Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, film critics for The New York Times, discuss an international assortment of rising young filmmakers.
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Given this glut it’s unsurprising that even the most talented filmmakers, especially those outside the mainstream, are sometimes relegated to semi-obscurity. Their art sees the light of day without quite being noticed.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that, despite occasional critical claims to the contrary, the quality of contemporary cinema is as exciting as the quantity is intimidating. Filmmakers around the world are making movies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, personal reflection and social advocacy, conventional narrative and radical experimentation. The oldest filmmakers on our list were born in 1973, on the eve of the home-video revolution, making them members of the first true on-demand generation. They have grown up with unprecedented access to movies from across the globe and from different epochs, an abundance of influences that informs their work and can make it difficult to pigeonhole them aesthetically or regionally.
We weren’t interested in promoting an idea of cinematic correctness or in fabricating an arbitrary new “wave.” We weren’t looking for diversity, even if we happily found it: 25 percent of our directors, for instance, are women, well above the American average. Fewer than half are North American. Male or female, black or white, Londoners or Brooklynites, these 20 do not represent a school, a movement or a generational cohort. What they do represent is the persistence of personal vision and the resilience of cinema, which in its second century remains a young art form with a bright future.
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Dee Rees
AGE: 36 | ‘PARIAH’
Since then, Ms. Rees, who worries about being a late bloomer (she earned a business degree before going to film school), has powered ahead. Among her projects is “Bolo,” a crime thriller about a Memphis police detective that she wrote for Focus Features as part of its deal for “Pariah.” Focus has decided that “Bolo” isn’t big enough for it to make, so now it’s being backed independently. Ms. Rees has actors like Thandie Newton involved and investors ready to write checks. The problem is that she now needs a white male actor (“some big, billion-dollar action hero”) who has “foreign value,” because her Memphis cop is also a black lesbian.
“There’s a secret foreign-value spreadsheet, apparently,” Ms. Rees said, “where you type in an actor’s name, and it spits out a value.” If she’s matter-of-fact when she talks about the industry and race, perhaps it’s because when you’re a black female director, you have no other choice. She’s also busy with an HBO series that she’s developing with Viola Davis. Ms. Rees wasn’t sure what she could say about that project, so she said little other than it’s been a dream job, calling Ms. Davis an amazing muse. Ms. Rees said even less about a biopic that she’s rewriting, also for HBO. What she will say is that she has a strategy: “to do things that I love and do things that are important to me. ”
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Pablo Larraín
AGE: 37 | ‘NO’
The Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín never expected to make a trilogy about life under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90), during which thousands of the country’s citizens were executed or disappeared. Yet that’s exactly what he created with his last three features: “Tony Manero” (2007), “Post Mortem” (2010) and “No” (2012). Darkly, at times queasily humorously, each tracks Chilean Everymen — a John Travolta impersonator in the first movie and a morgue worker in the second, both brilliantly played by Alfredo Castro — whose lives are inexorably upended by violence.
“No” is funnier and lighter than the first two movies, and both its tone and star, Gael García Bernal (as an adman who helps topple Pinochet through a hilarious TV campaign), made it an easier sell. Mr. Larraín has had an agent and manager for years, but with “No,” he also had a distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, that could pay for a serious Academy Awards push. (It was nominated for best foreign-language film, losing to “Amour.”) All this attention has probably made Mr. Larraín a bigger target, especially for those leery of his family background (his parents are politicians on the right; he’s on the left) and of his insistently playful, perverse approach to history.
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Corneliu Porumboiu
AGE: 37 | ‘12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST,’ ‘EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST, OR METABOLISM’
Corneliu Porumboiu grew up in Vaslui, a small city in Moldavia, where he was playing table tennis the day in 1989 when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in the most violent of the Eastern European revolutions that year. Seventeen years later, Mr. Porumboiu’s mordantly hilarious meditation on the revolution’s legacy — “12:08 East of Bucharest” — won at Cannes for best first film, establishing him as a star of a resurgent post-post-Communist Romanian cinema.
His new film, “Evening Falls in Bucharest,” is at the New York Film Festival this fall, and his work will be the centerpiece of the Making Waves festival of Romanian film at Lincoln Center in December. The global festival circuit has often been more welcoming to Mr. Porumboiu and his peers than their homeland, where theaters are monopolized by Hollywood and filmmakers often depend on state funds in a poor and politically volatile country.
