Laura Poitras
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Trailer Watch: Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Nan Goldin’s prolific career as an artist and photographer as well as her recent anti-Sackler activism is the focus of Laura Poitras’s latest documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which just released its first trailer today. The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where it earned the Golden Lion, making it only the second documentary in the festival’s history to win the top prize after 2013’s Sacro GRA. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is Filmmaker‘s most recent Fall Issue cover story, with an interview between Poitras and critic Amy Taubin currently available for digital subscribers. Physical […]
by Natalia Keogan on Oct 13, 2022 -
Images & Action: Director Laura Poitras on Her Nan Goldin Documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Perhaps the simplest way to describe Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is as a conversation between two artists who are committed to the truth potential of lens-based mediums. The film, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and will be released in theaters this fall by NEON, is Poitras’s portrait of Nan Goldin, one of the most celebrated photographers of her generation. What may be less known is that Goldin is also an organizer of campaigns for social justice to which she brings as much fiercely dedicated energy as she does to her photography. […]
by Amy Taubin on Oct 11, 2022 -
The Evolution of Impact: The Future of Social Change and Nonfiction Storytelling
The conversation about documentary impact has undergone a number of shifts since impact producing began to emerge as a practice within the documentary field around 20 years ago. Today it is almost expected that a social issue documentary film will be accompanied by an impact campaign to help ensure its story will reach audiences and motivate them towards social change, deeper engagement with a story’s themes and further learning. But earlier, things were different—the argument had to be made that some documentary filmmakers should focus on impact and to develop best practices for engaging audiences around a film and its […]
by Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress on Aug 23, 2022 -
“It’s Like Having a Diary Shot by Someone Else of Moments That You Don’t Remember….”: RaMell Ross on his Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening
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 […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 8, 2019 -
Y’allywood Babylon: The 20th SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable
This year’s 20th anniversary edition of the SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) Savannah Film Festival, which lays claim to being the largest university-run film fest in the world, continued its two-decades-long tradition of mixing Hollywood wattage with downhome southern hospitality. Once again the fest honored an eclectic mix of celebrity guests of all ages (elder statesmen and women included Richard Gere, Sir Patrick Stewart, Aaron Sorkin, Salma Hayek Pinault, Holly Hunter, and Kyra Sedgwick, while the “youngsters” featured the likes of John Boyega, Zoey Deutch, Robert Pattinson, Andrea Riseborough, and Willow Shields). The festival also played host to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 6, 2017 -
Laura Poitras Talks Assange, Her Final Version of Risk and Trump’s Tax Returns
Just now released on Showtime, Laura Poitras’s Risk, which found its way to theaters in May via upstart distributor Neon, is in a vastly different form than when it premiered last year in Cannes. The documentary traces a thread running counter to the moral certitude heard from our politicians, mostly on the right, about the role of leaks in degrading democracy. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the film’s primary subject, has been confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for nearly five years following allegations — and, later, charges — of sexual assault against two Swedish women. (The rape investigation was recently […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 28, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Laura Poitras’s Risk
“This is not the film I thought I was making. I thought I could ignore the contradictions…. I was wrong. They are becoming the story,” That’s Oscar-winning documentary director Laura Poitras at the head of this new trailer for her latest feature, Risk, with a voiceover that functions as a new statement of artistic intent. Poitras has been working on this film about Wikileaks and Julian Assange since before CITZENFOUR, but as those words testify, there was more to document since the film’s screening last May at the Cannes Film Festival. That earlier version necessarily ended before the ’16 election, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 10, 2017 -
“Story Drives the Form”: Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook on Creative Tag-Teaming
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 […]
by Meredith Alloway on Oct 3, 2016 -
Cannes Dispatch #4: Thoughts on Awards, I, Daniel Blake, Risk, Elle
I won’t spend too much time bemoaning the Competition prizes handed out last night by George Miller’s jury. Their decisions sucked, just as the Coen brothers’ jury’s did, just as Campion’s did, just as Spielberg’s kinda did, just as Moretti’s very much did, and okay fine I’ll stop there. The best film way more often than not goes home empty-handed from these things, and it rarely matters. Maybe a few less people sought out Holy Motors because Nanni Moretti thought Leos Carax didn’t spend enough time developing his characters, or a few more people were curious to discover whatever the […]
by Blake Williams on May 23, 2016 -
What a Documentary DP Does: Kirsten Johnson on Cameraperson
Documentary DP Kirsten Johnson is probably best known for her work with Laura Poitras (The Oath, Citizenfour), but she’s been shooting for years. Out of her experience comes Cameraperson, an essay film assembled from mostly unused footage shot for many projects. Each segment is labeled by place rather than the project it came from. In eschewing voiceover, the chain of argumentation can be a little heavy-handed for my taste — i.e., cutting from someone talking about death to someone giving birth in a hospital — but the overall effect is constantly surprising and stimulating. The film begins by reminding us that even the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2016
