A highly personal hodgepodge of interviews, essays, coverage and quotes that stayed with me throughout (despite) this information overloaded year. Crime and Punishment Jon Alpert’s HBO doc Life of Crime: 1984-2020 (DOC NYC curtain raiser for Hammer to Nail) Thirty-six years following three street criminals in Newark, NJ culminates in one powerful, tightly-edited, two-hour journey. Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry’s Showtime doc Attica (interview with Curry for Filmmaker magazine, interview with former inmate Al Victory for Documentary magazine) A clear-eyed revisitation of the five-day, real-life, made-for-TV event that resulted in “the deadliest violence Americans had inflicted on each other in a single day since […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 6, 2022I first encountered Joonas Neuvonen’s Lost Boys, a sort of “unintended sequel” to 2010’s spectacular look at self-destructive Subutex addicts in rural Finland, Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland – which was co-written and edited by Lost Boys co-director Sadri Cetinkaya – at this year’s virtual CPH:DOX. At the time I tried but failed to take notes while watching. The film just got under my skin in a way that froze me to my laptop screen. Atmospherically, Neuvonen’s decade-later doc brought to mind the sensation of being trapped inside a Nine Inch Nails video. Memorably narrated by Pekka Strang (Tom of Finland), Lost Boys picks up where Reindeerspotting left off: After […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 25, 2021