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Sep 30, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Leo Koziol |Rez Ball
A great sports film is worth its weight in streamer subscriptions, and while Netflix has many, only one features a narrative drama cut through with dry frybread humor, spotlighting the “specific style of play” that is rezball, an aggressive hybrid of basketball that’s played on reservations across the United States. “It’s fast-paced, up-tempo, [about] keeping the ball moving,” Navajo filmmaker Sydney Freeland explains.
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May 30, 2024 | 
letterboxd.com | Rafa Sales Ross |Leo Koziol |Ella Kemp |Big Picture
As high school fades in the rearview mirror and responsibilities melt into possibilities, five teenagers from rural Oregon hop into a busted van heading toward the Pacific Coast. Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’s fiction debut Gasoline Rainbow spans the 500 miles that separate the recent grads’ small hometown and the ocean shores they dream of yet have never seen.
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Nov 17, 2023 | 
letterboxd.com | Annie Lyons |Leo Koziol |Gemma Gracewood
Don your Mockingjay pins and fashion your side braids—it’s time to head back to Panem. By the time The Hunger Games arrived on screens in 2012, fans were already well-versed in Suzanne Collins’s best-selling trilogy about a futuristic regime forcing children to compete in annual battle royale-style games and the ensuing revolution.
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Oct 24, 2023 | 
letterboxd.com | Leo Koziol
“My hope was to pass on a message that even if we go through hard times, there is also a moment in time that we can say, ‘Okay, I do need help’.” Lucy Tulugarjuk went through a lot to make her second feature film, Tautuktavuk (What We See), with Covid lockdowns and mandatory quarantines keeping her from her traditional land in the north of Canada.
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Oct 13, 2023 | 
letterboxd.com | Leo Koziol |Ella Kemp |Brian Formo
In the new feature film Uproar, Josh Waaka (Julian Dennison, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2) is the only Māori kid in a mostly-white 1980s New Zealand high school. He’s also bookish and nerdy, and wants to find his voice and his own path–be it an activist filmmaker, dramaturg or player on the rugby field.
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Sep 29, 2023 | 
letterboxd.com | Leo Koziol |Gemma Gracewood
In both her 2022 debut feature Charcoal (Carvão) and her newest film Toll (Pedagio), which recently premiered at TIFF 2023, filmmaker Carolina Markowicz bravely reproaches the absurdities of life in Brazil today. With her dark mix of comedy and drama and “lush, lived-in photography”, audience members are not quite sure if they should be laughing or feeling deeply disturbed about her country’s current state of affairs.
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Jul 31, 2023 | 
letterboxd.com | Leo Koziol |Annie Lyons
Lily, what drew you to the role in this film? LG: Honestly, it was Lainey. Morrisa had approached me, and it was another director I’d worked with before that put us in touch, Sarah Adina Smith. At that point in my career, post-Certain Women, I was getting a lot of inquiries about these small indies that were going to be very gritty, very hands-on—for lack of a better word, very tiring.
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Jul 28, 2023 | 
letterboxd.com | Ella Kemp |Leo Koziol
With this being your debut feature, how do you think the online experience interacts with how protective folks can be around cinema and auteurism? I loved Matt Neglia’s review, where he calls Talk To Me “the definition of ‘fuck around and find out’.” Did you feel closer to that, or to the masters of horror who came before you in this sacred genre? DP: Horror is a fun way to express so many different themes and not have it feel too heavy-handed. MP: And not be in a box.
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Jul 12, 2023 | 
thespinoff.co.nz | Leo Koziol
Wairoa Māori Film Festival curator Leo Koziol (Ngāti Rākaipaaka, Ngāti Kahungunu) shares a few favourites, all screening in cinemas this July. Matariki is traditionally a time of remembrance and storytelling. In ancient times, we gathered around the fireplace and shared oral histories, moteatea and waiata. In modern times, we gather in a cinema, a marae or around our giant screen television.
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Jun 8, 2023 | 
letterboxd.com | Rafaela Sales Ross |Leo Koziol |Jack Moulton
This feeds into something else that’s complex to tackle: the moment where passion turns into toxicity. When writing the script, how hard was it to steer away from an on-the-nose cautionary tale? Treating all three characters as though they were right is what helped. I don’t think the film tries to make the case that any of them is 100 percent right or 100 percent wrong. I don’t think any of them are really the true villain, and none of them are really the hero.
