“Catnip for the cinephile” boasts the program synopsis for Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s Subject, which makes its world debut on June 11 in the Documentary Competition at this year’s Tribeca Festival. It’s a pretty spot-on claim for a doc that probes the post-screen afterlives and reflective minds of some of nonfiction cinema’s most recognizable stars. By juxtaposing contemporary interviews with characters from Capturing the Friedmans, Hoop Dreams, The Staircase, The Wolfpack, and The Square as well as interviews with acclaimed documentary directors (though smartly, none behind any of the aforementioned), academics and various experts on non-fiction ethics, a bigger and deeper picture […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 11, 2022The latest from husband-and-wife team – and 2016 25 New Face alums – Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan (Pahokee), Naked Gardens is a nonsexual skin flick of sorts, a season-long vérité look at the residents of family nudist resort Sunsport Gardens. Tucked away in the Florida Everglades, and run by a hippieish, Gandalf-like owner named Morley, the paradisiacal enclave draws folks from around the country – those opposed to society’s strict clothing mandate, but also just gung-ho for the place’s cheap rent. A virtual melting pot of nonconformity, Sunsport Gardens is likewise a bipartisan haven where a family with kids […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 10, 2022The Janes, which closes this year’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival in-person May 26, followed by an HBO premiere June 8, is one woefully prescient walk down pre-Roe memory lane. Directed by Academy Award nominee Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water, which also nabbed the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Independent Film Award back in 2008) and Emmy nominee Emma Pildes (Spielberg, which the debut director likewise produced for HBO), the doc tells the illicit tale of the titular underground network of college-age activists who defied the law and male expectations to provide women in Chicago with safe, shame-free […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 25, 2022Middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has won two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships in the women’s 800-meter competition. But no amount of endurance training could have prepared this South African Olympian for the long legal battle (a dozen years and counting) sparked by that very first 2009 World Championship victory. While other winning athletes were celebrating in Berlin, this Black woman from the Global South was undergoing “sex testing,” her right to even compete being thrown into question by a sports governing body made up almost wholly of white European men. But optics be damned. In the end, the […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 6, 2022Jasmín Mara López is a journalist, audio producer, and nonfiction filmmaker whose 2015 audio doc Deadly Divide: Migrant Death on the Border received the Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Award. But the Los Angeles and New Orleans-based director-producer, an immigrant rights advocate with family ties to Mexico, is also a victim of trauma herself. And even more tragically, not at the hands of any faceless government bureaucracy but by those who purport to love her the most. It’s a harrowing tale, one López heroically, and with brutal honesty, dives headfirst into in her Hot Docs world-premiering Silent Beauty. The courageously intimate film […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 2, 2022African Moot marks the Hot Docs return of human rights law specialist/award-winning filmmaker Shameela Seedat, who last took the Special Jury Prize at the fest back in 2018 with Whispering Truth to Power. That doc trailed her nation’s brave anti-corruption crusader Thuli Madonsela, South Africa’s first female Public Protector. And now with this latest Seedat turns her lens to an international topic even closer to home. Created under the auspices of Generation Africa, African Moot refers to the African Human Rights Moot Competition, the largest mock court tournament on the continent. (Generation Africa itself is a project of South Africa’s […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 29, 2022For a film journo who closely followed last year’s he said (filmmakers)/she said (ISIS “sex slave” subjects) controversy that entangled Hogir Hirori’s Sundance-premiering (followed by film-festival-shunned) Sabaya, the recent CPH:DOX panel “Beyond Courage: Trauma-Informed Storytelling” was simply a must-see. The discussion, expertly moderated by Gavin Rees, Executive Director of Dart Center Europe (a satellite of Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma), was part of the “Claim Your Story!” program, one of three engaging afternoons under CPH:CONFERENCE’s “Business As Unusual” banner. (“Follow the Money!” and “Shaping Success.” were likewise smartly curated by The Catalysts, a multimedia agency that “turns […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 25, 2022“Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.” So sayeth the titular, straight-talking matriarch at the heart of Laura Herrero Garvín’s La Mami, a gloriously female-centered portrait of the hardworking dancers of Mexico City’s Cabaret Barba Azul. Told entirely from a female POV – with no men in sight to hijack the narrative – the film takes place almost exclusively in the cloakroom/bathroom/dressing room of the legendary nightclub, where Doña Olga (aka “La Mami”) presides. It’s in this safe space that the cabaret world vet, who in the past 45 years has transitioned from party girl […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 25, 2022The following interview originally ran as coverage of the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2022 First Look festival. The Balcony Movie will screen at MoMI this weekend as part of their series In the Neighborhood: The Films of Paweł Łoziński, running from December 2-4. It is also currently playing on MUBI.—Editor As its title implies, Paweł Łoziński’s The Balcony Movie, which closes this year’s First Look Festival on March 20, is a film shot entirely from a balcony. Which may sound like the worst elevator pitch of all time until one realizes that the balcony belongs to the acclaimed Polish […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 18, 2022When Toby Amies emails me the Vimeo press link to his SXSW-premiering documentary on the band King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, he appends a list of influences. There’s a documentarian (Ross McElwee), a pseudo-documentarian (Christopher Guest), a narrative filmmaker who is a real King Crimson fan (Vincent Gallo) and then a couple of directors whose impact remained a bit puzzling both before and after seeing the film: Ernst Lubitsch and Sam Peckinpah. But perhaps the cinephile (and King Crimson fan) in me was looking too closely, because after watching In the Court of the Crimson King […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2022