Directors
Interviews - Directors
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“Her Archive Was Kind of a Trail… A Filmmaker’s Trail”: Alan Berliner on his DOC NYC-debuting BENITA
Recipient of DOC NYC 2024’s Lifetime Achievement Award (as well as the 2025 Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at the upcoming Hamptons Doc Fest), the “virtuoso of essayistic documentary” Alan Berliner (Letter to the Editor, First Cousin Once Removed) returns to this year’s fest with BENITA, an unconventional portrait of an even more unconventional artist. Benita Raphan was a NYC filmmaker (and a MacDowell fellow in 2004 and a Guggenheim fellow in 2019) best known for her own short portraits of eccentric artists, from John Nash, to Buckminster Fuller, to Emily Dickinson. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Raphan […]
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“The Film Is a Portrait of Amy Goodman, But It’s Also a Celebration of Resistance”: Carl Deal and Tia Lessin on their DOC NYC and IDFA-debuting Steal This Story, Please!
Steal This Story, Please! is a compelling and often unexpected look at the multi-award-winning investigative journalist (and author and syndicated columnist) Amy Goodman, best known as the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, which airs on over 1500 public television and radio stations worldwide. Since its inception nearly three decades ago, the daily, global news broadcast has been unwaveringly dedicated to telling the stories of those on the “end of the trigger.” And shockingly, it’s been doing so entirely supported by audience dollars: no government funding, corporate sponsorship, underwriting or advertising revenue required (or allowed). Just a lot of […]
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“She Withheld Empathy From Everyone But Herself”: Andres Veiel on Riefenstahl
Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl is an arresting and deeply disturbing all-archival portrait of the titular Third Reich actor-director, responsible for some of the most innovative filmmaking of the 20th century as well as horrific war crimes (though Riefenstahl would go to her grave insisting she knew nothing of the mass murder taking place all around her, let alone the power of her propaganda). That said, Hitler’s cinematic mouthpiece would undoubtedly agree that great art requires great sacrifice — just not her own. The film is made up entirely of materials excavated from the 700 boxes Leni Riefenstahl bequeathed to the Prussian […]
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“’We’re More Afraid of What Happens When We Stop Filming’”: Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman on The Alabama Solution
When Andrew Jarecki (HBO’s The Jinx, Capturing the Friedmans) and Charlotte Kaufman (a producer on The Jinx, Part Two) first stepped inside the secretive Alabama prison system they were there to shoot a revival meeting — an uplifting event that church ministries hold in prison yards throughout the state. What they stumbled upon instead was a far different story, one of horrific abuse, sweeping coverups and even murder at the hands of those charged to enforce the law. Making ample use of the evocative footage shot over six years on contraband phones by the incarcerated men who risked their lives […]
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“It Did Feel Like a Conjuring”: Avalon Fast on Her Witchy Sophomore Feature CAMP
After a tragic loss, college dropout Emily (Zola Grimmer) is desperate for some distance in CAMP, the sophomore feature from 25-year-old writer-director Avalon Fast. While her father (Michael Tan) is patient and supportive, the comfort of returning home only seems to make Emily regress into a volatile depression. On a lark of sorts, he suggests that she apply to work as a counselor at a summer camp deep in the Canadian wilderness. Though skeptical of the overt Christian slant espoused on the promotional pamphlet, something draws her in. When she arrives after a long journey, she is surprised to see […]
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“It’s Great to Feel Like You Made a Cult Favorite”: Alex Winter and Bill Corso on “Freaked”
Alex Winter and Tom Stern’s 1993 cult classic Freaked is less an example of “high” and “low” art commingling than of pop- and-sub-cultures colliding. At the precipice of marquee fame after headlining the first two Bill & Ted movies alongside Keanu Reeves, Winter—along with his former NYU classmate Stern and TV writer Tim Burns—pitched 20th Century Fox on an anarchic comedy called Hideous Mutant Freekz, in which Ricky Coogan (played by Winter), a shallow TV idol, becomes spokesman for a patently evil chemical corporation. Ricky, his best friend and a handful of others board a plane to the fictitious South […]
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“Long Time Artistic Relations Are Fascinating… And Hard to Maintain”: Rick Linklater on “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon”
One of our most prolific independent American filmmakers, Richard Linklater, now has two new movies in release. Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon are both evocations of transformative moments in, respectively, narrative cinema and Broadway musical theater. Both are period films, ingenious in form and generous in spirit — in other words they are two of the best films of the year. Nouvelle Vague is set in Paris in 1959, when many of the critics who had formed a community around the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had already directed at least one feature. Desperate to catch-up was Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague […]
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“We Wanted to Run It Like a Normal Powwow”: Sky Hopinka on Powwow People
Sky Hopinka is one of those rare filmmakers who seems to possess an instinctual artistic eye. And his latest Powwow People is a “vérité-style documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering” according to its spot-on synopsis. It’s also a beautifully-crafted art film refreshingly not specifically made for the cinephile (i.e., East Coast liberal/Euro) gaze. Indeed, in order to avoid the extractive lens Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, purposely did not parachute in to capture a powwow “National Geographic” style (as the […]
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Global Warming ‘Knows No Ideology, No Political Boundaries'”: Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk on The White House Effect
Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk’s The White House Effect is an intriguing all-archival trip back in time to the precise moment in US politics when we arguably could have turned the page on climate change. From 1988-1992, Yale grad and oil company founder George H.W. Bush was commander-in-chief; not only did Bush. Sr. improbably make vocal his belief that global warming (“The Greenhouse Effect”) was real, but promised to employ “the White House effect” to counter it. Which included appointing as EPA chief Bill Reilly, an avid conservationist and veteran of Nixon’s Presidential Council on Environmental Quality and […]
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“There’s an Opera Out On the Turnpike”: Benny Safdie on The Smashing Machine
Benny Safdie’s mixed martial arts drama The Smashing Machine, currently in theaters from A24, is brutal and tender, and both in surprising ways. Working with blockbuster actor Dwayne Johnson, who, shapeshifting into the role of fighter Mark Kerr, is even more bulked up than usual, Safdie dramatizes an early 2000s time when MMA was in a transitional phase, with its fighters touring internationally on a loosely regulated circuit where the purses weren’t so huge, there was still a camaraderie among fighters, and the rules felt a bit slippery. Drawing from John Hyams’s 2002 documentary, The Smashing Machine: The Life and […]
