Rachel Boynton
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“I Don’t Think Black People Should be Expected to Carry All the Weight of Grappling with America’s History of Racism and White Supremacy”: Rachel Boynton on Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are)
Civil War (or, Who Do We Think We Are), the latest doc from Rachel Boynton (Big Men, Our Brand Is Crisis) unfolds in a series of revelations. The project was sparked in the wake of the slaughter of Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC during President Obama’s last year in office,and continued right through the domestic terrorism of the Trump administration. During that time Boynton took a historical journey, traversing the US from Massachusetts to Mississippi, with a singular question in mind: What’s the story of the Civil War? Or more precisely, What’s your story of the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 17, 2021 -
“That’s My Brain On Screen…”: Rachel Boynton on Her African Oil Exploration Documentary, Big Men
In a world of simplified, cable-news talking points, documentary filmmaker Rachel Boynton makes layered, complicated films exploring the nexus of politics and personality. With Our Brand is Crisis, Boynton — one of Filmmaker‘s 2005 25 New Faces — traveled to Bolivia to cover the 2002 election, embedding herself both within the campaigns of local candidates as well as the war room of hired-gun U.S. consultants Jim Carville and his GCS Associates team. Big Men, opening today, is her second feature, and it has similarly required an immersive, years-long process. She began the process of considering the film before its so-called […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 14, 2014 -
CPH:DOX 2013
“Mission accomplished.” That might have been the motto of the 2013 edition of CPH:DOX. If, at one point, this doc festival’s liberal definition of “reality” roiled nonfiction traditionalists (it was the fest, after all, that gave its 2009 top award to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers), those days are long since gone. As BBC Storyville’s commissioning editor Nick Fraser commented at a panel on hybrid journalism, there’s almost an expectation by contemporary audiences that documentaries today — not just at CPH:DOX but everywhere — will play with concepts of truth and fiction. “Is there anything left of the tradition of objective […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2014 -
Five Questions with Big Men Director Rachel Boynton
Oil. We can’t live with it. We can’t live without it. For some, this is the major environmental predicament of our times. For a few countries in Africa, it’s an unexpected windfall, the consequences of which are still not entirely known. While researching what was to become her second feature Big Men, Rachel Boynton traveled to Nigeria to find out what exactly was going on in the oil fields there, only to discover that the story was much bigger than just one country or even one continent. It was a story that would take her to nearby Ghana all the […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Apr 18, 2013
