Lance Oppenheim
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Trailer Watch: Lance Oppenheim’s HBO Documentary Series, Ren Faire
Lance Oppenheim, a 2019 25 New Face who is something of a non-fiction poet laureate of contemporary loneliness, oddball institutional rituals, and the ways in which fantasy and reality commingle in American life, premieres his latest documentary series, Ren Faire, tonight on HBO. Produced by Elara Pictures, with executive producers including Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie and Ronnie Bronstein, the three-part series tells a Succession-like drama involving an aging “king,” George Coulam, in the midst of deciding which of his employees will take over his sprawling and lucrative Texas-based Renaissance theme park. The series follows Oppenheim’s excellent Spermworld, for which the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 2, 2024 -
Fluid(s) Filmmaking: Lance Oppenheim and Daniel Garber on Spermworld
Like Lance Oppenheim‘s first feature, 2020’s Some Kind of Heaven, his follow-up Spermworld follows three nonfiction protagonists through a niche American context. Heaven focused on three residents of The Villages, a retirement community in Florida that’s the largest in the world, through cleanly composed, academy-ratio images of seniors who’ve self-selected to live in something like Back to the Future’s ’50s backlot suburbia writ large. Per its title and subject, Spermworld is a grimier follow-up in the wider 2.1 ratio, all sickly blue and green colors and degraded frame edges, following three main sperm donor subjects who tell themselves different stories about […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 29, 2024 -
“I Wanted To Find Real People Who Were Going Through Real Problems in an Unreal Place”: Lance Oppenheim on His Hulu-Screening Doc, Some Kind of Heaven
The recently announced results of the 2021 U.S. census produced a number of headline takeaways: for example, the nation’s white population declined for the first time, Hispanics have become California’s largest ethnic group, and metropolitan areas were the beneficiary of declining population in over half of America’s smaller counties. And among those growing metropolitan areas, one, in Florida, stood out as the most quickly expanding: The Villages. Over the last decade, the over-55 retirement community saw its population increase by nearly 40%; it now encompasses 60,000 homes, with more on the way. Seeing The Villages show up in an official […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven
Opening in theaters and on demand January 15, 2021 from Magnolia Pictures is the debut feature from documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, Some Kind of Heaven. Featured in Filmmaker‘s 2019 25 New Faces, Oppenheim makes documentaries that are as attuned to their subjects’ interior lives — their fears, dreams, insecurities and aspirations — as to their physical surroundings. “How fantasy informs the way people live their lives, the camera has to do the same,” he told me when I interviewed him. “The only way to get into these people’s lives and their stories is to accurately depict the headspace they are […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2020 -
Sundance 2020 Dispatch 3: Some Kind of Heaven, Black Bear, The Fight
The Villages—a planned retirement community approximately 130,00 strong in Florida—has, its happiest residents say, “everything”: an orthopedic clinic, karate classes, a bank, etc. There’s overlap here with limited American ideas about what, exactly, the Good Life might look like as cruelly/accurately imagined in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, whose community for the shrunk-down to live out the rest of their lives is a strip mall adjacent to character-less suburban sprawl. Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven, which explores The Villages through three subjects, isn’t here to either celebrate or roast a community established, as its founder explains in archival footage, to suggest a kind […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2020 -
Lance Oppenheim
While in high school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Lance Oppenheim would send documentary pitches to New York Times Op-Docs. Some were written treatments, and others were actual shorts, documenting, says Oppenheim, “crazy things happening in my backyard,” like the story of an armed vigilante animal rescue group rescuing discarded dogs being mistreated by their new owners in the Everglades. (A no-go for the Times, The Dogmatic [2012] went on to win multiple awards at regional and student film festivals.) Another short that year was Quicksand, an elegiac portrait of Oppenheim’s grandfather in the final days of Alzheimer’s. “’Good job, not […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019
