Divide and Conquer: The Corporate Coup d’Etat

Thanks to Canadian filmmakers Mark Archbarand and Jennifer Abbott’s 2003 doc The Corporation (which was subsequently turned into the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by the film’s writer, University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan) I’ve long been aware that corporations have been granted personhood in the eyes of our law. (And been dismayed that though corporations are people, too, they rarely suffer serious consequences for breaking the law.)

So I was surprised by how utterly unnerved I felt during this year’s IDFA, when I caught the premiere of another Canadian doc, The Corporate Coup d’Etat. Emmy Award-winner Fred Peabody (All Government’s Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone) tackles the same topic as his countrymen’s earlier film, while updating it for the current worldwide mess we find ourselves in. Frighteningly, Peabody makes the compelling case that today’s rising authoritarianism and declining democracy can be traced right back to these faceless, if not nameless, “individuals.” And unlike catastrophes like climate change, stopping corporations is on nearly no nation’s global agenda.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

Three Faces of Evil: Top Scary Political Docs of 2018

If there was one theme that dominated the landscape on the doc fest circuit this year it was politics — and not just that of the Trump administration or the Kremlin (though those subjects were well represented). Filmmakers around the globe seemed to be in obsessive pursuit, trying to find some rational explanations for the irrational hell that’s been going on. Which means that as bad as the decline of western civilization might seem in our current time, there is one upside — it makes for some stunning cinematic art. So with that in mind I’d like to give a shout to a trio of must-see character studies, portraits of men in power that both chilled me to the bone and opened my eyes to the bigger picture.

To read my picks visit Filmmaker magazine.

Talking Gender Parity in the Immersive World at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival

No film fest is complete these days without an attempt to tackle the vast gender inequality that’s long afflicted the industry. So it comes as no surprise that the sixth edition of the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival devoted an entire panel to searching for remedies when it comes to immersive media. “Reaching True Gender Parity in Interactive Storytelling” proved to be a fascinating chat amongst four fervent ladies — Marie-Pier Gauthier of the National Film Board of Canada (who also served as panel moderator), HP’s Global Head of Virtual Reality Joanna Popper, Vivian Marthell, who leads local art house O Cinema, and FilmGate’s own executive director Diliana Alexander. Sitting in the comfy leather recliners at the cozy Silverspot Cinema — a five-minute walk from the Eurostars Langford, the hotel in one of downtown Miami’s landmark beaux arts buildings where guests were put up — we audience members (who refreshingly included quite a few dudes) were treated to a no-holds-barred discussion filled with both frustration and hope.

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

“If the Content is Sh*t, It Will Still be Sh*t in VR and AR”: Virtual Reality and Hard Truth at the 2018 FilmGate Interactive Media Festival

The Virtual Reality Portal at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival, which this year overlapped with Art Basel in downtown Miami, featured a wealth of new discoveries alongside some stellar high-profile projects. Among the three-dozen or so interactive works on display were a pair that made for great companion pieces. The first was Lynette Wallworth’s “psychedelic documentary” Awavena, an inner trip that I’d just missed experiencing at IDFA DocLab (and which made me wish that every VR experience came with a hammock). The second, Eliza McNitt’s Sundance-premiering outer trip Spheres, also had perhaps the widest target audience of any of the pieces represented. As I waited in line, watching a little boy who looked to be having a ball participating in this Darren Aronofsky-produced “songs of the cosmos,” I noticed an elderly woman in a wheelchair chatting amiably with the project’s creator. (I later learned this was McNitt’s 90-year-old grandmother, who’d shown up to don a headset for the very first time and experience her granddaughter’s Florida debut.)

To read all about my own Miami trip visit Filmmaker magazine.

A Sneak Peek at the 6th FilmGate Interactive Media Festival

The upcoming FilmGate Interactive Media Festival (November 30th – December 6th) will mark its sixth year of bringing the immersive arts to South Florida. A quick glance through the lineup shows it’s the most impressive edition yet. Divided into four programs — Miami @ Play, Festival Panels, Interactive Installations, and the Virtual Reality Portal (with its 35-plus interactive experiences to choose from) — not to mention the many parties (this is Miami after all), the 2018 edition may just make the folks in town that same week for Art Basel look 20th century passé.

To read my top picks visit Filmmaker magazine.

In With The New at The 31st International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

This edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November 14th-25th) — now in its third decade, but also marking its inaugural year under the exciting new leadership of Syrian documentarian Orwa Nyrabia — offered one of the most binge-worthy lineups I’ve experienced in all my years covering the world’s largest doc fest. Of the nearly two-dozen films I managed to catch both in Amsterdam during my stay (once again guests were put up at the lovely — and couldn’t get more convenient — Hotel NH Carlton, which doubles as the fest’s headquarters) and online, not one disappointed. Indeed, veteran filmmakers working at the top of their game were well represented by some stellar films. This included Vitaly Mansky (Putin’s Witnesses), Werner Herzog (Meeting Gorbachev), Errol Morris (American Dharma), Ruth Beckermann (The Waldheim Waltz), Kazuo Hara (Extremely Private Eros: Love Song 1974), Sergei Loznitsa (The Trial), Maria Ramos (The Trial), Nikolaus Geyrhalter (The Border Fence) — and that’s just off the top of my head.

To read all about my inspiring time visit Filmmaker magazine.

IDFA 2018 Presents Industry Talk: Steve James and Claire Simon on Storytelling in Serialized Documentaries

People are “natural scriptwriters,” Claire Simon noted towards the beginning of what turned out to be a surprisingly lively discussion between the French documentarian and the US’s own Steve James about one of the hottest topics in the doc industry today: serialized storytelling. The setting was an intimate theater at De Brakke Grond (the longtime headquarters of IDFA DocLab, where this year’s Humanoid Cookbook theme whimsically allowed for browsing a menu before ordering, or rather requesting, VR experience time slots).

