Rama Rau’s League of Exotique Dancers is an absolutely delightful and lovingly crafted doc structured around a group of legendary striptease artists as they prepare to return to the stage for the Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend in Las Vegas — a trip which becomes merely an excuse for the filmmaker to delve deeply into the extraordinary lives of some truly groundbreaking women. Among the timelessly sexy inductees is none other than Kitten Natividad, best known as cult director Russ Meyer’s buxom muse. Prior to the film’s Hot Docs premiere, Filmmaker was fortunate enough to catch up with the Beneath […]

Playing divorced parents embarking on a strange journey into Death Valley, Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu bring an easy chemistry and rich shared experience to Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, opening today in the States from Strand. They both play famous actors, one a skeptic and one a life-after-death believer, yoked together on a road trip conceived by their son, who committed suicide in San Francisco several months earlier. He’s written them both letters and given them a map to seven locations, telling them in his posthumously received correspondence that he’ll appear to them at one of the stops. The premise […]

After winning the Special Jury Prize in the U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance, filmmaker Robert Greene and actress Kate Lyn Sheil arrived in Berlin for their international premiere of Kate Plays Christine. Of the 44 titles slated in Berlinale’s Forum, Greene’s documentary is one of only three American films to have been selected to screen. The film is described as a documentary, but the nature of the project has a complicated and multi-layered explanation. On one level, the film follows Kate preparing for a role, but the character she must assume isn’t written in a script. She’s researching to play […]

“One of my friends was killed over there,” says Christopher Waldorf, reflecting back to a scene from KIKI, the 66th Berlinale’s Teddy Award-winning documentary. In an early scene from the film, Waldorf is captured voguing down a dangerous street in Harlem. “The Trade are straight hood guys,” says Waldorf, explaining the threat of violence and harassment that the Trade inflicts on Voguers like himself. “The only reason we were able to joke around when we were filming there,” chimes in another featured subject in the film, Gia Marie Love, “is because we were with white people.” First-time documentary filmmaker Sara […]

Winner of the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Waves ’98 is the debut film from writer/director/animator Ely Dagher. The film is set in Beirut – Dagher’s hometown – and concerns a young man who becomes isolated from reality. Filmmaker spoke with Dagher about the film’s blend of video footage, still photography and animation. The Sundance Film Festival presented Waves ’98 in 2016 as part of its Animation Spotlight shorts program. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being […]

Veteran  DP Robert Richman has shot more than 60 documentary films since 1985, including such heavyweights as An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for ‘Superman’ and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. His latest work is Suited, an HBO documentary produced by Lena Dunham. The film profiles Bindle & Keep, a tailoring company in Brooklyn that caters to an LGBTQ community. Richman speaks below about direct cinema, the Maysles brothers and why “pure verite films” are his favorite kind to shoot. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being […]

When I meet Tippi Hedren in Vienna, we’re with a handful of other journalists for nearly an hour-long roundtable interview. There are less than ten of us, but after a series of interruptions, digressions, poking, and prodding, the pack feels more like an encroaching swarm. But Hedren is no stranger to this kind of journalistic interrogation. The recent Viennale programmed a tribute to her and invited Hedren from her home on the Shambala Preserve in California for her first visit to the capital of Austria. The animal rights activist also worked with both Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin, so Hedren’s presence at […]

“I can’t keep beating around the bush because I’ll eventually run out of bushes to beat around,” sighs Mya Taylor. We’ve just spent 90 minutes together in her hotel room at the 59th London Film Festival. In that time, I don’t speak much, but when I do, I’m drawing parallels between Taylor and Marlon Brando. To be fair, I’d just seen Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon, so referencing some uncovered Brando philosophy from the documentary during my conversation with Taylor felt pertinent at the time. Mya Taylor is a black trans-woman born in 1991, so in retrospect, the comparison is pretty ridiculous. […]

With Celia Rowlson-Hall’s bold and original MA opening today in New York at the IFC Center, with wider digital distribution next month, we’re reposting Taylor Hess’s interview with the writer/director/star and her collaborators out of Venice. Check the IFC site for screenings and Q&A moderators, who include, tonight at 8:30 PM, Lena Dunham. Barefoot on a sandy shore of the Mediterranean coast, I’m only mildly bothered by the luxury cruise ships obstructing the horizon. It’s an otherwise picturesque pre-dusk afternoon in Venice, and I’m focused mostly on keeping up with Celia Rowlson-Hall, who sets an intimidating pace as we walk […]