Documentary

“KICKING IT” writer-director, Susan Koch

My first thought was I wished I had an additional 10 percent of everything! As an independent filmmaker, I don’t think you ever feel like there’s enough time or money or resources. You always feel like you need just a little more. In the end it’s about finding creative ways to make what you do have go that extra 10 percent… and it’s about making choices and compromises that hopefully don’t hurt the film. As we traveled around the world filming I never felt ready to leave one location and go on to the next. You can’t help but wonder […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 17, 2008
“ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED” co-writer-director, Marina Zenovich

I wish I’d had a 10 percent better understanding and insight into the case when I started the movie. I say that because this has been the most complicated and difficult film I’ve ever made. The story was legally complex and took place 30 years ago. I am not a lawyer. Although my father was a politician and a judge, I do not know the inner workings of the DA’s office or how lawyers and judges behave or bargain with one another. What’s more, there were only a limited number of people I could talk to. These people were not […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2008
“BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER*” co-writer-director, Christopher Bell

This film is an exploration into why people use steroids, but we live in a time where steroids are an extremely taboo subject. As we were making the documentary, we were frustrated because we kept hitting roadblocks with people not wanting to talk honestly about their relationship with steroids. Even one of my best friends lied to me on camera. While we were shooting interviews for the film we would have liked 10 percent more honesty from many of the people involved in the steroid issue. However as we were editing the film, we realized that the fact that people […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 15, 2008
“SECRECY” co-directors, Peter Galison and Robb Moss

Visualizing secrecy might seem about as promising as singing in outer space. Film what? From the start, we’ve constantly been on the lookout for 10 percent more things to make visual. How to imagine information that has been withdrawn, conversations stifled, photographs blocked, or words censored? In fact, the very absence of obvious things to film about secrecy became, over the course of making this film, our single greatest preoccupation. Some things ended up working pretty well — we found ways of animating the redaction — and de-redaction, the all-too familiar blacked-out texts. In fact, prodded by all the things […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 15, 2008
“THE ART STAR AND THE SUDANESE TWINS” writer-director, Pietra Brettkelly

A large part of my film, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, was shot in the extraordinary region of southern Sudan. Its first language is Dinka, its second language Arabic. Casual greetings are unfortunately my limits in both these languages, and this was both the challenge and the beauty of trying to film an observational documentary. My cameraman and I were often running on instinct, interpreting the body language of people we were filming. We’ve both filmed overseas and have gained some familiarity with European and Pacific Island languages. But Dinka in particular has no similarity to anything I’d […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008
Abby Epstein, The Business Of Being Born

AN EXPECTANT MOTHER IN DIRECTOR ABBY EPSTEIN’S THE BUSINESS OF BEING BORN. COURTESY RED ENVELOPE ENTERTAINMENT. After years as a theater director, Abby Epstein has transitioned into being one of the most important new female voices in documentary film. Epstein began directing plays in the 1980s in Chicago where she started her own theater company, Roadworks Productions. In the late 1990s, she relocated to New York to helm the highly successful Broadway musical RENT. Notable amongst numerous other credits is her involvement with Eve Ensler’s seminal The Vagina Monologues, which she directed during its New York run as well as […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 9, 2008
A WHOLE LOT OF GREEN

Filmmaker, performer and musician Brent Green, one of Filmmaker‘s 2005 25 New Faces of Independent Film, sent an email with all of the exhibitions and performances he’s planned for the next couple of months. If you haven’t seen his intense and theatrical live performances, in which he collaborates with musicians for a live score and, in the process, comes up with a different model of independent film exhibition, I highly recommend you check one of them out. A recent performance clip is embedded below, and here’s the email: On Jan. 11th I’ll be screening all of my films with live […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2008
POULTRY POWER

The below was posted on Filmmaker‘s Facebook page by John Fiege, director of the documentary Mississippi Chicken, which was one of our five “Best Film Not Playing Near You” Gotham Award nominees this year. As it’s a general call for support, I’m taking the liberty of posting it here. It’s the holiday season, and in the spirit of Christmas a major poultry company fired one of MPOWER’s board members in what appears to be a retaliatory action for his active involvement in fighting several cases of race discrimination at the plant. MPOWER is the workers’ center that was in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 5, 2008
Andrew Piddington, The Killing Of John Lennon

JONAS BALL AS MARK CHAPMAN IN DIRECTOR ANDREW PIDDINGTON’S THE KILLING OF JOHN LENNON. COURTESY IFC FILMS. After spending the majority of his career working in television, 54-year-old Brit Andrew Piddington has committed the rest of his career to being an independent film director. He began his career working with poetic filmmaker Brian Lewis in 1980, and directed his first solo project as a writer-director, D.H. Lawrence as Son and Lover, that same year. Over the course of the 80s, he distinguished himself with his television work, most notably more biographical dramas about significant cultural figures, such as Under the […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 2, 2008
Rising Voices

In Denzel Washington’s second directing effort, the Oprah Winfrey produced The Great Debaters, he takes what he learned from his debut, Antwone Fisher, and uses it to make the inspirational true story of one small all-black school’s rise to the top of the college debating ranks in the Jim Crow South. Washington also stars in the film as the rebellious Melvin B. Tolson. Known for his American Modernist poetry and a contemporary of the Harlem Renaissance, in the ‘30s Tolson was a professor at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. There he coached the debate team and in 1935 his team […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Dec 21, 2007

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