the paywall, I’ve got a bonus video - Underexposed Guest Picks with Stephanie Gardner.
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