My DOX:AWARD top pick for the Ekko jury grid I participated in at this year’s CPH:DOX, Margreth Olin’s Songs of Earth, was also number one in my critic’s notebook for the doc most needing to be experienced on the big screen. In this palpably loving portrait of the veteran filmmaker’s elderly parents and the country that shaped them (and her), “Olin juxtaposes jaw-dropping, drone-captured images of the awe-inspiring Norwegian landscape with closeups of her dad’s bald pate, his tender hand on her mother’s back, as the environment and humankind become one” (per that notebook, and my coverage). Thus, it comes as little surprise […]

“I wonder if we can find ourselves fully in a world we invented,” the French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actor Lina Soualem eloquently ponders in the role of ever-questioning narrator of Bye Bye Tiberias, her extraordinary, multigenerational, female-focused family portrait. Seen through contemporary footage and 90s home movies — expertly interwoven with material from historical archives — the women include not only Soualem’s conservative, customs-observing grandmother and great-grandmother, who never left the Palestinian village their entire community had been forcibly displaced to, but also her mother, Hiam Abbass, a rebellious dreamer set on becoming an international actress. And now, 30 years on […]

For over 20 years, the Australian video artists Soda Jerk have been making work that samples film, music and other various forms of pop culture. Their films are kaleidoscopic and psychedelic, irreverent and constantly surprising. Their newest film, Hello Dankness, is no different. Set in a fictional suburbia populated by Tom Hanks, Annette Bening, Bruce Dern, and Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World, Dankness is a response to–and a film about–the 2016 election and its aftermath. After all, an era of American history and politics that so ferociously shred away societal norms and imbued daily life with a lasting weirdness […]

“I literally finished the film at three in the morning last night,” director Matthew Heineman says on a video call with Filmmaker on Tuesday, just past the airport security on his way to the 50th Telluride Film Festival. “I’m barely alive right now.”  Thankfully, Heineman is alive and well, and at the height of his powers as a documentarian with sharp instincts and artistic finesse with American Symphony, which marks the second time a feature of his world premieres at the annual Colorado gathering. The first was last year’s stunning Oscar-shortlisted Retrograde, on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.  In a […]

Onur Tukel is a boldly independent writer-director-actor who, for more than a decade, has been making cutting edge comedies in New York City that sometimes land in the horror category, sometimes social satire, are often absurd, mostly hilarious and always thoughtful—Catfight, Applesauce, Summer of Blood, The Misogynists, Scenes From An Empty Church, to name just a few. His latest, Poundcake, about a serial killer who only targets straight white men, is maybe his boldest yet, which says a lot. In this hour, he talks about his reluctant approach toward acting in his own films, the ways he has navigated low […]

“How To Watch Birds,” episode five of How To with John Wilson’s final season, presents a familiar trajectory: eponymous documentarian follows through with stated premise before being diverted into a completely different context. Not more than seven minutes into Wilson’s episode about birding he’s interviewing UFO expert Travis Walton, whose alleged abduction story inspired Fire in the Sky (1993), and not long after that he voluntarily agrees to a lie detector test. “Have you ever lied to someone on your show?” asks the administrator. “No,” Wilson replies, following a pregnant pause. When informed he is lying, Wilson quietly mutters, “Fuck.” […]