Sometimes called minimalist or ultrarealist, the new Romanian style has a kind of austere, formally meticulous absurdism. Filmmakers under the old regime learned to cloak their social criticism in allegory and indirection; and in response, the younger generation (including Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu and Radu Muntean) embraced a style that favored honesty, specificity and humor as dark as the Black Sea.
Mr. Porumboiu is a master of the long static shot, the weary argument and the deadpan existential joke. He fixes his camera on the struggles of minor potentates and midlevel functionaries — a TV host in “12:08”; a detective and his bosses in “Police, Adjective”; a movie director in “Evening Falls on Bucharest, or Metabolism” — and divines the secrets of his society, and of our vain, pathetic species, in the smallest details of speech and behavior.
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Barry Jenkins
AGE: 33 | ‘MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY’
One of the characters in “Medicine for Melancholy” muses that there sometimes seems to be a contradiction between being “indie” and being black. Barry Jenkins, who lives in Oakland, Calif., is one of several filmmakers on this list challenging that dichotomy.
A. O. SCOTT What projects are you working on now?
BARRY JENKINS I’ve just returned from Europe, working on a project with [the producer] Mark Johnson of “Breaking Bad” about a group of black radicals running from the ’60s through today. While there, I also finished a script I’ve collaborated on with the playwright Tarrell McCraney, who grew up virtually a block from me in Miami. My short-term plans are to make more features. I spent the summer overseas getting away from my pay-the-bills work on commercials, away from the industry to complete writings I’ve begun in recent months, more personal pieces while working on the project with Mark.
Talk about your identity as a filmmaker.
I’m a black filmmaker. I must be. When I think of characters, or rather, when characters come to me — as the best ones do, outside of conscious thought — overwhelmingly they are black. And when I introduce these characters and films into the production framework of this industry, the funding and distribution “restrictions” I’m met with as a result of those characters’ blackness would remind me, if it weren’t clear already, that I am indeed black.
When and how did your interest in moviemaking originate?
I grew up very poor, but through one means or another, we always had cable. We lived in some rough spots. It’s a cliché, but movies were an escape. I vividly remember living in a house where we had to boil water in a kettle to bathe, and yet there was a satellite dish in the backyard. There was also the summer I went film by film at the local Blockbuster renting my way through the foreign section. I remember watching a film called “301/302” and having this feeling of how big the world was.
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Andrew Haigh
AGE: 40 | ‘WEEKEND’
It would be unfair to circumscribe Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend” as a gay film, and a mistake to describe it as a love story that transcends such categories. The movie is simultaneously a candid and detailed snapshot of gay life in Britain and one of the most persuasive and revelatory depictions of what it feels like to be alive today. Mr. Haigh lives in Norwich, England.
A. O. SCOTT What are your current projects?
ANDREW HAIGH I’m directing and exec-producing a show for HBO called “Looking,” which centers on three gay men in San Francisco. I also have two films in the works. I’m casting the first, “45 Years,” a kind of thematic sequel to “Weekend” about a marriage thrown into free fall. The second is an adaptation of the novel “Lean on Pete” by Willy Vlautin.
What are challenges you’ve faced? What is the situation for young filmmakers in Britain today?
The biggest challenge is not giving up. It can be a depressing process when you get turned down for funding, or your short film is rejected from a festival, or you’re told there is no market for your script. I think in Britain it is amazing that we have public funding for films, and I’m grateful for that, but at the same time, it does hamper a certain attitude. I was inspired by the microbudget filmmakers in the United States (such as Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz, Andrew Bujalski, et cetera) who just made their own personal films by any means necessary. My first feature, “Greek Pete,” cost under $10,000, and although hardly anyone saw it, it really got things started.
How did “Weekend” evolve?
“Weekend” came from wanting to make a film about gay people that felt authentic and true . Everyone turned the script down for funding, saying the things I expected: It’s too gay, not gay enough, no one will want to see it. In the end, we found regional funding. It was absolutely a collaboration between the three of us [including the actors Tom Cullen and Chris New], just trying to make something honest and real.
