Park Jung-bum’s debut feature The Journals of Musan won the Best New Narrative Director Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. Watch Liza Béar’s video interview with the filmmaker.

Writer-director Park Jung-bum’s powerful first feature The Journals of Musan, in which he also plays the leading role, deservedly won the Best New Narrative Director Award at Tribeca Film Festival 2011 for its insightful portrait of a North Korean defector in Seoul, so. Korea, grappling with the contradictions of consumer capitalism as he tries to survive, both physically and psychically, on the fringes of society. The Journals of Musan was previously screened at festivals in Pusan, Marrakech, Rotterdam and Krakow, where it also won awards. Liza Béar interviewed Park Jung-bum on April 26th during a public screening of his film at the Clearview Cinemas.

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Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter is the first feature film made by a Rwandan in Rwanda and won a Special Jury Mention at the Tribeca Film festival. Watch Liza Béar’s video interview with the filmmaker.

Grey Matter, the first feature film made by a Rwandan living in Rwanda, is a film-within-a-film. The character, Balthazar is trying to make a film, The Cycle of the Cockroach, about brother-sister characters coping with the trauma of the Rwandan genocide. It’s a haunting, skillful blend of metaphor, reality, hallucination and nightmare.

In the second part of the interview, Ruhorahoza discusses the origins of Grey Matter and how—still haunted by the 1994 atrocities—the story elements came together in the aftermath of genocide, 15 years later. “It’s the story of two siblings losing their parents,” he says, “and of a militia man who was involved in the massacre of those parents.” The film, written and directed by 28-year-old Kivu Ruhorahoza, won a Special Jury Mention at the Tribeca Film Festival in the Best New Narrative Director category and a Best Actor award for Shami Bizimana as Yvan, the mad brother.

Watch the second part of Liza Béar’s interview with Kivu Ruhorahoza after the jump

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Liza Béar talks to Miquel Barcelo about his 26-foot bronze sculpture, Gran Elefandret, which was recently unveiled in New York’s Union Square.

Miquel Barceló talks about his outdoor sculpture, Gran Elefandret, with Liza Béar. The 26-foot bronze sculpture, an outsize elephant balancing on its trunk, was cast at Alfa Arte, Eibar, in the Basque country, and shipped by freighter from Bilboa, Spain, in a 33-foot crate. The piece has previously been exhibited in Avignon, France. Its New York installation and the press conference on September 13th are courtesy Marlborough Gallery and the New York City Parks Department. Filmed by Liza Béar.

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Trabantimino, eight years in the making and completed just one hour before its October 7th opening at Salon 94, displays bravura mechanics, a whiff of nostalgia and a sense of humor. Liz Cohen took to task three aspects of car culture: ownership, fabrication and marketing.

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Contributing Editor Liza Béar sat down with the producer and director of Feathered Cocaine, a documentary about falconry and terrorism, for her video interview series Squaring Off.

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Liza Béar talks to Turkish artist Serkan Ozkaya about his monumental David Double.

Twice the size of the original David in carrara marble that Michelangelo completed in Florence in 1504, Serkan Ozkaya’s David Double—made of fiberglass from a Stanford University computer model—is 17 feet tall. It has a metal armature and is sprayed gold. The homage to Michelangelo was shipped by a freighter from Istanbul to the Storefront for Art and Architecture on Kenmare Street, where it was parked on March 6, lying on its side in a low-boy tractor-trailer. David Double will be driven around New York on this rig before heading to Louisville, Kentucky, where it has a permanent home in the 21C Museum collection. A styrofoam version of David Double was previously shown at the Istanbul Biennal.

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Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, writer and director of Turn me on, goddammit recently won Tribeca’s Best Screenplay award. BOMB co-founder Liza Béar sits down with Jacobsen and her leading lady, Helene Bergsholm.

At the world premiere of her debut feature, Turn me on, goddammit, writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen won Tribeca’s Best Screenplay award. An adaptation of the novel by Olaug Nilssen, the film is a tender and hilarious coming-of-age comedy about a 15-year-old girl in a small rural community in Norway, starring Helene Bergsholm as Alma.

After watching Liza Béar’s interview with Jacobsen, check out her chat with the film’s lead actress, Bergsholm, after the jump.

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Liza Béar sits down with Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, whose documentary tells of the building of a separation barrier on the West Bank.

The day Emad Burnat’s fourth son Gibreel was born, Israelis uprooted olive trees in his West Bank village of Bil’in prior to building an illegal separation barrier that would deprive the Palestinians of 55% of their arable land. Initially with a consumer camera, Burnat, a freelance TV cameraman, started filming both the ensuing militant protests, creative counteractions and the effects of the barrier on his family’s life as his son grew from baby to toddler. Soldiers shot at Burnat, bullets lodged in his cameras, and one of his best friends died. After accumulating 700 hours of footage over a five year period, he met Guy Davidi, an Israeli activist filmmaker then working on a film about the water problems of the region. The two decided to collaborate on Burnat’s footage and give it a personal angle, telling the story of the conflict from the cameraman’s point of view and structuring it by the lifespan of the five destroyed cameras.

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