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The 15 Most Interesting New Filmmakers We Met in 2021

In a mystifying year, we found hope in these fifteen filmmakers. Their art has our backs.
New Filmmakers
By  · Published on January 7th, 2022

5. Michael Sarnoski (Pig)

Most Interesting New Filmmakers We Met In Pig

When you first hear about Pig, a totally different movie flashes through your mind. Nicolas Cage stars as a reclusive chef who returns to Portland’s underground restaurant scene to retrieve his prized truffle-hunting pig friend from kidnappers. You’ve seen Drive Angry. You’ve seen Prisoners of the Ghost Land. This flick has to fall right alongside those maniac movies. Uh, not so fast.

Pig is a profoundly contemplative film. The narrative that holds it together is John Wick wild, but Michael Sarnoski is not interested in solely achieving “whoa”s from the audience. He’s after your heart, and by the climax, he’s cut it right out. Pig meanders through its tale, steadily dragging you into Cage’s perspective. As you sit with him at the end, you’re feeling the journey, the exhaustion, and its purging relief upon him. You may have wanted KickAss, but you got something else. Something utterly unique within his filmography. You got a Michael Sarnoski movie. More, please.


4. Natalie Morales (Language Lessons/Plan B)

Language Lessons Natalie Morales

Natalie Morales dropped two features in 2021, and the one-two punch is an incredible debut wallop. Plan B is this year’s Booksmart, a teen comedy that quickly cuts into American cultural issues. Morales joyously allows the film to plunge into gross-out depravity, knowing an emotional kick will spring two frames later. Language Lessons is somehow an even more assertive portrait, featuring two actors (Morales and Mark Duplass) acting across from each other, but through the massive gulf of two computer screens. In our pandemic era, the last thing I want is to suffer another Zoom meeting, but Morales never allows the story to devolve into an awkward, empty conversation. There are more twists and turns in Language Lessons than in most big-budget action movies.


3. Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. (Wild Indian)

Wild Indian Movie

Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. spent years crafting Wild Indian‘s script. The story consumed him, but when it came time to shoot, he only had 17 days. What you see in the final product is the contemplation, not the rush to get it done. The film is a taut, stressful confrontation with colonialization and the poisonous residue seeping below modern America. Corbine shoves his characters into conflict, and he does so with karmic inevitability. We follow a deadly choice made in childhood, and through that examination, we uncover the countless other choices made decades before that childhood existed. We walk paths not paved by us. Stepping from them first requires their acknowledgment and then their eradication.


2. Rebecca Hall (Passing)

Passing Rebecca Hall

Two women, passing for white, enter the Drayton Hotel tea room. They recognize each other as old high school friends. Their reunion leads to a complicated, tangled clash. Writer/director Rebecca Hall adapts Nella Larsen’s novel with a pair of scissors, trimming the extraneous plot and delivering a nearly unbearable and rigid sit. Her Passing is an anxious, tricky watch, where the tension continuously ratchets. The audience waits for a relief that may never come. Shot luminously in black and white by cinematographer Eduard Grau, Passing also confines its characters in the 4:3 aspect ratio. There is nowhere to run, for those inside or outside the box. We’re stuck.


1. Edson Oda (Nine Days)

Most Interesting New Filmmakers We Met In Nine Days

I first saw Nine Days at Sundance 2020. You know, during the Before Times. For the next year, the film stuck closely to the festival circuit before having its tiny release in 2021. It’s on you to seek it out. Don’t bother looking up what it’s about or why it’s one of the Best Science Fiction Movies of 2021. Just trust us. Go watch it. Now. I’ll wait.

Edson Oda‘s debut feature is a quietly fanciful film filled with big, heavy, human ideas. The world it explores is kinda kooky but arduously realized and solidified by deeply earnest performances from Winston Duke, Benedict Wong, and Zazie Beetz. You’ll chuckle along with its cleverness until it smashes you in the face with the best damn ending of 2021. The build on Nine Days is as outstanding as it is sneaky. At different points, you’re living multiple tones, and in doing so, it drags you into a life-affirming climax. You’ll laugh, cry — all that crap that every storyteller pursues. I’ve never had a year quite like 2021, and I’ve never needed a movie as much as I needed Nine Days. I’ll follow Edson Oda wherever he goes from here. We suggest you do the same.

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Brad Gullickson is a Weekly Columnist for Film School Rejects and Senior Curator for One Perfect Shot. When not rambling about movies here, he's rambling about comics as the co-host of Comic Book Couples Counseling. Hunt him down on Twitter: @MouthDork. (He/Him)