Documentary
-
“Speaking to a New World”: Addison O’Dea on the Virtual Reality Series Discovery TRVLR
Last month Discovery Communications, Google, and Here Be Dragons released one of the most ambitious virtual reality documentary series yet produced, Discovery TRVLR. Writer-director Addison O’Dea and his team created 38 episodes on all seven continents, going to as remote locations as possible and focusing on the universality of the people who live there. Available on DiscoveryVR.com, the Discovery VR app, and YouTube, the series marks the next step, after works like Felix & Paul Studios’ Nomads series, to push VR into the field of ethnographic nonfiction. But as O’Dea emphasizes in our conversation below, TRVLR is first and foremost a travel show, not an anthropological […]
by Randy Astle on Dec 4, 2017 -
What Makes A Great Interview? Filmmakers Share Tips on Securing Great On-Screen Dialogues
At “What Makes a Great Interview,” a November 12 panel at DOC NYC, moderator Sandi DuBowski (Trembling Before G-D) offered his reflections on interviews: “People want to have a cathartic experience, a soul journey… to take a breath out of the everyday rush and really sink into their life. I think interviews are very holy and they are gorgeous and there is something about life in them that is special.” Three filmmakers joined DuBowski on the stage to reflect on their process for conducting great interviews, from their personal theories to little tricks in the tool bag (like dropping a […]
by Lauretta Prevost on Nov 29, 2017 -
DOC NYC: Barbara Kopple on Her True Crime Tale, A Murder in Mansfield
“A friend of mine has this absolutely fantastic story that we should all do together.” Barbara Kopple heard these words, she tells me, on a phone call last year with producer John Morrissey (American History X). She’s likely heard such preambles before. Kopple has directed documentaries for more than 40 years, from her landmark labor-strike feature Harlan County U.S.A. to her profiles of Woody Allen (Wild Man Blues), the Dixie Chicks (Shut Up & Sing) and the late, eternally great Sharon Jones (Miss Sharon Jones!). Morrissey wanted to pitch Kopple a film on Collier Landry, an L.A.-based filmmaker whose mother […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Nov 12, 2017 -
“A Horror Film in Slow Motion”: Greg Barker on His DOC NYC Opener The Final Year
Opening this edition’s DOC NYC on November 9th is Greg Barker’s The Final Year, a truly up-close-and-personal, behind-the-scenes look at the Obama administration and its foreign policy team during its last 12 months. To say that Barker gained unprecedented access to the president’s men (and one woman) during that period is an understatement. The veteran documentarian (Homegrown: The Counter-Terror Dilemma, Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Bin Laden, etc.) managed to shadow three heavyweight insiders — Secretary of State John Kerry, Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, and “Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 8, 2017 -
Grappling with Qualms over A Gray State Before Moderating a Festival Q&A
As a film critic who also serves as a festival programmer I sometimes find myself in awkward positions. Such was the case recently at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in October, where A Gray State screened, along with the film’s director Erik Nelson and its executive producer Werner Herzog in attendance. Though I’d seen the film on screener, I didn’t have a strong opinion about it one way or another (and as I was only helping out with the international features this year my indifference didn’t much matter). Of course, asked to moderate the post-screening Q&A I jumped at the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Oct 26, 2017 -
Inequality and Systemic Racism in St. Louis: Landon Von Soest and Jeremy Levine on For Akheem
The St. Louis-set For Ahkeem’s central character, Daje Shelton, is on a path to avoid a life of poverty and disappointment. Having been suspended from her local high school for a number of petty offenses, Daje’s opportunities are narrowing by the season. Enlisting in a school for troubled youth as a last resort, her future is up in the air. While the documentary is centered around Daja, African-American teenage men are always present. Daja speaks of her many male friends who have been lost to gun violence, and her boyfriend Antonio (and their eventual son, the title character Ahkeem) will have […]
by Erik Luers on Oct 13, 2017 -
“As Humans, We Will Never Settle”: Five Questions for Human Flow Director Ai Weiwei
World-renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei makes his feature-length filmmaking debut with Human Flow, an expansive documentary that shines a light on the global refugee crisis. Ai circles the globe to showcase the personal stories behind the sweeping headlines of fallout from war, famine and climate change in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Palestine, Serbia, Switzerland, Syria, Thailand and Turkey. Today 65 million people have been forcibly displaced, more people than in the time period following World War II. Ai manages to show both the massive scale of the […]
by Ariston Anderson on Oct 13, 2017 -
“Women Were Afraid to Speak Up — That’s What Made Recy Taylor So Important”: Director Nancy Buirski on The Rape of Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor walked home from church on a warm September night. A 24-year-old black woman in Abbeville, Alabama, a sharecropper and mother, Recy was the most religious member of her family and regularly went to church by herself. A full house awaited her at home: her siblings, her father, her husband, and her daughter Joyce. The year was 1944. On her way home, a group of seven white boys abducted Recy and forced her into the nearby woods. The young men gang-raped her at gunpoint. One month later, an all-white, all-male jury refused to indict any of these men. The […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Sep 29, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Yance Ford, a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face, premiered his feature documentary debut Strong Island at Sundance this year, and the film’s new trailer has just dropped from Netflix. One of this year’s essential docs, Strong Island is a formally assured, highly thoughtful examination of racial injustice, family tragedy and the complexities of memory and grief. Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris wrote about the film earlier this year at The New Yorker: In the annals of cinematic memoir, there are very few films like Yance Ford’s Strong Island, a stylish and wrenching rumination on familial grief that had its première […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2017 -
Cinematographer Lucas Alvarado-Farrar on Shooting Whose Streets?
Opening today in theaters is Sabaah Folayan’s Whose Streets?, co-directed by Damon Davis. Both visceral and thoughtful, it looks back at the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in September, 2014, capturing all the turbulence and outcry of the moment before moving forward and following the activist energies ignited by the event. There’s archival and citizen-shot material, most only on cell phones, in the movie, but also expertly-captured footage of the original protests and following actions shot by the film’s DP, Lucas Alvarado-Farrar. Here, in an interview conducted just prior to the film’s premiere at the 2017 Sundance Film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 11, 2017
