Doc Stars of the Month: Nunu and Patrick Hogan, 'Through the Night'

Before the coronavirus crisis, the “essential worker” — flexible shorthand for the anonymous, hardworking, underpaid populace that allow our country (and all countries) to function — was hidden in plain sight. But with this sudden awareness that not just healthcare professionals, but also everyone from factory workers to grocery store employees are putting their lives on the line for little acknowledgment and even less financial renumeration should come some collective soul-searching. Fortunately, there’s Loira Limbal’s Through the Night to spur us on. In her Tribeca-premiering (and IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund Grantee) doc, Limbal, an Afro-Dominican filmmaker and DJ — and Senior Vice President of Programs at Firelight Media — follows two working mothers and their trusted caregivers, Deloris “Nunu” and Patrick Hogan, whose lives intersect at the 24-hour childcare center the Hogans founded and run in New Rochelle, New York. And through these individual heartfelt stories, we’re treated to both a “love letter to single mothers and caregivers” (as Limbal has described her film) and a wakeup call. Yes, we as Americans are truly blessed that private citizens like the Hogans have stepped up to fill in a glaring gap in the social safety net. But what does that say about us, when we in the richest country in the world blithely rely on folks like the Hogans, a couple barely making ends meet, to keep the children of those barely making ends meet physically safe and emotionally healthy? So to provide some answers, Documentary turned to the knowledgeable providers themselves. And we’re truly honored that Nunu and Patrick Hogan agreed to take time away (albeit with multiple children competing for attention in the background) from their literally round-the-clock schedule to be featured as our December Doc Stars of the Month.

To read my interview with the heroic duo visit Documentary magazine.

Ring in the New: Top Female Filmmakers of IDFA 2020

As I’ve noted in the past, fulfilling the 5050×2020 Gender Parity Pledge is easy pickings for any nonfiction fest. Within the documentary realm female helmers have long consistently been behind half (and often more) of the highest quality work put out every year anyhow. And this year’s hybrid International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam — which like most non-Europeans I experienced exclusively online during varying states of pandemic lockdown over its ample (November 18-December 6) run — proved no exception to the rule. First there was the wealth of exhilarating new projects by acclaimed veterans to choose from. Czech master Helena Třeštíková screened her latest “time-lapse documentary” Anny, a riveting character study shot between 1996 and 2012, that follows a hardworking bathroom attendant and sometime sex worker (who didn’t start streetwalking until her mid 40s).

To read all about this year's crop of cinematic visionary women visit Filmmaker magazine.

DOK LEIPZIG 2020: NAKED TRUTHS – INTIMACY IN DOCUMENTARY FILM

If there’s one panel that really catalyzed my mind this virtual festival year it was DOK Leipzig’s “Naked Truths – Intimacy in Documentary Film” discussion. Expertly led by moderators Djamila Grandits (who seemed to be posing questions straight from my head) and Carolin Weidner, both members of the fest’s selections committee, the participants ranged from sex-on-film veterans to those who defined intimacy in completely clothed terms. There was longtime producer and Berlinale programmer Jürgen Brüning, founder of Pornfilmfestival Berlin, and his co-organizer and curator at the fest, Paulita Pappel, who is also the cofounder of Lustery. And Pia Hellenthal, director of 2019’s exquisite Searching Eva (which Brüning had selected to premiere at last year’s Berlinale). And rounding out the lineup was Julia Palmieri Mattison, whose short Play Me, I’m Yours was playing DOK Leipzig.

To read Part 2 of my panel coverage visit Hammer to Nail.

