Interview: Ofir Raul Grazier on his Oscar hopeful "The Cakemaker"

An abridged version of this interview was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Ofir Raul GrazierThe Oscars are coming and with them, renewed attention for some of the year’s most memorable films. One of this past summer’s sleeper hits was The Cakemaker, an LGBT drama that’s just been released on DVD / Blu-Ray. The tiny but prolific distributor Strand Releasing, who have released many gay favorites, have been in business for almost 30 years now and, if you don’t adjust for inflation, The Cakemaker quietly turned into their biggest box office hit ever this summer. The drama about a grieving gay German man who seeks out the widow of his lover (who was unaware of her husband’s affair) earned nearly a million at arthouse box offices across the U.S!

After winning Best Picture at the Ophir Awards in Israel, it became the country's submission for Oscar’s Best Foreign Language Film category. We recently caught up with its director Ofir Raul Grazier. Our interview follows, edited for clarity and length.

NATHANIEL: The Cakemaker is your feature debut. Was that terrifying for you or totally natural on set? 

OFIR RAUL GRAIZER: It was a bit scary, of course, because the amount of responsibility is huge. The producers,  the crew, the actors --  I was thinking about all of that more than the film itself. But once the camera was rolling it felt quite natural. I love to do this. This is my passion. I managed to enjoy shooting. Everything between the shots was a nightmare [Laughs]...

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Interview: We the Animals' Jeremiah Zagar

by Murtada Elfadl

We the Animals has been compared to Moonlight (2016), The Tree of Life (2011) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). While the comparison is reductive it provides a shorthand for describing this film. It’s a story of three young brothers - one of whom is queer - and their relationships with each other and with their unpredictable parents. There are elements of magical realism in a story grounded in the economic desperation of a working class family in upstate New York.

Raul Castillo (HBO’s Looking) and Sheila Vand (A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night) give perceptive performances as the adults. However it is newcomer Evan Rosado, playing the central character of Jonah, who’ll take your breath away. More sensitive and conscious than his older siblings, Jonah increasingly embraces an imagined world in the secret journals in which writes and sketches. It is an assured narrative debut from documentary filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar. We loved the film when it played Tribeca last spring. We had the chance to speak to Zagar recently in New York.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Murtada Elfadl: You've said that you read the book in one sitting while still at a bookshop, before even buying it. What popped in the book for you and made you want to make it into a film?  

Jeremiah Zagar: Literally the first page of the book is so visceral, rhythmic and immersive that I couldn’t stop reading it. Beyond that it felt like something I knew how to visualize. I read a lot of books but very few where I feel that I know how to make them into a movie. Somehow I felt this connection to the material that wasn’t only emotional, it was technical almost. I didn't want to change it at all, I just wanted to figure out how to put it on screen. I could see it, I could hear it, I could feel it in my head before it happened...

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Interview: Desiree Akhavan on Queer Desire, Americana and One Scary Mustache

by Murtada Elfadl

The Miseducation of Cameron Post takes place in the 90s and is about a young queer woman who is sent to a gay conversion center after getting caught having sex with the prom queen at her high school. Once there she bonds with her fellow “inmates” (played by American Honey’s Sasha Lane and The Revenant’s Forrest Goodluck among others). She is forced to contend with the strict brother and sister team (Jennifer Ehle and John Gallagher Jr) who run the center and pretend they can "cure" her. The film is based on a novel by Emily M. Danforth and was adapted for the screen and directed by Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior). It won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance and has been making the festival rounds since January. We recently spoke with Akhavan in New York as she geared up for the film's release. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Murtada Elfadl: The book is longer and has much more detail, how did you arrive at the story for your film?

Desiree Akhavan: I always knew that I only wanted to focus on the last 200 pages; Cameron's time at God’s Promise. I think that when adapting a book it’s about whittling down for yourself what the kernel of inspiration is. What you loved about it and wanted to translate to the screen. And what you think you tangibly can translate into a different medium. To me that was the tone. My co-writer and I were always working in service to maintaining that tone... 

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In New York, A Repertory Film Renaissance

by Murtada Elfadl

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

A film I desperately wanted to see that had eluded me for a long time was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972). I promised myself that I wouldn’t succumb to watching it at home;  I’d wait and hope that it would eventually appear soon in a repertory theater. And sure enough it did, three months later. I got the full theatrical experience of the classic film, screened in celluloid glory. I’m glad I waited. My first screening of A Place in the Sun (1951) happened only last year, and was so exhilarating it was my favorite film I’ve seen in a cinema in 2017. Ditto Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999). I enjoyed all these films and more without distraction, in the dark, projected big and among fellow cinephiles...

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Interview: Director Haifaa al-Mansour & Actor Douglas Booth on "Mary Shelley"

by Murtada Elfadl

Douglas Booth and Elle Fanning as the Shelleys in "Mary Shelley"

The new biopic Mary Shelley is about the famous writer, played by Elle Faning, while she’s in the throes of writing the Gothic magnum opus Frankenstein, at only 18 years of age. The film tells the story of the events that led her there. Those include her tempestuous relationships with renowned romantic poet Percy Shelley (Douglas Booth) who would become her husband, and with her half-sister Claire (Bel Powley). The film takes us to the trio’s fateful stay at Lord Byron's (Tom Sturridge) house at Lake Geneva, where the idea of Frankenstein was conceived.

This is Haifaa al-Mansour’s second directorial project after the 2013 festival hit Wadjda. Wadjda was the first feature shot entirely inside Saudi Arabia, and the first ever directed by a Saudi woman, making al-Mansour a true trailblazer. It''s not surprising then to find her drawn to the story of Mary Shelley, another pioneer. I found a through line, despite the period setting and different locations, between the two films. Both stories of young women determined to chart their own destiny. So that was where I started my conversation with al-Mansour and Booth when they were in New York last month for the Tribeca Film Festival. THE INTERVIEW IS AFTER THE JUMP...

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