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

“High Security Was Essential, In Order to Protect My Sources, My Crew and the Ability To Complete the Film”: Alex Winter on The Panama Papers

Alex Winter’s The Panama Papers is a globetrotting, newsroom-hopping peek inside the multinational process, which ultimately brought together over 100 media organizations in 80 countries under the auspices of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). That led to the 2016 mass publication of documents from the highly secretive, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca — which in turn brought down heads of state and business leaders the world over, and cost the lives of at least two reporters affiliated with the leaked trove.

I was fortunate enough to catch Winter’s film at this year’s IDFA (in the stunning Tuschinski Theater, no less, which Winter proclaimed the grandest venue any of his films had ever played in), especially because the post-screening chat featured a conversation with not only the director, but also three of the journalists who’d worked on the exposé. (That included Pulitzer Prize winners Bastian Obermayer, whose Munich-based newspaper initially received the tip, and Icelandic journo Jóhannes Kr. Kristjánsson, whose work on the project led to the resignation of his own country’s prime minister.)

Prior to the film’s Epix release on November 26th, Filmmaker spoke with Winter about his logistically challenging, filmed-in-secret film.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Courage Under Fire Award: Stephen Maing and the NYPD 12

This year’s Courage Under Fire Award recipients, director Stephen Maing (High Tech, Low Life) and the whistleblowers of the NYPD 12 that he documented in his exquisite doc Crime + Punishment, may not at first glance seem as likely honorees as, say, journalists facing down the daily guns and bombs of the war-torn Middle East. But look closer. Maing, an Emmy Award-nominated Brooklynite, and the black and brown men in blue that he collaborated with, have taken on, as Maing reminds us, “the most powerful policing organization in the nation” in order to expose the illegal quotas that disproportionately affect New York City’s minority communities. So how dangerous is exposing systemic corruption in this force? Just ask Frank Serpico.

To read the rest visit Documentary magazine.

Top 10 Picks for IDFA 2018

The program for the 31st International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November 14th – 25th) — the first under the new artistic directorship of Syrian documentary filmmaker Orwa Nyrabia — feels equal parts familiar and fresh. On the one hand, as in years past, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the world’s largest nonfiction film festival. Once again the fest will include exceptional industry events like the IDFA Forum (and Docs for Sale, the IDFA Bertha Fund, IDFA Academy, etc.), competitions (14 in total), and more meet-and-greets and parties than one can reasonably attend. (Do I stop by the Korean night of food and music or the Scandinavian reception?)

On the other hand, Nyrabia and his team have made the upcoming event more navigable than ever, with a slimmed-down lineup — only a dozen films in each competition category this time — and a new site feature called Program Pathways, which groups films into 15 thematic categories (everything from “Lovers, Rebels, and Skateboarders,” to “Show Me Your ID,” to “Back to the USSR,” and “Backstage Politics”). This inspired me to get organized and create my own personal “Top 10” list of events not to be missed.

To read my suggestions visit Filmmaker magazine.

“What We Really Seem To Be Documenting…Is A Concerted Shift Away From An America That Sees Itself As A Land Of Immigrants Towards Something Else”: Andrés Caballero And Sofian Khan On Their DOC NYC Premiering The Interpreters

With anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise globally, and with a U.S. president who champions a ban on all Muslims to this country, Andrés Caballero and Sofian Khan’s (IFP-supported) The Interpreters serves as a timely corrective, to say the least. Their up-close-and-personal doc follows three men from Iraq and Afghanistan (and one American sergeant fighting the byzantine U.S. bureaucracy on behalf of his Baghdadi friend) who served U.S. troops as interpreters — not “translators,” since their role as intermediaries went well beyond mere language — as they struggle to keep the faith and avoid death while waiting to gain asylum in the land they risked their lives for.

Filmmaker was fortunate enough to chat with the clear-eyed co-directors prior to the film’s Veterans Day premiere at DOC NYC.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“The film brings audiences both the joys and pains of our political system via high school”: Alexandra Stergiou and Lexi Henigman on their DOC NYC-premiering The Candidates

If you spent the 2016 election season trying to wrap your head around the surreal circus that passed for political campaigning, just imagine actually participating in it while studying for exams. Such was the situation for the students of Townsend Harris High School in Queens, which since 1996 has included in its curriculum an as-close-to-real-life-as-possible Election Simulation. Fortunately, filmmakers Alexandra Stergiou and Lexi Henigman were there to capture it all. On one side is Russian-American Daniel, aka Trump, trying to focus on making America great again instead of grabbing women by the pussy. On the other, there’s Pakistani-American Misbah, aka Hillary, wooing votes with pizza and halal while coolly parrying xenophobic attacks (and all while wearing the hijab). And of course, there are stand-ins for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Bill, Melania, the media, the campaign operatives and all the rest of the sordid “swamp.”

Filmmaker caught up with the co-directors to get the scoop on their fly-on-the-wall look at civic (mis?)education prior to the film’s November 10th premiere at DOC NYC.

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We See Documentary Film as an Inherently Collaborative Process”: Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin on their DOC NYC premiering The Providers

Laura Green and Anna Moot-Levin’s IFP-supported The Providers is a film I regrettably left off my must-see list at Full Frame, most likely because a doc that follows a doctor, a nurse practitioner and a physician assistant serving rural communities abandoned by our traditional (and traditionally broken) healthcare system sounded like something that might put this liberal urbanite to sleep. But in one of those lucky film fest coincidences, I ended up chatting with the doc’s co-director Laura Green on the ride back to the Raleigh-Durham airport, and mentioned I was returning to Santa Fe. Which is both a drive away and worlds apart from the rural areas of northern New Mexico where The Providers takes place.

Fortunately, the film’s DOC NYC premiere (November 9th at Cinépolis Chelsea and November 12th at IFC Center) has now provided a second chance to sing the film’s praises. Filmmaker spoke with co-directors Green and Moot-Levin about their beautifully-composed doc, which immerses us in the lives of three unsung heroes quietly making a difference on the margins, even as urban bubble dwellers like me ignore our neighbors outside the city line.

