featured-image

Remember last year’s Cannes film festival, when Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, About Dried Grass, and Fallen Leaves vied for the Palme d’Or ahead of international releases? The French press also found a new auteur hero in the Directors’ Fortnight selection: Weston Razooli, the debut director of the madcap 1980s-inspired adventure movie Riddle of Fire. Cahiers du Cinema magazine put the young Utah film-maker on its cover, declaring him “capable of perpetuating the very essence of cinema as a collective experience”. The focus on Razooli – Cahiers’s cover star this year is Cate Blanchett – took American critics by surprise.

Where had he come from? Five days after he submitted the final cut of Riddle of Fire, Julien Rejl, the director of Directors’ Fortnight, confirmed the film was in the reckoning. The film-maker had previously directed only no-budget, no-crew shorts with friends. His sole previous festival credit was Jolly Boy Friday, a short that played at the Lower East Side Film Festival in 2016.



A self-taught practitioner who began making stop-motion videos with Playmobil and Lego figures as a preteen, Razooli majored in graphic design at college. He didn’t know anyone in the film business before Riddle of Fire, but he did try to crash Sundance parties with his friends as a teenager. “My dad is an industrial designer and my mom is an elementary-school art teacher,” he says.

“They were very supportive, but they are artists and they have ve.

Back to Fashion Page