Documentary
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The Long Shoot: 10 Questions for Calling My Children Director David Binder
For 25 years, first as still photographer and then as filmmaker, David Binder doggedly chronicled the Farrow family. The mother/wife dies … husband grieves and copes … four young sons struggle and mature … and for 25 years David Binder captures the story. Binder’s initial photo essay on the Farrow family was published by In Health magazine in 1990, and updated a decade later in Life magazine. His Farrow photographs were displayed in several major exhibitions, including at Harvard AIDS Institute and in 40 cities for the United States Centers for Disease Control. A decade later he made a short documentary […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Jul 9, 2013 -
Brooklyn Goes BAM: Docs at BAMcinemafest
Manhattan has its big dog festivals, while across the East River in Brooklyn, home to the country’s greatest number of independent filmmakers, several fests are aspirating to the top ranks. Not in a A-List cookie cutter way, but uniquely, in their own way. The number of documentaries at the fifth annual BAMcinemaFest remained limited. Out of 25 features nine were docs, and out of 14 shorts nine were docs. Events were likewise limited, with some filmmakers organizing their own post-screening get-togethers in local bars. But what continues to lift the stature of this festival is not number of movies or number […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Jul 2, 2013 -
Christine Turner on Homegoings
This article was orginally published in February 2013 to coincide with the film’s premiere at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight. Homegoings opens theatrically today at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem and airs tonight on POV. Just in the nick of time for Black History Month, and debuting at the 2013 Documentary Fortnight: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film, is Christine Turner’s Homegoings, a poetically crafted exploration of the history of African-American funeral traditions. Told via the Harlem neighborhood’s legendary funeral director Isaiah Owens – who found his calling as a small child, burying all deceased animals he stumbled across in his South […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 24, 2013 -
On Indiegogo: Mitch McCabe’s Make Me Normal
The body and mind — filmmaker Mitch McCabe tackled the former in her excellent HBO documentary, Youth Knows No Pain, which looked at the plastic surgery industry and America’s fixation on staying young. Now, she says, she’s “pointing the camera in the opposite direction, at our internal selves.” Make Me Normal is her film about the mental health industry. From her website: MAKE ME NORMAL is a feature-length documentary film exploring recent controversies in the psychiatry field, the rise of diagnosed mental illness, psychopharmacology and our new definition of “normal”— all set against the backdrop of the filmmaker’s own roll-coaster […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2013 -
American Doc: Five Tips for Nonfiction Filmmakers
Recently, I was on a panel at the Little Rock Film Festival titled “Cinematic Nonfiction: Not Your Parents’ Documentary Film.” As our moderator Robert Greene, the director of Fake It So Real, and I waxed rhapsodic over the state of nonfiction filmmaking in Denmark, I realized that my own doc philosophy has evolved over the years – as I’ve noticed more and more that Americans lag behind much of the world when it comes to quality doc-making. While a lot of nonfiction aficionados like to chalk up this disparity to generous government subsidies in Europe, the problem actually lies much […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 11, 2013 -
City World Director Brent Chesanek
Among the discoveries at the 2012 edition of CPH:DOX was Brooklyn-based Brent Chesanek’s City World, which is part magic realist children’s adventure tale and part austere landscape documentary. Over precisely framed tableaux shot in his hometown of Orlando, FL — nearly all of them completely absent of people — Chesanek drapes the narration of a young boy mulling the breakup of his family and subsequent move, with his father, to this Southern city. As in another recent film, General Orders No. 9, contemporary landscape photography is presented as historical residue meant to be both meditated on and explicated. Drained of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 5, 2013 -
Five Questions with La Camioneta Director Mark Kendall
This interview originally ran at the time of the film’s world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival 2012, and is now being republished to coincide with with La Camioneta‘s theatrical release, which starts today at Brooklyn’s reRun Theater. Visit the official website of La Camioneta for dates of further theatrical screenings. Director Mark Kendall carries a spirit of adventurous, a keen eye for character, and a wellspring of ambition into his first documentary feature, La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus. Starting out at an auction in rural Pennsylvania for decommissioned school-buses, Kendall boards one of the buses sold and accompanies the […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on May 31, 2013 -
Councilwoman Castillo: Margo Guernsey on Making Her Feature-Length Political Documentary
Margo Guernsey has produced promotional mini-docs and videos for a number of non-profits, but for her first feature-length project, “Councilwoman Castillo,” she is focusing on the story of a hotel housekeeper, Carmen Castillo, elected to the City Council in Providence, Rhode Island. The project will cover Castillo’s first three years in office starting with her election in November 2011. Guernsey spoke to us recently about how she became interested in the project and her strategy for shooting and funding this low budget, multi-year project. Filmmaker: What is the story? Guernsey: It’s a story about a hotel housekeeper elected to […]
by Michael Murie on May 29, 2013 -
Five Questions with Triumph of the Wall Director Bill Stone
Like many documentaries, Bill Stone’s Triumph of the Wall began its life as one thing and transformed into something else. Initially Stone sought to document the construction of a 1,000 foot dry-stone wall by Chris Overing, a young man with an impressively diverse resume that lacked one necessary skill for the project: masonry. Overing estimated the project would take two months and Stone decided to chronicle Overing’s effort. The filmmaker had at the time “a vague idea of the film exploring commitment.” But Overing underestimated a bit: eight years later he was still constructing the wall and Stone was still […]
by David Licata on May 28, 2013 -
Kicking Ass in Clintonland: The Little Rock Film Festival
“A great film is made with love and time. Then it knocks you on your ass.” Such was the guerrilla tagline for the seven-year-old Little Rock Film Festival, and the same could be said regarding fests themselves – and writing about them, for that matter. Truth be told, I was initially on the fence about heading south to cover a festival in a state I was hard-pressed to locate on a map, and knew only through its past racist history and present-day Jeff Nichols films. Fortunately, my sister pointed out why passing up the chance to visit Little Rock would […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 28, 2013
