[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21 6:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] “Why am I a filmmaker?” I often ask myself the same question. I ask it because first and foremost I guess I am less an artist than simply a small-p-political person who is moved by human struggle anywhere around me and who, however naively or presumptuously, wants to do something about it. My new film, The House I Live In, examines the destructive impact of the War on Drugs on poor and minority Americans and what can be done to reform it. It is my most personal film to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2012Remember the Earth Liberation Front? In the 1990s a collection of separate anonymous cells without any central leadership that carried out acts of sabotage and arson — burning lumber companies, torching a parking lot of SUVs, destroying a research laboratory. The clandestine group’s goal was to halt the destruction of our environment. If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front gives us the larger context of the environmental movement and the more radical Earth Liberation Front, and then focuses on one cell in Oregon and on the activist Daniel McGowan. It is an intriguing and important film […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Jan 29, 2011The Tribeca Film Festival has announced that Freaknomics will serve as the closing gala of the festival on April 30. Freaknomics is a documentary that was based on the bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Exposes the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. It melds pop culture with economics, and examines economics in such diverse subject matter as legalized abotion, drug dealing, education, and naming children. The film is directed by an array of critically acclaimed documentary filmmakers: Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Rachel Grady and Heidi […]
by Melissa Silvestri on Mar 30, 2010Ray Pride’s column over at Movie City News contains a long interview with Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki in which he takes issue with David Denby’s recent review of his film: PRIDE: I’m not asking you to respond to this specific review, but I was floored by the incredibly jejune review that David Denby wrote in the New Yorker of Why We Fight. This is merely a collage film; this guy went in with a point to make; this is not true filmmaking. Does that trouble you when a reviewer is so obstinate, so resistant to whatyou’ve made? JARECKI: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2006