One of the most thrillingly radical aspects of Angelo Madsen Minax’s astonishing North By Current, which premiered at the Berlinale and now makes it North American debut at Tribeca, is the film’s centering of absence, of its maker’s firm belief in the idea that “a viewer is not entitled to every piece of information.” Minax began shooting North By Current upon his return home to rural Michigan after the death of his niece, a toddler whose passing put Minax’s emotionally fragile sister and her formerly incarcerated husband in the crosshairs of Children’s Protective Services (which in turn led to law […]

Filmmaker Dan Chen planned to make an inspiring doc about a group of high-achieving students attending a most unconventional school in rural Louisiana, one that had a 100 percent college acceptance rate and sent its BIPOC kids to the likes of Harvard, Yale and Stanford. Well, so much for best laid plans. Unfortunately, right in the midst of production, the Ivy League dreams of Alicia, Adia, Isaac and Cathy, along with the rest of their classmates who were already under immense pressure from the unrelenting boot camp tactics of the school’s founder Mike Landry, morphed into a slow-motion nightmare. Even […]

An all-female factory floor that manufactures made-to-order sex dolls (which seems every bit as titillating as crafting car parts). A workshop featuring a social media entrepreneur who rhapsodizes about the “fan economy.” (Why be a regular boss when you can be a “star boss”?) An instructor in a class on business etiquette quizzing the Stepford Wives-creepy assemblage on how many teeth should be displayed when smiling at a client. (The correct answer? The “upper eight teeth.”) A dinner conversation in which the wealthy discuss the pros and cons of vacationing in Xinjiang. These are just a few of the unnerving glimpses […]

Jupiter Invincible, the latest augmented reality comic book from Ram Devineni and his NY-based Rattapallax media house, marks a bit of a departure for the doc filmmaker and technologist. Best known in the AR world for his comic book series Priya’s Shakti — starring India’s first female superhero and rape survivor (and UN Women-designated “gender equality champion”) — Devineni now travels both back to these shores and back in time, all the way to pre-Civil War Maryland. And he brings along an impressive trio of collaborators. Our superhero of this tale, the titular Jupiter, is the invention of the Pulitzer […]

After canceling last year’s festival Full Frame is back in virtual form this June (2-6) for its 24th edition. And because the Durham-based fest is probably as famous for its Southern hospitality and intimate atmosphere (that naturally leads to a wealth of networking opportunities) as it is for its stellar cinematic selections, I had to wonder if capturing the fest’s spirit online would even be remotely (no pun intended) possible. But then I realized “intimacy” also implies exclusivity. And Full Frame has always been on a parallel mission to expand access to documentary filmmaking and its tools to all. To […]

Terrorist or victim? That seems to be the animating question behind Alba Sotorra’s The Return: Life After ISIS. Premiering at SXSW, and selected for the Special Presentations section at this year’s virtual Hot Docs (April 29-May 9), the film is an up close and personal look at a group of Western women caught in nightmarish limbo in a detention camp in northern Syria. All left behind First World lives – in the US and Canada, the UK, Germany, and The Netherlands – with online propaganda-shaped dreams of rescuing fellow Muslims and finding shared community. And all ultimately became disillusioned and […]

A mother and daughter bond on a balcony, soaking in the sights and sounds of Karachi with a strange sort of pre-nostalgia, before embarking on a new life in the US. This is the opening of Amman Abbasi’s beautiful Udaan, which screens this week in the Hindsight Shorts program of CAAMFest (May 13-23). (CAAM, in partnership with Firelight Media and Reel South, launched the Hindsight initiative to provide “funding and support for diverse BIPOC filmmakers from the American South.”) Rendered with loving care and utmost nuance the scene is a reminder of something we in the US so often forget […]

World-premiering at the hybrid CPH:DOX (April 21-May 12), and co-presented with the all-digital Hot Docs (April 29-May 9), Life of Ivanna is one preconceived-notion-upending film. The story of an Arctic woman struggling to raise five young children as her often abusive husband spends more time drinking than working is a situation sure to strike concern in the hearts of many — alhough the chain-smoking, no-nonsense protagonist at the heart of this particular tale would likely scoff at anyone’s condescending sympathies. Indeed, with steely will the titular, tough-as-nails member of the Nenets of the tundra is able to stare down whiteouts […]

A feel-good film about end-of-life care for those whose minds have already departed might strike some as a radical notion. But no more so than the philosophy behind the Danish retirement home at the heart of Louise Detlefsen’s uplifting It is Not Over Yet, world-premiering at this year’s Hot Docs (April 29-May 9). With this latest project Detlefsen — whose last doc Fat Front delved into another unconventional subject, Scandinavia’s feminist body-positive movement — embeds, almost imperceptibly, in a female-founded, women-run facility. And one that covertly gives the finger to Big Pharma and corporate nursing homes by going back to […]

I last interviewed Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight) before the TIFF premiere of 2019’s This Is Not a Movie, which follows the uncompromising humanitarian war correspondent Robert Fisk (who died just this past October) on his eternal mission to give the lie to bothsidesism. And while Chang’s latest doc Wuhan Wuhan – an on-the-ground account of life during lockdown from the perspective of several brave and traumatized frontline workers – might seem a breaking news departure, it’s actually very much in line with the multiple award-winning filmmaker’s character-first approach. Whether tackling issues of capitalist exploitation, controversial righteous journalism, […]