Best of What's Next: Filmmaker Claire McCarthy

HOMETOWN: Sydney, Australia
FILM: The Waiting City
FOR FANS OF: Ingmar Bergman, Sofia Coppola, Federico Fellini

While the narratives of Australian screenwriter/director Claire McCarthy’s two most recent feature films—Cross Life and The Waiting City—are fictional, she rooted both in inimitably real places and used them to tell the stories of real people in her hometown of Sydney and Calcutta, India, respectively. The Waiting City, the first Australian movie shot entirely in India, debuted in her home country in July, and will hopefully screen in the U.S. soon. “I really like to come from a basis in which there is a reality to the film and there is a truth,” she says. “As a filmmaker, I am very inspired by the intersection between fact and fiction in my work.”

WHAT’S NEXT: McCarthy is currently tied to a few hush-hush American projects, and she’s working on her next feature, The Children, set in Bosnia during the Balkan War. “It’s not a war story,” she says, “but it’s sort of set during the backdrop of a war and kind of explores the emotional impact of war on family.”