Authors — Lauren Wissot
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“Maybe an Individual is Only as Interesting as the Energy Surrounding Them”: Angelo Madsen on His True/False-debuting A Body to Live In
Angelo Madsen’s A Body to Live In is a doc as unconventional in form as its leading man. Comprised of various formats (16mm, VHS, archival, 2K) overlaid with underground voices (Annie Sprinkle and Ron Athey are probably the best known), the film takes us on a winding journey through the life and philosophy of photographer-performance artist-ritualist Fakir Musafar, one of the founders of the modern primitive movement. With the archival Musafar (born Roland Loomis in 1930) as our guide we’re introduced to an unheralded slice of LGBTQ+ history that includes gay BDSM parties, the first piercing shop, body modification as […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 27, 2025 -
“He Realized It Was Useful to Stop Running From the 500 Pound Maus Chasing After Him”: Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin on Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse!
Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse! centers on a legendary cartoonist who’s long struggled with being eclipsed by his own creation. Decades ago Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Holocaust-focused, autobiographical graphic novel Maus launched the underground artist into mainstream fame, and its success prompted him to follow up with the explanatory MetaMaus so he could finally stop having to publicly dissect the most painful time in his family’s history. (Needless to say, the plan backfired spectacularly.) Fast forward to today, when calls to ban Maus — and other “uncomfortable” books — make the moral of the story […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 24, 2025 -
“Meredith Understood That I Needed the Freedom to Create My Own Interpretation of Her Work and Life”: Billy Shebar on his Berlinale-Premiering Meredith Monk Doc, Monk in Pieces
Billy Shebar’s Monk in Pieces stars Meredith Monk, an artist so singular as to be unclassifiable. (A collage of Zoom-interviewed academics who expound on the titular composer-singer-director-choreographer – and creator of new opera, music theater works, films and installations – is like watching proverbial blind men describing an elephant.) A progenitor of what we now call “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk began her career in the downtown NYC art scene of the ’60s and ’70s — a time and place not all that kind to female boundary busters. (Indeed, New York Times reviews ranged from scathing to the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 18, 2025 -
“It Carries the Weight of Improvisation but Also Inevitability”: Liryc Dela Cruz on his Berlinale-premiering Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte)
Liryc Dela Cruz’s Where the Night Stands Still (Come la Notte) takes the simplest of storylines and renders it infinitely complex. Three Filipino siblings, all domestic workers in Italy who’ve not seen each other for years, reunite at an extravagant villa the elder sister inherited after the death of her longtime employer. They reminisce about childhood over Filipino delicacies the younger sister and brother have brought, and stroll the vast grounds that the new owner meticulously preserves as if she were still a servant and not the lady of the house. But as the languorous day draws to a close […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 15, 2025 -
“Making Films in Iran Is Not an Easy Task at All”: Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni on their Sundance-debuting Cutting Through Rocks
Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks follows Sara Shahverdi, a middle-aged divorcee in a remote and extremely conservative region of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What makes the scenario rather remarkable that Shahverdi is neither pariah nor wallflower in her tiny town. On the contrary, the onetime midwife, who quite literally brought an entire generation of her village into the world, is also a loud motorcycle-riding rebel who ran for a seat at the government table and won. And now, as the first elected councilwoman, a woman who finds herself at the center of an incompetent bureaucracy, one […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 28, 2025 -
“It Was More Pointedly a Satirical Look at …’The Peace-Building Industry'”: Amber Fares on her Sundance-Premiering Coexistence, My Ass!
Amber Fares’s Sundance-premiering Coexistence, My Ass! takes its fabulous title from a one-woman show of the same name, a piece developed (at Harvard of all places) by the doc’s star, “activist-comedian” Noam Shuster Eliassi. The daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and a Romanian Jewish father, Shuster Eliassi grew up in “Oasis of Peace” (Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam), a utopian community purposely comprised equally of Jews and Palestinians, where she would become “the literal poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process” and eventually a co-director of the UN’s Interpeace organization by the time she was in her early 20s. But then […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 26, 2025 -
“You’d Be Surprised How Happy People Are to Talk About the Best Times in Their Lives”: Elegance Bratton on His Sundance-Debuting Doc, Move Ya Body: The Birth of House
“A good party knows no fucking sexual orientation, no race, no socioeconomic background,” notes Vince Lawrence, the very first person to record a house song and the main protagonist in Elegance Bratton’s Sundance-debuting Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. That a global movement could be traced back to a rather nerdy Black youngster raised in the segregated world of Mayor Daley’s Chicago is just one surprising element in this lovingly crafted music history lesson. (Less surprising is the number of white folks who would also like to take credit.) But perhaps most remarkable is that through a combination of […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 26, 2025 -
“Editorially It Was Similar to Quilt-Making”: Brittany Shyne on her Sundance-Debuting Seeds
While “stunning directorial debut” is an overused description that seldom lives up to the Sundance hype, in the case of Brittany Shyne’s Seeds it’s also quite precise. The lush, B&W-shot doc is a gorgeous portrait of what may very well be the last in a long line of generational Black farmers in rural Georgia, one in which Shyne’s camera serves as both portal and means of preservation. By quietly and patiently embedding with two extended families in the small town of Thomasville, Shyne is able to capture everything from the languid rhythm of daily work, from harvesting cotton to repairing […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2025 -
“I Filmed It, and I Posted It. Now, Watch”: David Borenstein on His Sundance-Debuting Mr. Nobody Against Putin
David Borenstein’s Sundance-premiering Mr. Nobody Against Putin stars Pavel “Pasha” Talankin (also credited as co-director), an “unlikely hero” in an even more unlikely collaboration. A jokey primary school teacher in his Ural Mountains hometown of Karabash (which has the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted cities on the planet), Pasha spends many days mentoring the kids who use the thirty-something’s open door office as a hangout/safe haven. That is, when he’s not documenting their young lives as the school’s videographer. Which is why things get rather complicated for this pro-democracy, but non-activist, educator. For once Putin decides […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2025 -
“There Was a Fair Amount of Us All Killing Each Other”: Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls on Grand Theft Hamlet
Grand Theft Hamlet, which took the Documentary Feature Jury Award at last year’s SXSW, is groundbreaking cinema to say the least. The first documentary to win an Innovation Award at The Stage Awards in London back in 2022, the film’s production probably also marked the first time a filmmaker jumped into an online avatar and then shot her doc entirely within a video game (one in which conditions often resembled a war zone to boot). The project was born out of the UK’s third Covid lockdown in 2021, when abruptly out-of-work theater actors Sam Crane (who co-directed along with his […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 17, 2025