![]()
Maren Ade
AGE: 36 | ‘EVERYONE ELSE’
For much of the moviegoing world, 2010 was about studio sequels with kiddie wizards and sensitive vampires and the like, but for those who ventured beyond the multiplex, it was also the year of “Everyone Else.” In America, this German film barely pulled in $100,000 in theaters, but it scored big in the major year-end critics polls, voted ninth best in Film Comment magazine, fifth in The Village Voice and fifth again on Indiewire.
If you have never heard of “Everyone Else” or its director, Maren Ade, or that she is often grouped together with a vital German film movement called the Berlin School, it’s no surprise. The deluge of new movies makes it extraordinarily difficult for art-house distributors to grab the attention of American viewers, especially for foreign-language titles that don’t speak French. And “Everyone Else,” which explores the relationship between a young man and woman while they’re on vacation at his parents’ Sardinian villa, isn’t flashy. It’s intimate, beautiful, real — and it’s about love, which is the most important thing in life but also one of the most difficult to get right on screen.
Ms. Ade hasn’t directed a new movie since “Everyone Else,” which won two awards at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival (it shared the Silver Bear). Still, she has remained busy, notably with the production company that she started with Janine Jackowski, whom she met when they were at the Munich Academy for Film and Television.
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Lixin Fan
AGE: 36 | ‘LAST TRAIN HOME’
Lixin Fan’s documentaries — those he has produced as well as those he has directed — explore some of the demographic and environmental consequences of China’s recent, rapid economic growth. These are excerpts from an e-mail exchange.
A. O. SCOTT How did you start working in China?
LIXIN FAN I was born and raised in the city of Wuhan in central China. I became a journalist for a local TV station after graduating from college. I started to work for indie documentary productions while having a day job. In 2006, I emigrated to Canada to join EyeSteelFilm, a Montreal indie company specialized in making social documentaries. In the same year, I came back to Chongqing to work on “Up the Yangtze,” a documentary about the Three Gorges Dam. Then I started to travel back and forth between the two worlds to work. In a nutshell, my journey was a loop to offer me some valuable insights about my home country from outside in and inside out.
What are some of the main challenges of making documentaries in China?
Censorship is obviously a big obstacle for films on sensitive subjects if you wish to broadcast in the country. Most government agencies or businesses are cautious about accepting film requests, but we always try to shoot run-and-gun style, without permits. I work mostly with Chinese crews, so we don’t sound alarms.
A change I’ve sensed in recent years is that people have less trust in strangers. That sometimes prolongs our filming process and dampens the penetration of story, if you don’t have enough time to let people willingly open up for your camera. That can be really frustrating, especially when you start to reflect that the reason is the whole society’s lack of a sense of security.
![]()
Matias Piñeiro
AGE: 32 | ‘VIOLA’
The romantic and professional predicaments of underemployed, overeducated young people in a big American city. These are hardly unusual concerns for a filmmaker, but in Matias Piñiero’s movies, the city is Buenos Aires and the strivings of the young are filtered through a lively literary sensibility and a precise and elegant visual style.
A. O. SCOTT Can you describe the process of making your films?
MATIAS PIÑIERO I work somehow fast. I make films with people that I respect both as friends and colleagues. I admire how they work and how they are. I make very low-budget films that work and are sustainable in their own system of production, distribution and exhibition, which is very small and doesn’t fall into any crisis. It is somehow “ecological.” Two months before shooting I write the script, and try to start rehearsing as soon as possible. Opening the script to actors, director of photography, assistants and friends is key, so as to take out the bad ideas and bring in the new, fresh ones, the ones that are more connected with the reality of the shooting, which is coming up in a short time.
Are you aware of the American term “mumblecore,” which is sometimes used to characterize low-budget films made by young people about (more or less) their own lives? Do you see any affinity between those movies and your own?
I know mumblecore, but for the last three years haven’t seen all. I think I may share with the films that are related to that term, extra-low-budgets that we use to produce, the production system and the young-people theme [and] imagery. On the other hand, I enjoy cinema much more in terms of artifice and composition rather than the obsessive naturalism that sometimes I think those films fall into. I’d rather not mumble, but enjoy talking in fast, plentiful kinds of ways, as in Hawks or Sturges.
read about the 12 other filmmakers at the source
any filmmakers under 40 you'd add to the list?
