The Brink
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“While I Knew the Music Inside Out There Was So Much I Didn’t Know About the Story Behind the Album”: Alison Klayman on Jagged
As perhaps one of the few people on the planet who managed to nightclub through the ’90s without any awareness of shooting star Alanis Morissette (her music just didn’t penetrate my punk/goth/new wave bubble) I came to Alison Klayman’s latest doc Jagged, part of HBO’s new Music Box series, with a positively clean slate. The film is an in-depth look at the Canadian-American musician-singer-songwriter-actress through an exhaustive amount of archival material, juxtaposed with straightforward interviews with the mercurial Morissette herself. (For those also in a Morissette-defying bubble, this would be a good time to state that the musician is not […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 18, 2021 -
“You Get To Be In Places You Have No Business Being”: Political Filmmakers Talk About Telling Big Stories With A Small Focus At IFP Week 2019
For documentarians, especially ones who focus on politics, it’s not enough to have a strong and vital subject. You need a way to get audiences engaged. The participants at the “Politically Engaged” panel at IFP Week 2019 know that all too well. Take Jehane Noujaim. Along with her creative partner Karim Amer, she makes docs about hot topics: the Egyptian Crisis in 2013’s The Square, the Cambridge Analytica Scandal in this year’s The Great Hack. But they’re not expository info dumps. They’re verité, following people, not merely ideas. Noujaim realized that earlier on. She got her start working with the […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 16, 2019 -
“The Whole Mission of this Film was About Holding Bannon Accountable for His Actions…I Didn’t Ever Want Him to Succeed”: Alison Klayman on The Brink
If there’s one defining trait of Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and White House Chief Strategist to Trump before he was given the boot from both, it’s his ability to disconnect, to casually dismiss inconvenient truths. And director Alison Klayman (Ai Wewei: Never Sorry, The 100 Years Show) captures this aspect right from the start of her compelling globetrotting doc The Brink. Embedding fly-on-the-wall style with Bannon on his unite-the-far-right/self-promotion tour across Europe and through the mid-term elections of 2018, Klayman opens with a scene in which the Soros-demonizing champion of Charlottesville waxes rhapsodic about one […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 29, 2019 -
Truth to Power: Why CPH:DOX is The Future of Progressive Fests
With the “golden age” of documentary filmmaking still upon us, there’s no shortage of doc fests to attend throughout the year (especially around November, when it often feels like a nonfiction pileup). The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, however, knows how to set itself apart from the pack. Besides now taking place in March (and thus not needing to fight with IDFA over eyeballs and premieres), CPH:DOX strives to be “the best festival in and for the world.” What this means in concrete terms is that, though CPH:DOX showcases everything from cinematic art pieces to true-crime thrillers, it’s forever rooted […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 19, 2019 -
“Picture Wrapped in Early November and We Had a Cut by Mid-December”: Editors Marina Katz and Brian Goetz on The Brink
Tracking “economic nationalist” and Deplorables-rouser Stephen Bannon from summer 2017 to fall of last year, The Brink follows Bannon as he tries to rebrand himself, post-White House, as a unifier of the European alt-right, culminating in the defeat of his preferred candidates on Election Night 2018. Director Alison Klayman shot the film and edited alongside Marina Katz and Brian Goetz. Via email, the latter two editors spoke about the challenges of assembling the documentary on a tight turnaround. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2019 -
Sundance Film Festival 2019: The Brink, The Wolf Hour
Learning that two documentaries on Steve Bannon would be dropping within half a year of each other didn’t bring to mind face-offs like Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano so much as a dire combination of Michael Apted’s Up series (an endless series of check-ins as Bannon ages in real time) and the pre-McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible franchise, in which each installment would be a chance for a different documentarian to render their own personal Bannon. First came Errol Morris’s American Dharma (which I wrote about here), which has yet to receive distribution; Klayman’s film was picked up by Magnolia prior to its Sundance premiere. Morris’s premise was flawed […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 30, 2019 -
Steve Bannon, Michael Jackson Docs Added to the 2019 Sundance Film Festival
Although there’s always a chance of an unannounced sneak screening, Sundance’s program is officially locked today with two last additions. The catalog blurbs are below, but suffice to say that both are high-profile docs that lean hard into topics of the day. Dan Reed’s Leaving Neverland deals with alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by Michael Jackson through the stories of survivors while Alison Klayman’s The Brink looks at Steve Bannon’s post-Trump career as an international anti-immigrant rabble rouser. (Klayman was a Filmmaker 25 New Face back in 2011 while in post-production on her debut doc, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.) From the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 9, 2019
