Scott Macaulay

Vahid Mobasseri, Majid Panahi and Hadis Pakbaten inA Simple Accident

When we meet Seymour Hersh at his Washington office in Laura Poitras’s and Mark Obenhaus’s Cover-Up, the veteran journalist is framed by papers—documents piled on his desk…

A garish panel from an R. Crumb cartoon was the cover of Filmmaker’s spring 1995 edition. Inside were interviews with Hal Hartley, David Salle, Lourdes Portillo and Gregory Nava…

The Copenhagen-based British cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle is known for his innovation around diverse shooting formats, from the MiniDV of The Celebration to the SI-2K digital camera of Slumdog…

Mark Obenhaus has had an extensive career in television documentary, having worked with ABC News as well as on the PBS series Frontline, Great Performances and The American Experience. His subjects have ranged from the Kennedy assassination to UFOs to Robert Wilson’s groundbreaking opera, Einstein on the Beach, and he has won five national Emmy awards, two for the Frontline series “Abortion Clinic” and “Living Below the Line.” He worked with Seymour Hersh on projects including the Frontline documentary Buying the Bomb and brought his long relationship with Sy and understanding of the reporter’s working methods and very understandable sensitivities […]

Steam pouring from manhole covers, the neon-lights of 42nd street seen through rain-streaked taxicab windows, phalanxes of cops spied from tenement rooftops as they sweep a city block — David C. Roberts’s Song of My City distills the visual rushes of a score of 1970s and early ’80s New York City-set film classics into a 15-minute city symphony of sorts. Drawing inspiration from 1920s pictures such as Walter Ruttman’s

for the 25th anniversary of Filmmaker, we commissioned a radical redesign and also initiated a new upfront section: Reflections. For four issues we published pieces looking back at the history of the magazine as well as ones that meditated anew on its enduring concerns, such as struggles of early career filmmakers, the changing models of independent producing, the role of print magazines in a digital culture, and the shifting definitions of the word “independent.” When our anniversary year was over, I decided to keep the section, reasoning that “reflections” didn’t have to just refer to the past; these reflections could speculate towards the future as well. Some of my favorite pieces of the last eight years have been published here, a portion of the magazine designed to be capacious enough to include personal memoir, advocacy pieces, dialogues on filmmaking, film history and more.

©2026 Filmmaker Magazine All Rights Reserved A Publication of The Gotham

©2026 Filmmaker Magazine All Rights Reserved A Publication of The Gotham

©2026 Filmmaker Magazine All Rights Reserved A Publication of The Gotham