Authors — Lauren Wissot
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Do You Need to Premiere at a Major Festival to Qualify your Doc for an Oscar? Roger Ross Williams on the Shortlist Process
One of the most intriguing aspects of this year’s Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable, which I wrote about a couple months back, was the lively back-and-forth that occurred when the subject of the Oscar shortlist came up. From all appearances it seems that a documentarian’s chances of making that Holy Grail cut are “predetermined” — i.e., if your film didn’t debut at one of a narrow number of A-list fests, well, forget about it. However, Roger Ross Williams, a member of the Documentary Branch of the AMPAS board of governors, took vigorous issue with that assessment. Which intrigued […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 2, 2017 -
The Best VR of 2016: Arnaud Colinart and Amaury La Burthe on Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness
This year’s DOK Neuland, DOK Leipzig’s interactive component (housed in what resembled an intergalactic pop-up tent in the beautiful, wide open Markt) allowed me a second chance to experience what will surely go down as the best work of virtual reality seen widely in 2016. Fortuitously, I’d been able to catch Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness — the accolade garnering (Storyscapes Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Alternate Realities VR Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest) VR companion piece to Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s much heralded documentary — at the charming Savannah Film Festival’s VR Showcase just the week before. […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 26, 2016 -
“There is a Certain Freedom to Being an Outsider”: Garrett Zevgetis on Best and Most Beautiful Things
Boston-based filmmaker Garrett Zevgetis’s SXSW-premiering Best and Most Beautiful Things (its title a nod to Helen Keller’s words) is a cinematic portrait of a young woman in Bangor, Maine, a recent high school graduate who is searching for a job to suit her skills. An anime devotee whose rebel fashion sense seems to be influenced by her vast Werecat Sisters doll collection, Michelle Smith also happens to be legally blind and has Asperger’s syndrome. As the doc progresses, though, disabilities fade into the background, upstaged by Michelle’s determination to assert her individuality (including exploring BDSM) and live her life on […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 2, 2016 -
Finding Some Post-Election Perspective at the 59th DOK Leipzig
Following the election returns via airplane TV (and hitting turbulence over the battleground states, no joke) on the second leg of my journey back from DOK Leipzig was surreal, to say the least. I’d just wrapped five whirlwind days at the oldest documentary film festival in the world (founded in 1955, also making DOK Leipzig the first independent film festival in East Germany) in a country heavy with a historical weight few Americans raised in the US could ever comprehend. Traveling outside my birth country – including through the terrific array of international films DOK Leipzig has a reputation for […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 11, 2016 -
Hello, Oscar!: The Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable
Though the 19th edition of the Savannah Film Festival took place just a couple weeks after Hurricane Matthew forced festival staff to evacuate their offices, this year’s event ended up running every bit as smoothly as the effortlessly gracious, charming city itself. Hosted (and founded) by the Savannah College of Art and Design – SCAD seems to be the South’s answer to Parson’s or RISD – the festival is jam-packed with A-list flicks screened at gorgeous venues, attended by an eclectic mix of topnotch guests. For example, I caught sight of the adorably grateful Molly Shannon at the daily breakfast […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 10, 2016 -
Lost in the Funhouse
House of Eternal Return is an overwhelming — 20,000 square feet! — immersive experience dreamed up by Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe art collective turned production company. Upon its March opening, the interactive art piece — realized through a multimillion dollar investment by Santa Fe resident George R.R. Martin, who also happens to own the local Jean Cocteau Cinema arthouse — garnered national attention from such mainstream outlets as The New York Times and NPR (which called it “Pee-wee’s Playhouse on steroids”), and drew the likes of Martin and Neil Gaiman. Yet at this moment, when artists are scrambling to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jul 25, 2016 -
Sexploitation Star Kitten Natividad on Russ Meyer, Roger Ebert, Porn and the Hot Docs-premiering League of Exotique Dancers
Rama Rau’s League of Exotique Dancers is an absolutely delightful and lovingly crafted doc structured around a group of legendary striptease artists as they prepare to return to the stage for the Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend in Las Vegas — a trip which becomes merely an excuse for the filmmaker to delve deeply into the extraordinary lives of some truly groundbreaking women. Among the timelessly sexy inductees is none other than Kitten Natividad, best known as cult director Russ Meyer’s buxom muse. Prior to the film’s Hot Docs premiere, Filmmaker was fortunate enough to catch up with the Beneath […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 28, 2016 -
LGBTQ in NC: Covering the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the RiverRun International Film Festival During the HB2 Boycott
Before North Carolina passed its HB2 legislation, officially known as “An act to provide for single-sex multiple occupancy bathroom and changing facilities in schools and public agencies and to create statewide consistency in regulation of employment and public accommodations” (or, for me, the simpler and more accurate “WTF?”), I’d been looking forward to covering two film festivals back-to-back on my very first visit to the southern state. Yet as the nationwide call for boycott gathered speed, and the opening night of Durham’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival approached, I found myself in a queasy quandary. So I did what any […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 25, 2016 -
Virtual Crime Scene
Since the 2012 Sundance premiere of Hunger in Los Angeles — a virtual reality piece derived from an actual incident in which a man had a diabetic seizure while waiting in line at a food bank — Nonny de la Peña has become one of the most celebrated artists in the VR world of immersive journalism. With One Dark Night, the “godmother of virtual reality” (as Endgadget dubbed her) has set her sights on another in-the-blink-of-an-eye tragedy — the killing of Trayvon Martin while the unarmed African-American teen was visiting his father’s fiancée’s condo complex in Sanford, Florida. Through 911 […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 21, 2016 -
Directors Leo Chiang and Johnny Symons Talk Screening LGBT Doc Out Run in Boycott State North Carolina
Ironically launching at the stellar Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina right as the anti-LGBTQ HB2 legislation hit the fan, S. Leo Chiang and Johnny Symons’s Out Run follows the Ladlad Party in the Philippines — the only LGBT political party in the world — in the run-up to what could be a history-making election. An artistic political doc, Out Run is both riveting and familiar, as the leaders (including Bemz Benedito, a trans woman who serves as the face of the party) deftly employ campaign strategies that include everything from transforming beauty parlors into headquarters to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 19, 2016
