Authors — Sierra Pettengill
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“You Have to Be There”: Barbara Kopple Looks Back on American Dream
Set in Austin, Minnesota, a company town where nearly every resident has a connection to food-processing giant Hormel Foods, Barbara Kopple’s American Dream (1990) embeds with unionized Hormel meatpackers as they respond to a 23 percent hourly wage cut in a time of unprecedented corporate profits. Kopple and her collaborators embedded with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local P-9 for a year. The film spans the Austin local’s initial PR push, their tactical disagreements with the UFCW leadership, their protracted contract negotiation process, and, ultimately, their year-long strike from 1985 to 1986. Gathering a wide array of voices—workers, […]
by Sierra Pettengill on May 1, 2026 -
This Sweet Sickness: Frank Beauvais On His Obsessive, Archival-Based Memoir, Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream
In 2016, filmmaker Frank Beauvais was rudderless, living in a remote village in the French countryside without a driver’s license and riding out the wake of a breakup in rural isolation. Over the course of a few difficult months, he watched more than 400 movies at home, a torrential—and torrented—flood of film that both sustained and corroded him. Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is a portrait of that time told through silent excerpts from Beauvais’s cinematic compendium. The films wildly span genre, nationality and time period, and are paired with a spoken first-person memoir narration track from Beauvais. The pairings […]
by Sierra Pettengill on Mar 17, 2020 -
Danger Man: Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg on Weiner
From where we currently sit in the middle of the Great Reality Show Presidential Primary Race of 2016, it seems like a point so obvious as to be nearly mundane: Politics can be the greatest show on earth. And, since the birth of the technology, that show has played out in front of the camera. Picking apart the symbiotic relationship between the media and politicians is an old conversation, merely updated with an ever-evolving set of tools: From Andrew Jackson, who controlled at least one newspaper and also blamed the press for ruining his wife’s good name, to Gary Hart, […]
by Sierra Pettengill on Apr 21, 2016
