When I saw The Lost Leonardo at the Tribeca Film Festival, I expected a documentary about art history, restoration techniques and how paintings are authenticated. I was vaguely aware of the film’s subject—the painting “Salvator Mundi,” a portrait of Jesus discovered in a New Orleans estate sale in April 2005 and later deemed a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci. What I was unaware of was the controversy over the painting’s authorship, its journey through the world of high finance and unfettered capitalism and how this made it an object of desire, a status symbol, for political actors like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed […]

As the first major festival to return in person as the pandemic recedes, Tribeca gave us one more sign that New York is coming back. In the Heights, which opened the festival at the United Palace on June 9, was a joyful celebration of community (even for those of us who watched at home), and even in a reduced capacity the festival was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the movies. It also seemed that after shuttering the 2020 festival, this year’s event was fairly bursting at the seams with new types of content—of course the short and feature films […]

Since releasing his first documentary in 2009, Noah Hutton has kept busy. That film Crude Independence and its follow-up Deep Time (2015) were both about the consequences of oil extraction in North Dakota, and he followed them with a multi-platform installation at Times Square in 2015 and the science-fiction film Lapis, which he wrote and directed, in 2020. His new film In Silico was in production throughout the entire time that Hutton was working on those other projects. It’s a longitudinal chronicle that Hutton began in response to a TED talk by Israeli scientist Henry Markram in 2009, where he announced that his team […]

The Dead Sea is one of the unknown casualties of the turbulent politics of the Middle East. Population growth since the founding of Israel has diverted much of its source water for human use. Mineral extraction companies have reduced it even further, and of course global warming is continually increasing temperatures and making the region more arid. Since the watershed basin is shared between Israel and Jordan it requires international cooperation to address, and though there have been attempts to do so they have not matched the challenge that the Sea is facing. The result is that the Sea shrinks […]

A Remote Festival The Sundance Film Festival, which ended February 3, succeeded remarkably well despite the pandemic, and nowhere was that more obvious than in the New Frontier lineup of virtual/augmented reality and other new media. In fact, as has been commented throughout 2020, in many ways virtual reality was made for this moment. With VR headsets reaching ever further into the consumer population it was feasible for this year’s New Frontier lineup, including several 2D browser-based works, to be shown remotely with essentially no loss in quality, especially when compared with feature films being screened on a laptop or […]

One of the most understated pieces at Sundance’s New Frontier this year was Namoo, an animated short by Baobab Studios and director Erick Oh. Baobab has been pushing the boundaries of top-tier animated virtual reality since its founding in 2015, with its short immersive films growing in depth, length, and complexity and leading to a slew of awards and spun-off properties including feature films and series. Erick Oh is an award-winning director and animator from South Korea and based in California who’s worked at Pixar and with Tonko House and whose work has shown at Annecy, Anima Mundi, and other festivals. […]

With Jamila Wignot’s documentary Ailey opening today from NEON, we are reposting Randy Astle’s interview with the director out of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Alvin Ailey’s choreography was as powerful and muscular as it was elegant and sublime. Most dance outsiders probably come to him through his most famous work, 1960’s Revelations, which exemplifies the fierce pride of the Black community moving from slavery through baptism and into celebration. The work also includes delicate and restrained moments, such as in an early pas de deux, where a slowly raised arm contains all the beauty of a the later exultation. […]

David Garrett Byars made his feature documentary debut with No Man’s Land in 2017, a riveting chronicle of the the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon (I spoke with him about it during its Tribeca premiere). In the largely verité film he manages to not only paint empathetic portraits of both the occupiers and their government opponents, but communicate the larger social and political movements that caused his characters to behave as they did. This eye for explaining complex topics comes to the fore in his sophomore film Public Trust, out September 25 from Patagonia Films. This new […]

In the past few days trademarks and brands like Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s and Eskimo Pie have been discontinued or altered in a long overdue reevaluation of racist stereotypes and iconography in American consumer culture. And the broader groundswell of change that finally got these brands removed — along with numerous other changes in everything from Congressional legislation on police reform to NASCAR banning the Confederate battle flag — seems poised to challenge one of the most infamous cases of corporate use of derogatory imagery, the Washington Redskins. Activists have long protested the use of a racial slur as an […]

When the coronavirus descended on the U.S., Firelight Media, like every other organization, quickly shifted its activities online. The Harlem-based nonprofit has been supporting nonfiction filmmakers of color since 2008, helping move hundreds of films forward through its Documentary Lab and other programs, and it functioned as a production company for another decade before that. Thus when the pandemic stopped film production and real-world gatherings the Firelight team responded quickly with a range of new programs, a service made all the more critical by COVID-19’s disproportionate affect on the Black population. Then, of course, came the murder of George Floyd […]