Toronto International Film Festival By Scott Macaulay Following 2013’s The Flag, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker returned to the Toronto International Film Festival this year with an entirely different meditation on national identity, Karl Marx City. Here Epperlein, who emigrated to the States following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, travels back to her East German homeland, attempting to uncover the reason for her father’s suicide in 1999. Evidence he may have been a Stasi informant deepens the urgency of her journey, with a visit to Stasi archives revealing thousands of hours of footage, somewhere in which may be the clue […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 20, 9:00pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] Our film wasn’t planned. As the events of Occupy Wall Street began to unfold, and Audrey [Ewell] and I decided to make a film around it, we basically went from working on other projects (our own follow-up film to Until The Light Takes Us, as well as the paying freelance work that pays our rent) to instantly being in production on an unbudgeted and risky film project that used an untested methodology to bring it to life, and that relied on the abilities and collaboration of people we’d never […]

I meet-up with documentarians Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites in downtown New York, they introduce me to Joanna Arnow, and Joanna and I are off to Liberty Plaza. Two streets north of Wall Street — in the former shadow of the World Trade Center towers — Liberty Plaza Park was created in 1968, renamed Zuccotti Park in 2006 for a real estate baron, and then renamed back to Liberty Plaza a few weeks ago by the Occupying Wall Street protesters. The park is one long block long and one short block wide, paved in stone with several colorful flower beds, ringed […]