Documentary
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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 -
“… A Running Dialogue Between Past and Present Notions of Screen Culture”: Jeff Reichert, Damon Smith and Eric Hynes on Room H.264
In 1982, in the Hotel Martinez at the Cannes Film Festival, where Steven Spielberg’s E.T. was the closing night film, German auteur Wim Wenders set up a stationary 16mm camera in a room on the sixth floor and asked a succession of directors to film themselves answering a single question: “Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?” Respondents ranged from yes, Spielberg, to Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michelangelo Antonioni, and topics covered included film vs. television, the rise of blockbuster “sensation-oriented” cinema, and the evolving theatrical experience. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2018 -
The Art of Being Alone: Brian Bolster’s Elegant Short Doc, Winter’s Watch
A hotel left empty during wintertime, a stormy island and a lone caretaker are the poetic elements of Brian Bolster’s elegant Winter’s Watch, a short documentary screening on the Atlantic Selects. For 19 winters photographer Alexandra de Steiguer has worked as a caretaker of the Oceanic Hotel, an imposing structure located on Star Island, 10 miles off the New England Coast. The island’s lone inhabitant, she sinks into her solitude and makes images, although, it is clear that, in this instance, her artistic practice is a byproduct of her need to escape the noise of the mainland and exist, one-on-one, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2018 -
“To Dominate out of Fear is Our Worst Characteristic as Humans”: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady on Their Oscar-Shortlisted One of Us
Directing partners Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady — selected for Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces in 2005 — first came on to the filmmaking scene with heartfelt documentaries The Boys of Baraka and Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp. In their latest documentary One of Us, currently available on Netflix and just shortlisted for the Best Documentary Academy Award, their signature cinema verite style of filmmaking unveiled a level of suspense and drama they were not expecting. Centered around three people who are attempting to leave the tight reigns of their New York-based Hasidic Jewish communities, the film goes deep inside an overly controlling, […]
by Tiffany Pritchard on Dec 12, 2017
