Authors — Lauren Wissot
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Happy Accidents at CPH:DOX 2018: My Three (Four-Star) DOX:AWARD Stars
The 15th edition of CPH:DOX (March 15-25) boasted over 200 films (100 of which were premieres) and a wide array of industry activities — including the inaugural Science Film Forum, a pitching event designed to encourage collaboration between filmmakers and scientists. But as in previous years, CPH:DOX was all about business as unusual. There were the “quirky events,” including a club night at Chateau Motel that featured “an evening with milk drinks as well as a film and debate about milk.” For the lactose intolerant, or if water was just more your thing, there were the three ocean-focused pictures at […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 3, 2018 -
“We Have Only Scratched the Surface of What is Possible in Erotic VR Media”: Jennifer Lyon Bell on Her Fantasy Film Workshop and Creating Erotic VR
The last time I interviewed veteran filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell for this site topics ranged from “fair trade” porn to the inaugural Holy Fuck Film Festival in Amsterdam (where the expat feminist pornographer has long resided). And now Bell, recipient of both the Feminist Porn Awards 2014 Movie of the Year (for Silver Shoes, which premiered at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts) and a psych degree from Harvard, continues to expand her mission of providing sex education for those behind the lens, while also exploring the new media horizon through her own artistic work. I caught up with Bell to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 21, 2018 -
Civil Liberties, Social Experiments and Getting Naked (to Audio Sex): A Sneak Peek at CPH:DOX 2018
For this dedicated docuphile, glancing through the program of the upcoming edition of CPH:DOX, which kicks off this Thursday and runs through March 25, serves as a pleasant reminder as to why the 15-year-old festival has become one of my favorites on the planet. With an emphasis on active audience engagement, and the underappreciated element of surprise, CPH:DOX truly marches to the beat of its own drummer. Not content to simply screen stellar docs to a passive public, founder and director Tine Fischer and her topnotch team instead curate one-of-a-kind events that enhance and add depth to their smartly programmed […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 13, 2018 -
“In the Master’s Narrative, We Don’t Hear the Stories of the Oppressed, the Disenfranchised, of Women”: Director Cathy Lee Crane on Her SF Indiefest Premiere, The Manhattan Front
Developed with the support of a 2013 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowship, The Manhattan Front is experimental filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane’s first feature-length narrative film in a career spanning over two decades. True to Crane’s hybrid art film roots, though, The Manhattan Front melds melodramatic acting on silent-film-styled sets with newly digitized archival footage of daily life in New York City and on the front lines during World War 1. Via this unconventional approach Crane presents the true story of how a German saboteur’s plans to prevent American munitions from reaching Britain during a period of official U.S. neutrality became entangled […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 11, 2018 -
“You Cannot be Objective When You’re Making a Film about the Peace Process between Israel and Palestine”: Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan on The Oslo Diaries
Receiving its world premiere at Sundance,The Oslo Diaries is the latest from Israeli filmmakers Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, who last came to Park City with 2015’s Censored Voices, an exploration of Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War through long-buried audiotape interviews with its on-the-ground soldiers. A similar reexamination of history, The Oslo Diaries combines unseen-until-now archival footage with the personal diaries of, and present-day interviews with, the handful of participants in the top secret, backchannel — and ultimately doomed — peacemaking process that took place in Norway in the early ’90s. Filmmaker spoke with the two directors prior to Sundance about […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2018 -
“The Bisbee Deportation Doesn’t Matter Unless it Relates to our Real Lives Today”: Robert Greene on Bisbee ’17
Sundance vet Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, Actress) returns to Park City this year with a film quite unlike his previous features, at least in subject matter if not approach. For Bisbee ’17 Greene turns his trademark technique of fusing fiction and nonfiction elements on the story of a sordid anniversary, the 1917 Bisbee Deportation, in which 1,200 immigrant miners in Bisbee, Arizona were rounded up, shipped out of the copper town on cattle cars and left to die in the desert. Through staged recreations developed and performed by local residents — including an actor whose mom was deported to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2018 -
“Modern-Day Slavery is Happening in our Neighborhood….”: Bernadett Tuza-Ritter on her Sundance Debut Feature, A Woman Captured
Making its U.S. premiere at Sundance in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, A Woman Captured is the remarkable debut feature doc from Hungarian filmmaker Bernadett Tuza-Ritter, who stumbled upon a horrifying story in her native country hidden in plain sight. Marish is a housekeeper in her early 50s, though her hard-knock life has aged her considerably. She has spent over a decade cooking, cleaning and serving, mostly as a human punching bag, both verbally and physically, to a mystery woman of indeterminate wealth who remains off-screen. That woman, Eta, who we hear but never see, has allowed Tuza-Ritter access to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 19, 2018 -
Sex Crimes and Virtual Reality: Best VR Storytelling of 2017, Gina Kim’s Bloodless
Nabbing Best VR Story at Venice, Bloodless is veteran filmmaker Gina Kim’s (perhaps best known for 2007’s Vera Farmiga-starring Never Forever) 12-minute immersive stunner. The US-South Korea coproduction was also selected as part of this year’s IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling program, which is where I experienced it, having gone into the VR Cinema without even bothering to read the synopsis. And because of my cluelessness, the story’s climax packed a punch I never saw coming — one that shook me to the core. This is another way of saying that if you plan on experiencing the project on a future […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 22, 2017 -
The Year of the Woman: The 30th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Though it’s been half a decade since I’ve covered Amsterdam’s International Documentary Film Festival, this year’s 30th edition was a welcome reminder as to why IDFA is often heralded as the crème de la crème of doc fests. First there’s its sheer size and scope — this year, a whopping 319 documentaries were presented over the festival’s 12 days. Fortunately, these nonfiction projects of every stripe were helpfully divided into a surprisingly navigable 20 sections — everything from your standard competitions (and not-so-standard, as IDFA DocLab has both a Competition for Digital Storytelling and a Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction) to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 1, 2017 -
“I Don’t Think Movies are Old-Fashioned”: James N. Kienitz Wilkins on His RIDM Retrospective (and Making Art in the Internet Age)
For this year’s 20th anniversary of RIDM, the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival teamed up with Visions, the city’s experimental documentary film series, for a truly cutting edge retrospective titled “James N. Kienitz Wilkins: Vessels/Containers.” Wilkins, a 25 New Face” of 2016, was honored with four programs containing seven of his works, created from 2012 through 2017. This includes 2012’s nearly two hour Public Hearing, a 16mm, B&W-filmed performance of the transcript from a town hall debate about replacing a Walmart with a Super Walmart, all the way to 2017’s 38-minute Mediums, a medium-length movie made up entirely of medium […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 22, 2017
