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Jim Jarmusch's best movies prove he has always been a risk-taker of a director, even if those risks are necessarily pronounced or brash compared to other filmmakers. Over more than 30 years in the business, Jarmusch has dominated the indie scene as a director concerned with the quotidian, the existential, the unusual, the confrontational, the bland, and everything in between. A typical Jarmusch plot presents as a logical, mild-mannered affair no matter how extraordinary the circumstances, choosing to focus on how the characters populating the film operate within the established rules of the world.

As such, Jarmusch has emerged as a director who has been able to go from genre to genre, be it a crime thriller, comedy, or supernatural drama, infusing it with his unique sensibilities. With 13 feature films and two documentaries to his name (not to mention the large handful of short films), Jarmusch has crafted an astounding...

Suzanne Fletcher and Ann Magnuson in Sara Driver’s Sleepwalk Photo: Nan Goldin

Sara Driver’s spellbinding Sleepwalk, co-written with Kathleen Brennan and Lorenzo Mans, shot by Jim Jarmusch and Frank Prinzi, with a score by Phil Kline, and starring Suzanne Fletcher with Ann Magnuson, Steve Buscemi (coming to the Tribeca Film Festival to present Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Fargo), Linda Yablonski, Sally Venue (aka Sally Berg), Richard Boes, Ako, Stephen Chen, Tony Todd, Dexter Lee, Harvey Perr, Barbara Klar, Cheryl Dyer, Rebecca Wright, and William Rice (aka Bill Rice) was a New Directors/New Films at 50: A Retrospective pick. Sara also participated in an HBO sponsored live virtual Free Talk, moderated by Wendy Keys. Ed Bahlman (99 Records founder and producer) and I sent in greetings to Sara. The exchange is below our conversation.

Sara Driver on New York City in the Eighties: “When I was making Sleepwalk,...

Sara Driver's Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993) is showing October and November on Mubi in the United States.SleepwalkIn Sara Driver’s too small yet varied filmography, her two fiction features, both poetic fantasies—Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993)—are bracketed by two other longer films, the 48-minute You Are Not I and the 78-minute documentary Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017). Sleepwalk stars Suzanne Fletcher, who also played the schizophrenic sister in You Are Not I; Boom For Real portrays both a highly interactive community and an eclectic artist inside it, which might also describe When Pigs Fly, a comedy inspired by Topper about a jazz pianist (Alfred Molina) living in an east coast port town populated by barflies and ghosts. Moreover, the community in Boom is basically Lower East Side Manhattan and more specifically the Bowery, the setting of Sleepwalk, as well as...

You Are Not I

"Showcasing a free-form approach to narrative that you'll wish wasn't all but extinct in American independent cinema," writes Benjamin Mercer in the L, "Sara Driver's long-unavailable (and too small) body of work constitutes a minor revelation. In her 1981 debut, You Are Not I — recently rediscovered and refurbished, providing the impetus for Anthology's retrospective — Driver laid the groundwork for her eerily dissonant overlay of enchantment, terror, and tedium: Adapting a Paul Bowles story with longtime collaborator (and partner) Jim Jarmusch, who also shot the film on black-and-white 16mm, You Are Not I is an outer-boundary study in the mind's capacity to project its disturbance." Suzanne Fletcher plays Ethel, "who has somehow escaped from a nearby mental hospital in the flaming aftermath of a several-car pileup. She travels through a derelict zone to her sister's house, where the 'inconvenient' Ethel winds up in an unnervingly clenched domestic showdown.

"Sara Driver's long-lost No Wave adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story finally resurfaces," writes Alt Screen at the top of its roundup. "Co-written and shot by Jim Jarmusch (with Tom Dicillo as assistant) and featuring cameos by Nan Goldin and Luc Sante, You Are Not I [1981] has only screened at the Iceland Film Fest and the Portuguese Cinémathèque in Lisbon."

"A nervous mental patient (Suzanne Fletcher) escapes her hospital, and wanders past a horrific car crash en route to her sister's house," writes R Emmet Sweeney at Movie Morlocks. "She desperately wants to eject her frazzled sibling and replace her, to create space for the patient to live alone in her own head. Driver sets a mood that is dreamlike and elliptical — the crash is a pile-up of abstracted forms on grass, and the corpses are lined up like dominoes. We are witnessing the world through the patient's frazzled brain,...

The 49th New York Film Festival has announced their Masterworks and Special Anniversary screenings that will show between the festival’s seventeen days, September 30th – October 16th. The Masterworks program and the festival’s additional programming will provide audiences with exciting opportunities to explore new film-making styles and storytelling events. To learn more about the Masterworks and Anniversary films, please check out below for full synopsis and details.

Masterworks And Special Anniversary Screenings

Masterworks: The Gold Rush

Chaplin’s personal favorite among his own films, The Gold Rush (1925), is a beautifully constructed comic fable of fate and perseverance, set in the icy wastes of the Alaskan gold fields. Re-released by Chaplin in 1942 in a recut version missing some scenes, and with added narration and musical score, The Gold Rush will be presented in a new restoration of the original, silent 1925 version. In this frequently terrifying and always unpredictable universe of...