To read the rest visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We found that securing institutions and private funders was more viable after we could share the breadth of the film in a meaningful way”: Hunter Robert Baker and Jordan Fein on their DOC NYC premiering The Blessing

The Blessing, the latest from the Emmy Award-winning team of Hunter Robert Baker and Jordan Fein, is the story of a Navajo coal miner and single dad as well as his teenage daughter, who navigate life on their reservation in northern Arizona. Other than Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside’s stealthy stunner América, I can’t think of another documentary I’ve seen this year in which the simplest of premises yields such an emotional powder keg. The film’s a nearly Shakespearean drama, one in which a deeply religious father is forced to choose between sacrilege (taking part in the destruction of his sacred tribal mountain) and feeding his kid (as coal mining is the sole industry on the rez). Meanwhile his daughter is forced to choose between saving her mentally and physically exhausted dad from any further stress and being true to herself (she has a passion for playing football, not running cross country like her siblings).

Filmmaker caught up with the acutely attuned co-directors to learn more about their riveting film prior to The Blessing’s November 9th premiere at DOC NYC.

To read the rest visit Filmmaker magazine.

Five Picks for the Ninth Edition of DOC NYC

As a documentary addict who probably attends more nonfiction festivals than can be considered sane, I’m always on the lookout for reasons why I shouldn’t wait for Netflix. And this year’s 9th edition of DOC NYC (November 8th – 15th) is chockfull of one-of-a-kind events. With that in mind, here are just five of my picks for getting off the couch and into the theater.

To read the list visit Filmmaker magazine.

Wonder Women Directors at the 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival

The 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 27 – November 3) featured a strikingly eclectic abundance of Specialty Series discussions and workshops this year. There was “In Conversation” (one with Barry Jenkins, another with Armie Hammer), a three-part Below the Line Panel Series (Casting, Costume Design and Production Design), and Animation Corner: Art in Motion. There was also the TV Sidebar (Starz’s Outlander was the focus, with creators and cast from the show in town — even a costume exhibit at the SCAD Museum of Art), and a Writers Guild of America-affiliated program (Writers on Writing:The Front Runner featured Jason Reitman). Exhibitions excitingly included one on Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, with its wonderful, outsider-art-style sets.

But the one panel I got up early for was the Wonder Women Panel Series: Directors, at the airy, light-infused Gutstein Gallery. Entertainment Weekly staff writer Devan Coggan moderated a surprisingly down-to-earth discussion that featured actresses-turned-directors Heather Graham (Half Magic), Polly Draper (Stella’s Last Weekend), Hannah Marks (After Everything) and Anna Martemucci, aka A.M. Lukas (One Cambodian Family Please for My Pleasure). Also present were this year’s Sundance Film Festival Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award-winner Christina Choe (Nancy) and elder indie stateswomen Karyn Kusama (Destroyer) and Debra Granik (whose powerfully nuanced Leave No Trace unfortunately didn’t screen during the fest).

To read all about what has (and hasn't) changed in Hollywood post-Time's Up visit Filmmaker magazine.

“There Are Unlikely Protagonists Everywhere”: The 5th Docs to Watch Roundtable at the 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival

Celebrating its fifth edition, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable is the number one reason I’ve been making the late October pilgrimage to Georgia’s charming city of (Spanish moss-draped) squares for the past few years. (That and the festival’s abundance of southern hospitality, of course. In addition to being the only fest I’ve ever been to that provides buffet-style breakfasts, lunches and dinners, guests are treated to some truly top-notch lodging. In my case, it was the lovely, Savannah River-adjacent Kimpton Brice Hotel, a mere five-minute walk from the fest’s Marshall House headquarters and the majority of the screening venues.)

Moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s extremely deft and knowledgeable columnist Scott Feinberg, Docs to Watch is, as Feinberg put it in his intro this year, a chance to hear from the documentary equivalent of his fantasy football team. This time around the lineup included a whopping 14 filmmakers hoping to score Oscar glory: Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), Tim Wardle (Three Identical Strangers), Matt Tyrnauer (Studio 54), Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster (Science Fair), Julie Cohen and Betsy West (RBG), Alan Hicks and Rashida Jones (Quincy), Nathaniel Kahn (The Price of Everything), Gabe Polsky (In Search of Greatness), Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo) and Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment).

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Sometimes You Abandon a Wrong Idea and It Comes Back to You in the Right Form”: Patrick Wang on His Four-Hour Double Feature A Bread Factory

Patrick Wang (a 25 New Face alum) takes a painstakingly nuanced, intimate approach to delicate subjects, specifically the ways in which we deal with — and don’t deal with — loss and the rippling effects in life after a death. His first feature, the breathtaking, Independent Spirit Award-nominated In the Family, and 2015’s Cannes and SXSW-screening The Grief of Others, which will finally be hitting theaters November 2nd, would make for a great marathon viewing alone. (Provided it came with a big box of Kleenex.)

And now Wang has created a work that is simultaneously lighter in tone, and his most ambitious undertaking yet — the two-part, four-hour, cast of 100 (including Tyne Daly in one of the leads) A Bread Factory, Part One: For the Sake of Gold and Part Two: Walk with Me a While. The film follows Dorothea and Greta, a couple fighting to keep their four-decade old, small town arts center open even as they’re being pushed out by Chinese performance art stars May and Ray (famous for their piece about the “hierarchy of furniture”) at the new FEEL Institute down the street. Not to mention the singing and tap-dancing techies (yes, it’s also part musical, which makes one wonder if Wang is a masochist for logistics) that invade the Bread Factory’s parking lot by the busload (selfie sticks firmly in hand).

Filmmaker had the chance to chat with the director — a Texas-born MIT grad, who is also the son of Taiwanese immigrants — about community, composing music, and the danger of accidentally contributing to the xenophobic viewpoint. A Bread Factory (Part 1 and Part 2) opens in theaters October 26th.

To read my interview with Wang visit Filmmaker magazine.

