It goes without saying that the upcoming 26th edition of Hot Docs (April 25th-May 5th) presents a wealth of topnotch nonfiction films to choose from. With over 200 pictures — not to mention numerous events, immersive media and the two-day industry Forum — North America’s largest documentary festival might even feel like too much of a good thing. Fortunately for me, between the miracle of Vimeo links and traveling on the doc fest circuit since IDFA, I’ve seen a good chunk of the feature-length selections, many of which I fear will be buried beneath the headline-grabbing buzz. (Much of it […]

Taking place on a Saturday afternoon in the lobby of The Durham Hotel, “Framing the Conversation: Stanley Nelson” was the final panel discussion in a series of A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy chats at this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. (Though the festival itself is an arm of the Center for Documentary Studies at the prestigious Duke University, these always informative, free-to-the-public, laidback talks have been the 22-year-old Full Frame’s secret weapon for close to a decade.) In town to interview Nelson, the down-to-earth founder of Firelight Media, a recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a National Humanities Medal […]

“DocsStillSoWhite: Moving From Ally to Accomplice” — the title inspired by a curriculum developed by the panel’s moderator Seena (“The Woke Coach”) Hodges — was the second of two diversity-centric A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy discussions presented at this year’s Full Frame. Speaking before an impressively packed house in The Durham Hotel lobby early on a Saturday morning, the upbeat Hodges began by reminding the four panel participants to be mindful of the allotted hour (while wryly apologizing for the “colonial construct of time”). She then asked the two teams of filmmakers — two black producers working alongside two white directors — […]

2016: not a good year for most people, and certainly not for Frank Beauvais. His Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is the opening night film at this year’s sixth annual Art of the Real series, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s perspective on the year in nonfiction. Handily for me, Beauvais (a music supervisor and documentarian making his feature debut) has written his own IMDb synopsis, upon which I cannot improve: January 2016. The love story that brought me to this village in Alsace where I live ended six months ago. At 45, I am now alone, without a car, a job […]

One of the pioneers of independent cinema in the Philippines, Kidlat Tahimik has been tinkering away on his latest film since 1979. Like much of his output, the pugnaciously titled BalikBayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment, Redux IV (2017), resembles as much a collage of moods, periods, film stocks and video formats as it does any kind of coherent movie. Working from an original 33-minute cut assembled in the early 1980s, the film is in part about Enrique of Malacca, a slave who accompanied his master Ferdinand Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe.  What showed at Play-Doc, the small […]

Filing into the lobby of the comfortably chic Durham Hotel at noon on a Saturday for “The Pathway to Producing,” an A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy panel moderated by Ian Kibbe (Raising Bertie) of the Documentary Producers Association, it struck me that the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is one of those rare fests, nonfiction or not, with genuine audience diversity. While one would expect people of color to show up for the always packed #DocsSoWhite discussions (of which there were two this year), non-white folks also fill the house for the conversations that have nothing to do with race or gender […]

A figure of such stature as Mikhail Gorbachev is an awkward fit for a documentary by Werner Herzog, a director whose non-fiction work has chiefly focused on extraordinary personalities and experiences excluded from history books. As such, it’s not overall surprising that his latest, Meeting Gorbachev (co-directed with his frequent producer André Singer), should be hamstrung by its subject, a man who withstood unimaginable political pressure and media scrutiny as he navigated, if not orchestrated, one of the most momentous chapters of the 20th century.  As Herzog explained in a masterclass held during the 50th Visions du Réel documentary film […]

Labor was a theme binding many selections at this year’s New Directors/New Films, which concluded this past weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. That feels timely, in the wake of the success enjoyed and debates sparked by Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, about a loyal mestiza housekeeper and nanny caring for a well-off Mexico City family, and the high-profile arrival in the U.S. House of Representatives of progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a proud former waitress whose working class roots have rattled the Fox News crowd. Not that world cinema attends to trending topics, but […]

If the International Film Festival Rotterdam can be credited for just one thing–and this would leave aside their robust global funding initiatives and industry market–it would be expanding the definition of what fits at a festival. And, therein, the definition of film. For instance, IFFR spotlights everything from installations to initiatives like this year’s Blackout program (curated by Julian Ross), which centered on performances using the now defunct Kodak 35mm carousel slide projector. It follows, then, that the festival’s centerpiece program, the Bright Future section, challenged the narrow idea of film being a title card followed by three acts and […]

This year CineKink NYC will be celebrating its upcoming sweet sixteen edition of the fest (April 3-7) by adding something new: the CineKink Artist Spotlight award. And in town to receive the honor — and premiere her latest Adorn, along with its making-of documentary, as well as host her “From Fantasy to Film: Design Your Own Porn Film” workshop — will be Amsterdam-based Jennifer Lyon Bell, no stranger to the kinky fest. Indeed, Bell has been screening her work at CineKink since 2006, racking up awards while making connections she cites as integral to her longevity in a notoriously difficult […]