Alison Klayman
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“While I Knew the Music Inside Out There Was So Much I Didn’t Know About the Story Behind the Album”: Alison Klayman on Jagged
As perhaps one of the few people on the planet who managed to nightclub through the ’90s without any awareness of shooting star Alanis Morissette (her music just didn’t penetrate my punk/goth/new wave bubble) I came to Alison Klayman’s latest doc Jagged, part of HBO’s new Music Box series, with a positively clean slate. The film is an in-depth look at the Canadian-American musician-singer-songwriter-actress through an exhaustive amount of archival material, juxtaposed with straightforward interviews with the mercurial Morissette herself. (For those also in a Morissette-defying bubble, this would be a good time to state that the musician is not […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 18, 2021 -
“You Get To Be In Places You Have No Business Being”: Political Filmmakers Talk About Telling Big Stories With A Small Focus At IFP Week 2019
For documentarians, especially ones who focus on politics, it’s not enough to have a strong and vital subject. You need a way to get audiences engaged. The participants at the “Politically Engaged” panel at IFP Week 2019 know that all too well. Take Jehane Noujaim. Along with her creative partner Karim Amer, she makes docs about hot topics: the Egyptian Crisis in 2013’s The Square, the Cambridge Analytica Scandal in this year’s The Great Hack. But they’re not expository info dumps. They’re verité, following people, not merely ideas. Noujaim realized that earlier on. She got her start working with the […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 16, 2019 -
“The Whole Mission of this Film was About Holding Bannon Accountable for His Actions…I Didn’t Ever Want Him to Succeed”: Alison Klayman on The Brink
If there’s one defining trait of Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and White House Chief Strategist to Trump before he was given the boot from both, it’s his ability to disconnect, to casually dismiss inconvenient truths. And director Alison Klayman (Ai Wewei: Never Sorry, The 100 Years Show) captures this aspect right from the start of her compelling globetrotting doc The Brink. Embedding fly-on-the-wall style with Bannon on his unite-the-far-right/self-promotion tour across Europe and through the mid-term elections of 2018, Klayman opens with a scene in which the Soros-demonizing champion of Charlottesville waxes rhapsodic about one […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 29, 2019 -
Sundance Film Festival 2019: The Brink, The Wolf Hour
Learning that two documentaries on Steve Bannon would be dropping within half a year of each other didn’t bring to mind face-offs like Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano so much as a dire combination of Michael Apted’s Up series (an endless series of check-ins as Bannon ages in real time) and the pre-McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible franchise, in which each installment would be a chance for a different documentarian to render their own personal Bannon. First came Errol Morris’s American Dharma (which I wrote about here), which has yet to receive distribution; Klayman’s film was picked up by Magnolia prior to its Sundance premiere. Morris’s premise was flawed […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 30, 2019 -
Steve Bannon, Michael Jackson Docs Added to the 2019 Sundance Film Festival
Although there’s always a chance of an unannounced sneak screening, Sundance’s program is officially locked today with two last additions. The catalog blurbs are below, but suffice to say that both are high-profile docs that lean hard into topics of the day. Dan Reed’s Leaving Neverland deals with alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by Michael Jackson through the stories of survivors while Alison Klayman’s The Brink looks at Steve Bannon’s post-Trump career as an international anti-immigrant rabble rouser. (Klayman was a Filmmaker 25 New Face back in 2011 while in post-production on her debut doc, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.) From the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 9, 2019 -
Five Questions with Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry Director Alison Klayman
Ai Weiwei has been a presence on the international art scene for three decades, but within the past few years the Chinese artist has become a superstar. His profile has grown for a couple reasons. First, he’s made large-scale works that have been seen by millions in London, Berlin and, recently, in New York City, where in 2011 Mayor Michael Bloomberg heralded the installation of Ai’s sculptures at the southeastern edge of Central Park. Second, Ai has used just about every means available—documentary films, photography, crowd-sourced art projects, newspaper op-eds and his Twitter feed, which had more than 155,000 followers […]
by Kevin Canfield on Jul 24, 2012 -
“AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY” | director, Alison Klayman
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 11:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] Working in radio journalism in college and then as a reporter in China, I fell in love with the power of aural storytelling. I always hoped to make a documentary film because I thought it would add even more layers to an audience’s experience. As a director I know my choices and authorship necessarily shape the film, but my hope is that good documentary filmmaking can come as close as possible to letting viewers encounter a story directly and decide things for themselves. Ai Weiwei is a master […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
Alison Klayman
Alison Klayman remembers the moment people knew she was really making a movie about Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. A Brown University graduate, Klayman had moved to Beijing with the intent of learning Mandarin and becoming a documentary filmmaker and journalist. “I bought my first camera there,” she remembers, “and was doing video for hire, trying to get into television.” In 2008 a friend asked her to make a short video to accompany a gallery show of Ai’s New York photography — shots of the artist and the downtown scene taken during his years living there in the 1980s. “My camera […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011