The Blessing brings a bright moral compass to a dark world

Watching The Blessing, Hunter Robert Baker and Jordan Fein’s exquisite portrait of one family on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, during the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival this month marked one of the rare times I’ve seen a doc that could have used a longer (theatrical) cut. So wrapped up was I in the everyday struggles of Lawrence Gilmore, a single father of five, and his nonconformist daughter Caitlin, that I could have used an added half hour or so of breathing space between scenes, some time to pause and take a break from this unrelenting, emotionally traumatic, complicated drama.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

Doc Stars of the Month: Rudy Valdez and Cindy Shank, The Sentence

Part home movie, part activist doc, Rudy Valdez's The Sentence is that rare film that can bring even the most jaded filmgoer (yes, that would be me) to tears. Indie cinematographer Valdez spent nearly a decade shooting hundreds of hours of footage to create a portrait of his own close-knit family in the aftermath of his sister Cindy Shank's incarceration — the consequence of what's colloquially referred to as "the girlfriend problem." Shank, who'd never before been in trouble with the law, was sentenced to 15 years — the mandatory minimum — on conspiracy charges after her boyfriend, a drug dealer, was murdered. (Basically, she ended up taking the fall for the crimes he'd committed.) Six years after his death — after she'd been cleared of any wrongdoing, after she'd turned her life around — the cops suddenly came calling, and simply whisked away the devoted mother from her three young girls and loving husband.

With Valdez's heartfelt visceral doc set to air on HBO on October 15, Documentary was fortunate enough to chat with the devoted siblings about their firsthand experience with the Kafkaesque entity we (ironically!) call the US justice system.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“What is Our Responsibility to Survivors?”: Alexandria Bombach on her Sundance-Winner On Her Shoulders

Recently announced Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nadia Murad, a survivor of the Yazidi genocide and a current human rights activist, is the star of On Her Shoulders, Alexandria Bombach’s Sundance-winning (both for Best Documentary and the U.S. Documentary Directing Award) portrait of Murad as she navigates a world that would be overwhelming and intimidating for any 23-year-old, let alone one who has experienced unspeakable crimes at the hands of ISIS. But speak Murad must — to the prying media, to the cold bureaucratic UN, to indistinguishable assorted government officials. And to the refugees at camps who look to her as a modern day Moses, heaven-sent to lead her people out of relentless misery.

Filmmaker caught up with Bombach to discuss the director’s fly-on-the-wall journey with this tireless yet strikingly fragile crusader prior to the doc’s theatrical debut (October 19 at NYC’s Village East Cinemas, October 24 for LA, with a national rollout to follow).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Call Her Ganda is an indictment of Western imperialism, transphobia, and injustice

PJ Raval’s Call Her Ganda is a film I’ve been raving about since catching it at Hot Docs last spring. It’s the story of Jennifer Laude – Filipina, trans and a sometime sex worker – whose 2014 murder at the hands of a US Marine stationed overseas might have gone unnoticed, like the vast majority of victims of violence fitting Jennifer’s many marginalized identities. Instead the 26-year-old’s death sparked not only a national outcry, but led to an international showdown over issues far beyond gender or sex – and straight into matters of unequal justice, unleashed militarism and American imperialism.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

“We Sometimes Think of the Film as a Quirky Guide to Grieving”: Elan and Jonathan Bogarín on 306 Hollywood

At first, the notion of sibling filmmakers creating a doc about clearing out their recently deceased grandma’s house in New Jersey struck me as a potential recipe for a navel-gazing home movie. But the sister-brother team of Elan and Jonathan Bogarín, 25 New Faces alum, is not your average documentarian duo (even as their beloved Jewish grandmother is a familiar character — at least to those of us who grew up with idiosyncratic Jewish grandmas in Jersey. My physician grandmother in Teaneck likewise believed there was no wrong time for gefilte fish).

Yet it’s this transformation of a very personal story into an artistic work resonating with universal themes — the deep sense of loss that comes with death, contrasted with the jubilant celebration of a life well lived — that makes their film so emotionally powerful. And it’s the magnificent imagination of the Bogaríns themselves, who decide to treat their fashion designer grandma’s home at 306 Hollywood in Newark as an archaeological excavation site (even going so far as to visit Rome to better understand the process!) that makes this “magical realist documentary” alternately inspiring, heartbreaking and, above all, innocently enchanting.

Filmmaker caught up with the outside-the-box-thinking siblings prior to the film’s theatrical release today.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

How to act like a man in the age of #MeToo

The recent #MeToo years have made me wonder why the sexual assaults I experienced as a teen didn’t have much impact on my life. At first I chalked it up to my own resilience – though now I’ve come to believe it was as much in part due to the behavior of the men around the men who harassed me.

To read my reflections in this post-Harvey Weinstein et al environment visit Global Comment.

Flight of a Bullet: A nailbiting 80 minute single take of a documentary

Perhaps the biggest surprise of this year’s Open City Documentary Festival – a five-day, under-the-radar gem situated in the heart of London, and dedicated to championing nonfiction work as an art – was that my favorite film of the fest actually ended up taking top prize. Beata Bubenec’s Flight of a Bullet never garnered the sort of buzz during its premiere at True/False that it did over in Europe. (Thankfully, perhaps, as the Russian director faced not only death threats, but also protests and a gas attack by ultra-nationalists when it showed at Moscow’s Artdocfest).

To read my review visit Global Comment.

Keep Calm and Doc On: The 8th Open City Documentary Festival

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.

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Star of the Month: Judge Ruchie Freier, Paula Eiselt's '93Queen'

As a secular Jew who resided for over a decade in pre-Girls Brooklyn, I'm not sure which Williamsburg community proved more inscrutable to my eyes — hipster or Hasidic. Both appeared isolated in secret echo-chambered societies, living blocks away — and worlds apart — from one another. And the notion of a feminist Hasid would strike me as outlandish as a hipster sporting payot.

Enter Rachel "Ruchie" Freier to upend my preconceived notions. Freier is the pigeonhole-avoiding star of filmmaker Paula Eiselt's 93Queen, a fascinating look at America’s very first all-female EMT corps—started in the heart of Borough Park, Brooklyn, home to one of the world's largest communities of Hasidic Jews. Freier, one of the founders of this untraditional mobile medical service (dubbed "Ezras Nashim," or "women who help"), is simultaneously a deeply religious family woman wedded to a strict faith, and a practicing lawyer unafraid to stand up for a Hasidic woman's right not to, as one of her EMT colleagues puts it, "ever be too embarrassed to call for help."

