That grainy, lo-fi video of del Toro in the Criterion Closet—featuring the filmmaker nerding out on Blu-Rays of Stanley Donen’s Charade and Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician—was published in 2010, kickstarting a series initially called “DVD Picks.” Three years later, starting with a video featuring the Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins, the series officially became “Closet Picks.”
The series has certainly come a long way from that first iPhone-shot video with del Toro. Today, they’re produced with efficiency and great consistency by a two-person team—Weston and producer and research director Valeria Rotella.
The pair shoot about one or two “Closet Picks” videos a week but might do even more during busy seasons for the film world, like this week’s New York Film Festival or awards season in the winter. “We’ve been publishing about six a month recently,” Weston tells me.
Soon, the pair are ushering me into the closet itself. “Are you ready?” Rotella asks me, with a smile. “Let’s do this.”
Today, the camera they use to shoot the videos is mounted on a wall, allowing the guests to have a sense of privacy while perusing the titles, with Rotella and Weston standing outside of view while still in the closet. That’s crucial because the closet is shockingly small. “You’ll get to tell us how much work our lens does to make it seem big,” Rotella cracks.
Later, the pair encourage me to make my own picks and grab a few titles before leaving.
“People don’t come in usually, and pick or talk about our top 10 sellers, whatever those might be,” Becker says. “That’s not really it. People are coming in a lot of the time, either trying to find a film that they can stick up for that they feel like isn’t talked about enough, or seen enough, or a film that really marked them in some way, or sometimes a film that they made, but that was so crucial for their career that only they can talk about.”
The Filipino filmmaker Isabel Sandoval remembers her 2021 “Closet Picks” video as an affirming experience, especially for an emerging filmmaker who was just starting to establish herself in world cinema. At the time, Sandoval was just coming off the Venice Film Festival premiere of her breakout film Lingua Franca. “This is the next best thing to transitioning, let me tell you,” the filmmaker said in her video. “If I was ever going to be trapped in a closet again, this would be the perfect closet to be in.”
“I’d like to think that, between being invited to do a Criterion Top 10 and the Closet, it certainly added a patina of legitimacy as a cinephilic filmmaker or at least a lover of cinema,” she tells me. “But I was also [just] really having fun and giddily, unabashedly so in that closet—such a surreal experience..” For her Top 10, Sandoval made sure to champion the legendary Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka’s Insiang as well as films like Alan J. Pakula’s Klute and Alais Resanis’ Hiroshima mon amour that were incredibly influential on her work.
