Cultured Magazine

CULTURED is a leading voice for inspiration and a trusted vehicle for discovery at the intersection of art, design, and style. Since its founding in 2011 by Sarah Harrelson, CULTURED has become a bellwether showcasing emerging talents before they become household names.

CONTRIBUTORS

Cultured Magazine

LETTER from the EDITOR

AT THE EDGES OF IT ALL • Jeffrey Deitch’s latest exhibition in Los Angeles puts 12 local artists in conversation, and at the curatorial forefront.

CORD JEFFERSON • Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut and Oscars sensation American Fiction opens on a writer struggling to land his next book deal. His academic prose isn’t “Black” enough for publishers, who expect a certain level of gangster mayhem from African-American authors. The film, based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, gleefully follows as its protagonist’s efforts to exact revenge on the literary world spiral out of control. Back in grade school, it was a low-budget ’80s flick directed by Robert Townsend that first taught Jefferson just how cutting—and complex—comedy could be.

ROBERT EGGERS • Robert Eggers is best known for creating macabre, otherworldly films like The Witch (2015), and The Lighthouse (2019), set in his native New England. His latest feature, Nosferatu—loosely inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula—tackles a distinctly European tale. Ahead of its release in December, Eggers recounts how a little-known German artist named Sascha Schneider helped inspire the look of The Lighthouse.

TINA SATTER • In 2017, playwright Tina Satter discovered the transcript of an FBI interrogation. The transcript became the backbone for Reality—Satter’s first film, out last spring—which charts the true story of NSA whistleblower Reality Winner. The thriller mines the inherent absurdity of a yoga- and gun-loving 25-year-old translator’s prolonged encounter with two bumbling FBI agents, without veering from the simmering tension that undergirds it. Here, Satter reveals an artistic inspiration that illustrates the ominous, unresolved emotions at the heart of the film.

RAVEN JACKSON • All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, poet and filmmaker Raven Jackson’s feature debut, slaloms its way through five decades of its protagonist Mackenzie’s life in just under two hours. Shot in rural Mississippi, where Jackson’s mother and grandmother grew up, the film revels in the emotional topography of its landscape. Here, Jackson singles out Carlos Reygadas’s 2007 film about a Chihuahuan Mennonite community and speaks to how it shaped the spirit and sounds of All Dirt Roads.

REINALDO MARCUS GREEN • Director Reinaldo Marcus Green understands that real people can be the key to unlocking a good story. Following his 2021 Oscar-winning biopic King Richard, which recounts the life of Venus and Serena Williams’s unrelenting father, the New York–born director took on yet another biopic—Bob Marley: One Love—about the king of reggae. Below, the filmmaker shares the painting that shaped the way he thinks about telling Black men’s stories.

NUMA PERRIER • Numa Perrier filmed her first feature, Jezebel—a semi-autobiographical look at a 19-year-old girl entering the world of sex work and camming—in the building where she grew up. Ahead of her latest project, a biopic of the contemporary Black country music duo the War and Treaty, Perrier discusses the artist installation that gave her license to mine her life in her art.

MOLLY MANNING WALKER • British holiday culture has provided generations of filmmakers with cinematic fodder, from Joanna Hogg’s Tuscan-tinged feature debut Unrelated to The Inbetweeners’s musty mancation. The Greek party town of Malia played host to the latter’s debauchery, and resurfaces once more in How to Have Sex, Molly Manning Walker’s chilling debut feature, which sees its protagonist Tara confront the penumbra of sexual...