Interviews
Interviews
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“Women Like Gail are Often Vilified in the Media as Cold-Blooded Killers and Even Monsters”: Jessica Earnshaw on her SXSW-Debuting Baby Doe
Baby Doe is the latest from Jessica Earnshaw, whose Jacinta won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at Tribeca 2020. While that film followed a mother-daughter relationship bound up in drugs, incarceration and generational trauma, Baby Doe stars a happily married mother and grandmother who likely never even smoked a cigarette or garnered a speeding ticket. Indeed, Gail Ritchey was an unassuming conservative Christian living in rural Ohio until the magic of DNA matched the fifty-something to “Geauga’s Child,” a newborn left abandoned in the woods three decades ago. Which soon led to an arrest for murder (though […]
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“… The Visual Approach of the Documentary is Deeply Influenced by Amish and Mennonite Norms”: Elaine Epstein on her SXSW-Premiering Arrest the Midwife
As its nonsensical title might imply, Elaine Epstein’s Arrest the Midwife centers on the plight of three certified professional midwives who, after the death of a newborn (ironically, at a hospital one of the midwives rushed her client to the minute she noticed complications), find themselves in the crosshairs of their local authorities in upstate New York, one of only 11 states where midwifery is either illegal or highly restricted. (NYC midwives might consider moving to progressive Alabama.) And while the tale is quite harrowing, it’s also unexpectedly empowering. For what the (male) police and prosecutors didn’t quite bargain for […]
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“I’ve Been Trying to Coin the Phrase ‘Hangout Horror'”: Alexander Ullom on SXSW 2025 Premiere It Ends
In the last decade, a growing number of films and TV shows have iterated the time loop: Russian Doll‘s nested doll approach, Inception‘s infinitely spinning top. Alexander Ullom’s feature debut It Ends subverts those genre expectations at every turn—or rather, at every absence of a turn. Premiering in SXSW 2025’s Narrative Feature Competition, the film might superficially be grouped alongside similar-sounding genre titles like It, It Comes at Night and How It Ends. But as Ullom explained to me, his intentions were both more playful and somber. In a sense, this story about four zoomers who get into a car […]
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“It Took 31 Years”: Zeinabu irene Davis on Compensation
Because I had loved so deeply, Because I had loved so long, God in His great compassion Gave me the gift of song. Because I have loved so vainly, And sung with such faltering breath, The Master in infinite mercy Offers the boon of Death. — “Compensation” (1906) by Paul Laurence Dunbar Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) tells dual stories of pairs of lovers (both played by Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks) at the beginning and end of the 20th century. The film is uniquely attuned to deaf culture, American prejudice and two distinct pandemics. Creative in her […]
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“The Link Between Exploration and Exploitation”: Eleanor Mortimer on How Deep Is Your Love
Barbie Pig, Gummy Squirrel, Psychedelic Elvis Worm. These are not quirky colloquialisms for party drugs or Trolli candies, but rather taxonomic shorthand for deep sea creatures. For her debut documentary feature, director Eleanor Mortimer boarded a research vessel for an extended two-month expedition in the deep Pacific and encountered these alluring and alien animals firsthand. How Deep Is Your Love chronicles the work undertaken by taxonomists, who are slowly trying to identify the estimated 1.75 million undiscovered ocean species. Already a herculean task, the looming likelihood of rampant commercial deep sea mining—which intends to extract precious minerals like cobalt, nickel […]
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“I Put 30 Years of My Life Into 80 Minutes”: Myrid Carten on Her True/False Documentary, A Want in Her
Interweaving home movies, intimate phone calls, previous art school projects and deeply moving footage shot over an intense seven-month timeframe, A Want in Her documents increasing tumult within the filmmaker’s immediate family. The documentary may be the feature debut of moving-image artist Myrid Carten, but the inclusion of charming mini-DV footage shot by the director in her youth proves that, in many ways, she’s been a personal storyteller her whole life. (Even if the early ‘00s footage is more interested in parodying America’s Next Top Model than capturing the cracks already materializing in her family’s foundation). The film opens by […]
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“I Feel Like the World is Literally on Fire”: Lemohang Mosese on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Ancestral Visions of the Future
Following its premiere in Venice’s 2019 Biennale College Cinema section and North American launch at Sundance 2020, Lemohang Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection became a noteworthy arthouse success, scoring wide international distribution and eventually gaining a place in the Criterion Collection. Now six years later, Mosese has premiered his follow-up feature Ancestral Visions of the Future, shifting to a poetic, hybrid documentary form while retaining his previous work’s expressive tempo and eye-searingly colourful outdoor cinematography. Whilst Burial was concerned with the maintenance of longterm dynastic communities in Lesotho, the landlocked country of his birth fully enclosed […]
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“Maybe an Individual is Only as Interesting as the Energy Surrounding Them”: Angelo Madsen on His True/False-debuting A Body to Live In
Angelo Madsen’s A Body to Live In is a doc as unconventional in form as its leading man. Comprised of various formats (16mm, VHS, archival, 2K) overlaid with underground voices (Annie Sprinkle and Ron Athey are probably the best known), the film takes us on a winding journey through the life and philosophy of photographer-performance artist-ritualist Fakir Musafar, one of the founders of the modern primitive movement. With the archival Musafar (born Roland Loomis in 1930) as our guide we’re introduced to an unheralded slice of LGBTQ+ history that includes gay BDSM parties, the first piercing shop, body modification as […]
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“Now the Main Person Talking about Lilly is Joe Rogan”: Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens on John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office
John Lilly’s very Californian trajectory from Cold War scientist to New Age visionary, aided by prodigious consumption of LSD and ketamine, feels quaint from today’s vantage. The Silicon Valley inventors and tech pioneers who could be considered his present-day counterparts mostly went the opposite route—first taking psychedelics and proclaiming lofty ideals, then turning to ever more terrifyingly real fantasies of world domination. Such comparisons account for the wistful experience of watching John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s documentary portrait of Lilly, which premiered at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. That’s not to say […]
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“He Realized It Was Useful to Stop Running From the 500 Pound Maus Chasing After Him”: Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin on Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse!
Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse! centers on a legendary cartoonist who’s long struggled with being eclipsed by his own creation. Decades ago Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Holocaust-focused, autobiographical graphic novel Maus launched the underground artist into mainstream fame, and its success prompted him to follow up with the explanatory MetaMaus so he could finally stop having to publicly dissect the most painful time in his family’s history. (Needless to say, the plan backfired spectacularly.) Fast forward to today, when calls to ban Maus — and other “uncomfortable” books — make the moral of the story […]
