Authors — Astra Taylor
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“We Process Our Memories In a Dreamstate, Building Meaning Between the Absences”: Samara Grace Chadwick on her Hot Docs Doc, 1999
1999 is one of the most haunting documentaries I’ve ever seen, which perfectly suits its subject matter. Director Samara Grace Chadwick returns to the small Acadian town in New Brunswick, Canada that she left as a teenager after a wave of suicides shook her high school over a handful of years, though the actual events always remain somewhat mysterious and opaque. A portrait of a group of people who, just when they were beginning to live, came intimately face-to-face with the finality of death, 1999 is not an investigation but an immersion into the emotional flux of a community struggling […]
by Astra Taylor on Apr 24, 2018 -
Prisons without Crime: Brett Story on Her Genre-Subverting Doc on Mass Incarceration, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes screens this Sunday at the Art of the Real showcase at the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Given the growing consciousness about police violence and the awe-inspiring momentum of the movement for black lives, the film couldn’t be more timely, though it eschews the hot-button approach. Story has crafted a profound and political film that, while not sensational, is quietly shocking — even if you are already steeped in the project’s central theme. By taking an innovative and unexpected approach to the subject of mass incarceration, Story reveals just how deeply entrenched the problem of over-policing is. The […]
by Astra Taylor on Apr 14, 2016
