Authors — Lauren Wissot
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“I Operate From a Trans Lens, or Frame, as Though It Is the Only Choice Available”: Jules Rosskam on Desire Lines
For me, watching Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines, which won this year’s Sundance Special Jury Award in the NEXT competition, was a cinematic breath of fresh air. The experimental feature combines no holds barred interviews with transmen (of all shapes and colors) who are attracted to men, with a fictional storyline involving a real archive (one that includes shamefully buried history, like the story of author/ activist Lou Sullivan, probably the first transgender man to publicly identify as gay). The result is a riveting look back in time, and to the present and possible future, to reveal how, in the words […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 28, 2024 -
Bodiless Entities, Body Politics and Bodily Functions: CPH:DOX Inter:Active 2024
Expertly curated (under the direction of Londoner Mark Atkin, who also serves as Head of Studies of the CPH:LAB), this year’s edition of the Inter:Active exhibition at CPH:DOX (March 13-24) featured the provocative theme “Who Do You Think You Are: The Body Reexamined.” As the title might suggest, the 17 XR works were wide-ranging and eclectic, both in form (VR yes, but also mixed reality and AI chatbots) and substance (perhaps unsurprising coming from a group of creators with myriad intersectional identities). Indeed, quite a number of the works I experienced on the top floor of the invitingly designed (palace […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 26, 2024 -
“A Film Can Be a Spark, and What Comes After It Is Where the Magic Is”: Elizabeth Nichols on Her True/False-Debuting Flying Lessons
Debuting at True/False (followed by First Look), Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons is a beautiful ode to a New York City Lower East Side artist as well as to the larger “dying breed” that once roamed the streets of Alphabet City, performing in its now extinct clubs. Importantly, it’s also a call to end rampant gentrification and a love story between director and character all rolled into one. The drama began, rather unhappily, with an eviction notice after NYC real estate owner/convicted fraudster Steve Croman bought the building Nichols was living in as a rent-stabilized tenant. Within months the “Bernie Madoff of landlords” had unleashed […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 1, 2024 -
“I Don’t Invest Hope in Celebrity or Leaders Too Much, But I Do Have Hope in People”: Mitch McCabe on Their True/False Premiere 23 Mile
While the pandemic spurred many (white collar) Americans to flee the big cities and retreat to the safety and comfort of living room Zooming, Detroit native Mitch McCabe returned home to the big city and instead roamed the often chaotic streets, eventually journeying throughout Michigan, camera in tow. What the veteran filmmaker-educator (and Flaherty Seminar and MacDowell fellow) witnessed was what we all primarily saw in that “unprecedented” election year: anger. At lockdowns, at those attending protests unmasked. And masked. At the murder of George Floyd, at the BLM movement, at Trump. At Democrat elites like Governor Gretchen Whitmer and […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 1, 2024 -
“We Always Sought Out Photos with Movement”: Klára Tasovská on Her “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” Doc I’m Not Everything I Want to Be
”The only way to survive is to take photos,” declares Libuše Jarcovjáková, the iconoclastic star/narrator/guide of Klára Tasovská’s visually arresting (and eye-catching titled) I’m Not Everything I Want to Be. Nominated for the Teddy Documentary Award at this year’s Berlinale, the all-archival film is a globetrotting, black and white trip back in time (primarily to the 80s and 90s) viewed entirely through the rebelliously inquisitive eyes of this “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” (in the words of curator Sam Stourdzé). And words. For not only did Jarcovjáková obsessively collect images of both her defiantly unglamorous self and her decidedly adventurous life, […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 24, 2024 -
“There Was No Backup Plan Other Than We’d Make It Happen Somehow”: Natalie Rae and Angela Patton on Their Sundance-Debuting Daughters
Filmed over a remarkable eight years, Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s Sundance-premiering Daughters is an on-the-ground (and behind the bars) look at the preparations — physical, mental and above all emotional — leading up to the DC-jail-based Daddy Daughter Dance, the culmination of a fatherhood program for the incarcerated. Following Aubrey, Santana, Raziah, and Ja’Ana — four “at-promise” girls ranging from tiny to teenage — and the respective dads who are desperate to bond with them (and are serving sentences that likewise range in years) the doc is every bit as inspiring as one would expect from a co-director (Patton) […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 22, 2024 -
“The Good, Bad and Ugly of Organizing Against Amazon’”: Stephen Maing and Brett Story on their Sundance-debuting Union
Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s unsurprisingly riveting Union is the one Sundance selection most assuredly not coming to Prime Video anytime soon — or ever. (Nor I’m guessing will the doc’s producers Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone be receiving any Amazon Studios Producers Awards from the Sundance Institute. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bezos behemoth did try to bid for Union to then bury it.) As its title succinctly implies, the film follows a group of very brave, and admirably unrelenting, activist-workers in their fight to unionize a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8 back in 2021. […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2024 -
“My Shooting Process Involved a Mix of Planned Setups and Spontaneous Captures….”: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen on Her Sundance-debuting A New Kind of Wilderness
Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind of Wilderness is a film structured in a way I’ve not seen before. With a title that likewise could apply to the psychic space into which the audience is thrust, the rural Norway-set doc is an intimate, first-person narrated, cinematic essay from a director whose story it is not. Indeed, straight from its bold opening, the viewer is left abruptly disoriented, forever second-guessing whose eyes we are actually looking through. It’s a deft structural feat that in turn emotionally transports us into the shoes of the free-spirited, forest-dwelling – and above all grieving – Payne family, five […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 19, 2024 -
“Being a Latina Immigrant Offered Me Personal Insight Into the Culture That Influenced and Inspired This Great Artist”: Carla Gutiérrez on Her Sundance-Premiering Frida
Though 2024 marks seven decades since the passing of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, it often feels as if the ubiquitous artist never actually died (or lived) at all. A feminist/Chicana/indigenous/disabled/nonbinary icon ahead of her (if not outside the concept of) time, Frida Kahlo has long been celebrated as more phantasmagoric myth than flesh-and-blood painter (as opposed to her corporeal hubby Diego Rivera). Indeed, the visage that first radiated from her own canvas has since reverberated — and been commercialized — down through the ages. (One of many ironies in the lives of the staunchly communist couple who traveled […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 18, 2024 -
“Where Exactly Does Consent Live?” Rea Tajiri on Wisdom Gone Wild
Rea Tajiri’s Wisdom Gone Wild takes a hard look at a difficult subject. Tajiri’s 93-year-old mom Rose is a witness to the US’s dark concentration camp history, having been incarcerated along with the rest of her Nikkei farming family during the Second World War. Primarily through Rose’s engaging tales, alongside home video and family photos, Tajiri goes (and takes us) on a decade-plus, nonlinear cinematic journey— neatly paralleling Rose’s own thought process, as the veteran filmmaker’s mom began her dementia decline at the age of 76—or should I say, dementia “reinvention.” For far from being a tragic story about “losing” […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 20, 2023
