Film Forum

Filmmaker is a magazine about the art, craft, and future of cinema published by the Gotham Film & Media Institute. It has been essential reading for cinema artists and audiences since 1992. Founding editor Scott Macaulay has said that the magazine was premised on a “broader idea of what independent film was,” and Filmmaker has been broadening that idea for over three decades. Discover more interviews, profiles, reviews, reporting, and behind-the-scenes features on the Filmmaker Substack and in the quarterly print magazine.

Brydie O’Connor is a filmmaker from Kansas living in New York. Her work has been presented at Sundance, Berlinale, Full Frame, Hot Docs, Le Centre Pompidou, BFI, and The Museum of Modern Art, among other festivals and galleries worldwide. Her debut feature documentary, BARBARA FOREVER (2026), was awarded the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, the TEDDY Award for Best Documentary at the Berlinale, and is an honoree at the Maysles Documentary Center Abie Awards. In 2026, Brydie received the Creative Capital State of the Art Prize for New York, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 64th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and a Special Mention for the John Schlesinger Documentary Award for a first-time filmmaker at the Provincetown International Film Festival. She also works professionally as an archivist on documentaries, art films, video essays, and installations.

Chloe Lizotte is the content director of Filmmaker Magazine. She contributes a column on new media, Event Horizon, to Reverse Shot; her writing has also appeared in Vulture, Film Comment, Cinema Scope, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Screen Slate, among other outlets. She has mentored writers as a co-organizer of the Locarno Critics Academy and through workshops at Film at Lincoln Center, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image. Previously, she was the deputy editor of MUBI’s film journal Notebook and a contributing editor at Le Cinéma Club.

Kirsten Johnson’s DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD premiered at Sundance 2020, where it won the Jury Prize for Innovation in Nonfiction Storytelling. Listed by The New Yorker as one of the films that “Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking”, the movie won the Primetime Emmy for Directing, made the Oscar® shortlist and is currently showing on Netflix. Her previous film, CAMERAPERSON, has been included on several Best Films of the 21st Century lists and was also shortlisted for the Academy Award®. Her camerawork appears in Academy Award® winner CITIZEN FOUR, Academy nominated THE INVISIBLE WAR, and Cannes winner FAHRENHEIT 9/11. She is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers (only 5% of members are female).

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