Authors — Lauren Wissot
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“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 -
“A Vindication of the Primal Nature of Creativity, Spontaneity, and the Uniqueness of Each Human Being”: Gustavo Sánchez on I Hate New York
For those of us who spent most post-midnight hours of the Giuliani years on the smoke-choked dance floors of places like Limelight and The Pyramid Club, I Hate New York, the debut feature of Barcelona-born journalist Gustavo Sánchez, is a walk down an age of innocence memory lane. A pre-9/11 time when nightclub royalty such as Amanda Lepore and Sophia Lamar were as ubiquitous as the flyers in the St. Mark’s record stores that showcased their names. For those not steeped in trans-fabulous NYC lore, the aforementioned Lepore is best known as the longtime (Jessica Rabbit-esque) muse of David LaChapelle, while […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 2, 2020 -
“Cinema is Prophecy — It Creates Truth”: Hubert Sauper on his Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Epicentro
“What kind of future does tourism portend?” wonders a Cuban character rhetorically in Epicentro, the latest work of cinematic nonfiction from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare, We Come as Friends). “None! It is only devouring the future,” the Havana man declares. Indeed, it devours the “past and the culture,” rendering everything “superficial.” But then comes the real multimillion-dollar question, “How much does cinema resemble tourism?” Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at this year’s Sundance, Epicentro — an allusion to the northern Caribbean island’s place at the epicenter of the Americas, both geographically and politically — is […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 28, 2020 -
In Opposition to “A Very Particular Mode of Transness”: Isabel Sandoval On Lingua Franca
The struggles of outer borough working class folks is nothing new to NYC-set dramas. But, in the outsider eyes and busy hands of director/writer/producer/editor/actress Isabel Sandoval, one of the newest auteurs of Filipino cinema—who makes her English-language debut in her adopted city with her third narrative feature Lingua Franca—classic tropes are updated to reflect our current intersectional reality. The Venice International Film Festival 2019-premiering movie follows live-in caregiver Olivia (Sandoval), who, in the course of looking after an elderly Russian resident of Brighton Beach (Lynn Cohen), becomes romantically entwined with the woman’s ne’er-do-well grandson Alex (Eamon Farren), who labors under […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 27, 2020 -
“There is No Expiration Date on Your Sexuality”: Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard on Their Fantasia Festival-Debuting Doc Morgana
The bored and lonely housewife embarking on a life of erotic pleasure has been a porn-movie trope since at least the days of the 8mm-stag film. But the Belle de Jour-style protagonist is never an unhappy Australian mom who goes from planning suicide, to radically reclaiming agency by hiring a male escort, to soaring to international fame as an award-winning feminist pornographer. Until now. Meet Morgana Muses, the unlikely star of Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard’s Fantasia Film Festival-premiering documentary Morgana. Hess, a filmmaker and pornographer, and her co-director Peppard, who is also an animator and visual artist, began collaborating […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 20, 2020 -
“Very Much Like Short Cuts, and the Medfly was Duterte — That Was My Pitch”: Ramona S. Diaz on A Thousand Cuts
While recent right-wing attacks on the free press here in the US have rightly been sounding alarm bells, in a global context they are merely wake-up calls. Sure, Trump deeming the “lamestream” media “fake news” is dangerously juvenile, but it’s also a far cry from, say, the Duterte administration finding the founder and CEO of the Philippines’s top online news site Rappler guilty of “cyber libel” — a travesty of justice that happened just this past June. And the politically orchestrated verdict comes with both a hefty fine and potential prison time for “2018 Time Person of the Year” Maria […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 6, 2020 -
“This Movie is a Cry for Help from the Members of Congress to the American People”: Daniel DiMauro and Morgan Pehme on Their HBO doc The Swamp
To call HBO’s The Swamp a thrilling character-based portrait of three conservative white guys might seem oxymoronic, but in the capable hands and open minds of co-directors Daniel DiMauro and Morgan Pehme (Get Me Roger Stone) it’s a completely apt description. The doc is an unexpected, up-close look at the daily D.C. lives of a trio of House members who few subscribers to HBO would ever conceive of voting for: far right-wingers Matt Gaetz (R-FL 1st District), Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District), and Ken Buck (R-CO 4th District). In other words, it’s exactly the caricature-busting film that progressives (like myself) really need […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 4, 2020 -
“Documentaries Need Stars Just Like Feature Films Do”: Tiller Russell on his Amazon Docuseries The Last Narc
To say that documentarian Tiller Russell has a knack for discovering unconventional characters is an understatement. From NYPD cops running a cocaine ring (2015’s The Seven Five), to a Russian mobster, a Cuban spy and a Miami playboy conspiring to sell a Soviet sub to the Cali cartel (2018’s Operation Odessa), the filmmaker has more than earned his gonzo doc bona fides. And the weird winning streak continues with the director’s four-part docuseries The Last Narc, premiering on Amazon Prime Video today. The story catalyzing Russell’s latest is one familiar to any viewer of the first season of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico — the 1985 kidnapping […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 31, 2020 -
“We Worked With as Many BIPOC Womxn Crew Members as Possible, Whenever Possible!”: Linda Goldstein Knowlton on We Are The Radical Monarchs
The Black Panther Party, with its firm commitment to nourishing and nurturing the children of Oakland’s barely served African-American community, was founded all the way back in 1966. So it’s a bit shocking that it took nearly half a century later for the Radical Monarchs to be born. Or maybe not. After all, historically, queer women of color — like the Monarchs’ tireless co-founders Anayvette Martinez and Marilyn Hollinquest — had never been given leading roles in the Black Panther show. Fortunately, dedicated feminist and filmmaker Linda Goldstein Knowlton and her all-female team (including EP Grace Lee) are now shining […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 20, 2020