Deeyah Khan conquers hate with a camera

INTERVIEW: Modern Times Review speaks with Deeyah Khan on choosing subjects, gaining access, and sitting down with those dedicated to making the world a more hateful place. BAFTA-nominated, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentarian Deeyah Khan, who was also the inaugural UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Artistic Freedom and Creativity, can now add the 2020 Fritt Ord Foundation Prize to her mantle. The Norwegian-Pakistani filmmaker was recently honored «for her intrepid, methodical and innovative documentary films on extremism.» Indeed. Beginning with 2012’s Banaz: A Love Story, which detailed the life and untimely death of a British-Kurdish woman murdered by her own family in a senseless «honor» killing, and on through 2015’s Jihad: A Story of the Others and 2017’s White Right: Meeting The Enemy – which involved Khan embedding with those on diverse sides of the extremist divide – the UK-based activist-artist has proved to be an uncompromising talent with one heck of a fearless gaze. And most recently, Khan has trained that gaze across the pond with not one but two films out this year, America’s War on Abortion and Muslim in Trump’s America. How she’s found time to tackle these explosive topics while also running Fuuse, the media and arts company she founded in order to put «women, people from minorities, and third-culture kids» in control of their own narratives, is a question that’s lately been front and center in the Modern Times Review mind, which is why we’re grateful Khan took a breather from her busy schedule to fill us in on choosing subjects, gaining access, and sitting down with those dedicated to making the world a more hateful place.

To read my intrepid interview visit Modern Times Review.

Underrepresented participants of war: This Rain Will Never Stop

CONFLICT: Fleeing one war and entering into another, the grief and uncertainty of one Syrian family beg the question: what drives a person to serve a country that doesn’t always appreciate the sacrifice? One of the unintended upsides of the far too many global conflicts of recent years has been the fueling of on-the-ground local filmmakers passionate to tell their country’s stories from their own insider’s POV. And one of the talents (specifically a 2019 Berlinale Talents) taking the lead in her native Ukraine is Alina Gorlova. Gorlova’s prior film No Obvious Signs, about a battle-scarred female vet of the ongoing war against Russian separatists on the border, blew my mind at Docudays UA 2018 (and won Gorlova and her protagonist top honors at the human rights fest). And now Gorlova has continued to prove she’ll likely be a cinematic force for years to come with This Rain Will Never Stop, world premiering at the hybrid IDFA 2020.

To read all about it visit Modern Times Review.

Doc Star of the Month: Joy Buolamwini, 'Coded Bias'

Safe to say that Joy Buolamwini, civil rights star of both the tech world and of Shalini Kantayya’s Coded Bias, a globetrotting investigation into how the building blocks of AI (built, of course, almost exclusively by straight white men) have basically charted a course for systemically embedding universal inequality into our everyday lives, never set out to be either. The MIT Media Lab researcher just wanted to create a feel-good “aspire mirror” (which she eventually did) and was having trouble getting the facial-recognition software to see her face. This sent Buolamwini, a Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Fellow (and onetime competitive pole vaulter!), on an innocent search for answers — which ended in the darkest of realizations. Literally. Turns out that the supposedly “neutral” algorithms behind the software rendered her Blackness (and femaleness) invisible. Which is why Documentary is grateful that the busy Buolamwini, who was born in Canada and grew up in Mississippi, took time away from her online freedom-fighting to be our November Doc Star of the Month. 

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“His Materials and His Letters Were Just Sitting in Boxes in the Basement of Her House”: R.J. Cutler on Belushi at DOC NYC