Needless to say, Documentary is thrilled that the incredibly busy Freier — whose bio now includes the distinction of being "the first Hasidic Jewish woman to be elected as a civil court judge in New York State, and the first Hasidic woman to hold public office in United States history" — found time during Rosh Hashanah preparations to answer a few wide-ranging questions via email.

93Queen, an IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund grantee, airs September 17 on PBS' POV.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“Silent Solidarity” and Portraying Sexual Violence on Screen: Jayisha Patel on Her TIFF Short Circle

London-based director Jayisha Patel has amassed an impressive resume in a remarkably short period of time. Since 2014 Patel’s documentary shorts have screened LAFF, SXSW, NYFF, the Berlin International Film Festival and beyond, racking up numerous awards along the way. Her latest VR project — Notes to My Father, the world’s first live-action 360-degree documentary on sex trafficking, commissioned by Oculus — premiered at Sundance. Her most recent short, the Berlinale-premiering Circle, a sensitive portrait of an adolescent rape survivor caught in the endless loop of India’s gender-based violence, made its Toronto debut this week. Currently an artist in residence at the UK’s Somerset House (where she’s at work on her latest immersive experience, After The Fire, a collaboration with DFI’s Anidox:lab), the international media-maker found time to chat with Filmmaker about a wide variety of topics, including working in the short format and addressing empathy in VR. And how Brexit and Trump changed her thoughts about her own TIFF-selected doc.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We Need to Strive for a Better, More Inclusive, Emerging Tech Landscape”: Paisley Smith on her VR Project Homestay and Advocating for Women in VR/AR

For the past eight years London’s Open City Documentary Festival has been dedicated to “celebrating the art of non-fiction,” and the upcoming 2018 edition (September 4-9) looks to be doing so in a creatively cutting edge way when it comes to immersive media. In addition to a wide-ranging Expanded Realities exhibition (divided into three themed sections, A New Lens, Motion and Sonic), OCDF will present a full day (September 7) Expanded Realities symposium featuring deep-thinking speakers tackling some of the most pressing issues affecting new media-makers today. One discussion I’m especially looking forward to is the “Barrier to Entry: Accessibility in XR” talk, which will focus on the “big questions of who gets to tell the stories, who gets to experience them and what the industry can do to break down barriers and allow more diverse voices to inform the future of digital storytelling.”

And one of the artists I’m most looking forward to hearing from on that panel is Paisley Smith, a Fulbright scholar who nabbed the Sundance Institute and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship just this year. Filmmaker caught up with the Canadian filmmaker for a sneak peek of her talk and to discuss her latest VR project Homestay, her life as a binational media-maker and her work advocating for women in the emerging tech world.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Star of the Month: Sergeant Edwin Raymond, Stephen Maing's Crime + Punishment

Though heroic activists have been pushing for change in policing across the country in recent years, they've mostly sprung from those communities suffering disproportionately under unjust law enforcement policies—not from the institution tasked with enforcing those policies. Which is what makes the NYPD 12, a dozen of NYC's finest who are truly living up to the moniker, so unique. Comprised of minority officers fed up with carrying out racially discriminatory practices and meeting quotas (outlawed, but nevertheless expected), these whistleblowers spent years putting both career and life on the line covertly gathering evidence to bring their unbendingly bureaucratic employer to court. And for most of that time, intrepid director Stephen Maing (High Tech, Low Life) followed along with them—gaining unprecedented access to the secret recordings and blue wall of silence's piercing accounts that make up his latest tour de force (no pun intended), Crime + Punishment.

Needless to say, it was a privilege to speak with Sergeant Edwin Raymond via email about his life as both a prominent civil rights activist and a proud cop. Crime + Punishment premieres in theaters and online August 24, through Hulu.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #146: ANDREW SOLOMON

“How do we decide what to cure and what to celebrate?” asked Andrew Solomon, rhetorically, during the New Yorker Festival. The lecturer and author of Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity is referring to the transformation of the “illness” of homosexuality into the “identity” of gayness in a telling scene from Rachel Dretzin’s recent documentary adaptation.

Solomon, a once-closeted gay man who now happily lives with his husband, serves as both character in and producer on Dretzin’s film. His decade-long investigation into families with children born “far from the tree” — who are surviving and thriving with everything from autism to Down syndrome to dwarfism — is both a celebration of diversity under threat, and a call to society to reexamine our long-held assumptions of exactly who needs to be “fixed.”

I spoke with Solomon prior to the film’s theatrical release about serving as both a producer and a character, distinguishing what to cure from what to celebrate, and the difference between promoting books versus films.

To read my interview visit The Rumpus.

“I Had to Think How to Distill the Spirit of the Book, and Not Try in Any Way to Replicate It”: Rachel Dretzin on Far From the Tree

As someone who is not a parent, never wanted to be a parent, and still says a silent prayer of “thank heaven that’s not me” every time I walk by a mom or dad struggling with a stroller, Rachel Dretzin’s Far From the Tree — based on Andrew Solomon’s NY Times bestseller Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity — at first glance seemed far from making my must-watch-docs list. Which is precisely how I know it’s as good as it is. When I finally got around to catching it on screener recently, Dretzin’s film — which premiered at last year’s DOC NYC and was the opening night picture at this year’s Montclair Film Festival — not only had me riveted for its entire 90-some-minute running time but for days afterward. Forget parents and children for the moment. Far From the Tree is nothing less than a startling, powerful portrait of what it means to be human – in all our endlessly diverse ways.

The doc itself focuses on several families in which a child is “far from the tree” – be it due to Down syndrome, autism, dwarfism, or having committed an inexplicable crime. Contrary to preconceived notions, not only are these parents and their offspring thriving, not just surviving, but as Solomon himself (also a character in the film, as his book was inspired by his own personal experience of being an only gay child) puts it, in his decade of reporting he’d not once met a parent who said, “I’d like to turn my child in for a better model.” Indeed, as the film expertly shows, a challenging child is often full of more life-affirming revelations than any so-called “normal” one.

