One of the most intriguing aspects of this year’s Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable, which I wrote about a couple months back, was the lively back-and-forth that occurred when the subject of the Oscar shortlist came up. From all appearances it seems that a documentarian’s chances of making that Holy Grail cut are “predetermined” — i.e., if your film didn’t debut at one of a narrow number of A-list fests, well, forget about it. However, Roger Ross Williams, a member of the Documentary Branch of the AMPAS board of governors, took vigorous issue with that assessment. Which intrigued […]
Placed deep in the secluded landscape of the Mojave Desert, Black Rock High School isn’t your typical institution for American teenagers. A continuation school designed specifically for trouble students for whom Black Rock is their last chance at academic redemption, the men and women frequenting these halls face a daily struggle of balancing their studies with often toxic home lives (and fearing that the destructive family cycle could repeat itself over the next generation). As society appears ready to deem them unworthy of fitting in, the title characters in the documentary The Bad Kids work increasingly hard to fight against their stereotypical image. As the […]
Reconciling the flawed humanity of a person with their extraordinary deeds means accepting that both vice and virtue can coexist. Ditching the narrative shackles of biographical films that aims to encompass the entirety of a person’s life, even if that means just piecing together a sequence of significant events, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín inventively designed an iridescent impression of his homeland’s most notable artist, Pablo Neruda, which captures his essence without simplifying his humanity. No stranger to revisiting Chile’s most scabrous historical passages through a fictional lens that neither condemns nor absolves, in Neruda Larraín presents the man as a masterful poet, lazy communist, seductive […]
This year’s DOK Neuland, DOK Leipzig’s interactive component (housed in what resembled an intergalactic pop-up tent in the beautiful, wide open Markt) allowed me a second chance to experience what will surely go down as the best work of virtual reality seen widely in 2016. Fortuitously, I’d been able to catch Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness — the accolade garnering (Storyscapes Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Alternate Realities VR Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest) VR companion piece to Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s much heralded documentary — at the charming Savannah Film Festival’s VR Showcase just the week before. […]
Longtime Filmmaker readers will instantly recognize writer/director Matt Ross as our former Managing Editor, whose intelligent and probing interviews with directors like Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney — to say nothing of his sit-down with critic Armond White — were staples in this publication in the early to mid-aughts. In 2006, Ross, who had made two short films and written a pair of scripts left the magazine to go make his debut feature, the darkly compelling Frank & Lola. A Vegas-set psychosexual love story, Frank & Lola stars Michael Shannon as an ambitious, tightly-wound star chef working in […]
Every city has a learning curve. In Burn Country, opening today from Samuel Goldwyn, an exiled Afghan writer (Dominic Rains) arrives in rural California eager to immerse himself in the culture and customs of an American town. He befriends an unbalanced local (James Franco) in his search to “get to the source of things,” as he describes it, but the outsider soon becomes confronted by a culture he can’t quite comprehend. Burn Country marks Ian Olds’s first foray into fiction filmmaking after a pair of documentaries shot in Iraq and Afghanistan. Below, Olds speaks about the film’s origins, the Northern California landscape and his prior […]
Nakom is the first ever feature film in the Kusaal language and the first Ghanaian narrative film to have screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. Following the world premiere in Berlin, the film made its U.S. debut at the New Directors/New Films festival in New York. Last month, Nakom was nominated for the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award for films budgeted less than $500,000. On the eve of their Berlin premiere, co-directors Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. (Trav) Pittman said they were most excited to screen in Nakom, the rural village in northern Ghana where they lived for four […]
In the summer of ’64, after President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act which enabled African-Americans to vote for their government, many young men and women (primarily white) took to Mississippi to join the Mississippi Summer Project, a season long initiative that would register African-Americans to vote in an increasingly dangerous, highly segregated and hate-filled state. At the same time — and as politically removed from the tense, racist climate as could be — two groups of white, male country blues fans (unbeknownst to each other) from the “big cities”also headed to Mississippi to search for the whereabouts of two […]
Following its New York premiere this past Thanksgiving weekend, Sophia Takal’s highly recommended psychological drama Always Shine opens today in 16 markets across the United States. When the film premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, I wrote Sophia Takal makes her long-awaited to follow-up to her microbudget stunner Green with Always Shine, which takes the abstracted psychological thriller aspects of her debut and warps them into, well, a crafty, intelligent and altogether satisfying psychological thriller. It’s Persona meets Mulholland Drive meets Single White Female as a weekend getaway between two old actress friends goes horribly awry. Caitlin Fitzgerald is […]
Boston-based filmmaker Garrett Zevgetis’s SXSW-premiering Best and Most Beautiful Things (its title a nod to Helen Keller’s words) is a cinematic portrait of a young woman in Bangor, Maine, a recent high school graduate who is searching for a job to suit her skills. An anime devotee whose rebel fashion sense seems to be influenced by her vast Werecat Sisters doll collection, Michelle Smith also happens to be legally blind and has Asperger’s syndrome. As the doc progresses, though, disabilities fade into the background, upstaged by Michelle’s determination to assert her individuality (including exploring BDSM) and live her life on […]