Confessions

Wim Wenders: The Road Back

BY Chris Cotonou

Cinema has the ability to teleport us to faraway places—revealing other peoples’ lives, and ask us to imagine ourselves among their landscapes and cities. Wim Wenders’ films have always been portals to these foreign places and ideas. Even after five decades as a director, his latest work Perfect Days is ‘made to measure’ for Japan, he tells A RABBIT’S FOOT. At the same time, there are other journeys he embarks on that are more internal: the frontiers of an artist’s mind, as seen in his documentary on Anselm Kiefer, following similar works about Pina Bausch and Ozu. For Wenders, understanding artists is as much of an adventure as visiting the American deserts he spent his earlier years travelling to. In this discussion, Wim Wenders tells Chris Cotonou about his beginnings, and how they would inform a prolific career as a filmmaker, the origins of New German Cinema, and why his work has always been informed by a sense of urgency

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Confessions

Emma Seligman: Started from the Bottoms

BY Fatima Khan & Luke Georgiades

Here’s a one-line elevator pitch for the funniest comedy of the year: Two high school girls desperate to lose their virginities hatch a plan to seduce local cheerleaders by starting an all-female fight club in their school gymnasium.
The film is Bottoms, writer-director Emma Seligman’s raunchy follow up to Shiva Baby, the 2020 indie-hit that marked her and best friend–writer, comic, and actor Rachel Sennott—as bold new forces in Hollywood. As sophomore features go, Bottoms couldn’t be more of a detour from the expected, with Seligman and co-writer Sennott making the risky leap from nightmare-shiva dramedy to absurdist sex-comedy. The premise was conceived from Seligman’s yearning to see more gay characters represented in the kind of silly, R-rated romps that defined her formative years—characters that are messy, flawed, and more human as a result. For the 28 year-old filmmaker, the solution was simple: if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.
But don’t let its foul-mouth and balls-to-the-wall humour fool you, Bottomsis a radical new entry into the queer cinema canon, and a cult-classic in the making from two of the new wave’s most unconforming outsiders.
Sitting poolside with Seligman on a typically sun-drenched LA morning, A RABBIT’S FOOT spoke to the filmmaker about the nuances of queer intimacy on-screen, comedy in the internet era, and just how the hell she and Sennott got this film greenlit in the first place.

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