It was a very good year for True/False, but I’ll save the taking-fest-temperature overview for our next print issue. In starting to sort through this year’s films, therefore, I need some kind of arbitrary framework that will provide the illusion of meaningfully segueing from one work to another. In this dispatch, I’ll be focusing on the thorny subject of what happens when documentaries do — or antagonistically don’t — try to serve as compassionate ambassadors to the world on behalf of their subjects. Unambiguous Sympathy Christopher LaMarca and Jessica Dimmock’s The Pearl is a nighttime movie, all quiet, warmly illuminated interior spaces populated by a self-supporting […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 10, 2016Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? McMullan: Rae Spoon and I have been friends and collaborators for some time. The more they (Spoon prefers the use of the gender-neutral, third-person pronoun) told me about their life and their story, the more interested I was. I just found it fascinating, and I wanted to know more. That started triggering all these questions of my own, about Rae’s specific experience but also broader questions about the context of the world we’re all living in. It was becoming this big knotted ball of curiosity, and I think another […]
by Danielle Lurie on Jan 19, 2014Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? Attention as it […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 16, 2014