15 International Filmmakers to Watch

Move over, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Coppola (father and daughter). From Lebanon to Tokyo, the next generation of directors is coming into its own.

Illustrations by Timba Smits

Independent filmmakers armed with unique stories and scrappy budgets are garnering the spotlight once reserved for major Hollywood directors. From the first female Arab filmmaker to be nominated for an Oscar to a rising basketball star-turned-documentarian, here are 15 exciting filmmakers making their mark on cinema.

Nadine Labaki

Hometown: Beirut, Lebanon
Notable work: Capernaum, the story of a streetwise adolescent who sues his negligent parents for creating him.
Influences: Bahman Ghobadi, Asghar Farhadi, Abdellatif Kechiche
Awards: Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival; Golden Globe nominee

Growing up during Lebanon’s civil war, when the danger outside occasionally meant months without school and little incentive to leave the apartment, Nadine Labaki would go downstairs to the local video store and pick out films to escape her grim reality, or at least inject it with a little fun and humor. The director of the Cannes Jury Prize–winning Capernaum, a sweeping, slightly absurdist story about poverty and immigration that focuses on a 12-year-old boy, gravitated toward American classics. “I used to love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Labaki says over the phone. “I’ve watched that one, I don’t know, maybe 2,000 times, until the VHS tape was completely destroyed.”

Labaki stayed in Lebanon to study film — her husband, Khaled Mouzanar, who scores her films, describes her as “a fish in water” on set — and after years honing her skills directing music videos and working in advertising, she pivoted to feature-length films.

“I think ordinary life is as interesting as any film,” says Labaki, 44, so she sets her work in Lebanon, which she knows well, and typically uses nonprofessional, street-cast actors to dramatize aspects of everyday life.

Caramel, her 2007 debut, follows five Lebanese women in various romantic predicaments ranging from reckoning with homosexuality to having premarital sex in a conservative culture. Where Do We Go Now? draws inspiration from Lysistrata, telling the story of Christian and Muslim women in a rural village who come up with increasingly madcap solutions to stop violence between their feuding husbands.

Her latest, Capernaum, stars Zain Al Rafeea, a nonprofessional actor and Syrian refugee Labaki discovered in one of Beirut’s most deprived neighborhoods, as a poor boy who sues his parents for having brought him into the world, and touches on issues of immigration and poverty.

“I believe that cinema can humanize problems,” she says. “When you hear about it in the news, it’s mainly figures and numbers and statistics. But when you put a face to the struggle on the big screen, you identify differently.”

Of her slightly surreal visit to Cannes last year, where she became the first female Arab filmmaker to win a major award, she demurs. “It was a victory for the whole team,” she says. “All of a sudden everyone felt like their struggle in life was important.”

RaMell Ross

Hometown: Fairfax, Virginia
Notable work: Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Influences: Terrence Malick, Charles Burnett, Godfrey Reggio

After a promising basketball career at Georgetown University was marred by injuries, RaMell Ross followed a roommate to Hale County, Alabama. After three years coaching high school basketball and teaching GED classes in the tight-knit community, he started filming. He formed close bonds with his players, traveling with the team to games and attending church services with their families.

Hale County, a tribute to his time there, centers on Daniel Collins, one of his players, and Quincy Bryant, who was part of his youth program. Once Ross hit on the idea, he spent a total of five years filming the minute details of his subjects’ lives while continuing his day job. Ultimately, Ross, 36, shot 1,300 hours of footage and whittled it down to just 76 minutes.

“I would just wake up and call the guys and go hang out all day,” Ross says, “and whatever they did I would do. I think that’s probably the only reason why it worked.”

Though Ross had never made a film before, his background in photography and music videos provided a strong artistic foundation, and his patience to get the absolute perfect shot yielded what the Village Voice called “a new cinematic language being born.”

“No one would ever give a black filmmaker $50 million to make something as ambitious and potentially esoteric as [Terrence Malick’s] The Tree of Life. It just doesn’t happen,” he explains. “But I was like, If no one will give me the money, I have time.”

Josephine Decker

Hometown: Dallas, Texas
Notable works: Bi the Way, Thou Wast Mild & Lovely, Madeline’s Madeline
Influences: Julian Schnabel, Darren Aronofsky, Paweł Pawlikowski, Pixar
Next feature: Shirley, a thriller about the groundbreaking horror writer Shirley Jackson, starring Elisabeth Moss in the titular role.

Of all films, it was Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. that turned Josephine Decker — whose Madeline’s Madeline is the dark story of a gifted, troubled young actress torn between an intense theater troupe and an overbearing mother — on to filmmaking years ago.

“In a kid’s film you go through the full range of human emotions,” she says. “You’re scared, you’re excited, you laugh, you’re joyous, you’re sad.” It’s exactly what she aims to capture when focusing on Madeline as she navigates mental illness and grapples with her racial identity.

The character of Evangeline, the group’s director — played by a sly, exploitative Molly Parker — is miles from Decker, 37, who scheduled formal check-ins with the cast throughout the shoot to make sure everyone’s voice was heard.

“The movie is in some ways a real critique of being a director,” says Decker. As for her own future? “I hope I do a lot better.”

Eliza Hittman

Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Notable work: Beach Rats, the tale of a wayward teen reckoning with his sexual orientation and burgeoning adulthood on Brooklyn’s beachy boundaries.
Influences: Darren Aronofsky, Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold
How living in Brooklyn informs her relationship with Hollywood: “I live in Kensington, in a micro-neighborhood of almost all immigrants from Uzbekistan and from Bangladesh and Azerbaijan, so I couldn’t feel farther from the industry.”
Award: Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic, Sundance
In addition to feature films: Hittman, 39, has directed episodes of 13 Reasons Why and High Maintenance and is an assistant professor of film and video at Pratt.