Filmmaker was fortunate enough to chat with the Emmy Award-winning documentarian prior to the film’s theatrical release today at IFC Center.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Stars of the Month: Leah Smith and Joe Stramondo, Rachel Dretzin's 'Far From the Tree'

Leah Smith defiantly refuses to believe she needs to be "fixed." A media and entertainment advocate for the Center for Disability Rights, who holds degrees in both public relations and political science (as well as a master’s in public administration), Smith is one of several preconceived notion-upending characters in Emmy Award-winning documentarian Rachel Dretzin’s Far From the Tree. An adaptation of Andrew Solomon’s widely lauded 2012 bestseller Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, the film is a lovingly rendered deep dive into the lives of families with challenging children quite dissimilar from themselves. It's also a radical manifesto of sorts, a visual plea to society to stop pathologizing those who fall outside our arbitrarily decided norms.

Certainly, Smith, together with husband Joe Stramondo (an assistant professor of philosophy at San Diego State and a longtime activist with a variety of disability rights organizations), are the film's most academic couple—and the most fun-loving and deeply satisfied duo I've seen onscreen all year. Unfortunately, however, Leah and Joe—both dwarfs who absolutely do not "suffer" from dwarfism—also happen to be delightfully unconventional individuals whose very identity might be "cured" out of existence in a not-too-distant day.

Needless to say, it was an honor to have both these role models provide their words of wisdom to Documentary prior to the film’s July 20th theatrical release, through IFC Films and Sundance Selects.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

"The Main Way to Force Strategic Failures and Fix Broken Elections is to Pay Attention”: Kimberly Reed on Dark Money

With the sudden renewed focus on the Supreme Court this summer the theatrical premiere (July 13th at NYC’s IFC Center, July 27th at the Landmark Nuart in LA) of Kimberly Reed’s Dark Money couldn’t have come at a more apropos time. The momentous Citizens United decision of 2010 had a political game-changing impact across the U.S., nowhere more so than in Reed’s home state of Montana, a land with a long and sordid history of outside money influence — most notably from the copper barons, who once swept in to essentially buy the city of Butte. As a result, however, perhaps no state in the country is also better prepared to smell a corporate rat during election season — and to know how to fight back against an invisible billionaire invasion that affects us all.

Filmmaker spoke with the deep-diving director — a “25 New Faces of Independent Film” alum — about her twisting, six-year trip following the Big Sky folks who follow the dark money.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Whose Pride?: Expanding Diversity in “Far From the Tree”

The premise behind Emmy Award-winning Rachel Dretzin’s Far From the Tree is both simple and profound. Based on the 2012 bestselling book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon (who’s also a producer on the doc and one of the main characters), the film challenges its audience to reexamine some fundamental assumptions about human traits which society deems “defects.” Instead offering the radical notion of celebrating those “flaws” rather than attempting to “fix” them.

Case in point is Solomon’s own experience as that of a closeted gay man during a time when homosexuality was still classified as a psychological problem. He observed that which was once considered the “illness of homosexuality” slowly morph over the years into what we now recognize as the “identity of gayness.” As a now happily married man with a husband and several kids, he began to wonder what other types of folks out there didn’t need to be “cured”? Which in turn led him on a ten-year-long odyssey into the lives of families with challenging children, born “far from the tree” with autism, Down syndrome, dwarfism, and many more renegade identities.

To read my entire review visit Global Comment.

YouTube Body Horror: Penny Lane on Her Morgellons Disease Doc, The Pain of Others

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 to a scientifically unrecognized series of symptoms that seem straight out of a Cronenberg flick (crawling sensations and thread-like fibers emerging from the skin!), and it leaves the viewer with conflicting emotions and more questions than answers. Indeed, watching the film before its Rotterdam premiere I went from laughing and rolling my eyes to getting angry at these “con artists” to feeling ashamed that I was being dismissive of mental illness to wondering if one woman was a psychologically disturbed fraudster, another just lonely and mentally ill, and on and on. In other words, these psychically distressed ladies defy any easy categorization — much like Lane’s entire body of work.

Prior to the film’s June 28th NYC premiere at BAMcinemaFest, Filmmaker was fortunate enough to catch up with the very busy director who also has two shorts, Nellie Bly Makes the News and Normal Appearances (debuting in NYC as part of the Rooftop Films shorts program on July 14th), currently making the festival rounds. The Pain of Others will be released exclusively on Fandor July 1st.

To read my interview with the boundary-pushing documentarian visit Filmmaker magazine.

Unresolved Pain and the Spanish “Pact of Forgetting”: Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar Discuss The Silence of Others

Executive produced by the Almodóvars, and nabbing the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary and Peace Film Prize at this year’s Berlinale (not to mention, most recently, the Grand Jury Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest), Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar’s The Silence of Others was one of the most compelling films I caught at Hot Docs back in April. It was also unnervingly revelatory, as the Spotlight on Documentaries at IFP Week project — which will be co-presented by IFP tonight at New York’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival — deals with a disturbing piece of buried history I knew nearly nothing about.

Indeed, I’d never even heard of the “Argentine Lawsuit,” an attempt by the victims of the Franco regime’s 40-year reign of torture and murder to gain redress in Buenos Aires because Spanish law prevents any dictatorship-related crimes from being prosecuted. (Though the fact that Spain’s shameful 1977 amnesty ruling was dubbed “the Pact of Forgetting” indicates that erasure was also likely by design.)

Filmmaker was fortunate enough to speak with the co-directors, who previously collaborated on 2008’s award-winning Made in L.A., prior to the doc’s NYC premiere at HRWFF (June 19th at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, June 20th at the IFC Center).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“The Film Became About What Growing Up in the Midst of a War Does to a Child… ”: Simon Lereng Wilmont on The Distant Barking of Dogs

I discovered Simon Lereng Wilmont’s The Distant Barking of Dogs, a poetic look at everyday life on the frontline of the War in Donbass — as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old Ukrainian boy who lives with his grandmother in the warzone — at IDFA last November. After nabbing the First Appearance Award at that prestigious festival, it went on to win the Student Jury Award (from an all-kids jury) at the Docudays UA fest, where I watched as the Danish director appeared onstage only to quickly step aside so that the young protagonist and his entire family, having traveled all the way from Donetsk to Kiev, could accept the award instead.

