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CINEMA CENTRICAuthor: CINEMA CENTRIC
A co-hosted podcast. We have in depth discussions involving filmmaking. (Bonus: Guests are included) Language: en-us Genres: Arts, Visual Arts Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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S.J. Chiro (Director of Lane 1974 & East of the Mountains) Exploring Jane Campion’s Cinema Through Criterion
Episode 16
Wednesday, 4 February, 2026
The CINEMA CENTRIC meet up for an episode with filmmaker S.J. Chiro, a director whose work is quietly precise, emotionally attentive, and deeply attuned to inner worlds and moral complexity. Chiro first came to wider attention with Lane 1974, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film that tenderly charts identity, belonging, and the unspoken currents beneath adolescence. She then directed East of the Mountains, an adaptation of David Guterson’s novel starring Tom Skerritt, a film defined by its gentle rigor, its meditations on aging, grief, masculinity, and the quiet autonomy of a life approaching its dusk. Across her work, there is a consistent sensitivity to interior lives and a commitment to letting emotional truth emerge without fanfare, a quality that makes her an especially rich voice in contemporary American cinema.In this episode, S.J. chose to explore the work of Jane Campion, one of the most distinctive, uncompromising filmmakers in world cinema and a director whose films live in the rich terrain of subjectivity, memory, desire, and the tensions between stillness and rupture. For our Criterion segment, we watched every Jane Campion title available in the Criterion Collection and on the Criterion Channel, from early shorts to her later films. Our conversation weaves these ideas back into S.J. Chiro’s own work and creative process: how restraint can be a strategy for emotional precision, how the camera can become a companion to a character’s interiority, and how memory and longing inform both narrative and performance. We talk about the way Campion’s films unsettle simple arcs and invite the viewer into a layered, subjective space, and why, for Chiro, those qualities resonate deeply with her own artistic concerns.S.J. ChiroWebsite:https://sjchiro-director.comInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/sjchiroIMDb:https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1849850Wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._Chiro
