Documentary
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On Power and Solidarity : Brett Story and Yance Ford at CPH:DOX 2024
Produced in collaboration with Documentary Campus, this year’s five-day CPH:CONFERENCE featured a wide-ranging series of panels and conversations, diving in to everything from indigenous narratives to climate storytelling to the mind of Alex Gibney. Especially notable were the four mornings, FILM:MAKERS in Dialogue, all moderated by Wendy Mitchell (festival producer of Sundance London as well as a journalist for Screen International). In these sessions audiences were invited to listen in as the directors behind two films chose clips from each other’s work to engage with. One such pairing in particular proved both inspired and inspiring. Brett Story (The Hottest August, The […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 8, 2024 -
“A Film Can Be a Spark, and What Comes After It Is Where the Magic Is”: Elizabeth Nichols on Her True/False-Debuting Flying Lessons
Debuting at True/False (followed by First Look), Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons is a beautiful ode to a New York City Lower East Side artist as well as to the larger “dying breed” that once roamed the streets of Alphabet City, performing in its now extinct clubs. Importantly, it’s also a call to end rampant gentrification and a love story between director and character all rolled into one. The drama began, rather unhappily, with an eviction notice after NYC real estate owner/convicted fraudster Steve Croman bought the building Nichols was living in as a rent-stabilized tenant. Within months the “Bernie Madoff of landlords” had unleashed […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 1, 2024 -
“I Don’t Invest Hope in Celebrity or Leaders Too Much, But I Do Have Hope in People”: Mitch McCabe on Their True/False Premiere 23 Mile
While the pandemic spurred many (white collar) Americans to flee the big cities and retreat to the safety and comfort of living room Zooming, Detroit native Mitch McCabe returned home to the big city and instead roamed the often chaotic streets, eventually journeying throughout Michigan, camera in tow. What the veteran filmmaker-educator (and Flaherty Seminar and MacDowell fellow) witnessed was what we all primarily saw in that “unprecedented” election year: anger. At lockdowns, at those attending protests unmasked. And masked. At the murder of George Floyd, at the BLM movement, at Trump. At Democrat elites like Governor Gretchen Whitmer and […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 1, 2024 -
Pitch People: Restoring A 25-Year-Old Cinematic Documentary into 4K
Pitch People is a feature documentary that takes an energetic look at the pitch business, a dynamic world that started in Europe, made its way to the U.S. boardwalks, and exploded on worldwide television in the 1990s. The film was completed in 1999. It was well-received at various festivals and independent film venues but a year later, it was still incomplete. It was missing an audience, partially due to it never having a formal theatrical release. In 2020, production and postproduction stopped due to the pandemic. With advanced filmmaking tools available and new ways of making people aware of a […]
by Stanley Jacobs on Feb 29, 2024 -
“We Always Sought Out Photos with Movement”: Klára Tasovská on Her “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” Doc I’m Not Everything I Want to Be
”The only way to survive is to take photos,” declares Libuše Jarcovjáková, the iconoclastic star/narrator/guide of Klára Tasovská’s visually arresting (and eye-catching titled) I’m Not Everything I Want to Be. Nominated for the Teddy Documentary Award at this year’s Berlinale, the all-archival film is a globetrotting, black and white trip back in time (primarily to the 80s and 90s) viewed entirely through the rebelliously inquisitive eyes of this “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” (in the words of curator Sam Stourdzé). And words. For not only did Jarcovjáková obsessively collect images of both her defiantly unglamorous self and her decidedly adventurous life, […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 24, 2024 -
“There Was No Backup Plan Other Than We’d Make It Happen Somehow”: Natalie Rae and Angela Patton on Their Sundance-Debuting Daughters
Filmed over a remarkable eight years, Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s Sundance-premiering Daughters is an on-the-ground (and behind the bars) look at the preparations — physical, mental and above all emotional — leading up to the DC-jail-based Daddy Daughter Dance, the culmination of a fatherhood program for the incarcerated. Following Aubrey, Santana, Raziah, and Ja’Ana — four “at-promise” girls ranging from tiny to teenage — and the respective dads who are desperate to bond with them (and are serving sentences that likewise range in years) the doc is every bit as inspiring as one would expect from a co-director (Patton) […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 22, 2024 -
“Is There a Difference Between Theater Improv and Doing a Psychic Reading?”: Lana Wilson On Her Sundance-Premiering Look Into My Eyes
It was 2016, the day after the presidential election, when filmmaker Lana Wilson (Miss Americana, After Tiller, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields) was filming an omnibus film about the election night in Atlantic City, NJ. To her, the night was like living in a horror movie. It was when she was waiting for her ride back to New York that she noticed a sign that said, $5 Psychic Readings. “I was feeling depressed, sad, confused and really frightened of the future,” Wilson tells Filmmaker recently, before the Sundance premiere of her latest film, Look Into My Eyes. “Without even thinking, I […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jan 22, 2024 -
“The Good, Bad and Ugly of Organizing Against Amazon’”: Stephen Maing and Brett Story on their Sundance-debuting Union
Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s unsurprisingly riveting Union is the one Sundance selection most assuredly not coming to Prime Video anytime soon — or ever. (Nor I’m guessing will the doc’s producers Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone be receiving any Amazon Studios Producers Awards from the Sundance Institute. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bezos behemoth did try to bid for Union to then bury it.) As its title succinctly implies, the film follows a group of very brave, and admirably unrelenting, activist-workers in their fight to unionize a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8 back in 2021. […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2024 -
“My Shooting Process Involved a Mix of Planned Setups and Spontaneous Captures….”: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen on Her Sundance-debuting A New Kind of Wilderness
Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind of Wilderness is a film structured in a way I’ve not seen before. With a title that likewise could apply to the psychic space into which the audience is thrust, the rural Norway-set doc is an intimate, first-person narrated, cinematic essay from a director whose story it is not. Indeed, straight from its bold opening, the viewer is left abruptly disoriented, forever second-guessing whose eyes we are actually looking through. It’s a deft structural feat that in turn emotionally transports us into the shoes of the free-spirited, forest-dwelling – and above all grieving – Payne family, five […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 19, 2024 -
“Being a Latina Immigrant Offered Me Personal Insight Into the Culture That Influenced and Inspired This Great Artist”: Carla Gutiérrez on Her Sundance-Premiering Frida
Though 2024 marks seven decades since the passing of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, it often feels as if the ubiquitous artist never actually died (or lived) at all. A feminist/Chicana/indigenous/disabled/nonbinary icon ahead of her (if not outside the concept of) time, Frida Kahlo has long been celebrated as more phantasmagoric myth than flesh-and-blood painter (as opposed to her corporeal hubby Diego Rivera). Indeed, the visage that first radiated from her own canvas has since reverberated — and been commercialized — down through the ages. (One of many ironies in the lives of the staunchly communist couple who traveled […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 18, 2024