From the mid to late 70s John Belushi was a multimedia meteor, seemingly destined to be an inescapable part of the zeitgeist for years to come. The outsized and ubiquitous talent — original cast member on late night TV’s SNL, scene-stealing star of the big screen (National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers), and hit record maker (again with The Blues Brothers) — was so inescapable that when in 1982, at the age of only 33 and the peak of his career, his life crashed to a drug-fueled end at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont, the shock to the world was seismic. So how does a documentary filmmaker even begin to wrap his arms around such a larger-than-life character? If you’re veteran director-producer R.J. Cutler (The War Room, A Perfect Candidate, The September Issue) you go intimate and small. Rather than dissect the legend “Belushi,” Cutler deftly zooms in on John, the boy from Wheaton, Illinois who grew up in his Albanian father’s diner (the inspiration for the SNL classic “Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger!” sketch) and married his high school sweetheart. And in addition to showcasing archival footage and delightful TV and movie clips, Cutler treats us to a trove of personal letters and audiotapes, and the insightful reminisces of close friends and colleagues (everyone from Dan Akroyd and Ivan Reitman, to Penny Marshall and Carrie Fisher). What emerges is a portrait as unexpected and artistic as the man himself — a brilliant mind without an “off” button, but with a heart of gold. The Emmy Award-winning Cutler was gracious enough to take time away from editing his latest (Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry) to give Filmmaker the scoop on Belushi, which opened this year’s (home of The Second City) Chicago International Film Festival, and is currently playing in Not Ready For Prime Time Players territory at the virtual DOC NYC.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“There is No Film Safe from Some Version of Exploitation…”: Mo Scarpelli on her DOC NYC Feature El Father Plays Himself

Mo Scarpelli’s El Father Plays Himself, which premiered at Visions du Réel, is now at DOC NYC and will next be hitting IDFA, is one complicated multilayered journey, both logistically and emotionally. It began when Scarpelli (Anbessa, Frame by Frame) decided to train her documentary lens on a narrative feature in the making — specifically her partner Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Fortaleza (which premiered at Rotterdam). La Fortaleza in turn is based on the hard-hitting, hard-drinking life of Jorge Roque Thielen, the director’s father, who stars as himself in his own story. That “el father” remains as wild and unpredictable as the Venezuelan Amazon in which both films take place only adds to the production (and ethical) complications. Filmmaker managed to catch up with the globetrotting, Italian-American director-cinematographer the week of her meta film’s DOC NYC debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“They Live and Breathe Video, So We Just Completely Fit in with the Fixtures”: Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir on her DOC NYC-debuting The Vasulka Effect

As a New Yorker who has long prided my ability to namecheck most of the experimental art pioneers of the 1960s, I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of Steina and Woody Vasulka before watching Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir’s The Vasulka Effect. Sure, I knew of The Kitchen, the legendary performance space the couple founded in 1971. And of course I was familiar with the work of the sound and visual visionaries that the Soho (now West Chelsea) institution provided a platform for — from Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson to Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. I’d just never connected a classically-trained Icelandic violinist and a Czech with a background in engineering — refugees from the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia — to the birth of it all. Fortunately, The Vasulka Effect, virtually premiering at DOC NYC (November 11-19), remedied this knowledge gap for me. The film not only showcases a wealth of archival materials, including Woody’s video of Jimi Hendrix performing at Fillmore East and footage of their raucous parties with the Factory family, but also dives into their later creations. (Woody passed away in December 2019, and Steina has since turned to interactive installations. She’s also been a force behind The Vasulka Chamber in Iceland and The Vasulka Archive in the Czech Republic, founded in 2014 and 2016, respectively.) The result is an exhaustive portrait of two fearless boundary-busters forever obsessed with melding abstract imagination with concrete technology. And, in their retirement in Santa Fe, with the grind of meeting financial obligations and securing their rightful place in art history. Filmmaker managed to catch up with the film’s Icelandic director, who likewise hadn’t heard of her iconic countrywoman until arriving on the West Coast to study, a week before the doc’s US debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Five WTF Must-Sees at the 2020 DOC NYC Festival

If there’s one thing we can all agree on in these polarized times it’s that 2020 will inevitably go down in history as one WTF year. And since I generally tend to adore batshit insane films — and especially batshit insane cinematic nonfiction — I was pleased to discover a wealth of WTF treasure buried inside this year’s (a bit overwhelming at 108 features and 92 shorts!) virtual DOC NYC lineup, which begins today. So in honor of this global topsy-turvy moment, here’s just a handful of my favorite gems that, humbly and with little fanfare, screwed with my mind in all sorts of exciting and unanticipated ways.

