The Belarusian-American Succession actress, writer, director and Red Scare podcast host on the friends she turns to for recommendations.

Dasha Nekrasova

Source: Richard Kern

Dasha Nekrasova

I’m lucky to live in New York City where there is lots of quality repertory film programming. I’m a big fan of Film Forum, personally.

Eugene Kotlyarenko directed me in my first film that I also co-wrote with him called Wobble Palace. We’ve been friends a long time and he has a movie club that he sends out via newsletter. He has terrific, wide-ranging and searching taste and knows me well, so I can trust his recommendations.

Eugene recommended a film to me recently called Exposed starring Nastassja Kinski, who I always enjoy. Madeline Quinn, my co-writer on The Scary Of Sixty-First, recently saw an Olivier Assayas film called Boarding Gate that seemed very up my alley, and ended with one of our favourite Sparks songs: ‘The Number One Song In Heaven’. That really intrigued me.

I used to be in a WhatsApp group that I was invited to join by a British artist called Ed Fornieles called Film Club but it wasn’t exclusive enough so there was lots of in-fighting and peripheral chatter. It’s now defunct.

Nick Pinkerton is a friend and film critic [for Film Comment] who I’d met through people in New York involved in filmmaking and has a terrific Substack. I don’t follow the work of many contemporary critics, and find it to be a typically lowly form, increasingly corrupted by moralism and politics. I listen to Pure Cinema Podcast [hosted by indie producer Elric Kane and music supervisor Brian Saur] from time to time, but mostly I glean my insights instinctively, or from my dreams or subconscious impulses.

I had dinner recently with Ed Lachman, the cinematographer who did Carol with Todd Haynes and Light Sleeper for Paul Schrader, who I met at a screening of Annette. Ed is such a pure and thoughtful enjoyer of cinema and brought along a list of films he thought I should see. One of them was a recent Dutch film called Take Me Somewhere Nice by Ena Sendijarevic. It hadn’t even been on my radar, but was so beautiful and special.

I don’t have much of a libido for social media as now that I’ve achieved niche celebrity I’m not allowed to shitpost anymore.