The Moguls of Williamsburg
When the White House recently ordered a print of writer-director Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, about a young woman (Elizabeth “suddenly the most famous” Olsen) who flees a cult, arthouse audiences and critics who attended this year’s Sundance, Cannes and New York film festivals nodded approvingly. Durkin, along with fellow Williamsburg residents and MMMM producers Antonio Campos and Josh Mond, is one third of the production company Borderline Films, which has garnered attention for its technically suave, unsettlingly subjective handling of hot-potato subject matter since Campos’s 2008 breakthrough Afterschool. Durkin, Campos and Mond, who met at NYU film school in the early aughts, alternate work-for-hire jobs on commercials and music videos to subsidize each other’s more ambitious projects like MMMM, which just earned them a first-look deal with distributor Fox Searchlight. Borderline is currently in postproduction on the Paris-set Simon Killer, written and directed by Campos, produced by Durkin and Mond.
Photo Ashley Minette