Authors — Lauren Wissot
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“I Rejected the Concept of Linearity”: Leslie Tai on How to Have an American Baby
Sprawling in scope, observational in form and jaw-dropping in access, Leslie Tai’s How to Have an American Baby shows exactly what its title describes. The title is also the name of a sales talk one of the doc’s characters gives to Chinese moms with the financial means to travel and gift their future offspring US citizenship. The Chinese-American director takes her viewers on the wildest of rides through a birth tourism industry hiding in plain, sunny SoCal sight: underground maternity hotels run by shady operators and filled to the brim with expectant mothers, local hospitals employing doctors in on the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 14, 2023 -
“The History of Racist Ideas”: Roger Ross Williams on Stamped From the Beginning
Though I’ve not read Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s New York Times bestseller Stamped From the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, I’m guessing the National Book Award-winner might not be the most obvious material for the big screen. Which is why I was a bit surprised when I finally watched the TIFF-debuting Netflix doc Stamped From the Beginning, Roger Ross Williams’ cinematic and often playful take on the professor-author’s quite heavy subject matter. Indeed, any film that opens with its (Black) director ambushing his (Black) talking heads with the query/salvo, “What is wrong with Black people?” is […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 10, 2023 -
Behind the Lens at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival 2023
As the US’s largest university-run fest, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 21-28) smartly caters to an overwhelmingly collegiate audience, which means bringing in loads of celebrities for red carpet events (Kevin Bacon! Ava DuVernay! Eva Longoria!) balanced with veteran Hollywood craftspeople for numerous nuts and bolts panels (this year’s Artisans series included “The Creators of Worlds: The Artisans of Oppenheimer”). Not to mention there’s a puppy dog enthusiasm with which these young industry aspirants gobble up the eight-day “celebration of cinematic excellence.” It’s both contagious and, for someone like me long past their dorm room years, dauntingly exhausting. (FOMO […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 6, 2023 -
“My Film is For the Pigs”: Heather Dewey-Hagborg on Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera
Heather Dewey-Hagborg is on a mission to confront the uncomfortable future, especially when it comes to emerging tech. Stranger Visions features portrait sculptures crafted from analyses of genetic material the transdisciplinary artist, educator and filmmaker literally picked up in public places (one person’s discarded cigarette butt is another’s way into a stranger’s DNA). T3511, a collaboration with cinematographer Toshiaki Ozawa (Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog), sees an anonymous saliva sample become fodder for the alchemizing of the perfect romantic partner. Now there’s Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera, perhaps Dewey-Hagborg’s most ambitious work to date. Opening at NYC’s Fridman Gallery on […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 1, 2023 -
“A Journey That Allowed Us to Harness the Power of Storytelling”: Kaouther Ben Hania on her Cannes-winning Four Daughters
Co-winner of the Cannes 2023 Golden Eye, Kaouther Ben Hania’s (Zaineb Hates the Snow, Beauty and the Dogs) Four Daughters is both compellingly crafted and deeply disturbing. The “fictional documentary” looks back on an infamous, winding and tumultuous Tunisian saga involving five women: the titular quartet of older siblings Ghofrane and Rahma and youngest Eya and Tayssir, along with their mother Olfa Hamrouni. The younger daughters appear as themselves, and the film features two actors taking on the roles of the oldest, a necessity since Ghofrane and Rahma can’t “play” themselves, having “disappeared” back in 2015 at the tender ages of […]
by Lauren Wissot on Oct 27, 2023 -
“We Offered to Bear Witness”: Sonia Kennebeck on Reality Winner
Reality Winner was a US Air Force vet and NSA employee whose leaking of an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, which subsequently handed it over to the FBI in a bungled, source-disclosing attempt to verify it wasn’t a hoax, in turn led to her arrest. The saga has been well-documented, to say the least: Just this year, Tina Satter premiered her Sydney Sweeney-starring HBO film Reality, adapted from the playwright’s IS THIS A ROOM: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription. Now we have Sonia Kennebeck’s Reality Winner, itself an extension of the 25 New Faces alum’s […]
by Lauren Wissot on Oct 12, 2023 -
“Is There an Orchestra Playing in the Depths of the Glacier?”: Margreth Olin on Her TIFF-Debuting Documentary, Songs of Earth
My DOX:AWARD top pick for the Ekko jury grid I participated in at this year’s CPH:DOX, Margreth Olin’s Songs of Earth, was also number one in my critic’s notebook for the doc most needing to be experienced on the big screen. In this palpably loving portrait of the veteran filmmaker’s elderly parents and the country that shaped them (and her), “Olin juxtaposes jaw-dropping, drone-captured images of the awe-inspiring Norwegian landscape with closeups of her dad’s bald pate, his tender hand on her mother’s back, as the environment and humankind become one” (per that notebook, and my coverage). Thus, it comes as little surprise […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 13, 2023 -
“Forgetfulness is Fought with Words”: Lina Soualem on Her TIFF-Premiering Doc, Bye Bye Tiberias
“I wonder if we can find ourselves fully in a world we invented,” the French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actor Lina Soualem eloquently ponders in the role of ever-questioning narrator of Bye Bye Tiberias, her extraordinary, multigenerational, female-focused family portrait. Seen through contemporary footage and 90s home movies — expertly interwoven with material from historical archives — the women include not only Soualem’s conservative, customs-observing grandmother and great-grandmother, who never left the Palestinian village their entire community had been forcibly displaced to, but also her mother, Hiam Abbass, a rebellious dreamer set on becoming an international actress. And now, 30 years on […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 11, 2023 -
Heart of Darkness (and Light): The 29th Sarajevo Film Festival
Taking place from August 11-18, this year’s 29th edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, the largest film fest in (and focused on) Southeast Europe, unsurprisingly presented a wealth of cinematic gems to choose from. (And in a variety of venues, from the storied National Theater, built during the Austro-Hungarian takeover, to the evening-only Open Air Cinemas.) That is, when one wasn’t scrambling to catch the numerous talks and masterclasses—taught by this year’s Honorary Heart of Sarajevo recipients/hot tickets Mark Cousins, Lynne Ramsay and Charlie Kaufman—or attending the equally busy CineLink Industry Days (which, like the festival itself, is smartly geared […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 29, 2023 -
“We Didn’t Want an Audience Member To Be Able To Say, ‘Oh, That Was Just One Bad Cop’”: Stanley Nelson and Valerie Scoon on Sound of the Police
Stanley Nelson and Valerie Scoon’s Sound of the Police is an exhaustive exploration of the oppositional dynamics between African Americans and law enforcement, from slavery right up to today. Through a wealth of archival imagery, interviews with academics, authors and assorted deep thinkers of various backgrounds and colors as well as an ear-catching soundtrack (indeed the doc’s title is a nod to rapper KRS-One’s 1993 anti-police brutality anthem “Sound of da Police,” which serves as a sort of sonic exclamation point throughout the ABC News Studios doc), the veteran filmmakers make a compelling case that any relationship built on the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 10, 2023