To read all about them visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Women of Blumhouse: Shaping Genre Storytelling at the Iconic House of Horror” at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival

Appropriately presented the day before Halloween, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s “Women of Blumhouse: Shaping Genre Storytelling at the Iconic House of Horror” provided an intriguing peek inside the multifaceted production house from a female POV. Moderated by Variety’s Deputy Awards and Features Editor Jenelle Riley, the three executives Zooming in included Blumhouse Television’s head of physical production, Lisa Niedenthal; Blumhouse Productions’ executive vice president of development for feature films, Bea Sequeira; and Blumhouse Productions’ head of casting, Terri Taylor.

To learn how these ladies are leading the way to a more inclusive scary movie future read my coverage at Filmmaker magazine.

Unmasking MAGA Hispanic Man

As a liberal American who has never lived in a state where my presidential vote counted (thanks to our white, male, landowning founders having created a little system of disenfranchisement called the Electoral College), it’s long been hard for me to fathom why so many slices of the US electorate eagerly organize against themselves. There’s the Log Cabin Republicans, serving queer conservative interests (while sidestepping their party’s ingrained homo-and-trans-phobia) since 1977; and Black folks who subscribe to the jurisprudence of the only Black man on the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, a far-right, anti-affirmative action zealot. (Whose philosophy, I might mention, is shockingly rooted in Black nationalism. But that’s a puzzle for another column – or rather book. Check out Corey Robin’s The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.) That said, ever since Trump descended his faux golden escalator onto the political scene, ranting incoherently about “Mexican rapists,” a new demographic head-scratcher emerged: the MAGA Hispanic (and specifically MAGA Hispanic Man). Which, of course, has sent the mainstream media into a frenzy for the past four years – especially in these days and weeks before US President-elect Biden’s victory (wow, it felt good to type that!) – trying to find and then figure out who the nearly 30 percent of Hispanic voters claiming to support Donald J. Trump really are.

And to read the rest of my op-ed on who he really is visit Global Comment.

DOK Leipzig 2020: Naked Truths – Intimacy in Documentary Film

DOK LEIPZIG: DOK Leipzig provided the informative panel discussion Naked Truths - Intimacy in Documentary Film. Safe to say that in all my years covering nonfiction fests around the globe, Naked Truths – Intimacy in Documentary Film is a panel title I’d never seen listed in any program. Until now. Presented at this year’s hybrid DOK Leipzig, this thrillingly enlightening (virtual) talk posed a lightning rod question rarely wrestled with: Namely, what is the place of sexually explicit imagery in the nonfiction, non-porn world? (And since we’re getting all philosophical, what is, in fact, intimacy itself?)

To hear all about the philosophical discussion visit Modern Times Review.

Wonder Women: Producers Zoom In at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival

Moderated by Megan Lombardo, a professor in the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Film & Television department, this year’s Wonder Women: Producers panel was an all-Zoom affair. And taking to the computer screen were six diverse (albeit all white) women with a variety of career stories to tell. There was Jayme Lemons, whose Dawn Porter-directed doc The Way I See It had played the virtual fest earlier in the day, and who runs Jaywalker Pictures (with another wonder woman Laura Dern). Also Julie Christeas, founder and CEO of Tandem Pictures, who most recently produced Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear; and Libby Geist, Vice President and Executive Producer, ESPN Films and Original Content (and one of the forces behind Jason Hehir’s epic Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls series The Last Dance). Geist was also behind Bao Nguyen’s Bruce Lee doc Be Water, from British producer Julia Nottingham, who likewise participated on the panel. As did Nottingham’s countrywoman Alison Owen, perhaps the most veteran of the producers, and whose long list of credits includes everything from 1998’s Cate Blanchett vehicle Elizabeth to last year’s coming-of-age-in-the-90s comedy How to Build a Girl. And rounding out the lineup was Cate Blanchett’s American business partner Coco Francini, their Dirty Films having most recently produced Mrs. America for FX Networks.