Given this glut it’s unsurprising that even the most talented filmmakers, especially those outside the mainstream, are sometimes relegated to semi-obscurity. Their art sees the light of day without quite being noticed.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that, despite occasional critical claims to the contrary, the quality of contemporary cinema is as exciting as the quantity is intimidating. Filmmakers around the world are making movies that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, personal reflection and social advocacy, conventional narrative and radical experimentation. The oldest filmmakers on our list were born in 1973, on the eve of the home-video revolution, making them members of the first true on-demand generation. They have grown up with unprecedented access to movies from across the globe and from different epochs, an abundance of influences that informs their work and can make it difficult to pigeonhole them aesthetically or regionally.
We weren’t interested in promoting an idea of cinematic correctness or in fabricating an arbitrary new “wave.” We weren’t looking for diversity, even if we happily found it: 25 percent of our directors, for instance, are women, well above the American average. Fewer than half are North American. Male or female, black or white, Londoners or Brooklynites, these 20 do not represent a school, a movement or a generational cohort. What they do represent is the persistence of personal vision and the resilience of cinema, which in its second century remains a young art form with a bright future.
Dee Rees
AGE: 36 | ‘PARIAH’
Since then, Ms. Rees, who worries about being a late bloomer (she earned a business degree before going to film school), has powered ahead. Among her projects is “Bolo,” a crime thriller about a Memphis police detective that she wrote for Focus Features as part of its deal for “Pariah.” Focus has decided that “Bolo” isn’t big enough for it to make, so now it’s being backed independently. Ms. Rees has actors like Thandie Newton involved and investors ready to write checks. The problem is that she now needs a white male actor (“some big, billion-dollar action hero”) who has “foreign value,” because her Memphis cop is also a black lesbian.
“There’s a secret foreign-value spreadsheet, apparently,” Ms. Rees said, “where you type in an actor’s name, and it spits out a value.” If she’s matter-of-fact when she talks about the industry and race, perhaps it’s because when you’re a black female director, you have no other choice. She’s also busy with an HBO series that she’s developing with Viola Davis. Ms. Rees wasn’t sure what she could say about that project, so she said little other than it’s been a dream job, calling Ms. Davis an amazing muse. Ms. Rees said even less about a biopic that she’s rewriting, also for HBO. What she will say is that she has a strategy: “to do things that I love and do things that are important to me. ”
Pablo Larraín
AGE: 37 | ‘NO’
The Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín never expected to make a trilogy about life under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90), during which thousands of the country’s citizens were executed or disappeared. Yet that’s exactly what he created with his last three features: “Tony Manero” (2007), “Post Mortem” (2010) and “No” (2012). Darkly, at times queasily humorously, each tracks Chilean Everymen — a John Travolta impersonator in the first movie and a morgue worker in the second, both brilliantly played by Alfredo Castro — whose lives are inexorably upended by violence.
“No” is funnier and lighter than the first two movies, and both its tone and star, Gael García Bernal (as an adman who helps topple Pinochet through a hilarious TV campaign), made it an easier sell. Mr. Larraín has had an agent and manager for years, but with “No,” he also had a distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, that could pay for a serious Academy Awards push. (It was nominated for best foreign-language film, losing to “Amour.”) All this attention has probably made Mr. Larraín a bigger target, especially for those leery of his family background (his parents are politicians on the right; he’s on the left) and of his insistently playful, perverse approach to history.
Corneliu Porumboiu
AGE: 37 | ‘12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST,’ ‘EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST, OR METABOLISM’
Corneliu Porumboiu grew up in Vaslui, a small city in Moldavia, where he was playing table tennis the day in 1989 when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in the most violent of the Eastern European revolutions that year. Seventeen years later, Mr. Porumboiu’s mordantly hilarious meditation on the revolution’s legacy — “12:08 East of Bucharest” — won at Cannes for best first film, establishing him as a star of a resurgent post-post-Communist Romanian cinema.
His new film, “Evening Falls in Bucharest,” is at the New York Film Festival this fall, and his work will be the centerpiece of the Making Waves festival of Romanian film at Lincoln Center in December. The global festival circuit has often been more welcoming to Mr. Porumboiu and his peers than their homeland, where theaters are monopolized by Hollywood and filmmakers often depend on state funds in a poor and politically volatile country.
