Reflections
Featured
Minnesota Fierce: Documentary Filmmaker Joua Lee Grande Reports From Operation Metro Surge
Image: Kazua Melissa Vang & Sheng Elizabeth Lor
Though Joua Lee Grande studied cinema and media culture in college, she built much of her early career in nonprofits based in the Twin Cities. “I was mentoring young people about how they should follow their dreams, and I was… Read more
Slow Your Roll: Can Durational Cinema Save Us?
Illustration by Johanne Licard
You know the feeling: the algorithm catches you one lazy afternoon, and hours melt in the blink of an eye. You come to, dehydrated, achy, struggling to focus. Or at night, your couch sucks you in. You bounce from Netflix… Read more
Reel to Reel: Is “Content” So Different From Edison’s Early Cinema?
Illustration by Johanne Licard
The churn is relentless. The demand, insatiable. The output, rushed and raw but undeniably compelling. Working with cutting-edge communications devices, a rotating cast of tinkerers comes together each day to produce new pieces of short-form visual entertainment, racing to keep… Read more
How Ridgewood Became New York City’s Communal Cinema Hub
Photo by Steven Gonzalez
A white, windowless storefront in Ridgewood, Queens, has the distinction of being the neighborhood’s first new cinema in nearly 100 years. Co-founded last year by filmmaker John Wilson alongside collaborators Davis Fowlkes and Cosmo Bjorkenheim, Low Cinema features 42 seats… Read more
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Who Wants to Be White Famous?
After covering film and TV for more than 25 years, I’m still surprised at how long it takes some Black artists to become White Famous. What’s White Famous, you ask? It’s the state of being recognized by the mainstream media, something many Black performers experience long after first coming to the attention of Black audiences. Being White Famous has its benefits. Your IMDb ranking goes up, as does your salary quote for your next project. Your agents, managers, and publicists will be thrilled. “You’ve crossed over,” they’ll say, and they’ll mean it as a good thing. But White Fame can […]
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K. Austin Collins Salutes Frederick Wiseman
I think of the work of Frederick Wiseman, and my mind is drawn, immediately, to the faces. The blank stare of a monkey whose head, stem still attached, has been painstakingly severed from its body, for the sake of science, in Primate (1974). Young Black and Latino students in Harlem parsing the immediate ramifications of the Rodney King beating in High School II (1994). The sinewed despair that confronts us as the working-class people of Titicut Follies (1967), Hospital (1970), Welfare (1975), Public Housing (1997), In Jackson Heights (2015), and so many other of Wiseman’s films navigate the life-and-death intricacies […]
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Dreams Deferred: How Iranian Filmmakers Pursue Liberation Under Unbearable Constraints
The people of Iran find themselves suspended in a historical moment of great uncertainty. On December 28, 2025, in the midst of a major economic crisis exacerbated in part by U.S. sanctions, shopkeepers and vendors in several commercial centers throughout the country went on strike. The protests grew larger in number, culminating in early January as Iran’s largest uprising since the 1979 Revolution. The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) responded by imposing an internet blackout to facilitate the indiscriminate murder of protesters and civilians alike. Thousands were killed in the largest massacre in the nation’s history, and the periodic protests […]
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Perfect Eleven: Harry Shearer Remembers Rob Reiner
I first became aware of Rob Reiner as a member of The Committee, an improv group that began in the early 1960s in San Francisco and then, as some members moved south where the showbiz work was, opened a branch in Los Angeles. Of course, I became more aware of him, like most of America did, as a character derisively known as “Meathead” in the ground-breaking sitcom All in the Family. But he started making an impact on me personally when he’d show up to see his friend David L. Lander (later TV’s Squiggy) as part of the comedy group I […]
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What I Saw, Heard, and Felt as Sundance Bid Farewell to Park City—and Robert Redford
“What I’m saying is, if you want to go, I won’t stop you.” At the final Park City edition of Sundance last week, my 14th consecutive one, I contemplated this line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid daily. That’s because a gorgeous, Western-style artwork painted on plywood by local artist Ryan Williams stood not far from The Library Theater, displaying the dearly departed Sundance Kid Robert Redford (who passed away last September at age 89) next to these famous words spoken by his character. The quote felt like a homegrown farewell steeped in bittersweet resignation, an ingenious marking of […]
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Learning From Amos Poe
The following essay about Amos Poe appears in Filmmaker’s Winter, 2026 print edition in a section, Reflections, that looks back on 33 years of American independent film and Filmmaker Magazine. Upon the sad news of Amos’s passing on Christmas Day, 2025, we are posting it and sending condolences to Amos’s family and friends. — Editor Back when I was editing Filmmaker’s precursor, The Off-Hollywood Report, I’d attend the IFP’s Independent Feature Film Market. Filmmakers—some wearing sandwich boards or costumes—were hawking acquisition titles outside New York’s Angelika theater that were screening past the escalators inside, and the event always had an […]