Chloe Zhao

Hometown: Beijing, China
Notable works: The Rider, Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Influences: Wong Kar-wai, Werner Herzog, Bong Joon-ho
Awards: Art Cinema Award, Cannes; Best Feature honors, Gotham Awards
What’s up next: A biopic about Bass Reeves, one of the first black U.S. deputy marshals, for Amazon Studios; Marvel’s The Eternals.

Though she lived in Beijing until she was 14, Chloé Zhao, now 35, developed a gift for capturing the nuances of life on America’s Great Plains, first with her debut, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, about the bond between brother and sister on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and then with 2017’s Cannes hit The Rider, about an injured rodeo rider living on the brink of poverty. Zhao visited a Lakota reservation while still in graduate school at NYU and was inspired by the tension within the indigenous Lakota, who hew to centuries-­old customs and remain close-knit even as younger members embrace modern urban culture like hip-hop. The Rider stars real-life Lakota cowboy Brady Jandreau as a rodeo performer searching for meaning after a devastating injury leaves his future on horseback in question. Brady’s actual father, Tim Jandreau, and sister Lilly play dramatized versions of themselves, which lends an unadulterated, realistic quality to the film, while Zhao’s sweeping shots of the Dakotan plains imbue it with majesty and poetic motion.

Brady Corbet

Hometown: Glenwood Springs, Colorado
Notable work: Vox Lux, which stars Natalie Portman as a seismic pop star who is the sole survivor of a school shooting.
And before that? The Childhood of a Leader (2015), an allegorical tale about the rise of 20th-century European fascism from the perspective of a rambunctious, neglected child.
Influences: Alfred Hitchcock, Mia Hansen-Løve, John Cassavetes
Why he might look familiar: At 37, he’s an accomplished actor who’s appeared in films including Funny Games, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Force Majeure.
On directing: “I realized that you don’t have to behave like John Ford in order to make radical projects. I’m quite shy and timid, but my films aren’t.”

Atsuko Hirayanagi

Hometown: Chiba, Japan
Notable work: Oh Lucy!
Influences: Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni

When Atsuko Hirayanagi was a kid, she’d spend hours drawing manga comics, typically tales of unrequited love, one of which featured some steamy scenes and got into the hands of her older brother and his classmates. (She burned the book as soon as she got it back.) Years later, she’d translate that creative drive and a fascination with lonely characters into Oh Lucy!, about Setsuko, a lonely, middle-aged office worker in Tokyo whose world opens up when she begins taking an English class.

“I noticed that I had two personas in America initially,” Hirayanagi, 43, says of her peripatetic life, which involved living in L.A. during high school and Singapore for film school. “When I was speaking English, my body language changed and my voice changed,” a transformation she sought to capture on screen.

Josh Hartnett, who stars as Lucy’s teacher, was blown away on set. “I worked with Sofia Coppola on her first film,” he says, referring to The Virgin Suicides, “and Atsuko is the only other director I’ve worked with on their first film and felt, ‘She knows what she’s doing.’ She’s going to surprise people consistently throughout her career.”

MORE FILMMAKERS TO WATCH

Bing Liu

Age: 30
Hometown: Rockford, Illinois
Notable work: Minding the Gap, a documentary about skateboarding and young men’s trauma in Liu’s hometown.
Awards: Best First Time Director, Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards

Carlos Lopez Estrada

Age: 30
Hometown: Mexico City, Mexico
Notable work: Blindspotting, about racial tension in gentrifying Oakland, starring Daveed Diggs.
Awards: Critics’ Prize, Deauville Film Festival

Alice Rohrwacher

Age: 37
Hometown: Castel Giorgio, Italy
Notable works: Happy as Lazzaro, a surreal tale of a peasant and a mischievous rich kid in rural Italy, and The Wonders, a film about an Italian beekeeping family.
Awards: Best Screenplay, Cannes Film Festival

Cathy Yan

Age: 32
Hometowns: Hong Kong; Washington, D.C.
Notable works: Dead Pigs, a humorous lampoon of Chinese capitalism. Up next is Birds of Prey, about DC’s Harley Quinn.
Awards: Special Jury Award for Ensemble Acting, Sundance Film Festival

Rungano Nyoni

Age: 36
Hometown: Lusaka, Zambia; Cardiff, Wales
Notable work: I Am Not a Witch, an unflinching look at the life of a serious young Zambian girl who arrives in a village and is sent to a witches’ camp.
Awards: Outstanding Debut, BAFTA Film Award

Michael Pearce

Age: 37
Hometown: Jersey, United Kingdom
Notable work: Beast, a frenetic psychological thriller about murder and manipulation on the island of Jersey.
Awards: Best Director nominee, British Independent Film Awards

Mia Hansen-Love

Age: 38
Hometown: Paris, France
Notable work: Things to Come, in which a middle-aged academic, played by Isabelle Huppert, re-examines her life after an unexpected divorce.
Awards: Best Director, Berlin International Film Festival

Gabriel Mascaro

Age: 35
Hometown: Recife, Brazil
Notable work: Neon Bull, a drama about a rodeo rider who spends his days wrangling bulls and his free time nurturing a passion for clothing design.
Awards: Special Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival

About the author: Grant Rindner is the editorial assistant for Airbnb Magazine. He also writes about music for Dazed, Complex, Billboard, and Pigeons & Planes.