Documentary
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“While It’s Not About the Experience of Being Quarantined Per Se, It Taps into a Kind of Universal Experience”: Director Matt Wolf on His Moving Saga of Human Ambition, Spaceship Earth
“Theater engages the whole organism,” says Biosphere 2 Director of Systems Engineering William Dempster. “Movement, through emotion — [it] gives you insight into yourself. Building a foundation from which we could go on and do other projects.” Accompanying Dempster’s voiceover early in Matt Wolf’s engrossing and unexpectedly stirring documentary, Spaceship Earth, is black-and-white footage from the first public activity of John Allen’s band of “Synergists”: a traveling theater production called The Theater of All Possibilities. The artistic value of the production is indeterminate; seen in brief clips, it falls somewhere on the continuum between The Living Theater and an Allan […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 14, 2020 -
“People’s Relationships to Their Moms is Always Deep”: Director Rachel Grady on the Comedy Central Doc Call Your Mother
The latest film from the Academy Award-nominated team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, Call Your Mother is a laugh-out-loud love letter to one of the most universally defining figures in all of our lives. (That would be our moms.) Executive produced by Caroline Hirsch, the force behind legendary comedy club Carolines on Broadway and the New York Comedy Festival, the doc airs on Comedy Central on May 10th (Mother’s Day, naturally). Featuring a vast and eclectic array of interviews with famous funny folks — everyone from Awkwafina, to Tig Notaro, to Jim Gaffigan and Jo Koy discuss their mother’s […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 8, 2020 -
“A Time-Traveling Conquistador Confronting Modern Mexicans”: Rodrigo Reyes on His Tribeca and Hot Docs Selected 499
499, the fourth feature film from “25 New Face” alum Rodrigo Reyes, is an epic, enchanting road movie that travels seamlessly through time (a 500-year-old journey reenacted in the present day) and space (across Mexico, from coastal Veracruz to the nation’s capital — or what used to be called Tenochtitlán back when the Aztecs claimed it as their own). Cemented by Eduardo San Juan Breña’s gripping performance as a Spanish conquistador who finds himself washed up into the future and onto modern day Mexico’s shores, the film recreates the path taken by Hernán Cortez in his 1621 quest to conquer the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 25, 2020 -
“Our Criminal Justice System is Broken, and the Sooner Folks See that the Sooner We Can Begin to Fix It”: Roger Ross Williams on the Netflix docuseries The Innocence Files
Executive produced and directed by Liz Garbus, Alex Gibney and Roger Ross Williams, with episodes also helmed by Jed Rothstein, Andy Grieve and Sarah Dowland, The Innocence Files is a riveting, nine-part docuseries that dives deep into eight wrongful convictions that The Innocence Project and its affiliated Innocence Network fought tooth and nail to overturn. The Netflix series gets off to a binge-worthy start with its first three installments — “The Evidence: Indeed and Without Doubt,” “The Evidence: The Truth Will Defend Me,” and “The Evidence: The Duty to Correct” — all directed by Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams. (And if your time […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 24, 2020 -
“There Were Clearly Other Things Going On, From Klan Involvement to Pedophile Rings…”: Maro Chermayeff on the HBO Docuseries Atlanta’s Missing And Murdered: The Lost Children
HBO’s Atlanta’s Missing And Murdered: The Lost Children, a five-part docuseries executive produced and directed by Sam Pollard and Maro Chermayeff, along with Jeff Dupre and Joshua Bennett, is an intricate reexamination of one of the most horrific events in that southern city’s not-too-distant history — the kidnapping and murder of at least 30 (though likely more) African-American children and young adults between 1979 and 1981. Though the crimes ultimately would all be pinned on one man, a 23-year-old oddball named Wayne Williams, the case has now been reopened by current Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The case was the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 20, 2020 -
Going Virtual in the Pandemic Age: CPH:DOX 2020, The Digital Edition
Hard to believe just a few weeks back I was eagerly preparing for my annual pilgrimage to Copenhagen to begin the spring doc fest season. Well, we all know how that turned out. Or not. As a deadly virus forced festivals the world over to cancel, CPH:DOX, long a champion of outside-the-box filmmaking, counterintuitively decided the show must go on. Rather than cut losses and hunker down in social isolation, festival director Tine Fischer and her scrappy team did the exact opposite, reaching out online to actually expand the CPH:DOX audience on a global scale. Picking up and relocating to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 4, 2020 -
“Avoid Time Blur”: at CPH:DOX, the Red Heaven Filmmakers on Surviving Isolation
Keeping calm and carrying on (digitally, that is) during the global pandemic, CPH:DOX fittingly launched its five-day CPH:CONFERENCE series with a program titled “Science is Culture.” The “day celebrating the value of science in society and exploring how new approaches to science storytelling can engage the audience” was moderated by Jessica Harrop, supervising producer of science-centric doc studio Sandbox Films. (And impressively so. Not only did Harrop seem to be downloading questions directly from my head, but she kept the proceedings running swiftly and smoothly, all while sheltering in place from her Brooklyn apartment no less.) While every discussion was […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 28, 2020 -
“…An Attempt to see Anorexia From a Perspective That Goes Beyond That of the Spectacle”: Moara Passoni on Her CPH:DOX Debut Ecstasy
Premiering in the DOX:AWARD main competition at this year’s (now digital) CPH:DOX, Ecstasy (Êxtase) is the astonishing debut of Brazilian filmmaker Moara Passoni, a longtime collaborator of The Edge of Democracy Oscar nominee Petra Costa (who serves as the doc’s producer). It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction, of historical images and staged scenes, of autobiographical diary entries obsessively developing a “geometry of hunger” even as political chaos grips ’90s Brazil (and it’s all tied together by a stunning soundtrack, including music by David Lynch and Lykke Li). It’s also a startlingly unusual coming-of-age story, one in which the director […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 26, 2020 -
CPH:DOX Goes Live (and Virtual): Online Talks and Debates
CPH:DOX, having already established itself as one of the most cutting-edge festivals on the circuit, can now take the prize for the ballsiest fest around. As a global pandemic causes cancellations and postponements from SXSW to Tribeca on these shores, the feisty Copenhagen International Documentary Festival has nevertheless refused to concede defeat. Within hours of the Danish government announcing restrictions on public gatherings, the festival made an announcement of its own. CPH:DOX 2020 would keep calm, carry on, and simply pivot to the virtual world. And as manmade “natural” disasters are primed to become the new normal, it might also […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 19, 2020 -
“…A Forensic Tick-Tock of How Lies Spread”: Andrew Rossi on After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News
The information landscape has transformed with vertigo-inducing speed since 2011, when Andrew Rossi last looked under the hood of the (reality-based) news business in Page One: Inside the New York Times. And now that Edward R. Murrow is rolling in his grave (and Geraldo Rivera is most likely looking for ways to monetize that), it makes sense that Rossi would be the filmmaker to tackle today’s crisis of media faith with his latest HBO doc, After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News. Executive produced by CNN’s Brian Stelter, the film takes a deep dive into the post-truth world that […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 19, 2020
