Documentary
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Eye of the Storm
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Howard Feinstein interviewed Trouble The Water directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal for our Summer ’08 issue as well as the film’s subjects, Kim and Scott Rivers, in a sidebar to the piece. Trouble The Water is nominated for Best Documentary. Brooklynites Tia Lessin and Carl Deal had the near-perfect recipe for what I consider the near-perfect documentary: a unique situation, inimitable subjects, a strong but non-didactic political thrust and that […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009 -
“WHITE LIGHTNIN”‘ director, Dominic Murphy
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 11:59 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] I didn’t consciously think about the forces affecting cinema today at any point during the long development of the movie. The script was inspired by the life of a real person but it’s fiction so we told the story in the way we thought would be most effective. But that’s not to say myself and the writers didn’t agonize over structure. I’m naturally drawn to character and narrative and I’ve worked in current affairs and documentary so that helped. We never made any decisions based on how we […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009 -
Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World
WERNER HERZOG AND D.P. PETER ZEITLINGER CAPTURE ANTARCTICA IN ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. COURTESY THINKFILM. Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Encounters at the End of the World director Werner Herzog for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Encounters at the End of the World is nominated for Best Documentary. For more than 40 years, Werner Herzog has been redrawing the map, both cinematically and geographically. He started making short […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 19, 2009 -
Dancing in the Clouds: Director James Marsh on Man on Wire
James Marsh has wrestled before with subjects — both fictional and real life — whose obsessions have fueled eccentric and, at times, even extreme behavior. In The Burger and the King (1996), based on David Adler‘s book, he chronicled Elvis Presley‘s lifelong habit of compulsive eating. Wisconsin Death Trip (2000), based on the nonfiction book by Michael Lesy, traced the origins of a bizarre strain of murders, suicides and odd happenstances in a small Wisconsin community of the 1890s. And in his debut feature, The King (2005), which Marsh scripted with Milo Addica, he dramatized a story of misguided faith […]
by Damon Smith on Jan 19, 2009 -
ELLEN KURAS, THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON) By Nick Dawson
THAVISOUK PHRASAVATH AND ORADY PHRASAVATH IN DIRECTOR ELLEN KURAS’ THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON). COURTESY CINEMA GUILD. Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed The Betrayal director Ellen Kuras for our Director Interviews section of the Website. The Betrayal is nominated for Best Documentary. Since she first came to prominence almost twenty years ago, Ellen Kuras has established herself as one of the most talented directors of photography working today. Film was not Kuras’ primary focus when […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009 -
Director Ellen Kuras on The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed The Betrayal director Ellen Kuras for our Director Interviews section of the Website. The Betrayal is nominated for Best Documentary. THAVISOUK PHRASAVATH AND ORADY PHRASAVATH IN DIRECTOR ELLEN KURAS’ THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON). COURTESY CINEMA GUILD. Since she first came to prominence almost twenty years ago, Ellen Kuras has established herself as one of the most talented directors of photography working today. Film was not Kuras’ primary focus when […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009 -
Performance Driven
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. James Ponsoldt interviewed Rachel Getting Married director Jonathan Demme, as well as other principals from the film, to dissect the creation of the title character for our Fall ’08 issue. Rachel Getting Married is nominated for Best Actress (Anne Hathaway). Jonathan Demme has made a career out of revealing the humanity in oddballs, eccentrics, zealots and rock stars. As a storyteller, Demme doesn’t judge. He trusts that if you listen to […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009 -
“DIRT! THE MOVIE” co-director, Gene Rosow
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 19, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] We set out to make a feature-length documentary DIRT! The Movie inspired by the book Dirt, the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth written by William Bryant Logan. When we started out on this project we were thinking of either a four-part television series or a feature-length documentary for theatrical release. We could either explore the subject as a topic as the book had done, or with a more traditional film narrative — in our case, telling the story of dirt and humans from dirt’s point of view. My […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 19, 2009 -
CROSSING OVER: LOUIS PSIHOYOS By Alicia Van Couvering
Unlike other films playing in our three-part look at crossover artists at Sundance, The Cove is not playing in New Frontier, but in the Documentary Competition, and that’s despite its director’s non-traditional background. Louie Psihoyos was one of the world’s top-ranked photographers, a staff member at National Geographic who had traveled the world taking portraits of the world’s most famous people and abstract concepts (you try photographing “science.”) He was also an avid diver who witnessed year by year the physical destruction of the world’s oceans. He and his friend Jim Clarke, founder of Netscape and WebMD, decided to form […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2009 -
“CRUDE” director, Joe Berlinger
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 18, 6:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] As someone who believes in making non-fiction feature films for the big screen, Crude is in many ways a reaction against some of the forces affecting cinema today. From a craft standpoint, Crude is steeped in the traditions of cinema vérité filmmaking that I have embraced throughout my career — it’s a film with a great deal of complexity and nuance, requiring a viewer’s full attention in order to appreciate all that I hope it has to offer. While new forms of distribution are important for independent filmmakers […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 18, 2009
