Joe Swanberg (USA, 1981)

As one of the ‘founders’ of the American independent filmmaking movement mumblecore, his film debut, Kissing on the Mouth, was shown in 2005 on the South by Southwest festival in Austin. In the meantime, Joe Swanberg has been very prolific, he made several shorts, 16 full feature films (of which 6 in the year 2011 alone) and he also did a web-series and directed an episode for Andrew Haigh’s new LGBT series Looking (2014). He appears in a couple of films of independent filmmaking friends and he regularly enforces the new American horror scene with Ti West and Adam Wingard as the key players, who from their part, tend to show up in his movies as well.

Mentioning Eric Rohmer and Paul Mazursky as a couple of his major influences, Swanberg makes movies about twentysomethings struggling with relationships, sex or even filmmaking, in an improvised Cassavetes, cinéma vérité kind of way.

His masterpiece until now would be Nights and Weekends (2008), which he made with rising star Greta Gerwig. The film depicts a realistic portrait of a reunited couple that tries but does not connect with each other. Joe Swanberg’s metafictional Full Moon Trilogy (2011): Silver Bullets/Art History/The Zone is also very much worth the watch.

After All the Light in the Sky (2012), Drinking Buddies (2013) and his new twisted genre-thriller 24 Exposures (2013), we certainly can not wait to see his mumblecore comedy Happy Christmas (2014). His major role in Josephine Decker’s film Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (2014) also appears to be outstanding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAIl5hz60ZU

For more about American independent ‘Mumblecore’ cinema, have a look at our US mumblecore 2013/2014 overview.