6298 Results for “Open ”
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“Security Considerations on this Film Were Everywhere, All the Time”: Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing on Her Sundance-Debuting doc Midwives
With grace and humility, Midwives, the feature debut of Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, puts a nuanced human face on a complicated conflict long flattened by the Western press. Back in 2012 the director returned to her birthplace in Rakhine State, an area of Myanmar now infamous for the ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya population, yet also a place where Buddhists and Muslims lived in harmony at the time Snow was growing up. There she met two equally complicated women: Hla, a Buddhist midwife and the hardened business-minded owner of a medical clinic, and her young apprentice Nyo Nyo, a dreamy […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 28, 2022 -
“Even in Asian American Progressive Circles, People Have Not Heard This Story”: Eugene Yi and Julie Ha on Their Sundance-Premiering Documentary, Free Chol Soo Lee
Those who knew Chol Soo Lee, or saw his image printed on the posters, stickers, and t-shirts of the 1970s Pan-Asian American movement to release him from jail, often remarked on his stunning beauty. “What a good-looking kid. I mean real good-looking kid,” chirps investigative reporter K.W. Lee, recalling their first encounter at San Quentin Prison in Free Chol Soo Lee, a new Sundance documentary that tells the story of a young man falsely convicted of murder, the symbol he became, and the activists who rallied for both. Later in the film, investigative reporter, Josiah “Tink” Thompson, asks the witness […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jan 27, 2022 -
Sundance 2022 Critic’s Notebook: The Mission, Utama
The beginning of Tania Anderson’s The Mission transported me from my virtual festival cocoon to Utah’s snowy slopes and the towns below; the ambient Mormonism emanating from those surroundings is a shadow structure of any IRL Sundance. Anderson’s debut feature documentary invites viewers to observe the nice-seeming young men and women dispatched from there to proselytize on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The opening introduces four main subjects—two male, two female—preparing to separate from their families for a two-year term, beginning with nine weeks of missionary training camp in Provo. From there, they’re sent to Finland, whose total […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 27, 2022 -
“I’d Never Really Written Personally About My Own Loss”: Mark Pellington on The Severing
Director Mark Pellington has long been one of the American cinema’s great chroniclers of grief, from early genre films like The Mothman Prophecies (in which the horror story is a vehicle for an unsettling, affecting tale of personal anguish) to more overtly philosophical takes on the subject like I Melt With You, The Last Word, and Nostalgia. While Pellington’s work is undeniably informed by the devastating loss of his wife Jennifer in 2004, it has tended, up until this point, to come at the subject from oblique angles, as in the 2008 dramedy Henry Poole Is Here. With his latest […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 26, 2022 -
“Originally I Had a 200-Page Script”: Ricky D’Ambrose on The Cathedral
Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature, The Cathedral, begins in the mid-’80s, with a narrator outlining the history of the Damrosch family: father Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), mother Lydia (Monica Barbaro) and son Jesse (Hudson McGuire as an adolescent, Robert Levey II as a pre-teen, William Bednar-Carter as a teenager). The film begins shortly before the latter’s birth and continues into the mid-aughts, outlining an often difficult Long Island upbringing. Richard casts a dark shadow over Jesse’s upbringing. The years’ passing is concretized datewise by a plethora of broadcast news footage—a new element for D’Ambrose’s work in a feature full of them. I […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2022 -
“I Wanted to Enchant the Birds and the Increasingly Poisonous Skies They Fall Out Of”: Shaunak Sen on His Sundance-Debuting Doc All That Breathes
“You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics. Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air.” Those are the poetic words heard in the closing voiceover of Shaunak Sen’s mesmerizing All That Breathes. World-premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition (January 21) at this year’s Sundance, the film’s an ambitiously intricate study of the intersection of environmental collapse, religious tension, and the love of two Muslim brothers for a feathered scavenger unnervingly falling from a smoggy Delhi sky. With stunning cinematography and utmost attention to the tiniest detail (down to mosquitos buzzing […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 26, 2022 -
“Something Makes us Feel Like We can be Saved When Action Stars are Elected as Our Leaders”: Martika Ramirez Escobar on Leonor Will Never Die
Thrown from a second floor window, a box television clocks old Leonor (Sheila Francisco) square on the head. She wakes up inside her work-in-progress movie script, an homage to ’80s Pinoy action movies, able to steer the rest of the unwritten plot in first person. Back in reality, the retired movie director lies comatose in a hospital bed while her sons–one flesh and blood, the other a ghost–wander and wonder around, trying to option their mother’s unfinished script to pay the bills. Will Leonor wake up in time, if at all, to retain agency of her comeback story? When you […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jan 25, 2022 -
Back to One, Episode 187: Renate Reinsve
Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve’s performance in her first leading role, in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World, earned her the best actress award at Cannes and is slowly taking the world by storm. She embodies Julie with a levity and depth that is both grounded in a relatable reality and poetically expresses the beauty and heartbreak of life at the same time. To say it’s the kind of work that changes people’s lives is not an exaggeration. In this half hour, we take the microscope to her performance and lay out the factors at play in its creation. […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jan 25, 2022 -
“I Would Love for Horror to Be My Home, But I Want to Be Bi-Coastal”: Mariama Diallo on Master
The racist roots of Ivy League academia are molded into an intangible boogeywoman in writer/director Mariama Diallo’s feature debut Master. While the film takes place on the fictional campus of Ancaster—located in the greater Boston area—much of the film’s insights on matters of race and gender stem from Diallo’s own undergraduate experience at Yale. In fact, the titular term “master” refers to what would more commonly be known as “head of house,” or the senior member of a college within a wider university system. If this term still seems convoluted and archaic, it’s likely because it’s largely a British custom, […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jan 25, 2022 -
Sundance 2022 Critic’s Notebook: Fire of Love, Every Day in Kaimukī and Shorts
Derrida’s “archival turn” of the ’90s has officially taken over mainstream documentary filmmaking—a trend that has been covered in general interest thinkpieces in Indiewire as well as in academic scholarship, and one that’s proven more lucrative than I could have ever imagined. For the second year in a row, Sundance opened its U.S. Documentary competition selections with a blockbuster archival film, and National Geographic Documentary Films won the bidding frenzy for Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love with a “mid-seven figures” purchase almost a year after reports that 2021 Sundance “Day One” film Summer of Soul sold for north of $12 […]
by Abby Sun on Jan 24, 2022