Serendipitously, I ended up meeting and chatting with the humble inquisitive filmmaker between post-fest flights back to Schengen territory. And now thanks to the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, where the doc will be having its NYC premiere today, I’ve found the perfect excuse to continue that intriguing conversation.

Filmmaker spoke with Lereng Wilmont prior to the June 18th (Film Society of Lincoln Center) and June 19th (IFC Center) screenings.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Making a Good Movie Has to Come from the Heart, Not from a Mental Understanding of an Issue”: Matthieu Rytz on Anote’s Ark

Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Matthieu Rytz’s Anote’s Ark follows the international, one-man crusade of Anote Tong, president of Kiribati. That island republic is situated smack in the middle of the Pacific with an indigenous population — exemplified here by Sermary, a young mother of six forced to choose between family and a future in New Zealand — poised to lose their 4,000 year-old way of life as climate change will soon cause the entire country to disappear into the ocean. As the title implies, Tong is less concerned with saving Kiribati itself — he’s painfully aware it’s too late for such fanciful idealism — than in a mass relocation of its citizens to a new shared homeland. That, and in sounding the alarm that Kiribati is merely the canary in a global coalmine.

Filmmaker spoke with the Swiss director, who trained as a visual anthropologist before turning to photography and documentary work, prior to the doc’s NYC premiere at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival (June 15th at the IFC Center, June 18th at the Film Society of Lincoln Center).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“It’s Kind of Heartbreaking Sometimes to See Actors Try So Hard”: Leon Vitali on the Acting Profession and His Stanley Kubrick Doc, Filmworker

Filmworker, the title of Tony Zierra’s Cannes 2017-premiering portrait of Leon Vitali, is a term coined by the subject himself, probably still best known for his portrayal of Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon. But the former British TV star, who set aside his rising career to spend three decades as Stanley Kubrick’s behind the scenes right-hand man (and more), seems to have never fallen out of love with the acting craft.

Indeed, chatting with Kubrick’s actors’ coach/location scout/sound engineer/marketer — and current film restorer — one gets the sense that every role Kubrick tasked Vitali with was just that, a new “role.” Filmmaker spoke by phone with Vitali about his life as an actor outside the spotlight a week before Filmworker’s US premiere (at Metrograph in NYC on May 11th and Nuart in LA on May 18th, with a national rollout to follow).

To read the rest of my long and winding interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Star of the Month: Leon Vitali, Tony Zierra's ‘Filmworker'

Leon Vitali has spent his entire working life devoted to a single cause: the cinematic vision of Stanley Kubrick. After landing the role of Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, the well-known British TV star stepped out of the spotlight to become what he terms a "filmworker," doing whatever was necessary to ensure Kubrick’s next masterwork would come to fruition. From casting (he found Danny Lloyd for The Shining), coaching actors and scouting locations in pre-production, to color-correcting and sound-engineering in post, to marketing and promotion, and now restoration, there was no job too big or too small for Vitali to tackle. (Once, he even set up surveillance cameras to keep an eye on Kubrick's beloved dying cat.)

And now, through a combination of unvarnished interviews and archival footage, documentarian Tony Zierra has created a thorough portrait of this beyond-the-call-of-duty man, while also exposing the blood, sweat, tears and creative exhilaration that make up a life behind the scenes.

Documentary had the honor of speaking with the unconventional Vitali a week prior to the US release of Zierra's Filmworker (May 11 at NYC’s Metrograph, May 18 at LA's Nuart, and with a national rollout to follow, through Kino Lorber).

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Hot Docs 2018: The Silver Anniversary Edition

The 25th anniversary edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (April 26-May 6) marked my very first visit to North America’s largest nonfiction fest (and also to its host city of Toronto, for that matter). Since I’ve covered IDFA, the world’s largest doc fest, numerous times, I just assumed Hot Docs would be similar in setup and vibe. On the contrary, I was pleasantly surprised to find there are several key elements that make this Toronto mainstay its own exciting, one-of-a-kind event.

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

“It’s about the Barriers to Justice that Exist when you are Poor and Up Against a Foreign Superpower”: PJ Raval on Call Her Ganda

Fresh off its Tribeca world premiere, and currently wrapping up at Hot Docs (till Sunday, May 6th), Call Her Ganda, an alumnus of Spotlight on Documentaries at IFP Week, is the latest feature from 25 New Faces of Independent Film alum PJ Raval. The thought-provoking doc follows the heartbreaking and utterly thorny story of Jennifer Laude, much beloved by a doting mother (who called her by her nickname “Ganda,” which means “Beauty”), sisters, and her German fiancé. After a night out with girlfriends back in 2014, the 26-year-old ended up being murdered by US marine Scott Pemberton, who left her naked body in a hotel room bathroom, her head in the toilet. That Jennifer had the bad luck of being a member of an oft-ostracized community — in this case trans sex workers — in a country (the Philippines) that allows for the US military to be exempt from its local laws, is what makes her tragic death also so very complicated.

What makes Call Her Ganda so powerful is that Raval smartly widens the lens to tell Jennifer’s tale through the afterlife of her death, an event that brought together three real-life wonder women — a grieving mother who refuses to let her daughter be shamed, a tenacious, trans American journalist with roots in the Philippines, and a cisgender female lawyer determined to put a check on US imperialism.

Filmmaker caught up with Raval during Hot Docs to discuss what happens when human rights activism collides with American impunity in a country now run by a brutal, anti-Western, strongman.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Do Not Be Daunted by the Magnitude of the Challenge in Front of You”: Assia Boundaoui on Her Surveillance Doc, The Feeling of Being Watched

An Algerian-American raised in Bridgeview, Illinois, just south of Chicago, journalist and filmmaker Assia Boundaoui grew up being watched. The FBI has been aggressively spying on her predominantly Arab-American community at least as far back as the ’90s, despite the fact that the law enforcement organization uncovered very little lawbreaking in the process.

