Documentary
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“Do Not Be Daunted by the Magnitude of the Challenge in Front of You”: Assia Boundaoui on Her Surveillance Doc, The Feeling of Being Watched
An Algerian-American raised in Bridgeview, Illinois, just south of Chicago, journalist and filmmaker Assia Boundaoui grew up being watched. The FBI has been aggressively spying on her predominantly Arab-American community at least as far back as the ’90s, despite the fact that the law enforcement organization uncovered very little lawbreaking in the process. And now Boundaoui has turned the tables — or rather the lens — on the Federal Bureau with her debut feature, The Feeling of Being Watched (an alumnus of Spotlight on Documentaries at IFP Week). The film’s a nonfiction journey that takes Boundaoui from dogged FOIA requests […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 2, 2018 -
“Americans Love the Story of Saving People”: Stephanie Wang-Breal on Her Complex Prostitution Doc, Blowin’ Up
“Americans love the story of saving people,” filmmaker Stephanie Wang-Breal (Wo ai ni mommy, Tough Love) tells us when discussing her film Blowin’ Up, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Set within the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court, the documentary explores the lives of various women involved with sex work and prostitution, dropping its audience into this complex subject matter and wasting no time explaining what’s going on or introducing its characters. Wang-Breal wants you to feel as emotionally connected to the subjects’ circumstances as possible. Many of them live in the unknown, fearing arrest and/or deportation each […]
by Meredith Alloway on May 1, 2018 -
“We Process Our Memories In a Dreamstate, Building Meaning Between the Absences”: Samara Grace Chadwick on her Hot Docs Doc, 1999
1999 is one of the most haunting documentaries I’ve ever seen, which perfectly suits its subject matter. Director Samara Grace Chadwick returns to the small Acadian town in New Brunswick, Canada that she left as a teenager after a wave of suicides shook her high school over a handful of years, though the actual events always remain somewhat mysterious and opaque. A portrait of a group of people who, just when they were beginning to live, came intimately face-to-face with the finality of death, 1999 is not an investigation but an immersion into the emotional flux of a community struggling […]
by Astra Taylor on Apr 24, 2018 -
Documentary in the Time of Fake News at The 21st Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
This year’s 21st edition of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 5th-8th) boasted everything a doc geek would want in a top tier fest — strong selections, a nurturing southern hospitality, and many easily approachable big-name documentarians. And, as in year’s past (seven to be exact), the not to be missed, A&E Indiefilms Speakeasy conversations, which bring together some of the deepest thinkers in doc-making to discuss career and craft — and also to wrestle with some of the most pressing issues facing filmmakers (and the general public) today. Such was the case with one Friday afternoon Speakeasy I […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 19, 2018 -
From Euromaidan to the Naked Cowboy: The 15th Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival
Covering this year’s Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (March 23-30), a 15-year old event held primarily in Podil, an eclectic artists’ hub (think Kreuzberg or Williamsburg on the cusp of gentrification) and one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kiev, was an experience both endlessly inspiring and completely surreal. And though I’ve attended other fests in once communist countries (Camerimage in Poland, Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), my first visit to Ukraine also marked the first time at an international fest that I found myself fully aware of my otherness. (Possibly because I was the only American […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 8, 2018 -
Civil Liberties, Social Experiments and Getting Naked (to Audio Sex): A Sneak Peek at CPH:DOX 2018
For this dedicated docuphile, glancing through the program of the upcoming edition of CPH:DOX, which kicks off this Thursday and runs through March 25, serves as a pleasant reminder as to why the 15-year-old festival has become one of my favorites on the planet. With an emphasis on active audience engagement, and the underappreciated element of surprise, CPH:DOX truly marches to the beat of its own drummer. Not content to simply screen stellar docs to a passive public, founder and director Tine Fischer and her topnotch team instead curate one-of-a-kind events that enhance and add depth to their smartly programmed […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 13, 2018 -
Notes on Quotes (Or, The Problem of Quotation, Authorship and Authority)
Part 1: Notes on a Quote Like all great adventures, it began with a grammar dispute. In preparation for the film festival premiere of my film The Pain of Others, I was recently preparing the online edit. The online edit is a sort of crossing-the-Rubicon moment, primarily marked by the dawning horror that the time has come to accept all of your artistic choices because there’s no turning back from them now. (No really, the film is great.) One of the things on my to-do list was to check the quotation serving as epigraph. The quotation was: “One of the […]
by Penny Lane on Jan 30, 2018 -
“You Cannot be Objective When You’re Making a Film about the Peace Process between Israel and Palestine”: Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan on The Oslo Diaries
Receiving its world premiere at Sundance,The Oslo Diaries is the latest from Israeli filmmakers Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, who last came to Park City with 2015’s Censored Voices, an exploration of Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War through long-buried audiotape interviews with its on-the-ground soldiers. A similar reexamination of history, The Oslo Diaries combines unseen-until-now archival footage with the personal diaries of, and present-day interviews with, the handful of participants in the top secret, backchannel — and ultimately doomed — peacemaking process that took place in Norway in the early ’90s. Filmmaker spoke with the two directors prior to Sundance about […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2018 -
“The Bisbee Deportation Doesn’t Matter Unless it Relates to our Real Lives Today”: Robert Greene on Bisbee ’17
Sundance vet Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine, Actress) returns to Park City this year with a film quite unlike his previous features, at least in subject matter if not approach. For Bisbee ’17 Greene turns his trademark technique of fusing fiction and nonfiction elements on the story of a sordid anniversary, the 1917 Bisbee Deportation, in which 1,200 immigrant miners in Bisbee, Arizona were rounded up, shipped out of the copper town on cattle cars and left to die in the desert. Through staged recreations developed and performed by local residents — including an actor whose mom was deported to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2018 -
“Modern-Day Slavery is Happening in our Neighborhood….”: Bernadett Tuza-Ritter on her Sundance Debut Feature, A Woman Captured
Making its U.S. premiere at Sundance in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, A Woman Captured is the remarkable debut feature doc from Hungarian filmmaker Bernadett Tuza-Ritter, who stumbled upon a horrifying story in her native country hidden in plain sight. Marish is a housekeeper in her early 50s, though her hard-knock life has aged her considerably. She has spent over a decade cooking, cleaning and serving, mostly as a human punching bag, both verbally and physically, to a mystery woman of indeterminate wealth who remains off-screen. That woman, Eta, who we hear but never see, has allowed Tuza-Ritter access to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 19, 2018
