Nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and airing on PBS’s Independent Lens beginning February 11th (and now on iTunes), RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening lives up to its buzz and then some. The award-winning photographer’s debut feature is a low-key, highly cinematic look at the Alabama Black Belt over a period of five years. In that time Ross trained his lens mostly on two twenty-something men, Daniel and Quincy, as they navigated education, blue-collar labor, fatherhood, and just the intricacies of daily life in their culturally rich, economically impoverished Southern town. Filmmaker was fortunate enough […]

From 2004 to 2016, Steve Bannon directed nine feature-length documentaries. Bannon, who professes open admiration for the aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl, believed for a time that his films, which bear dire titles like Battle for America, Fire From the Heartland and District of Corruption, would catapult him to prominence as the right-wing’s cinematic answer to Michael Moore. Diving into his oeuvre is not unlike experiencing the last decade’s-worth of popular political documentaries but through a conservative looking-glass. Bannon’s films illustrate both his dangerously apocalyptic worldview, and provide an object lesson for probing the thin line between documentary and propaganda. They’re also near-unwatchable. But, they are texts worth encountering in order to get […]

Before IFP Film Week fades too far in our rearview mirror, we’re elaborating upon several of our snaps from our Instagram feed with further comments by the filmmakers, speakers and panelists. View all of Meredith Alloway’s Instagram diaries here at the link. Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook talked their visual journalism platform, Field of Vision, on an IFP Film Week panel called “Creative Tag-Teams” last month. Poitras, of couse, shook the world with her Oscar-winning doc, Citizenfour, in 2014. Cook, who was Director of Programming at Hot Docs, is an executive producer and co-founder of this new creative platform with […]

Charlotte Cook is a documentary film programmer, curator, producer and co-founder of Field of Vision. Cook was the Director of Programming at Hot Docs film festival for four years before she left in May of 2015 to start Field of Vision, a visual journalism film unit that aims to commission 40 to 50 original episodic and individual short non-fiction films each year. Cook co-founded Field of Vision with Academy Award-winning director of CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras, and filmmaker and founder of Cinema Eye Honors, A.J. Schnack. In this episode of the She Does podcast, we talk about Cook’s journey to programming […]

Ahead of the official launch of Field of Vision at 1 pm today, co-creators Laura Poitras, AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook gave an NYFF free talk last night on the brand new documentary unit of The Intercept. The trio spoke at length about their aims within the realm of episodic and short form nonfiction, and how the filmmaker-driven platform will function at the nexus of journalism and documentary. Below are a few highlights. Poitras was inspired to create Field of Vision after working with both The New York Times and Julian Assange.  While working on the feature films that constitute her post-9/11 trilogy, Poitras […]

Today it was announced that Laura Poitras, AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook will collaborate to launch Field of Vision, the visual journalism arm of The Intercept, of which Poitras serves as a co-editor. The trio will work together to commission between 40 and 50 short-form nonfiction films each year, with the first season debuting on The Intercept on September 29, following the world premiere of Poitras’ Asylum as part of “Field of Vision: New Episodic Nonfiction” at the NYFF on September 27. You can expect new work from 25 New Faces Iva Radivojevic and Dustin Guy Defa, along with Poitras d.p. Kirsten Johnson, […]