At twenty-eight, actor Mark Webber is already a recognizable veteran of the indie film-festival circuit. Using several years of valuable experience Webber took on a different role as the writer, director and producer of his first feature Explicit Ills. The semi-autobiographical film follows four interconnected stories within inner-city Philadelphia and focuses on some very relevant and timely social issues. It's been a big year for Webber. Aside from the release of his debut feature, he has been cast alongside Michael Cera in Edgar Wright's upcoming Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and also saw the birth of his first child. He spoke with us about the trials and tribulations of getting a movie from notebook to big screen as well as his muted optimism about America's current political landscape. — Bryan Whitefield

Obviously you've worked on a number of films as an actor and even a few as a producer, but how difficult was it to get your own film done from start to finish? 
You know what? It's really hard [laughs]. I mean the turnaround from when I wrote the script to when we got it cast, then got financing, to up and shooting, actually happened in a matter of months. And even with editing and post it all came together within a year — which is really fast. But at the same time it's taken me almost twelve years to make this happen, in a way, because it's taken me working as an actor and meeting directors and learning from them as well as throughout that process establishing relationships with other talented, creative people. And because of that I was able to call Paul [Dano] and Rosario [Dawson] and [Jim] Jarmusch directly and get them to read my script, which for a lot of people starting out is the uphill battle that takes up a lot of your time and energy. So I was very fortunate in that way. Then the actual making of the film was just a series of constant highs and lows. We were working with a really small budget and not a lot of time and some really ambitious set-ups shooting-wise. Not to mention we were shooting on film and working with young kids in some not-so-great neighborhoods. But fortunately for me, the majority of the films that I've worked on have been shot in a similar way, so I was able to lean on some of that experience as a filmmaker myself.  

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If anyone epitomizes a "wild thing," it's bohemian femme fatale Uschi Obermaier, sexual icon and successful model in 1960s Germany. She was the it girl, hippie rebel and rock-star player of the time (boasting affairs with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix). With her signature pout, big hair and fearless attitude, Obermaier's free and passionate spirit made her one of the most desired women of the times.

She first earned her rebellious reputation as girlfriend of Rainer Langhans, leader of Germany's leftist party Kommune 1, but found their ideals conflicted with the freedom she desired. Her lust for ultimate liberty was fulfilled when she won the heart of adventurer Dieter Bockhorn, with whom she traveled around the world in a bus he custom-made for her.

Obermaier's story of freedom amidst the sexual revolution is documented in director Achim Bornhak's recently released Eight Miles High, which adapts her biography High Times. Actress Natalia Avelon takes us through Obermaier's short-lived life of glamour from teenage runaway to nomadic model and fought-over Stones groupie. The movie is a whirlwind tour of her life, capturing the restlessness of the time and costs of free love. Talking to Obermaier on the phone, I found that at sixty years old, she's an even more potent figure of femininity and sexuality than the film portrays. — Bianca Merbaum

So life in the '60s really was one wild party, with lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll?
It really was like that with all the ups and downs. At that time everything — the music, the fashion, the politics — everything was really new. Germany at the time was really suffocating and you were supposed to do what your parents wanted to. I just did not want it. Other people around me didn't want to put up with it either. So we tried everything, and sometimes it was good and sometimes we made mistakes. When we were so young we wanted to try out everything. And also our hormones were raging. Right away you fall in love and you think sex is a beautiful language and you want to speak it, you want to try it.

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Joachim Trier's debut film Reprise centers on a pair of twentysomething best friends who drop their debut novels into the same mailbox to varied results. It's taken the writer/director on a very interesting journey. The film won Trier a Discovery Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival; it debuted in the States at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and was later the featured film in the 2007 New Directors/New Films series, where Manohla Dargis of the New York Times declared it "one of the most passionately and intellectually uninhibited works from a young director I've seen in ages." It also went on to win Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the Amanda Awards in Norway (the equivalent of an Oscar) in 2007. But only after support from superproducer Scott Rudin and Miramax will the film get a general release in American theaters today. Reprise is vibrant, inventive and original in both its ideas and its form, and is sure to be at the top of my own year-end list. — Bryan Whitefield

Foreign-language films typically have a hard time in America, and I remember someone at the MoMA screening asking if you had considered writing an English language version of Reprise. . .
[laughs] I've had offers, actually. But to me Reprise is perfect as it is now in its cultural setting. I'm interested in detail, and not because I'm trying to hone in on one particular part of the audience. You try to see things as they are — these are people who are living like that and have shoes like that and listen to music like this and this is the world where they live. You work to create it and you don't ask questions. To recreate that somewhere else would be absurd. But at the same time, some people were telling me, "This film reminds me so much of people I know on the Lower East Side." I get this even in Turkey. There were people there that were coming up to me to say, "We have boys like that in Istanbul that listen to Joy Division and everything."

You use some interesting formal devices in the film. . .

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I was probably about six years old when my mother told me about the baby boy she almost had. The baby that would have been born with an extra chromosome; an XXY. The doctors advised she terminate the pregnancy or risk having a very sick child. This was the 1970s, and little research had been done on chromosomal abnormalities. Today's evidence shows that if my mother had not been pressured to abort that baby boy, he very well may have grown up healthy and strong, with minimal behavioral issues. Nothing like the terrors the doctors had warned her about.

As a sophomore in college, I began feverishly studying the topic of intersexuality. I pored over Foucault's The History of Sexuality and obsessed about Anne Fausto-Sterling's theory of a five-sex gender model. Perhaps, I thought, it was part of my life's purpose to educate people about intersexuality, in homage to the baby who died so that I could exist.

Imagine my intrigue when I discovered the award-winning film XXY. Directed by Lucia Puenzo, this edgy, enthralling film explores the dramatic soul-searching of one intersex fifteen year-old, painfully straddling two worlds. It's a passionate depiction of the tumultuous road from desire to discovery. Puenzo called to discuss the film from her home in Argentina. — Alexandra Godfrey

What inspired you to make this film?
It was a writer who's right here with me — my husband, who wrote a short story about an intersex named Alex, and as soon as I read that short story I knew I wanted to do that film.

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Eran Kolirin's first feature, The Band's Visit, opened in New York and Los Angeles last Friday. A poignant story of an Egyptian police band lost in Israel, the film has won a host of awards worldwide. That the film has done well internationally is fitting, since for all its apparent evocation of local politics, its themes are existential — can we connect with other people, or even with our own pasts? The Band's Visit makes the political personal, capturing perfectly the homesickness that can strike even when you're still at home. And if I'm making it sound grim, it's also got some great jokes. When I reached Kolirin on the phone last week, he sounded weary and lonely, stranded in the middle of a two-week press tour — probably the perfect position from which to promote this wry, bittersweet film.
 
What was your initial inspiration for this film?
It began with an image of the main character, of Tewfiq, a man in uniform who sings an Arabic song.

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