Authors — Lauren Wissot
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Five WTF Must-Sees at the 2020 DOC NYC
Festival
If there’s one thing we can all agree on in these polarized times it’s that 2020 will inevitably go down in history as one WTF year. And since I generally tend to adore batshit insane films — and especially batshit insane cinematic nonfiction — I was pleased to discover a wealth of WTF treasure buried inside this year’s (a bit overwhelming at 108 features and 92 shorts!) virtual DOC NYC lineup, which begins today. So in honor of this global topsy-turvy moment, here’s just a handful of my favorite gems that, humbly and with little fanfare, screwed with my mind […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 11, 2020 -
“Women of Blumhouse: Shaping Genre Storytelling at the Iconic House of Horror” at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Appropriately presented the day before Halloween, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s “Women of Blumhouse: Shaping Genre Storytelling at the Iconic House of Horror” provided an intriguing peek inside the multifaceted production house from a female POV. Moderated by Variety’s Deputy Awards and Features Editor Jenelle Riley, the three executives Zooming in included Blumhouse Television’s head of physical production, Lisa Niedenthal; Blumhouse Productions’ executive vice president of development for feature films, Bea Sequeira; and Blumhouse Productions’ head of casting, Terri Taylor. There’s “so much emerging talent in this genre,” Niedenthal enthused when asked about working in today’s scary movie world. Though Niedenthal […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 10, 2020 -
Wonder Women: Below the Line at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival
While laudable causes to achieve gender parity in the film industry have been all the rage for a number of years (remember the mad rush of fests signing on to – and then publicizing their signing on to – the 5050×2020 pledge?), too often the result seems to be simply seating a woman in the director’s chair and forgetting about the rest of the table. Which is why the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Wonder Women: Below the Line panel (which, like everything else these days, took place via Zoom at the all-digital fest) struck me as so important. How could […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 3, 2020 -
Wonder Women: Producers Zoom In at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Moderated by Megan Lombardo, a professor in the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Film & Television department, this year’s Wonder Women: Producers panel was an all-Zoom affair. And taking to the computer screen were six diverse (albeit all white) women with a variety of career stories to tell. There was Jayme Lemons, whose Dawn Porter-directed doc The Way I See It had played the virtual fest earlier in the day, and who runs Jaywalker Pictures (with another wonder woman Laura Dern). Also Julie Christeas, founder and CEO of Tandem Pictures, who most recently produced Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear; […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 3, 2020 -
“An Outsider in that Testosterone-Driven Climate”: Laura Gabbert on Her Food Doc, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles
Sundance vet Laura Gabbert (No Impact Man, Sunset Story) is no stranger to the foodie world, having directed 2015’s City of Gold, which follows the Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold on his culinary excursions throughout LA. Now, with Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, Gabbert turns her lens to the other coast and across the pond, globetrotting through time and space with seven-time NY Times bestselling cookbook author and renowned restauranteur Yotam Ottolenghi. Though the Israeli Jew (whose business partner is a Jerusalem-born Muslim) is based in London, he’s invited by the Met to curate an edible, cake-centric exhibition […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 25, 2020 -
“An Opportunity to Look at How True-Crime Storytelling Can Affect Reality”: Marc Smerling on Reinvestigating Errol Morris’s Reinvestigation in A Wilderness of Error
Marc Smerling’s true crime docuseries for FX, A Wilderness of Error, debuting September 25, is a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, who has spent the past nearly four decades serving time for the 1970 killing of his wife and two young daughters – a gruesome triple homicide that the onetime Army surgeon and Green Beret blamed (and still blames) on Manson Family copycats. The five-part series is based on Errol Morris’s non-fiction book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case – specifically the case laid out by […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 24, 2020 -
“Cardboard Cutouts Don’t Grow Old, They Don’t Die”: Jan Oxenberg on Criterion’s Rerelease of Her “Docu-fantasy” Thank You and Good Night
Jan Oxenberg was a thorn in the nonfiction establishment’s side long before hybrid doc-making was a thing (or even a term). Case in point: Her feature-length (Sundance ’91) debut Thank You and Good Night, a restoration of which will hit the Criterion Channel this week (along with two of the queer pioneer’s earlier shorts, 1973’s Home Movie and 1975’s A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts, accompanied by a new director’s intro). Though Thank You and Good Night has been described as a “docu-fantasy” it’s also a very real time capsule of sorts. The film takes as its starting point the looming […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 24, 2020 -
“Can a Psychopathic Institution Be Redeemed, or Should It Be Eliminated?”: Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott on Their TIFF-Premiering Doc The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel
I can still recall my red pill moment while watching Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar’s 2003 documentary The Corporation with my best friend, at the (pre-financial crisis) time an analyst at a big bank. “Corporations are people? What the hell?” I practically shouted. “Yup,” he simply responded with a weary shrug. For many clueless progressives like myself, unaware that corporate power had been spreading like the coronavirus, silently hijacking all branches of our government for decades, The Corporation was both horror film and wakeup call. The real deep-state conspiracy. Since then we’ve endured the Great Recession and our current economic calamity/health catastrophe/racial injustice awakening. […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 14, 2020 -
“As a Director I Want to Show My Own Failure, My Own Intrusion in the Films I Make”: Milo Rau on His Venice Premiering The New Gospel
Making its world premiere at this year’s — IRL! — Venice Film Festival, The New Gospel is the latest work of “utopian documentarism” from Swiss director/writer/critic/lecturer Milo Rau. (Though one might add “biblical provocateur.” As the newly installed artistic director of NTGent, Rau once took out classified ads in a Belgian newspaper seeking modern-day crusaders for a staging based on the city’s Jesus-themed Ghent Altarpiece. One read, “Did you fight for IS, or another religion?”) With The New Gospel, the multimedia artist tackles Italy’s ongoing migrant crisis through a most unusual form — by creating a contemporary Jesus film in […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 10, 2020 -
Human Experience is the New Fossil Fuel: Jeff Orlowski on His Big Tech Critique, The Social Dilemma
From Arab Spring uprisings to Russian disinformation campaigns, social media platforms have swung from heralded saviors to all-purpose bogeymen with breakneck speed. So how did we get here? And can online life even be fixed? Was it all the inevitable result of a worldwide collective bargain with the Big Tech devil? (Nothing in life is free, and that goes double in Silicon Valley.) With Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma, which premiered at Sundance — as did the director’s 2017 doc Chasing Coral and 2012’s Chasing Ice — these consequential questions and more get addressed through a most unusual format. The […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 9, 2020
