Doc Star of the Month: Claudia Lacy, 'Always in Season'

Jacqueline Olive’s debut feature, Always in Season — its title a nod to the year-round racial terror that African-Americans, especially in the Deep South, historically have experienced — picked up the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency at this past Sundance Film Festival. Though the film explores the domestic terrorist act of lynching and its legacy through multiple angles — from sober, talking-head interviews to Monroe, Georgia’s harrowing, annual lynching reenactment — the beating heart of the film lies within one specific woman: Claudia Lacy.

Five years ago, Lacy — a native of Bladenboro, North Carolina, who had returned home to raise her teenage son after his older brother Pierre had left for college — was launched into an unthinkable nightmare. Her youngest child Lennon, a high school football star, was found hanging from a swing set in a park, his death immediately ruled a suicide. That Lennon had no history of depression, left no suicide note, and seemed to have injuries consistent with what one local mortician likened to those of a victim of a bar brawl, did not seem to faze law enforcement, which quickly closed the case.

Troublingly, to this day no one has been held responsible for the dubious investigation afforded this supposed suicide. And to this day Claudia Lacy continues to demand transparency from those in charge, her way of grieving while fighting for justice for her son. Which is why Documentary could think of no nonfiction protagonist more deserving of the role of September's “Doc Star of the Month.”

To read my inspiring interview visit Documentary magazine.

“The Privileged Life Can Also Come at a Price”: Eva Mulvad on her TIFF-Premiering Love Child

Having committed adultery and conceived a child out of wedlock, a couple is forced to choose between keeping secrets and family ties — or being true to love and residing in exile. Though that could be the plot of an old-fashioned romance novel (or modern-day soap opera), it’s actually the all-too-real situation the protagonists at the heart of Eva Mulvad’s documentary Love Child are forced to reckon with.

Over the course of six years Mulvad (the Danish documentarian behind lighter dramatic fare such as the Grey Gardens-in-Portugal standout The Good Life, and more recently, A Cherry Tale and A Modern Man) follows Iranian lovebirds Leila and Sahand, and their young son, as they flee their country, await asylum in Turkey, and attempt to start some semblance of a “normal” life. All the while knowing that the consequences of their initial momentous decision to leave could be never touching beloved family members again. Or a deportation to a homeland in which extramarital relationships are punishable by death.

Filmmaker was fortunate to catch up with Mulvad to discuss this latest work soon after the film world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“No One Saw a Thing” on SundanceTV

Avi Belkin, the director and executive producer behind SundanceTV’s (currently streaming) true crime series No One Saw a Thing, has described his six-part look at a nearly four-decade-old cold case as a Rashomon-style inquiry. The Israeli director – whose Mike Wallace Is Here premiered at Sundance back in January and in theaters just this past July – revisits the 1981 murder of “bully” Ken Rex McElroy (and the multiple violent incidents that followed his death) in Skidmore, Missouri by going to the small town and interviewing those who were there at the time. Literally. For though no one was ever charged with shooting McElroy in the head, while his wife sat beside him in his truck, there were by some estimates around 60 witnesses to the killing. And yet, once investigators came calling the entire town closed ranks. No one was convicted back then because “no one saw a thing.”

To read my entire review visit Global Comment.

“It’s About Pursuing ‘Truth’ and How Each Journalist Interprets That Word for the Rest of Us”: Yung Chang on His TIFF-Debuting This Is Not a Movie

Long a thorn in the establishment’s side, veteran foreign correspondent Robert Fisk has spent the past four-decades-plus reporting “subjectively” from frontlines the world over, most notably in the Middle East. An Arabic speaker, who interviewed Osama bin Laden three times before 9/11, Fisk has forever served “on the side of the suffering,” political implications be damned. Unsurprisingly, this has caused the Beirut-based Brit to become a controversial, if highly respected, figure, labeled both human rights advocate and terrorist sympathizer alike.

Now in his seventies and still dodging bullets, both literally and figuratively, Fisk continues to file columns for The Independent (he left The Times soon after Murdoch purchased it) with a near-religious dedication. It’s a dedication perhaps matched only by Canadian documentarian Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight), who tags along with Fisk on his current reporting crusades — and in the process paints a revealing cinematic portrait of an uncompromising journo hellbent on exposing modern-day news’s (i.e., Murdoch’s) “fair and balanced” charade. As Fisk himself damningly puts it at one point in Chang’s riveting This Is Not a Movie, if he were covering the Nazi death camps he would not be seeking comment from the SS spokesman.

Filmmaker had the good fortune to catch up with the Ottawa-born Chang just prior to his fourth feature’s Toronto premiere (September 9 and 11).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Tried to Take a Look at These Things from a Distant Future”: Thomas Heise on his TIFF-Premiering Berlin Doc, Heimat is a Space in Time

Winner of the Caligari Film Prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Heimat is a Space in Time is German documentarian Thomas Heise’s absorbing look at 20th-century history in his homeland via his own family’s artifacts — most notably astonishingly intimate letters that sweep us from the rise of Nazism, to the Cold War division of the country, to life on the Stasi-controlled side of the Berlin Wall. Three generations of firsthand accounts, read in unobtrusive voiceover, are gracefully interwoven with family photos and archival images to create a nearly three-and-a-half-hour cinematic epic — one that unfolds in digestible parts like a great novel.

Filmmaker took the opportunity to catch up via email with Heise (and his English-translating producer Heino Deckert) prior to the doc’s North American premiere in the Wavelengths section of the Toronto International Film Festival (September 6 and 15).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.