Sometimes called minimalist or ultrarealist, the new Romanian style has a kind of austere, formally meticulous absurdism. Filmmakers under the old regime learned to cloak their social criticism in allegory and indirection; and in response, the younger generation (including Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu and Radu Muntean) embraced a style that favored honesty, specificity and humor as dark as the Black Sea.
Mr. Porumboiu is a master of the long static shot, the weary argument and the deadpan existential joke. He fixes his camera on the struggles of minor potentates and midlevel functionaries — a TV host in “12:08”; a detective and his bosses in “Police, Adjective”; a movie director in “Evening Falls on Bucharest, or Metabolism” — and divines the secrets of his society, and of our vain, pathetic species, in the smallest details of speech and behavior.
Barry Jenkins
AGE: 33 | ‘MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY’
One of the characters in “Medicine for Melancholy” muses that there sometimes seems to be a contradiction between being “indie” and being black. Barry Jenkins, who lives in Oakland, Calif., is one of several filmmakers on this list challenging that dichotomy.
A. O. SCOTT What projects are you working on now?
BARRY JENKINS I’ve just returned from Europe, working on a project with [the producer] Mark Johnson of “Breaking Bad” about a group of black radicals running from the ’60s through today. While there, I also finished a script I’ve collaborated on with the playwright Tarrell McCraney, who grew up virtually a block from me in Miami. My short-term plans are to make more features. I spent the summer overseas getting away from my pay-the-bills work on commercials, away from the industry to complete writings I’ve begun in recent months, more personal pieces while working on the project with Mark.
Talk about your identity as a filmmaker.
I’m a black filmmaker. I must be. When I think of characters, or rather, when characters come to me — as the best ones do, outside of conscious thought — overwhelmingly they are black. And when I introduce these characters and films into the production framework of this industry, the funding and distribution “restrictions” I’m met with as a result of those characters’ blackness would remind me, if it weren’t clear already, that I am indeed black.
When and how did your interest in moviemaking originate?
I grew up very poor, but through one means or another, we always had cable. We lived in some rough spots. It’s a cliché, but movies were an escape. I vividly remember living in a house where we had to boil water in a kettle to bathe, and yet there was a satellite dish in the backyard. There was also the summer I went film by film at the local Blockbuster renting my way through the foreign section. I remember watching a film called “301/302” and having this feeling of how big the world was.
Andrew Haigh
AGE: 40 | ‘WEEKEND’
It would be unfair to circumscribe Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend” as a gay film, and a mistake to describe it as a love story that transcends such categories. The movie is simultaneously a candid and detailed snapshot of gay life in Britain and one of the most persuasive and revelatory depictions of what it feels like to be alive today. Mr. Haigh lives in Norwich, England.
A. O. SCOTT What are your current projects?
ANDREW HAIGH I’m directing and exec-producing a show for HBO called “Looking,” which centers on three gay men in San Francisco. I also have two films in the works. I’m casting the first, “45 Years,” a kind of thematic sequel to “Weekend” about a marriage thrown into free fall. The second is an adaptation of the novel “Lean on Pete” by Willy Vlautin.
What are challenges you’ve faced? What is the situation for young filmmakers in Britain today?
The biggest challenge is not giving up. It can be a depressing process when you get turned down for funding, or your short film is rejected from a festival, or you’re told there is no market for your script. I think in Britain it is amazing that we have public funding for films, and I’m grateful for that, but at the same time, it does hamper a certain attitude. I was inspired by the microbudget filmmakers in the United States (such as Joe Swanberg, Aaron Katz, Andrew Bujalski, et cetera) who just made their own personal films by any means necessary. My first feature, “Greek Pete,” cost under $10,000, and although hardly anyone saw it, it really got things started.
How did “Weekend” evolve?
“Weekend” came from wanting to make a film about gay people that felt authentic and true . Everyone turned the script down for funding, saying the things I expected: It’s too gay, not gay enough, no one will want to see it. In the end, we found regional funding. It was absolutely a collaboration between the three of us [including the actors Tom Cullen and Chris New], just trying to make something honest and real.
