Film Matters Magazine

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Sophia Rubino: My article combines two different analytical frameworks, object-relations psychoanalysis and phenomenology, to bring together the unconscious happenings of the mind and how they manifest in conscious choices. To me, this sort of work is only truly meaningful when you consider the subject (in my case, as I highlight, it’s Gustav von Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde) and the identities that dictate their overall societal treatment. The most important factor to me, the one which limits his ability as perceived by others and ultimately himself, is age. My primary objective was to dive into the processes of thinking that lead to the oppression of the elderly, much of these fears of aging and death being a manifestation of assigning moral judgments based on an individual’s ability.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Qingheng Yu: This article discusses the interesting relationship between two Chinese films, The Goddess (1934) and The Flowers of War (2011), produced at different times while featuring the same historical period. I wish to explore the concepts of transnationalism, modernism, and globalization expressed by the two films, which eventually seek to establish a national identity. From a feminist perspective, the investigation of the reception of history over time also raises new questions and insights into the historical events with a wider range of knowledge.

Sophia Fuller: Tell us a little bit about yourself; how did you get started in filmmaking?

Ryan Cudahy: This is actually a story I have told quite a bit. I have been passionate about film my entire life. It really started when I was four years old and my dad got a camcorder. I was already really into movies at the time. I had also gotten a reptar wagon toy from Rugrats for Christmas, and I was convinced that if I held the camera in the right way and made the angles just right, it would look exactly like the cartoon. Obviously, it didn’t work but it was a good start. It was around middle school where I realized I really wanted to be a director. I enrolled in a filmmaking course my freshman year of high school and it was really exciting. I decided to make a short film about cows taking their revenge on humans for eating them. It was just a comedy short film but it was significantly worse than other people’s films in the class. I realized if I actually want to do this, I really need to step it up. Instead of just making a bunch of other stuff, I took a break and watched about three hundred movies. I made a list of the movies I had heard of that were the best of all time and then when I was ready to start making short films again, I was able to make some stuff that I was moderately proud of. Then I went on to study at James Madison University for video production for media arts and design. I was struggling with my mental health, which truly plays into what this movie is about, and I decided to take a leave of absence. I always wanted to stick with film and I ended up in a career working as a producer for a very long time with a production company. During COVID, I worked on the TV series called Swagger. Once we came out of quarantine, I worked on the locations team for that. I always wanted to make this film that we just made. It was a very personal project to me and I am really glad we were able to make it and with how it turned out The film is mainly shot in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I recently just founded the Fredericksburg Film Festival. We just had the first year of that, which was fantastic. That’s kind of my way of sticking with everything.