Documentary

THE WORD OF GOD

Over on the main page Annie Nocenti interviews the directors of Jesus Camp,, the incredibly fascinating documentary that opened this weekend from Magnolia Pictures. In the piece, co-director Heidi Ewing discusses Magnolia’s strategy to position the film as something of interest to both Christian evangelical audiences and godless hipsters in the big city: Ewing: Eamonn wants to bring the film to Christian strongholds before it hits L.A. or New York. Colorado Springs, Kansas City — they get the movie first. Magnolia is withholding the film from the secular world for one or two weeks. The Evangelicals have time to embrace […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 24, 2006
IFP MARKET WINNERS

At a luncheon celebrating the end of the IFP Market and Filmmaker Conference at NoHo’s Chinatown restaurant this Thursday, a number of awards were given to films and filmmakers who were part of the IFP’s various programs. The winners are: The Fledgling Fund Award for Emerging Latino Filmmakers ($10,000): Vivian Lesnik Weisman. IFP Market Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award ($5,000, presented by Artists Public Domain): I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Scott Teems. IFP Market Documentary Completion Award ($5,000, presented by Artists Public Domain, and $25,000 in-kind support from Alpha Cine, Analog Digital International, Mercer Media, Showbiz Software/Media […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 23, 2006
Holy War

The team behind the award-winning documentary Boys of Baraka are back with a new film that focuses on Evangelical children training to be “soldiers in God’s Army.” Early on in Jesus Camp, Pentecostal minister Becky Fischer asks an auditorium full of children and parents: “Do you believe God can do anything?” A young mother grabs her child’s arm and raises it. LEVI IN HEIDI EWING AND RACHEL GRADY’S JESUS CAMP. This is just one of many provocative moments that give Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s latest documentary its haunting power. As enthralling as the religious rallies it reveals, Jesus Camp […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Sep 21, 2006
BLOGGING TORONTO

The Toronto Film Festival doesn’t start until later this week, but already its new doc blog is off to a great start. It’s both an online destination to update yourself on festival news as well as a place for Festival filmmakers to write about everything from the making of their films to other films at the festival they’ve been compelled by. There are a bunch of great pieces already up. Here, for example, is Sophie Fiennes on her Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a three-part documentary in which Slavoj Zizek analyzes films by such favorite directors as Hitchcock, Lynch and Tarkovsky: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 4, 2006
LENS ON LEBANON

Astra Taylor, one of our “25 New Faces” this year, passed on information about a new media activist and documentary organization, Lens on Lebanon, currently seeking donations and support. From the group: Lens on Lebanon is a grassroots documentary initiative formed in response to the devastating Israeli bombardment of 2006. As filmmakers, journalists, and activists from Lebanon, Europe, and North America, we are pooling our resources to deliver film and video equipment into communities in south Lebanon, and to bring out documentary evidence as well as photo narratives, and video diaries of daily life under siege. With its infrastructure destroyed, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 16, 2006
THE ATROCITY RETURNS

Several years ago I selected for our annual “25 New Faces” feature filmmaker Jonathan Weiss, who had just finished a many-years-in-the-making adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s great novel The Atrocity Exhibition. The film is full of amazing sequences, has a truly unique and disquieting tone, and embodies a keen understanding of the ideas that course through Ballard’s most radical novel. (Yes, more radical than Crash.) I spoke to Weiss a few weeks ago and it seems like he’s looking for a U.S. video deal for the film. I hope he’s secured one by now, but in the meantime, here’s Tim Lucas […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 19, 2006
Head Trip

Co-director Keith Fulton reveals how to create an unlikely filmic Frankenstein like Brothers of the Head, welding a bizarre story of conjoined rock stars onto a fake-documentary framework. HARRY TREADAWAY AND LUKE TREADAWAY IN KEITH FULTON AND LOUIS PEPE’S BROTHERS OF THE HEAD. Ever heard of Tom and Barry Howe, conjoined twin frontmen from seminal seventies punk rock band Bang Bang? Remember “Two Way Romeo,” their signature live hit, when Barry would pull up his shirt and display the shared flesh-band that forever connected them at the midsection? No recollection? Then what about the British band “Spinal Tap,” with the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jul 16, 2006
BACKSTAGE

The guys over at Other Music have noted the DVD re-release of Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard’s 1970 documentary, Groupies. A rarely seen cult film on the ’60s rock scene, Groupies is now out from Cherry Red Records and is described by their catalog like this: A classic sixties documentary, “Groupies”, finally gets its release on DVD. “Groupies” is the ultimate expose of back-stage shenanigans. At times hilarious, at times almost tragic, the documentary follows the fortunes and dilemmas of various real life groupies, a supremely hedonistic bunch of rock fans, on their relentless search for a new kind of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 15, 2006
PICK OF THE WEEK

Many filmmakers lately have been interested in blending documentary with drama, mixing real people and places into classically structured stories. Perhaps the best of these recent attempts is also the most timely and vital; Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Road to Guantanamo, which tells the true story of three British Muslims who, traveling to Pakistan for a wedding, haplessly wind up captured by U.S. military and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Winterbottom and Whitecross shoot on DV and blend talking-head interviews with the real “Tipton Three” — who have since been released — with incredibly dramatic scenes with actors that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 23, 2006
Agent Provocateur

With The Outsider, cinematic badboy James Toback gets in front of the camera for first-time filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki. “Who is James Toback?” That’s the question documentary filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki poses in The Outsider, a freewheeling and highly watchable portrait of the director of idiosyncratic films like Fingers and Black and White. Jarecki introduces his subject, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Bugsy, on the set of a 2004 film for which Toback had high hopes. When Will I Be Loved, which starred Neve Campbell as a young woman on the make, would, like many of Toback’s films, be a minor presence […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jun 16, 2006

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