Josh and Benny Safdie are brothers, filmmakers, and collaborators whose meteoric rise in American independent cinema has become the stuff of legend, first began their careers rather auspiciously when both were independently invited to attend Cannes: Benny with his short film Acquaintances of a Lonely John, and Josh with his feature debut The Pleasure of Being Robbed. Since then, the pair have worked together on five features, often crewing their own films in multiple roles (acting, writing, editing, and more) and along the way amassing a top-tier list of collaborators, including several notable celebrities; titans of contemporary cinematography Sean Price Williams and Darius Khondji; and, perhaps most influentially, Ronald Bronstein, who has co-written and edited all of their narrative features since 2009’s Daddy Longlegs.

Raised in New York and shuttled between divorced parents in Manhattan and Queens, Josh and Benny have been using the city’s streets as a stage of one kind or another since their youth. Their father Alberto, a movie enthusiast and amateur filmmaker, looms large in the mythmaking of the brothers, serving as future character inspiration and passing along the compulsion to record by obsessively documenting their childhood through home movies. A pivotal moment would come later when their father used scenes from Kramer vs. Kramer to illustrate his ongoing divorce from their mother ― further ingraining the generational slippages between reality and fantasy both in film and in their lives.

That tension between truth and fiction is a recurrent theme in their work ― oscillating between gritty docu-style realism and traditional narrative storytelling seems to be a sweet spot formally, and one they continue to mine. The Safdies have engaged many non-professional actors for their turn playing quasi-vérité versions of themselves in what is also known as streetcasting. A praxis shared by master minglers of documentary and fiction Abbas Kiarostami and Robert Bresson ― both cited by the Safdies as influences (Benny even names A Man Escaped as his favourite film) ― whose legacy they transmute and thoroughly modernize. That alchemy between fact and fiction is never more closely observed than in Heaven Knows What, which centres on a community of unhoused addicts and was inspired by the real story of Arielle Holmes, who is also the star. The film drove Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson to cold-call the directors in search of a role into which he could fully disappear ― that partnership would become 2017’s Good Time.

The Safdies’ penchant for magnetizing A-listers reached a peak in Uncut Gems, when they landed both Adam Sandler as the lead and Martin Scorsese as an executive producer. “The Safdie brothers, they’re crazy,” said Scorsese. “I saw them in Telluride at a dinner, and it was like they were mugging me. They look like two bandits.” Though Scorsese’s assessment does ring true to the rowdy DIY mystique that the brothers have cultivated, this legendary status also has the effect of overshadowing a rigorous work ethic and a thorough cinephilia, both qualities that animate and underpin their ambitious filmography.

A spiritual successor to their more personal film Daddy Longlegs, Uncut Gems likewise centres upon a morally fraught father figure (a career-defining role for Sandler) whose eccentric joie de vivre is constantly under threat by an irrepressible penchant for screwing up. A decade in the making, with multiple castings and over 120 drafts of the script before going to camera, Uncut Gems would pay off, amassing no shortage of critical acclaim and becoming one of A24’s highest grossing releases and spawning a meme sensation.

Balancing the rare elements of instinct and intellect, the films of the Safdies can be complicated viewing experiences where definitions of right and wrong are muddied and abstracted with lived experience, but are ultimately soulful and sincere portraits of people at their worst but who always try their best.

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