Whenever directors watch their own films, they always do so with the knowledge that there are moments that occurred during their production — whether that’s in the financing and development or shooting or post — that required incredible ingenuity, skill, planning or just plain luck, but whose difficulty is invisible to most spectators. These are the moments directors are often the most proud of, and that pride comes with the knowledge that no one on the outside could ever properly appreciate what went into them. So, we ask: “What hidden part of your film are you most privately proud of […]

“Blasphemy is not free speech” reads a protest banner on the Little Rock statehouse lawn in a scene from Hail Satan?, the latest from Sundance vet Penny Lane (Our Nixon, Nuts!). The sign is emblematic of the ludicrous (and too often unchallenged) falsehoods that The Satanic Temple — fighting to place an elaborate statue of goat-headed god Baphomet alongside a local legislator’s equally ostentatious Ten Commandments monument — is up against. Luckily Lane, never one to shy away from provocative subjects, is right there on the ground, providing an intimate look into the group’s wild rise. By seamlessly alternating interviews […]

As a longtime docuphile who prides myself on keeping up with the latest developments in cinematic nonfiction both at home and abroad, I’m embarrassed to admit I’d never heard of the Open City Documentary Festival before an invite to the eight-year-old London fest landed in my inbox. But between OCDF’s touted focus on documentary first and foremost as an art form, and my morbid curiosity about/solidarity with any film festival functioning amidst the chaos of Brexit, I was immediately sold. And, fortunately, this year’s OCDF did not disappoint when it came to showcasing a nonfiction lineup filled with under-the-radar artistry […]

In the era of fake news and alternative facts, and of people constructing their own custom-made versions of reality, Penny Lane’s The Pain of Others feels very timely, to say the least. Defying any expectations and preconceived notions, Lane’s perfectly titled “body-horror doc” acts as a challenging and thought-provoking sociological study of one unusual YouTube community (which, with Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President also on the fest circuit this year, makes me think “YouTube behavioral psych” might soon become a thing). The Pain of Others weaves together the video diaries of three women suffering from Morgellons disease, a term given […]

The mix of films in the 10th edition of BAMcinemaFest offers isn’t totally unexpected: a significant plurality of Sundance premieres (tightly curated, or maybe more accurately culled), titles from SXSW and True/False, two North American and three world premieres. The programming, though, is tighter and more original than a simple survey of The Year To Date In Festival Premieres. (I have already written elsewhere about the following titles: América, Bisbee ’17 [which has been cut down substantially since its premiere], Clara’s Ghost, Crime + Punishment, Eighth Grade, Madeline’s Madeline, Shirkers, Skate Kitchen, The Task. Please please please do not miss that last one. I’ll wait to write about Support the […]

What is film but a desire to make visible that which we cannot see? Love. Hate. Or in the case of the latest from Penny Lane, pain. After having bowed at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam before, Lane’s return to the Bright Future section with the world premiere of The Pain of Others isn’t a surprise, but she’s certainly earned her place there. The found-footage, experimental doc, which despite being compiled of YouTube videos and newsreels, feels dense enough to require a dissertation on delusion, suffering and this digital age. Working in a similar form to the all-archival constructed […]

In recent decades, some of the best documentary films — including Oscar-winners such as Bowling for Columbine and Searching for Sugar Man, and, more recently, festival favorites Point and Shoot and Meet the Patels — have have relied on animation to tell compelling nonfiction stories in nontraditional ways. It’s a technique audiences have grown accustomed to and nonfiction filmmakers have learned to adopt with varying degrees of success. While in the past, documentary purists might have posited that animation had no place in non-fiction storytelling, it’s now largely accepted that even observational documentaries involve some degree of manipulation. If anything, by using animation in a documentary, the manipulation is more […]

Tribeca Film Festival, I love you but you made a very serious mistake. On Monday, the widely discredited and dangerous anti-vaccination quack Andrew Wakefield tweeted: “Haven’t posted forever. Huge news tomorrow.” Perhaps he hadn’t “posted forever” because the media finally stopped giving him a megaphone. Perhaps once people in America and England began dying of measles, journalists finally realized that the “two sides to every story” approach granted Wakefield was literally killing people. Last I heard, Wakefield was headlining Conspira-Sea, a seven-day cruise where passengers learn about crop circles, chemtrails, yogic flying, ESP and astrology. Good, I thought, that’s where […]

A medical doctor in name only, John R. Brinkley became famous in the ’20s and ’30s for claiming to have found an unusual cure for male impotence: all it would take was the transplantation of goat testicles into his human subjects. A hundred years removed from “discovery,” documentarian Penny Lane (whose Our Nixon was about another very larger-than-life public figure) dives into the life and times of Brinkley, a man whose entire history was based on lies and false acclaim. Filmmaker: Your first feature documentary Our Nixon is compiled from archival footage clearly relevant to American history and politics. Did you set out for your follow-up to be a […]

Chad Hartigan’s Morris From America has an unpromising logline, but so did his previous feature, This is Martin Bonner (an unlikely friendship between two men looking for redemption etc. etc.), and that turned out pretty well, so I wasn’t worried. Morris is a coming-of-age crowdpleaser, in the vein of “it’s been 18 years since Rushmore, but this version is different because…” (Son of Rambow, Submarine, et al.). I know a lot of people (I’m one of them, no shade implied) who find a deep satisfaction in action movies novel only in their details and crispness of execution while placing no value upon originality per se. That’s a principle which, of […]