For more than 25 years, Laura Parnes’s multiplatform films, video installations and photographs have provoked and charmed audiences with genre-bending satirical narratives about teenage rites of passage gone terribly awry. From County Down, an episodic series about an epidemic of adult psychosis that coincides with a girl’s invention of a designer drug, to Blood and Guts in High School, which reimagines punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s titular book against the backdrop of early 1980s televised disasters, Parnes fuses comedy with pathos to probe social and political trauma.  Her newest feature-length work, Tour Without End, has the feeling of an epic—think a […]

Filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin (A Woman, A Part) sends this short dispatch from IFP Week’s Screen Forward Talks: Notes to the Future Sunday program — specifically, the afternoon panel, “Through the Generations: Queen Sugar: Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey’s Queen Sugar.” The panel featured IFP alums Kat Candler (Hellion), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), DeMane Davis (Lift), Lauren Wolkstein (The Strange Ones). Beyond the brilliance of the series itself, Ava Duvernay’s production model for Queen Sugar, a cable series on the Oprah Winfrey Network, is visionary and proactive. By choosing to hire only women independent film directors who have never […]

In 1992, award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox began round-the-clock filming of an interracial couple living with their two daughters in Flushing, Queens. Over 17 months she accumulated over 1,000 hours of footage documenting their daily lives. In 1997 An American Love Story aired as a nine-hour miniseries on PBS, described by The New York Times as “the most ambitious, exhaustive documentary about private life since An American Family.” The film, as I recall it 20 years later, was an enthralling and intense examination of love, middle-class aspirations, race relations and the failings of America to create a truly integrated society. […]

Speaking about the transgender movement and his leading role on the new Amazon Original series Transparent, actor Jeffrey Tambor exuberantly told Entertainment Weekly, “This is a brave new world.” From Emmy-nominated Laverne Cox’s Time Magazine cover to landmark federal policy laws, 2014 was an explosive year for transgender visibility and politics. Alongside these milestones, Jill Soloway’s groundbreaking new show mines the emotional landscape of trans-ness with a feeling-driven, multi-dimensional story of a family’s reckoning with a retired professor (Tambor, in a brilliantly nuanced performance) coming out as transgender. Funny, poignant and provocative, it’s been hailed as one of the best […]