One of the most storied shows of the punk era was seen by just a tiny audience at an unlikely venue — a California mental hospital. The punk rockabilly band The Cramps and theatrical art-punk band The Mutants played the Napa State Hospital on June 13, 1978, one of a series of concerts programmed at the institution for its residents during that era. What made this concert different was its documentation — it was recorded on old Sony equipment by Bay Area documentarian Joe Rees and his Target Video crew. “Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I’m not […]

A movie could be made out of the making of Abdallah Al-Khatib’s heartbreakingly poetic Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege), screening in the ACID program at this year’s Cannes. The film’s title refers to Yarmouk, a district in Damascus that served as the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world from 1957 until its destruction in 2018. In 2013 the Al-Assad regime set up a siege, depriving Yarmouk’s residents of food, medicine and electricity while haphazardly dropping barrel bombs on what it deemed a rebel stronghold. An accidental filmmaker, Al-Khatib—born and bred in Yarmouk until ISIS expelled him in 2015—was a […]

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) belongs to a family whose business is selling their ground-fishing catch off the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) all rely on the 17-year-old high school student to help negotiate the daily pricing of their catch so that the family isn’t taken advantage of by local cheapskate buyers. Ruby takes it upon herself to look after and stoically stand up for her family, and she does this, at least in part, because of her identity as a child of deaf adults (CODA). As […]

Matías Piñeiro’s sixth feature and seventh Shakespeare-related film, Isabella, begins with purely abstract images whose use here is new in his work: four different shades on the blue spectrum, alternately lighter and darker in smaller and smaller concentric rectangles. The smallest, central rectangle fades to purple before three different shades of that color pulsate outward to the largest rectangle. The rectangles then dissolve into one unified purple that fills the rectangular frame containing the film itself, which starts gently pulsating in different shades under silent opening titles.  These abstract color studies (whose resemblance to the work of James Turrell was […]

Fifteen minutes into Brandon Colvin’s third feature, A Dim Valley, Albert (Whitmer Thomas) presents Ian (Zach Weintraub) with a generously packed bowl of marijuana, which the two proceed to light up. Shortly thereafter, they witness a surreal vision in the forest near the field research camp where they’re spending the summer, but to call this a drug-induced departure from realism would be inaccurate. From the very beginning of this whimsical backwoods tone poem, Colvin establishes something like a stoner ambiance: pacing is lethargic, odd bits of behavior are lingered on, glassy-eyed stares into the middle distance proliferate. There’s a sense […]

This article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 2021 edition. It is being posted today online in conjunction with I Carry You With Me‘s release in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. Arriving amidst a number of recent pictures exploring notions of hybridity—mostly documentaries that incorporate narrative or meta elements—nonfiction filmmaker Heidi Ewing’s feature dramatic debut, I Carry You With Me, deploys its formal invention in movingly unexpected ways. Taking the recounted memories of an undocumented Mexican couple living in New York, Ewing tells a swooning, deeply romantic period love story. And it’s one that achieves an arresting sobriety with contemporary […]

Working primarily with a hand-wound 16mm Bolex, Neelon Crawford made a series of experimental films from 1968 through 1980. Shot in the US, the United Kingdom, and South America, the films explored light and movement in a variety of landscapes. Crawford manipulated the image through film stocks, filters, frame rates, double- and triple-exposures, animation, editing, and printing, at times adding soundtracks to imagery that ranged from observational to abstract. Crawford’s films were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Cineprobe series in the 1970s and were distributed by Canyon Cinema, among others. After For the Spider Woman in 1980, he […]

Directed and produced by Vivian Kleiman, Tribeca premiere No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics provides a glimpse into the lives and works of comic artists Alison Bechdel, Rupert Kinnard, Mary Wings, Howard Cruse, and Jennifer Camper, who were integral to the development of the first queer comics in the underground comic scene. Kleiman does a phenomenal job in placing the vibrant energies of the pioneering artists in dialogue with younger artists while framing their comic works within the larger context of intersectional identities and the history of the LGBT community.   When asked about the creative influences that […]

Since releasing his first documentary in 2009, Noah Hutton has kept busy. That film Crude Independence and its follow-up Deep Time (2015) were both about the consequences of oil extraction in North Dakota, and he followed them with a multi-platform installation at Times Square in 2015 and the science-fiction film Lapis, which he wrote and directed, in 2020. His new film In Silico was in production throughout the entire time that Hutton was working on those other projects. It’s a longitudinal chronicle that Hutton began in response to a TED talk by Israeli scientist Henry Markram in 2009, where he announced that his team […]