Documentary
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Five Questions with Last Call at the Oasis Director Jessica Yu
For Oscar-winning filmmaker Jessica Yu’s latest film, Last Call at the Oasis, she looks at the frightening realities of the current global water crisis. Produced through the social issue giants Participant Media, Yu’s film has the makings of a must-see like An Inconvenient Truth and Food, Inc. Filmmaker: Tell us a little about what your film is about? Yu: Last Call at the Oasis is about the water crisis, which is global and urgent, yet largely hidden here in the U.S. The film tells stories of people who are on the front lines in dealing with water shortage or contamination, […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Sep 7, 2011 -
“WE WERE HERE” DIRECTOR DAVID WEISSMAN
David Weissman moved to San Francisco in 1976 and has been a fixture of the filmmaking community there, working on films like Crumb and In the Shadow of the Stars before directing his own movie (with Bill Weber), The Cockettes, a documentary chronicle of the legendary Bay Area performance group. With his latest, We Were Here, Weissman again digs into the history of the city, this time capturing the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The following short conversation was conducted at Sundance before the first screening of his film. We Were Here opens in New York at […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 5, 2011 -
“RESURRECT DEAD” DIRECTOR JON FOY
This interview with Jon Foy, director of Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, was originally published during the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, where the film won the Documentary Directors Award. The film opens today at the IFC Center in New York, with Foy and his collaborators doing Q & A’s at the evening shows. There are few professions in the world that demand more from their practitioners than documentary filmmaking — most filmmakers spend years (if not lives) toiling away in obscurity, with little keeping them going beside the faith that theirs is a story worth sacrificing everything […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Sep 2, 2011 -
ON GATEKEEPERS AND “MALKOVICH’S MAIL”
Each week I write an original newsletter that I usually don’t repost to the blog. Here’s this week’s, about a favorite documentary I just found on YouTube. To receive future newsletters, you can sign up for free here. If I ever teach a course in the film business, there’s a documentary I’m going to make required viewing. My guess is that you probably haven’t seen it because it was made for AMC a few years ago as part of a short-lived strand of docs about film. It’s called Malkovich’s Mail, and it was directed by the independent filmmakers Keith Fulton […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 21, 2011 -
ENDING CHANGE FOR LATEST “WEST MEMPHIS 3” DOC
In news that developed Thursday night, Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin, also known as the “West Memphis 3,” could be freed later today after spending over 18 years in prison for the charge of murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993, though strong evidence over the years has pointed to their innocence. UPDATE: “West Memphis 3” have been set free. The subjects of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky‘s landmark Paradise Lost documentaries, the filmmaker’s latest, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, will premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and as its synopsis on the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Aug 19, 2011 -
TRAGIC POIGNANCY: THE TINIEST PLACE
Imagine a village of peasants in a mountainous jungle region of El Salvador that would be completely devastated by bombs during the Civil War (1980-92), and most of its inhabitants, including teenaged boys and girls, brutally murdered by the National Guard. Or better yet, let filmmaker Tatiana Huezo imagine it for us and update it in her unforgettable documentary, The Tiniest Place, one of the finest docs I’ve seen over the past year. The puebla is Cinquera, which was suspected by the government of being a hotbed of leftist guerrillas. Several families, many of which lost most of their children, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Aug 14, 2011 -
Alison Ellwood on Magic Trip
The saying goes that most documentary magic happens in the editing room. That’s an understatement for Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, a found footage documentary assembled by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood. Magic Trip takes us back to the cross-country road trip taken by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters in their psychedelically painted bus, interchangeably called “Further” or “Furthur.” The trip was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s pioneering work of New Journalism, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Fresh off the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey took the book’s proceeds to […]
by Daniel James Scott on Aug 14, 2011 -
Director Greg Barker on Koran By Heart
Koran by Heart, premiering on HBO today, comes out at a time when it couldn’t be more necessary. In the wake of July’s attacks in Norway and the Islamophobic response in Western media outlets, the film offers a composed perspective of life in the Muslim world. Koran by Heart follows three Muslim youths — Nabiollah from Tajikistan, Rifdha from the Maldives, and Djamil from Senegal — as they enter into an annual Koran-reciting competition in Cairo, Egypt. The competition attracts hundreds of Muslims from all over the world, many of whom don’t speak Arabic, but are able to recite the […]
by Daniel James Scott on Aug 1, 2011 -
IT’S ALL UPHILL FROM HERE
“It’s always a battle. Everything…everyday. It’s like,…can I just get off the battlefield for one day? Step out of the war-zone for a minute?” – Jens Pulver from JENS PULVER | DRIVEN This confession from Jens has rung through my head almost daily over the past year as I’ve worked to make, complete and subsequently market and release our film, JENS PULVER | DRIVEN. With the film being fully crowd-funded, having garnered festival play and just released nationally on nearly every major VOD network in North America it can be legitimately counted as a marked success in the micro-budget independent […]
by Gregorybayne on Jul 27, 2011 -
BRILLIANTE MENDOZA AND KICKSTARTING “THE JEEPNEY MOVIE”
Filmmakers Esy Casey and Sarah Friedland recently sent me a short video documenting their visit to the Philippines where they met the Cannes prize-winning filmmaker Brilliante Mendoza and visited his construction studio. The video, which catches Mendoza in the lead-up to his new feature, Prey, is posted below. After I received this link, Friedland informed me of the new project of Casey’s she’s producing. Also set in the Philippines, it’s called Jeepney, and it’s a feature doc about this vehicle and the people who drive it. From the project’s Kickstarter page: Visualizing the rich cultural heritage of the Philippines, this […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 26, 2011
