Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Minding the Gap Leads This Year’s Cinema Eye Honors Nominees
The non-fiction-centric awards body Cinema Eye Honors announced its nominees for 2018, ranging over 10 categories, such as directing, production, cinematography and, of course, Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking. Among the biggest recipients is Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap, which raked up a total of seven nominations — the most of any title this year. Others with multiple nominees include Robert Greene’s Bisbee ’17, RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers. The winners will be announced at the 2019 Honors Awards Ceremony on January 10, 2019, which will be held at the Museum of […]
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“We Found That Securing Institutions And Private Funders Was More Viable After We Could Share The Breadth Of The Film In A Meaningful Way”: Hunter Robert Baker And Jordan Fein On Their DOC NYC-Premiering The Blessing
The Blessing, the latest from the Emmy Award-winning team of Hunter Robert Baker and Jordan Fein, is the story of a Navajo coal miner and single dad as well as his teenage daughter, who navigate life on their reservation in northern Arizona. Other than Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside’s stealthy stunner América, I can’t think of another documentary I’ve seen this year in which the simplest of premises yields such an emotional powder keg. The film’s a nearly Shakespearean drama, one in which a deeply religious father is forced to choose between sacrilege (taking part in the destruction of his […]
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“We See Documentary Film As An Inherently Collaborative Process”: Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin On Their DOC NYC-Premiering The Providers
Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin’s IFP-supported The Providers is a film I regrettably left off my must-see list at Full Frame, most likely because a doc that follows a doctor, a nurse practitioner and a physician assistant serving rural communities abandoned by our traditional (and traditionally broken) healthcare system sounded like something that might put this liberal urbanite to sleep. But in one of those lucky film fest coincidences, I ended up chatting with the doc’s co-director Laura Green on the ride back to the Raleigh-Durham airport, and mentioned I was returning to Santa Fe. Which is both a drive away […]
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“The Film Brings Audiences Both The Joys And Pains Of Our Political System Via High School”: Alexandra Stergiou and Lexi Henigman On Their DOC NYC-Premiering The Candidates
If you spent the 2016 election season trying to wrap your head around the surreal circus that passed for political campaigning, just imagine actually participating in it while studying for exams. Such was the situation for the students of Townsend Harris High School in Queens, which since 1996 has included in its curriculum an as-close-to-real-life-as-possible Election Simulation. Fortunately, filmmakers Alexandra Stergiou and Lexi Henigman were there to capture it all. On one side is Russian-American Daniel, aka Trump, trying to focus on making America great again instead of grabbing women by the pussy. On the other, there’s Pakistani-American Misbah, aka […]
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Five Picks For The Ninth Edition Of DOC NYC
As a documentary addict who probably attends more nonfiction festivals than can be considered sane, I’m always on the lookout for reasons why I shouldn’t wait for Netflix. And this year’s 9th edition of DOC NYC (November 8th – 15th) is chockfull of one-of-a-kind events. With that in mind, here are just five of my picks for getting off the couch and into the theater. Documentary Now! Presents Original Cast Album: Co-op Not only are creators Seth Meyers and Rhys Thomas two of the big names expected to attend this Centerpiece Presentation, it’s a world premiere. You’ll be able to […]
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Wonder Women Directors at the 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival
The 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 27 – November 3) featured a strikingly eclectic abundance of Specialty Series discussions and workshops this year. There was “In Conversation” (one with Barry Jenkins, another with Armie Hammer), a three-part Below the Line Panel Series (Casting, Costume Design and Production Design), and Animation Corner: Art in Motion. There was also the TV Sidebar (Starz’s Outlander was the focus, with creators and cast from the show in town — even a costume exhibit at the SCAD Museum of Art), and a Writers Guild of America-affiliated program (Writers on Writing: The Front Runner featured […]
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“There Are Unlikely Protagonists Everywhere”: The 5th Docs To Watch Roundtable at the 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Celebrating its fifth edition, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable is the number one reason I’ve been making the late October pilgrimage to Georgia’s charming city of (Spanish moss-draped) squares for the past few years. (That and the festival’s abundance of southern hospitality, of course. In addition to being the only fest I’ve ever been to that provides buffet-style breakfasts, lunches and dinners, guests are treated to some truly top-notch lodging. In my case, it was the lovely, Savannah River-adjacent Kimpton Brice Hotel, a mere five-minute walk from the fest’s Marshall House headquarters and the majority of […]
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Five Questions for Shirkers Director Sandi Tan
With Sandi Tan’s beautifully cinephilic autobiographical documentary Shirkers arriving in theaters and on Netflix this Friday, October 26, we’re reposting our interview with Tan out of Sundance, 2018. As I wrote earlier in the festival, “Sandi Tan’s debut feature Shirkers is the 26-years-later compromise-of-necessity incarnation of a film that almost was. Shot in 1992, when Tan was in college, from a proudly illogical script of her own devising, Shirkers was meant to be a rare, hopefully transformative Singaporean independent film in a country without much history of those. Directed by Tan’s ambivalently-motivated mentor Georges Cardona — who subsequently absconded with […]
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Sundance Announces 2018 Art of Nonfiction Fellows and Grantees
The Sundance Institute today announced the four filmmakers and six grantees who comprise the 2018 Art of Nonfiction program. Launched in 2018, Art of Nonfiction is the Institutes’s program “working at the vanguard of inventive artistic practice in story, craft and form.” This year’s Art of Nonfiction Fellows are Deborah Stratman, Natalia Almada, Sam Green and Sky Hopinka. Grantees are Jem Cohen, Kevin Jerome Everson, Kevin B. Lee and Chloé Galibert-Laîné, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Leilah Weinraub. “This year’s cohort reflects our continuing desire to explore the space in between,” said Tabitha Jackson, Director of the Documentary Film Program, in […]
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Blackmagic and More: NAB in the “Post-Breakthrough Era”
The NAB Show at the Javits Center is a great place to get lost. Row after row, booth after booth, you’re surrounded by catchy company names and logos: ALT Systems, Inc., Primestream, Calrec, Voxnest, Snapstream, multiCAM Systems, Digital Nirvana, Wowza Media, Adder, BB&S Lighting, Live X… There are tons of video monitors, storage units, software displays, brightly colored control panels and studio cameras overflowing to the point where it all starts to blur together. You can casually stop to figure out where you are, realize you’re standing in front of the CueScript setup, and the next thing you know, their […]
