In the opening days of this year’s edition of IDFA, the documentary festival issued two statements on the bombing of Gaza. Following protests at the opening night ceremony where protesters carried banners including the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the festival issued a first statement that condemned “the hurtful slogan written on a banner by the protestors, for voicing their concerns, expressing the hurt they felt,” before going on to state that “we believe that this slogan should not be used in any way and by anybody anymore.” The Palestine Film Institute condemned that […]
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 […]
The SAG strike is over and Back To One returns in the most fitting way—with The Sixth Annual Kevin Corrigan Episode. The living patron saint of the indie actor fills us in on what’s been going on in his world over the past year, talks about playing off of Tim Blake Nelson in his latest film Bang Bang, takes us way back to his first time on a film set as an extra in 1987, describes a recent rewarding experience of performing his own ultra personal material, and ponders his strange case of involuntary lens spiking. Plus stories about “manhandling” […]
After supporting a range of programs uplifting the independent film community, including Sundance’s Art of Nonfiction and the Dear Producer Award, philanthropist, grant maker and producer and executive producer (Pahokee, Aleph, The Tuba Thieves), Maida Lynn recently announced through her company Facet a new “experimental” initiative, the Producer Group. Rather than the traditional model of providing project-specific support that sees grantees working individually, and different in many ways from the prevalent “lab” model, where supported filmmakers gather for brief bursts of mentorship from industry professionals, the Producer Group will attempt to foster collaboration between producers and “create a space for […]
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 […]
When I was a student at Bard, I spent a lot of time looking at a poster taped to Ed Halter’s office door for Matt Wolf’s 2008 film Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, about the composer, country-folk singer, disco trailblazer and avant-garde pioneer who passed away in 1992 of AIDS. Sometime later, I hosted a screening of Keep The Lights On by Ira Sachs, which is full of Russell’s beautiful music. Ira told me afterward that he had discovered the artist through Wild Combination, a film that introduced a lot of people to Russell but which also introduced […]
The ninth annual edition of Double Exposure, a festival celebrating investigative journalism, once again brought together an intensely engaged group of journalists, documentarians, lawyers and funders. Washington, D.C., where antennas prick right up when you start talking about how to influence public opinion, is the precise intersection for these different professional groups to find each other. So, it’s not surprising that this is an event where the (three-day) symposium is at least as important as the festival. The topics were tough. What does collaboration look like for newspapers used to honing their competitive edge and maintaining strict distance from “sources”? […]
As the US’s largest university-run fest, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 21-28) smartly caters to an overwhelmingly collegiate audience, which means bringing in loads of celebrities for red carpet events (Kevin Bacon! Ava DuVernay! Eva Longoria!) balanced with veteran Hollywood craftspeople for numerous nuts and bolts panels (this year’s Artisans series included “The Creators of Worlds: The Artisans of Oppenheimer”). Not to mention there’s a puppy dog enthusiasm with which these young industry aspirants gobble up the eight-day “celebration of cinematic excellence.” It’s both contagious and, for someone like me long past their dorm room years, dauntingly exhausting. (FOMO […]
Kino Lorber, a leading name in independent film distribution for over 45 years, has launched Kino Film Collection, a new streaming service available in the U.S. on the Amazon Service via Prime Video Channels for $5.99 per month. As their press release states, “The Collection will feature new Kino releases fresh from theaters, along with hundreds of films from its expansive library of more than 4,000 titles, many now streaming for the first time.” Highlights now available on the service or soon to be added include notable titles Filmmaker has covered over the years, such as Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, […]