Interviews
Interviews
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“It was Extremely Brutal”: Max Keegan on “The Shepherd and the Bear”
High in the Pyrenees, a centuries-old way of life approaches its twilight amid a controversial rewilding scheme. France’s government has for decades airlifted brown bears from Slovenia to repopulate those hunted out of existence by the region’s hunters. But the bears are apex predators who threaten the flocks of a community of shepherds, whose earth-bound traditions don’t readily coexist with state-mandated policy. Within this context, British filmmaker Max Keegan illuminates richly human connections with stirring observational portraiture in The Shepherd and the Bear, whose Academy Award-qualifying run begins Friday Nov. 21 at New York City’s Cinema Village. Much more about […]
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“You Learn to Let Yourself Go Completely”: June Squibb, Back To One, Episode 367
June Squibb has only been acting for about seven decades, so forgive her if she hasn’t figured this whole acting thing out yet. Luckily she isn’t stopping or even slowing down. In fact, at 96 years old, she is more busy than ever before. Since her Oscar nomination for a supporting role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, Squibb has been in high demand. Her first leading role in a film, Thelma, led to another, Eleanor The Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson. And now she’s about to take the stage in the exciting new Broadway production of Marjorie Prime. On this episode, […]
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“We Are an Accumulation of These Encounters”: Lynne Sachs on Her IDFA-Debuting Every Contact Leaves a Trace
Every Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she’s collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into “how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking” (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film). As a collage of words, sounds and images collide it becomes increasingly clear that Sachs’s mission to understand how each of these random contacts has changed her in some profound […]
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“The Ethical Work Hasn’t Stopped Now That the Film has Premiered”: Monica Strømdahl on Her DOC NYC-Premiering Flophouse America
Flophouse America is the unnervingly intimate feature debut of Monica Strømdahl, an internationally award-winning photographer who spent 15 years documenting the impoverished communities that have sprung up in rundown motels throughout the US. Which is how she met Mikal, an energetic, 11-year old boy who’s called home the hotel room he’s shared with his parents since the day he was born. Thus began a three-year cinematic collaboration, shot almost entirely in the aforementioned home, between the Norwegian director and the marginalized trio she captures through her quietly unwavering lens. Which allowed her, and now us, to serve as a silent […]
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Tokyo 2025: Mario Patrocínio on “Maria Vitória”
Mario Patrocínio’s Maria Vitória is the writer-director’s first narrative feature, but it brings the chops of his documentary background to ground the story of the titular young woman (Mariana Cardoso). Under the relentless eye of her controlling father Nacho (Miguel Borges), Maria is subjected to a rigorous soccer training regimen that makes having a social life nearly impossible. When her estranged brother Bruno (Miguel Nunes) unexpectedly returns to their small Portuguese village, the film expands from a father-daughter duo to a fraught triangle. Bruno’s queerness challenges his father’s stereotypical machismo; her brother’s former absence and her father’s constant presence are […]
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“Diving Into the Mess and Chaos of Cinema Doesn’t Have to Exist Apart from Care and Ethics”: Gabrielle Brady on The Wolves Always Come at Night
Gabrielle Brady’s The Wolves Always Come at Night follows Davaa and Zaya, a rural Mongolian couple with four young daughters whose dream to continue the traditional herding way of life they’d always known is upended by a cataclysmic storm; which forces them, like so many of their friends and neighbors before, to finally relocate to the outskirts of the urban capital Ulaanbaatar in search of work. It’s a deceptively simple tale of loss — of both livelihood and identity — poignantly and cinematically captured by the talented Australian filmmaker’s lens. Yet what makes the docufiction drama, crafted with a primarily […]
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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 […]
