Authors — Lauren Wissot
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Barbara Forever, The Lake, Closure and Other Sundance Docs Still Seeking Distribution
For me, the fun of Sundance—and all festivals—is seeing not the films that everyone is buzzing about pre-fest (I can wait for the streaming release), but discovering the quieter gems that US distributors would do well to take a chance on. While this year’s nonfiction crop was weaker overall than 2025’s exceptional slate—which saw such cinematic revelations as Life After, The Perfect Neighbor and Seeds all competing in the US Documentary Competition—the docs that rose to the top, most notably the handful below, have continued to stay with me long after the final credits rolled in Park City. Barbara Forever […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 3, 2026 -
“We Will Be Passing Out Little NOT AI Buttons to Our Audiences”: Valerie Veatch on Her Sundance-premiering Ghost in the Machine
Until now, the Silicon Valley hype cycle has defined the terms of the artificial-intelligence debate, with advocates predicting universal affluence and the end of all diseases while critics worry that computers will steal not only our jobs but our creative pursuits too. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine proposes a different possibility altogether: that “AI,” if you can even call it that, is just the latest in a long line of grift-y attempts by powerful, exclusionary white guys to remake the whole world in their own image. Connecting the dots between AI’s origins and such lamentable historical low points as the discredited […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 26, 2026 -
“Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever
“It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor—who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 24, 2026 -
“It Was Too Dangerous To Make This Film in America”: Eugene Jarecki on The Six Billion Dollar Man
Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man, much like its main character Julian Assange, is a doc destined to spark controversy. Jam-packed with gripping never before seen footage (much of it captured by Ecuadorian embassy CCTV) and an eclectic roster of interviewees (from Edward Snowden to Pamela Anderson), the film offers a sort of vertigo-inducing alternative history of the WikiLeaks founder and his tabloid-sensationalized troubles; and in doing so asks us to reconsider the media narrative that’s long been built by unseen hands around him. For how much of what we know about the information freedom fighter is actually “true,” […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 5, 2025 -
“There Were Many Fragmented Aspects to Sara Jane’s Testimony”: Robinson Devor on “Suburban Fury”
Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, made in collaboration with writer Charles Mudede (who also co-wrote Devor’s 2005 acclaimed narrative feature Police Beat and 2007’s provocatively disturbing Zoo), is as counterintuitively intense as its title might imply. The unconventionally riveting doc takes us on a wild and winding (car) ride back in time, via the backseat reminisces of its enigmatic star Sara Jane Moore, who in September 1975 tried to shoot President Gerald Ford outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Eschewing recreations for cinematically staged interviews with the infamous nonagenarian (who passed away in September at age 95), along with evocative archival […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 3, 2025 -
“We Are an Accumulation of These Encounters”: Lynne Sachs on Her IDFA-Debuting Every Contact Leaves a Trace
Every Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she’s collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into “how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking” (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film). As a collage of words, sounds and images collide it becomes increasingly clear that Sachs’s mission to understand how each of these random contacts has changed her in some profound […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 16, 2025 -
“The Ethical Work Hasn’t Stopped Now That the Film has Premiered”: Monica Strømdahl on Her DOC NYC-Premiering Flophouse America
Flophouse America is the unnervingly intimate feature debut of Monica Strømdahl, an internationally award-winning photographer who spent 15 years documenting the impoverished communities that have sprung up in rundown motels throughout the US. Which is how she met Mikal, an energetic, 11-year old boy who’s called home the hotel room he’s shared with his parents since the day he was born. Thus began a three-year cinematic collaboration, shot almost entirely in the aforementioned home, between the Norwegian director and the marginalized trio she captures through her quietly unwavering lens. Which allowed her, and now us, to serve as a silent […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 16, 2025 -
“Diving Into the Mess and Chaos of Cinema Doesn’t Have to Exist Apart from Care and Ethics”: Gabrielle Brady on The Wolves Always Come at Night
Gabrielle Brady’s The Wolves Always Come at Night follows Davaa and Zaya, a rural Mongolian couple with four young daughters whose dream to continue the traditional herding way of life they’d always known is upended by a cataclysmic storm; which forces them, like so many of their friends and neighbors before, to finally relocate to the outskirts of the urban capital Ulaanbaatar in search of work. It’s a deceptively simple tale of loss — of both livelihood and identity — poignantly and cinematically captured by the talented Australian filmmaker’s lens. Yet what makes the docufiction drama, crafted with a primarily […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 14, 2025 -
“Her Archive Was Kind of a Trail… A Filmmaker’s Trail”: Alan Berliner on his DOC NYC-debuting BENITA
Recipient of DOC NYC 2024’s Lifetime Achievement Award (as well as the 2025 Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at the upcoming Hamptons Doc Fest), the “virtuoso of essayistic documentary” Alan Berliner (Letter to the Editor, First Cousin Once Removed) returns to this year’s fest with BENITA, an unconventional portrait of an even more unconventional artist. Benita Raphan was a NYC filmmaker (and a MacDowell fellow in 2004 and a Guggenheim fellow in 2019) best known for her own short portraits of eccentric artists, from John Nash, to Buckminster Fuller, to Emily Dickinson. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Raphan […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 14, 2025 -
“The Film Is a Portrait of Amy Goodman, But It’s Also a Celebration of Resistance”: Carl Deal and Tia Lessin on their DOC NYC and IDFA-debuting Steal This Story, Please!
Steal This Story, Please! is a compelling and often unexpected look at the multi-award-winning investigative journalist (and author and syndicated columnist) Amy Goodman, best known as the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, which airs on over 1500 public television and radio stations worldwide. Since its inception nearly three decades ago, the daily, global news broadcast has been unwaveringly dedicated to telling the stories of those on the “end of the trigger.” And shockingly, it’s been doing so entirely supported by audience dollars: no government funding, corporate sponsorship, underwriting or advertising revenue required (or allowed). Just a lot of […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 13, 2025
