Predators
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“Film isn’t Meant to Solve Problems, It’s Meant to Create More”: David Osit on Predators
In Predators, three-time Emmy-winning filmmaker David Osit’s new documentary, the titular descriptor applies to multiple people: the pedophiles who found themselves the target of popular NBC sting series To Catch A Predator (2004-07), but also the makers of a show which packaged disturbing subject matter into mass entertainment while feigning moral superiority, the slapdash copycat series that have sprung up in its wake and the undiscerning audience for all of these. Osit divides Predators into three chapters. The first uses To Catch A Predator clips, chat logs and phone calls to build an introduction to the show, in which men […]
by Gayle Sequeira on Sep 19, 2025 -
Sundance 2025: Predators, André is an Idiot, Marlee Matlin: I’m Not Alone
“Is it even possible for something designed as entertainment to be a public service?” Predators cinematographer-editor-director David Osit asks this question of ethnographer Mark de Rond about NBC TV show To Catch a Predator and its successors, but it also applies to this project’s of-the-moment anxieties about nonfiction practice. Documentaries seem to have entered a phase of self-reflexive fretting about their own impact; I think one reason No Other Land has become so popular is because it explicitly states this, having its subjects worry about their Facebook click rates and wonder out loud whether the film they’re making can possibly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2025