Maren Ade
AGE: 36 | ‘EVERYONE ELSE’
For much of the moviegoing world, 2010 was about studio sequels with kiddie wizards and sensitive vampires and the like, but for those who ventured beyond the multiplex, it was also the year of “Everyone Else.” In America, this German film barely pulled in $100,000 in theaters, but it scored big in the major year-end critics polls, voted ninth best in Film Comment magazine, fifth in The Village Voice and fifth again on Indiewire.
If you have never heard of “Everyone Else” or its director, Maren Ade, or that she is often grouped together with a vital German film movement called the Berlin School, it’s no surprise. The deluge of new movies makes it extraordinarily difficult for art-house distributors to grab the attention of American viewers, especially for foreign-language titles that don’t speak French. And “Everyone Else,” which explores the relationship between a young man and woman while they’re on vacation at his parents’ Sardinian villa, isn’t flashy. It’s intimate, beautiful, real — and it’s about love, which is the most important thing in life but also one of the most difficult to get right on screen.
Ms. Ade hasn’t directed a new movie since “Everyone Else,” which won two awards at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival (it shared the Silver Bear). Still, she has remained busy, notably with the production company that she started with Janine Jackowski, whom she met when they were at the Munich Academy for Film and Television.
Lixin Fan
AGE: 36 | ‘LAST TRAIN HOME’
Lixin Fan’s documentaries — those he has produced as well as those he has directed — explore some of the demographic and environmental consequences of China’s recent, rapid economic growth. These are excerpts from an e-mail exchange.
A. O. SCOTT How did you start working in China?
LIXIN FAN I was born and raised in the city of Wuhan in central China. I became a journalist for a local TV station after graduating from college. I started to work for indie documentary productions while having a day job. In 2006, I emigrated to Canada to join EyeSteelFilm, a Montreal indie company specialized in making social documentaries. In the same year, I came back to Chongqing to work on “Up the Yangtze,” a documentary about the Three Gorges Dam. Then I started to travel back and forth between the two worlds to work. In a nutshell, my journey was a loop to offer me some valuable insights about my home country from outside in and inside out.
What are some of the main challenges of making documentaries in China?
Censorship is obviously a big obstacle for films on sensitive subjects if you wish to broadcast in the country. Most government agencies or businesses are cautious about accepting film requests, but we always try to shoot run-and-gun style, without permits. I work mostly with Chinese crews, so we don’t sound alarms.
A change I’ve sensed in recent years is that people have less trust in strangers. That sometimes prolongs our filming process and dampens the penetration of story, if you don’t have enough time to let people willingly open up for your camera. That can be really frustrating, especially when you start to reflect that the reason is the whole society’s lack of a sense of security.
Matias Piñeiro
AGE: 32 | ‘VIOLA’
The romantic and professional predicaments of underemployed, overeducated young people in a big American city. These are hardly unusual concerns for a filmmaker, but in Matias Piñiero’s movies, the city is Buenos Aires and the strivings of the young are filtered through a lively literary sensibility and a precise and elegant visual style.
A. O. SCOTT Can you describe the process of making your films?
MATIAS PIÑIERO I work somehow fast. I make films with people that I respect both as friends and colleagues. I admire how they work and how they are. I make very low-budget films that work and are sustainable in their own system of production, distribution and exhibition, which is very small and doesn’t fall into any crisis. It is somehow “ecological.” Two months before shooting I write the script, and try to start rehearsing as soon as possible. Opening the script to actors, director of photography, assistants and friends is key, so as to take out the bad ideas and bring in the new, fresh ones, the ones that are more connected with the reality of the shooting, which is coming up in a short time.
Are you aware of the American term “mumblecore,” which is sometimes used to characterize low-budget films made by young people about (more or less) their own lives? Do you see any affinity between those movies and your own?
I know mumblecore, but for the last three years haven’t seen all. I think I may share with the films that are related to that term, extra-low-budgets that we use to produce, the production system and the young-people theme [and] imagery. On the other hand, I enjoy cinema much more in terms of artifice and composition rather than the obsessive naturalism that sometimes I think those films fall into. I’d rather not mumble, but enjoy talking in fast, plentiful kinds of ways, as in Hawks or Sturges.
read about the 12 other filmmakers at the source
any filmmakers under 40 you'd add to the list?