Spencer MacDonald is a Berlin-based director, born in NYC and raised in San Francisco by an oil painter and an architect. This meant he was forced, tragically young, to care about how things look, what they mean, and whether they make you feel something.
This impossible assignment seems to have pushed him toward things that resist being judged cleanly at all: sound, atmosphere, microscopic worlds, and the small invisible forces that quietly run everything.
He was not especially interested in filmmaking at first, because life seemed more compelling than screens, which remains a reasonable position. Then he made a film and realized cinema gave that strange attention somewhere to go. Naturally, he has spent the years since directing people back toward screens and away from life.
His work is human, visceral, and playful at the edges, often poking at the ironies of being alive. It has won dozens of awards at international film festivals, qualified for the Academy Awards, and been recognized by Ciclope, the 1.4 Awards, the Webbys, The Atlantic, Nowness, and Vimeo’s Best of the Year.