For Annie Ernaux fans, The Super 8 Years is something better than a movie—it’s effectively a new Ernaux novella, assembled from home movie footage shot by her late ex-husband Philippe Ernaux and directed by her son David. The author reads her text over a trim 61 minutes, assembled from footage shot by Philippe beginning in 1972, when he first bought a Bell & Howell super 8 camera, until their separation in 1981. Ernaux’s memoirs have examined her life while rarely overlapping what’s recalled from one book to another, which is true here even as what we see fills out her work: […]

The Janes, which closes this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in-person May 26, followed by an HBO premiere June 8, is one woefully prescient walk down pre-Roe memory lane. Directed by Academy Award nominee Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water, which also nabbed the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Independent Film Award back in 2008) and Emmy nominee Emma Pildes (Spielberg, which the debut director likewise produced for HBO), the doc tells the illicit tale of the titular underground network of college-age activists who defied the law and male expectations to provide women in Chicago with safe, shame-free […]

Anthony Banua-Simon’s nonfiction feature debut, Cane Fire, is a personal family history, historical explainer of sugar production, ode to union organizing and expose of a Hawaiian island’s mistreatment of its native people. Each of these elements are connected. Focusing on the island of Kaua’i, one of the most photographed areas of land in countless Hollywood productions, Cane Fire derives its title from a (now lost) 1934 film directed by Lois Weber, in which Banua-Simon’s great-grandfather was an extra. Banua-Simon uses this personal trivia as a way to dive into the egregious ways the island (and its people) have been depicted […]

Released in the fall of 1980, while Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining continued to horrify audiences in theaters, Stephen King’s eighth novel, Firestarter, tells the story of Charlie McGee, a young girl struggling to control her pyrokinetic powers. Her parents knew this would be an issue: years earlier, Andy and Vicky McGee participated in a trial run of a new chemical compound, Lot Six, that embedded telekinetic and mind-controlling powers that shady government officials now wish to end. A run in with Rainbird, who had also been experimented on and now acts as a hired assassin wiping out […]

In 2007, Michelangelo Frammartino was scouting locations for Le Quattro Volte in Alessandria del Carretto, whose mayor took him to the Bifurto Abyss, one of the world’s deepest caves. That, along with a follow-up expedition in 2016, planted the seed for Il Buco, Frammartino’s third feature. In the time since, Frammartino has become an avid speleologist, and Il Buco is ostensibly a recreation of the initial exploration of Bifurto in 1961, at the outset of Italy’s “economic miracle.” Frammartino juxtaposes it with the day-to-day life of an aging shepherd, giving the film an elegiac tone as it mixes pastoral myth […]

“An elite Baltimore police task force spent years plundering the city and its residents for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, drugs, and jewelry” is how a 2018 Vox article began its explainer of the disgraced Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) of the Baltimore Police Department. Nine officers took part in the multi-year scandal, with two detectives, Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, being convicted for their crimes, while another four pled guilty alongside two sergeants and one officer. All remain currently imprisoned. The severity and expansiveness of the GTTF’s crimes documented in Baltimore Sun journalist Justin Fenton’s 2021 book, […]

Any director whose bio includes being fired from “an animated children’s film for Miramax titled The Great North Pole Elf Strike for portraying Santa’s elves as gay” is my kind of filmmaker. And Juliet Bashore, of the aforementioned dismissal, also has the added distinction of being the force behind the prescient time capsule of the pre-gentrified San Francisco sex industry, Kamikaze Hearts (1986). That “fictionalized documentary” (“hybrid” was a term yet to be coined) depicted the doomed relationship between lovestruck Tigr (also a producer on the film) and the object of her adoration, gender fluid “(nonbinary” was likewise not yet […]

In the world of erotic cinema, veteran indie filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell is a (non-nuclear) household name. An early member of both the feminist porn and ethical porn movements, the director-producer — and curator, writer and teacher — has for over a decade and a half been on a transatlantic mission to spread the sex-positive word. And now the Amsterdam-based expat and founder of Blue Artichoke Films will be Zooming in to this year’s virtual CineKink (May 4-8 with a week of encores to follow) on the afternoon of May 8 to present “From Fantasy To Film: Design Your Own […]

Middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has won two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships in the women’s 800-meter competition. But no amount of endurance training could have prepared this South African Olympian for the long legal battle (a dozen years and counting) sparked by that very first 2009 World Championship victory. While other winning athletes were celebrating in Berlin, this Black woman from the Global South was undergoing “sex testing,” her right to even compete being thrown into question by a sports governing body made up almost wholly of white European men. But optics be damned. In the end, the […]

Jasmín Mara López is a journalist, audio producer, and nonfiction filmmaker whose 2015 audio doc Deadly Divide: Migrant Death on the Border received the Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Award. But the Los Angeles and New Orleans-based director-producer, an immigrant rights advocate with family ties to Mexico, is also a victim of trauma herself. And even more tragically, not at the hands of any faceless government bureaucracy but by those who purport to love her the most. It’s a harrowing tale, one López heroically, and with brutal honesty, dives headfirst into in her Hot Docs world-premiering Silent Beauty. The courageously intimate film […]