Authors — Lauren Wissot
-
“It’s Like Having a Diary Shot by Someone Else of Moments That You Don’t Remember….”: RaMell Ross on his Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and airing on PBS’s Independent Lens beginning February 11th (and now on iTunes), RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening lives up to its buzz and then some. The award-winning photographer’s debut feature is a low-key, highly cinematic look at the Alabama Black Belt over a period of five years. In that time Ross trained his lens mostly on two twenty-something men, Daniel and Quincy, as they navigated education, blue-collar labor, fatherhood, and just the intricacies of daily life in their culturally rich, economically impoverished Southern town. Filmmaker was fortunate enough […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 8, 2019 -
“Must Political Solidarity be Unconditional?”: Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche on Their Sundance Doc, Advocate
Long a lightning rod, Lea Tsemel is an idealistic Jewish lawyer who has spent the past five decades defending political prisoners. Or she’s the terrorist’s go-to barrister, rarely turning down a case no matter how heinous the crime. Like most things in Israel, the perspective depends on which side of the occupation you’re on. Veteran filmmakers Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche understand this reality all too well, having followed Lea Tsemel’s career closely for the past 25 years. And now with their Sundance-premiering Advocate they’ve created an in-the-trenches portrait of this unapologetic firebrand, trailing Tsemel as she juggles high-profile […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 27, 2019 -
“Sometimes Restraint and Holding Back Yields a Far More Meaningful Result…”: Luke Lorentzen on Sundance Doc Midnight Family
Poetically composed and effortlessly segueing between graveyard-shift stillness and chaotic rides through the darkened streets of Mexico City, Midnight Family is a unique cinematic gem. Director Luke Lorentzen spent nearly three months embedded night after night in a private ambulance run by the Ochoa family, an all-male team who race to the scenes of accidents hoping both to save lives and get paid by those they aid. Filmmaker caught up with the award-winning director to discuss this rare glimpse into an incongruous underworld characterized by equal parts heroic acts and monotonous labor prior to the doc’s January 27th premiere at […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 27, 2019 -
“I Have a Naive Conviction That Images Serve a Potentially Positive Purpose”: Beniamino Barrese on The Disappearance of My Mother
Not many filmmakers have a mom who’s an iconic model from the ’60s, photographed by the likes of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, a muse to Warhol and Dali. Far fewer have one that kept that past hidden. Indeed, it wasn’t until director/cinematographer Beniamino Barrese made a youthful discovery — a stash of portfolios containing Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar covers tucked away inside a locked wardrobe — that he got an inkling that Benedetta Barzini was more than just the radical, outspoken, intellectual mother he’d been filming since he got his first camera at seven. And with The Disappearance of […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2019 -
“I Was Watching Midcentury Hollywood Biblical Epics, Anti-Communist Propaganda Films, and 1970s B-Movies about Devil Worshippers”: Penny Lane on Hail Satan?
“Blasphemy is not free speech” reads a protest banner on the Little Rock statehouse lawn in a scene from Hail Satan?, the latest from Sundance vet Penny Lane (Our Nixon, Nuts!). The sign is emblematic of the ludicrous (and too often unchallenged) falsehoods that The Satanic Temple — fighting to place an elaborate statue of goat-headed god Baphomet alongside a local legislator’s equally ostentatious Ten Commandments monument — is up against. Luckily Lane, never one to shy away from provocative subjects, is right there on the ground, providing an intimate look into the group’s wild rise. By seamlessly alternating interviews […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2019 -
Grappling with “Insider” and “Outsider” Documentary Filmmaking: Sally Rubin on hillbilly
From The Beverly Hillbillies to Buckwild, and from Coal Miner’s Daughter to Deliverance, the face of Appalachia has long been defined (and stereotyped and exploited) by the Hollywood eye. And in the wake of the 2016 presidential election the caricaturing continued, this time at the hands (and pens) of the press corps on the other coastal liberal side. Enter native Appalachian documentarians Sally Rubin (Deep Down) and Ashley York (Tig) to remedy historical wrongs. In their LA Film Festival Best Documentary Feature winner hillbilly the duo systematically take a wrecking ball to every highly offensive yet socially acceptable white trash […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 9, 2019 -
Three Faces of Evil: Top Scary Political Docs of 2018
If there was one theme that dominated the landscape on the doc fest circuit this year it was politics — and not just that of the Trump administration or the Kremlin (though those subjects were well represented). Filmmakers around the globe seemed to be in obsessive pursuit, trying to find some rational explanations for the irrational hell that’s been going on. Which means that as bad as the decline of western civilization might seem in our current time, there is one upside — it makes for some stunning cinematic art. So with that in mind I’d like to give a […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 17, 2018 -
Talking Gender Parity in the Immersive World at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival
No film fest is complete these days without an attempt to tackle the vast gender inequality that’s long afflicted the industry. So it comes as no surprise that the sixth edition of the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival devoted an entire panel to searching for remedies when it comes to immersive media. “Reaching True Gender Parity in Interactive Storytelling” proved to be a fascinating chat amongst four fervent ladies — Marie-Pier Gauthier of the National Film Board of Canada (who also served as panel moderator), HP’s Global Head of Virtual Reality Joanna Popper, Vivian Marthell, who leads local art house O […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 11, 2018 -
“If the Content is Sh*t, It Will Still be Sh*t in VR and AR”: Virtual Reality and Hard Truth at the 2018 FilmGate Interactive Media Festival
The Virtual Reality Portal at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival, which this year overlapped with Art Basel in downtown Miami, featured a wealth of new discoveries alongside some stellar high-profile projects. Among the three-dozen or so interactive works on display were a pair that made for great companion pieces. The first was Lynette Wallworth’s “psychedelic documentary” Awavena, an inner trip that I’d just missed experiencing at IDFA DocLab (and which made me wish that every VR experience came with a hammock). The second, Eliza McNitt’s Sundance-premiering outer trip Spheres, also had perhaps the widest target audience of any of the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 9, 2018 -
A Sneak Peek at the 6th FilmGate Interactive Media Festival
The upcoming FilmGate Interactive Media Festival (November 30th – December 6th) will mark its sixth year of bringing the immersive arts to South Florida. A quick glance through the lineup shows it’s the most impressive edition yet. Divided into four programs — Miami @ Play, Festival Panels, Interactive Installations, and the Virtual Reality Portal (with its 35-plus interactive experiences to choose from) — not to mention the many parties (this is Miami after all), the 2018 edition may just make the folks in town that same week for Art Basel look 20th century passé. Starting with the panels (on December […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 26, 2018
