Authors — Daniel James Scott

DOC NYC: Interview with Festival Directors Thom Powers & Raphaela Neihausen

The living room-sized lobby of the IFC Center was teeming with people over the past two weeks as DOC NYC concluded its second year. With more days, more films, more panels and more filmmakers in attendance, the festival was a veritable feast of documentaries. Among the faces passing through the crowd — including Albert Maysles, Werner Herzog, D.A. Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple — were those of festival directors Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen. Wearing the titles of artistic director and executive director, respectively, the husband and wife team conceived DOC NYC from their Manhattan apartment. Though involved in their own […]
by Daniel James Scott on Nov 10, 2011
DOC NYC: Directors Nara Garber & Betsy Nagler on Flat Daddy

In the corpus of documentaries that have come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve seen a gradual progression from the outward to the inward — immersive forays into the battlefield giving way to subtler studies of the wartime psyche. Yet the majority of them have focused on the soldier’s experience of war. Flat Daddy, premiering at DOC NYC this Sunday at 4PM and screening again on Nov. 8th at 1:30, sets itself apart by focusing on the people who feel war perhaps the deepest: military families put on hold or torn apart by the absence of their […]
by Daniel James Scott on Nov 4, 2011
Alison Ellwood on Magic Trip

The saying goes that most documentary magic happens in the editing room. That’s an understatement for Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, a found footage documentary assembled by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood. Magic Trip takes us back to the cross-country road trip taken by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters in their psychedelically painted bus, interchangeably called “Further” or “Furthur.” The trip was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s pioneering work of New Journalism, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Fresh off the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey took the book’s proceeds to […]
by Daniel James Scott on Aug 14, 2011
Director Greg Barker on Koran By Heart

Koran by Heart, premiering on HBO today, comes out at a time when it couldn’t be more necessary. In the wake of July’s attacks in Norway and the Islamophobic response in Western media outlets, the film offers a composed perspective of life in the Muslim world. Koran by Heart follows three Muslim youths — Nabiollah from Tajikistan, Rifdha from the Maldives, and Djamil from Senegal — as they enter into an annual Koran-reciting competition in Cairo, Egypt. The competition attracts hundreds of Muslims from all over the world, many of whom don’t speak Arabic, but are able to recite the […]
by Daniel James Scott on Aug 1, 2011
The Myth of the American Sleepover — A Hammer to Nail Review

It’s easy to be judgmental about the characters of David Robert Mitchell’s teen drama, The Myth of the American Sleepover, about the escapades of several adolescents on their last night of summer. You can judge one girl for betraying her friend for their shared object of affection; or one guy for stalking a pair of twins whom he once had a crush on. But to do so would be to sell the film and its characters short. The Myth of the American Sleepover isn’t about actions and events, but moments and gestures. Through the impressionable eyes of a handful of […]
by Daniel James Scott on Jul 22, 2011
Project Nim: An Interview with Director James Marsh

James Marsh first became a household name in the States after winning the 2009 Oscar for Best Documentary for his film Man on Wire, a “heist” picture about the French tightrope walker, Philippe Petit, who traversed a line between the twin towers in 1974. That film’s use of genre, its stylistic flair, and its fusion of fiction and documentary elements can be witnessed as early as Marsh’s 1999 film Wisconsin Death Trip, about the tragedies that befell a small town of Wisconsin at the turn of the 20th century. Marsh stays true to form in his latest documentary Project Nim […]
by Daniel James Scott on Jul 8, 2011
Director Robert Persons on General Orders No. 9

Much can be made of duration. The long stretches of time presaging the releases of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut or, more recently, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, lent each film a preordained measure of value. Yet, those films were helmed by directors with celebrated careers and reputations for being perfectionists. So it comes as an anomaly that General Orders No. 9, premiering at the reRun Gastropub Theater on June 24th, took first-time filmmaker Robert Persons 11 years to make. General Orders No. 9 is a person-less documentary about Georgia’s ongoing process of urbanization. A synthesis of voiceover, music, […]
by Daniel James Scott on Jun 24, 2011
Director Alex Gibney on Catching Hell

Few documentary filmmakers’ careers are as fascinating to follow as that of Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and that’s not just because of the consistent quality of his films, but because of the astonishing rate at which he produces them. In the midst of three other projects — an untitled Wikileaks documentary in pre-production; The Road Back, about Lance Armstrong, in post-production; and the newly completed Magic Bus, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — Gibney was at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with his sports documentary Catching Hell, which […]
by Daniel James Scott on May 2, 2011

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