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How Gazelle was made and released
Gazelle is an American independent feature, shot entirely on location in New York City and in Paterson and Hackensack, New Jersey. It was made with a small crew and released by the people who made it.
Making it
Gazelle is drawn from true stories, lived by the people who made the film and by people close to them. Nothing was built. The streets, the workplaces, the places of worship and the temporary rooms are all the real ones, and Lasse Ulvedal Tolbøll shot them on available light in a muted palette, so most of the unease sits in the city and very little of it in the score.
The performances were found in long rehearsals and then caught fast with a small crew. The result is a psychological drama told entirely from inside one man’s experience. Yakup is in every scene, and we never know more than he does.
Releasing it
In 1974 John Cassavetes couldn’t find a distributor for A Woman Under the Influence, so he phoned theatre owners himself, booked art houses and college campuses, and stayed in the room afterward with Peter Falk to talk to whoever had turned up.
We weren’t trying to reenact any of that. It’s just what was available to us. Nadir wrote the film because nobody was calling him, and we booked the theatres because no distributor was going to. Since April that has come to 32 nights across the US and Canada, more than half of them sold out, and he has stood in the room after the film, night after night, for a conversation that usually runs longer than anyone planned.
See every city we’ve playedThe people behind it
Nadir Sarıbacak also plays Yakup. He was in the ensemble of Winter Sleep, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014, won Best Actor at Antalya for Ivy (Sundance, 2015), and has been to Tribeca with Leylak and Psycho Therapy. Gazelle is his first film as a director.
On the festival circuit
Crew
Screeners and press
Los Angeles: October 22 to 29. Theaters to be announced.
Screeners go out by request. Write to press@gazellefilm.com and we’ll send you a link.