Dialogs: Podcaster/Designer Debbie Millman Talks About Why Design Matters and What We Can Do About It

A big swing and a miss comes courtesy of writer/director Sophie Barthes (Cold Souls, 2015’s Madame Bovary) in The Pod Generation, concerning a New York couple, Rachel (Emilia Clarke) and Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), living in the not-so-distant future where convenience is everything, even when it comes to childbirth. Rachel is the primary breadwinner as an executive at a tech company, while Alvy is a botanist, who believes that all things should be done and grown naturally, including children. These days, however, anyone of means has children via the Womb Center, which offers couples a portable womb to gestate their child within, making it possible for both men and women to handle the burden of pregnancy.

Editor’s Note: this interview contains mild spoilers and includes discussion of suicide. Regardless of how the film may have ultimately been received upon release, writer/director Lukas Dhont’s 2018 first feature, Girl, was meant to explore the feminine side of some of the things he experienced as a gay teenager in Belgium. With his second feature Close (also co-written by Angelo Tijssens), Dhont is looking at thing from the masculine part of his personality. Although the sometimes heartbreaking events of Close don’t directly mirror events from his own life, the story of a rift in the friendship between 13-year-old boys, Leo and Remi, caused when classmates accuse them of being gay, is something the filmmaker had experienced at various points in his younger life, making this film all the more personal.

During my brief time living in New York City in the early 1990s, I resided in a building in the Village, near the NYU campus. Just a couple of blocks from my place was the legendary strip of St. Mark’s Place (in the East Village) that included many a used record store as well as a veritable gold mine for film lovers called Kim’s Video. Th store featured tens of thousands of VHS tapes (I’m old), including a special collection of titles, mostly from Europe and Asia, that were unavailable in the United States. These were undeniably illegal bootlegs, but they were precious cargo, curated by an enigmatic businessman named Youngman Kim. You could find virtually anything there, and Kim’s Video had a devoted and knowledgable staff that could point you down any cinematic avenue of your choosing.