Filmmaker, video artist and “cultural worker” Marta Popivoda has spent much of her career focusing on philosophies and movements through a decidedly feminist lens. Her first feature, 2013’s Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, premiered at the Berlinale and went on to become part of the permanent collection at MoMA. And now with Landscapes of Resistance, which debuted in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2021, the Berlin-based filmmaker returns to her native Belgrade with her partner, and the film’s co-writer, Ana Vujanović. Together they gently probe and cinematically preserve the memory of Vujanović’s grandmother Sonja, who brings to life an […]

Binge-worthy doesn’t even begin to describe The Lady and the Dale, Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker’s four-part, one-of-a-kind docuseries, premiering January 31 on HBO. Produced by the Duplass brothers, this twist-and-turning saga stars a three-wheeled car called the Dale (that may or may not have been viable) and its marketer extraordinaire, a visionary female entrepreneur (and longtime serial con artist) named Elizabeth Carmichael. With a promise of 70 miles to the gallon at a time when the 70s oil crisis was leaving Americans to linger at gas stations in Soviet-long lines, the Dale seemed to many a dream come true. And […]

Jay Rosenblatt’s latest inventive short When We Were Bullies, world premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, originated with a stranger than fiction coincidence surrounding a guy named Richard and the making of Rosenblatt’s 1994 short The Smell of Burning Ants — which itself had been influenced by another Richard, who is likewise the spark for this film. Fifty years ago the director and the former Richard, fifth-grade classmates, had been on the bullying side of a bizarre incident involving the latter Richard — a moment in time subsequently frozen in both their minds in similar, yet distinctly different, ways. So to get at […]

Salomé Jashi is not a name I was familiar with before catching her exquisitely crafted Taming the Garden, which made its Sundance debut on January 31 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. That said, the Georgian director (and founder of not one but two production companies), whose 2016 doc The Dazzling Light of Sunset took top honors at Visions du Réel, is certainly a prolific filmmaker I’ll now be keeping an eye out for. With her latest, Taming the Garden, a “cinematic environmental parable,” Jashi weaves together a series of perfectly composed shots, containing the lush magical nature on the […]

Hogir Hirori’s Sabaya is a harrowing tale of heroism from a filmmaker all too familiar with the wartime struggles of those he documents. With his latest, the final piece of a cinematic trilogy that includes The Deminer (which nabbed the Special Jury Award for Feature-Length Documentary at IDFA 2017), the Swedish director, who fled his native Kurdistan in 1999, returns to the battle zone to spotlight the dedicated civil servants of the Yazidi Home Center. Putting their lives on the line 24/7, two brave men and a slew of extraordinary, anonymous female “infiltrators” fight, using phones more than guns, to save […]

As someone who came of age at a time when looking for a potential partner(s), be it for a lifetime or one night, was less a neat calculated exercise and more a messy spontaneous surprise, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of online dating. Seeking love and/or sex via swipe just always seemed creepily clinical and controlled, cold and robotic — about as sexy as in vitro fertilization to my mind. And yet watching Pacho Velez’s Searchers, an exploration of online connecting through the eyes (literally, as Velez’s Interrotron-style setup allows his characters to look directly at us as they […]

One of the few upsides to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s necessary pivot to digital was the smart decision to take its A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy discussions online with the rest of the fest – and one step further. Now these always inspiring panels have been expanded to year-round, free virtual events. While the palpable camaraderie at this southernly hospitable fest unfortunately can’t be replicated through Zoom, the insight from the many brilliant doc-making minds Full Frame consistently brings together still shines through. And the most recent edition “Black Frame: New Voices of Documentary,” which took place January 13, proved […]

As I’ve noted in the past, fulfilling the 5050×2020 Gender Parity Pledge is easy pickings for any nonfiction fest. Within the documentary realm female helmers have long consistently been behind half (and often more) of the highest quality work put out every year anyhow. And this year’s hybrid International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam — which like most non-Europeans I experienced exclusively online during varying states of pandemic lockdown over its ample (November 18-December 6) run — proved no exception to the rule. First there was the wealth of exhilarating new projects by acclaimed veterans to choose from. Czech master Helena Třeštíková […]

From the mid to late 70s John Belushi was a multimedia meteor, seemingly destined to be an inescapable part of the zeitgeist for years to come. The outsized and ubiquitous talent — original cast member on late night TV’s SNL, scene-stealing star of the big screen (National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers), and hit record maker (again with The Blues Brothers) — was so inescapable that when in 1982, at the age of only 33 and the peak of his career, his life crashed to a drug-fueled end at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont, the shock to the world was seismic. So how […]

Mo Scarpelli’s El Father Plays Himself, which premiered at Visions du Réel, is now at DOC NYC and will next be hitting IDFA, is one complicated multilayered journey, both logistically and emotionally. It began when Scarpelli (Anbessa, Frame by Frame) decided to train her documentary lens on a narrative feature in the making — specifically her partner Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Fortaleza (which premiered at Rotterdam). La Fortaleza in turn is based on the hard-hitting, hard-drinking life of Jorge Roque Thielen, the director’s father, who stars as himself in his own story. That “el father” remains as wild and unpredictable […]