Filmmaker Magazine recently published their annual listing,“25 New Faces of Independent Film,” which highlights emerging filmmakers with standout work from 2024. Included in this year’s awardees are CalArts alumni Julian Castronovo (Film/Video MFA 24) and Ali Vanderkruyk (Film/Video MFA 23).
Castronovo’s first feature-length film, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, came together nonlinearly as compared to his previous films. Filmmaker Magazine described Debut as a “laptop movie,” both in format and in style. It features digitally collaged photobooth screen recordings, layers of text over found footage, and bits from some of Castronovo’s previous films, including “Hannah’s Video” (2020), “Noise” (2022), and “This Living Hand” (2024).
Originally from Wisconsin, Castronovo received his undergraduate degree from Brown University before coming to CalArts for his MFA.
During a recent call, he expressed his surprise and appreciation to have made the “25 New Faces” list. “I spend my mornings typing on the computer and I spend my evenings deleting what I’ve typed,” he said about his creative process.
“I’m very grateful my work has been recognized in this way, and I’m even more grateful to my CalArts peers, collaborators, and mentors for affording me their guidance, support, and care,” he said. Looking forward, with this award under his belt, Castronovo now plans to “continue trying to make more films until I am dead.”
In a recent conversation outside of Tatum Lounge, Vanderkruyk similarly expressed her surprise and gratitude for the award. Her CalArts thesis film, “Six Knots,” was discovered by someone from Filmmaker Magazine, and when she received the email about her achievement, she was in disbelief: “I thought it was a joke, I thought it was spam.”
Vanderkruyk is currently working at CalArts as a postgraduate teaching fellow in the program in Film and Video, teaching a class in music video production as well as a class she designed called More than Human: Animacy and the Moving Image. She received her MFA degree from CalArts last year after her undergraduate program at McGill University in Vancouver, Canada.
With her experience in music video production and experimental documentary, Vanderkruyk explained that the latter is about following subjects to where they want to take you. “Six Knots” was born out of a local tragedy near her hometown, involving an overlooked alarm, a dam, and several fishermen who died in the flood. This event sparked her thinking and reading about “the desire to repair damage that can never be fully repaired.” This led to her following a few subjects all working in whale conservation, and now the final film mostly explores a crosssection of nature, humans, death, and reparations. “I’m still thinking about that project so much, and it’s probably something I’ll come back to in the future.”
—Audrey Tucker