And now Boundaoui has turned the tables — or rather the lens — on the Federal Bureau with her debut feature, The Feeling of Being Watched (an alumnus of Spotlight on Documentaries at IFP Week). The film’s a nonfiction journey that takes Boundaoui from dogged FOIA requests to a survey of our long history of racial and religious profiling — ultimately ending in, what she terms, a strategy for “citizen under-sight.”

Filmmaker caught up with the festival-hopping director during the film’s international premiere at Hot Docs (right on the heels of its Tribeca world premiere).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Ukraine-Based Docudays Offers a Robust Slate of Human Rights Docs

The 15th Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (March 23-30) presented 62 films from 36 countries, and brought together over 200 participants to the architecturally eclectic city of Kiev. This was my first trip to Ukraine, and I'll admit, I wasn't expecting a country that had just had a revolution four years prior, and was currently embroiled in a no-end-in-sight war on its border, would prove to be such an inspiring environment to watch and talk docs.

Yet after a heady five days of soaking in the surrounding sights, and the festival's engaging panels and strong selection of films, all doubt in my mind disappeared.

To read about the rest of my nonfiction flick trip visit Documentary magazine.

Full Frame Fetes Jehane Noujaim

This year's Full Frame Tribute honoree, Jehane Noujaim, is no stranger to the 21-year-old Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, having brought both her very first film, Startup.com (co-directed with Chris Hegedus, and produced by DA Pennebaker) to Durham over a decade and a half ago, and three years later, 2004's prescient Control Room. Since then, of course, the Harvard-educated, globetrotting director (she splits her time between the US and Egypt) has gone on to be nominated for an Academy Award (for 2013's The Square), as well as winning the TED Prize (which allowed her to create the globally broadcast, multimedia event Pangea Day—which in turn inspired TEDx, which blends live community events with TED Talks). Most recently, Noujaim partnered with Angelina Jolie to executive-produce Nora Twomey's The Breadwinner, an animated feature that also garnered an Oscar nomination just this year.

And fortunately for those of us attending the fest earlier this month, Noujaim sat down with festival director Deirdre Haj for a wide-ranging discussion about her body of work and its continued relevance today, as part of this year's A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy conversations (which have been an integral part of Full Frame for the past eight years). A Discussion with Jehane Noujaim took place at the Durham Hotel at noon on a Friday to an eager (and probably over-caffeinated) crowd.

To read all about it visit Documentary magazine.

A Follow-Up Interview with Erik Ljung (THE BLOOD IS AT THE DOORSTEP)

It’s been a year since I first caught Erik Ljung’s (SXSW 2017-premiering) The Blood is at the Doorstep on the festival circuit. The doc’s title is a reference to the chant of activists who’d gathered outside the home of the Milwaukee attorney general after the senseless killing of a black man, in this case Dontre Hamilton, who was shot 14 times by a white officer with a history of community complaints. But if you think you’ve seen this heartbreaking, enraging story (too many times) before think again. This was pre-Ferguson, and Ljung – a white guy, but also a Milwaukee-based filmmaker living not far from where Dontre died – gained access to the Hamilton family over years, in the process painting a powerful portrait of daily life for a grieving mother and brother long after the sound bite-scooping camera crews have gone home.

I spoke to Ljung in-depth about the challenges he faced in telling a story he himself questioned whether he even had the right to tell.

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

Documentary in the Time of Fake News at The 21st Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

This year’s 21st edition of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 5th-8th) boasted everything a doc geek would want in a top tier fest — strong selections, a nurturing southern hospitality, and many easily approachable big-name documentarians. And, as in year’s past (seven to be exact), the not to be missed, A&E Indiefilms Speakeasy conversations, which bring together some of the deepest thinkers in doc-making to discuss career and craft — and also to wrestle with some of the most pressing issues facing filmmakers (and the general public) today.

Such was the case with one Friday afternoon Speakeasy I attended titled “Documentary in the Time of Fake News.” Moderated by Christopher Clements (The Cleaners, Inventing Tomorrow), it featured Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment), Laura Nix (Inventing Tomorrow) and Maxim Pozdorovkin (Our New President). As the audience that had gathered at the Durham Hotel settled in with coffee and cocktails, Clements began with a decidedly Trump-era question for the panel: “Does truth exist anymore?”

To read the rest visit Filmmaker magazine.

#DocsSoWhite: The Gatekeepers at The 21st Annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

Recently, I’d been pondering why the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival always tops my must-attend U.S. doc fest list. Like few fests in the U.S. or Europe, Full Frame truly walks the walk — it’s a top tier, mainstream nonfiction festival in which the people in power are almost exclusively women. Indeed, one look at the 10-member staff page on the Full Frame website reveals just two male faces (only one of which is white). Then there are the attendees, the other ingredient that makes Full Frame truly special — as many folks of color as white. The one thing all these people, organizers and attendees, have in common — other than a passion for nonfiction cinema — is a desire to think deep. Indeed, Full Frame is one of the few fests where I’ll willingly stay for the Q&As as that random audience member stepping up to the mic is often knowledgeable enough to have served as the moderator.

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

From Euromaidan to the Naked Cowboy: The 15th Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival

Covering this year’s Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (March 23-30), a 15-year old event held primarily in Podil, an eclectic artists’ hub (think Kreuzberg or Williamsburg on the cusp of gentrification) and one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kiev, was an experience both endlessly inspiring and completely surreal. And though I’ve attended other fests in once communist countries (Camerimage in Poland, Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), my first visit to Ukraine also marked the first time at an international fest that I found myself fully aware of my otherness. (Possibly because I was the only American in attendance.) And the first time the host country’s current events colored every screening, each discussion and random encounter. Indeed, the Euromaidan Revolution had overthrown the government of Viktor Yanukovych just four years prior, and the subsequent War in Donbass still rages today. The ongoing conflict with Russian separatists (and the Kremlin), as the locals told me over and over, is a “sensitive” topic.

To read the rest visit Filmmaker magazine.