Haute cuisine as a form of artistic creation—one both time-intensive in its preparation and ephemeral in its shelf-life—and how to keep such a tradition alive is at the center of Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros. Whittled down from 150 hours of footage, the four-hour documentary takes on a leisurely pace matching both the unhurried unfolding of the dining experience at the titular restaurant and the elaborate process of crafting a meal. Beyond showing us the preparation of the food and every conceivable method of cookery, Wiseman brings us the source of it, too, following the Troisgois chefs as they visit […]
Terra Long’s exquisite debut feature film, Feet in Water, Head on Fire, is at once cine-essay, landscape film and sensory investigation into the production of space. The space in question is the Coachella Valley of Southern California, on traditional Cahuilla territory, a place produced and transformed over multiple eras by overlapping mythologies, migrations and capital accumulation strategies. Arid, hot and prone to tectonic trauma, the landscape is challenging to many kinds of harvest, save the tenacious date palm, a species widely cultivated across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia with roots in Arabia stretching back millennia. That the […]
Brandon K. McLaughlin remembers the exact moment he knew he wanted to work in the movie business. It was Halloween night and McLaughlin was eight years old. His uncle—a special effects technician—had invited him to set to watch the Disney adventure The Rocketeer being made. “I got to see them blow up the zeppelin while the Rocketeer was running on top of it,” McLaughlin said. “From that point on, I never wanted to do anything else. I was fascinated with everything that went into the magic of moviemaking, and the special effects department creates that magic, tricking the audience into […]
Rea Tajiri’s Wisdom Gone Wild takes a hard look at a difficult subject. Tajiri’s 93-year-old mom Rose is a witness to the US’s dark concentration camp history, having been incarcerated along with the rest of her Nikkei farming family during the Second World War. Primarily through Rose’s engaging tales, alongside home video and family photos, Tajiri goes (and takes us) on a decade-plus, nonlinear cinematic journey— neatly paralleling Rose’s own thought process, as the veteran filmmaker’s mom began her dementia decline at the age of 76—or should I say, dementia “reinvention.” For far from being a tragic story about “losing” […]
“I wanted to make something about a desire so intense that it destroys everything around it,” says Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell of Saltburn, her opulent sophomore psychodrama about class, obsession and longing set in an English countryside estate. “That locust cannibal obsession that I think we’ve all felt about someone that makes you completely lose your fucking mind.” In Saltburn, it’s Barry Keoghan’s humble and unknowable Oxford novice Oliver Quick who feels that fixation. His object of desire and fascination is Jacob Elordi’s dreamboat Felix Catton, an upper-class cool guy who welcomes Oliver into his inner circle, and later, to […]
Though producer-director Vanessa Hope has spent her career zeroing in on China—from producing Wang Quanan’s The Story Of Ermei and Chantal Akerman’s Tombee De Nuit Sur Shanghai to directing her own short China In Three Words and feature-length debut All Eyes and Ears—Hope’s followup feature is nonetheless a bit of a surprise. An intimate portrait of Taiwan’s first female president Tsai Ing-wen, Invisible Nation weaves the tale of President Tsai’s contemporary rise with the (often buried) history of the long-colonized island itself. Through archival footage and in-depth interviews with activists, historians and, of course, the head of (a disputed) state, […]
Sprawling in scope, observational in form and jaw-dropping in access, Leslie Tai’s How to Have an American Baby shows exactly what its title describes. The title is also the name of a sales talk one of the doc’s characters gives to Chinese moms with the financial means to travel and gift their future offspring US citizenship. The Chinese-American director takes her viewers on the wildest of rides through a birth tourism industry hiding in plain, sunny SoCal sight: underground maternity hotels run by shady operators and filled to the brim with expectant mothers, local hospitals employing doctors in on the […]
“I think the reason we’ve never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because we’ve never agreed on what the genre even is. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes… I am here in search of art.” — Jon D’Agata When I interviewed documentary filmmaker Frances Henderson for Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2014, she discussed the above quote from author Jon D’Agata, noting that it held pride of place on the moodboard that hung above her desk. ” I am very much […]
In his first feature, The Target Shoots First, Chris Wilcha documented his tenure at Columbia House, the mail-order music service whose ads famously promised “12 CDs for a penny.” Then a recent NYU philosophy graduate, Wilcha landed the job partly due to his familiarity with “alternative culture,” a burgeoning new market at the time (Nirvana’s In Utero was soon to be released), and brought a sardonic Gen X sensibility to chronicling his time in the company’s marketing department. Part workplace comedy and part personal essay, Target chronicled Wilcha’s anxiety about selling out his personal integrity and punk rock principles by […]
Though I’ve not read Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s New York Times bestseller Stamped From the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, I’m guessing the National Book Award-winner might not be the most obvious material for the big screen. Which is why I was a bit surprised when I finally watched the TIFF-debuting Netflix doc Stamped From the Beginning, Roger Ross Williams’ cinematic and often playful take on the professor-author’s quite heavy subject matter. Indeed, any film that opens with its (Black) director ambushing his (Black) talking heads with the query/salvo, “What is wrong with Black people?” is […]