To read all of my coverage visit Filmmaker magazine.

Wonder Women: Below the Line at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival

While laudable causes to achieve gender parity in the film industry have been all the rage for a number of years (remember the mad rush of fests signing on to – and then publicizing their signing on to – the 5050×2020 pledge?), too often the result seems to be simply seating a woman in the director’s chair and forgetting about the rest of the table. Which is why the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Wonder Women: Below the Line panel (which, like everything else these days, took place via Zoom at the all-digital fest) struck me as so important. How could aspiring craftswomen see themselves pursuing crucial, behind-the-scenes roles in the industry if they rarely ever saw (or heard) from the women already succeeding in those roles?

To find out read my coverage at Filmmaker magazine.

Egotism and incompetence: Totally Under Control

CORONOAVIRUS: After 200,000 deaths and staggering economic losses, Alex Gibney & co. look into the Trump administration's disastrous response to COVID-19. Totally Under Control, its title a tongue in cheek reference to President Trump’s repeated declarations regarding his administration’s clear-as-day chaotic response to our cataclysmic health crisis, is (one of) the latest from the US’s most ADD prolific documentarian, Alex Gibney. It’s a film the Oscar and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker – along with his co-directors/producers/conspirators Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger – made in secret in a mad dash of five months, in a race to get it in the can and out to the American public prior to the November presidential election. Whether it will change any voter’s mind – let alone get in front of the eyes of any Fox News cult follower – is dubious. What it will do, and has done already, is allow the left-leaning liberal viewership (and I count myself in that camp) to feel equal parts enraged and vindicated. It’s a primal scream catharsis. Yes, the f*ckup was as bad as we feared. And much much worse.

To read the rest of my not-so-devastating critique visit Modern Times Review.

Neither banal nor evil: Me and the Cult Leader - A Modern Report on the Banality of Evil

CONTROL: A search for understanding from a survivor of Aum Shinrikyo's 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo's subway. True to its arresting title and media sensation subject matter, Atsushi Sakahara’s Me and the Cult Leader – A Modern Report on the Banality of Evil makes for some undeniably riveting viewing – but for the most unexpected of reasons. Ostensibly a revisitation of the 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system carried out by members of the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo religious cult – which left a dozen dead and hundreds more to suffer lifelong complications, including the director himself – the film is as much a story about Sakahara’s relationship with the mastermind behind the inexplicable acts of terrorism as Roger & Me is about Michael Moore and a similarly invisible yet omnipresent GM CEO.

To read the rest of my take visit Modern Times Review.

Doc Stars of the Month: Boniface and Njeri Mwangi, 'Softie'

Premiering at Sundance, going on to open Hot Docs, and now set to air on POV October 12, Nairobi-based director Sam Soko’s Softie is both inspirational character study and unnerving cautionary tale (at least for those of us here in the West who’ve long taken our democracy for granted and may now be paying a costly price). The film follows Boniface “Softie” Mwangi, a grassroots activist-turned-politician, as he faces down his country’s entrenched corruption — paying for votes, power-brokering behind closed doors, and police blithely gunning down protestors is all just business as usual in Kenya — by doing the unthinkable: Running a clean campaign. And by Mwangi’s side is his wife, Njeri, who likewise does the unthinkable — allows herself (and their three young children) to be out in public and in front of Soko’s lens. She proudly supports the unlikely candidate for regional office as he battles to overcome overwhelming skepticism and outright hostility with unbridled optimism and heartfelt idealism, all while knowing exactly where the nonstop threats to her husband’s life might very well lead. Which is why Documentary is honored to feature this heroic, change-making couple — who are also the co-founders of Kenya’s artist-activist hub Pawa254 — as our October Doc Stars of the Month.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Another brick in the wall: Zaho Zay

PRISON: A picturesque hybrid documentary within a hopelessly overcrowded prison in Madagascar. Zaho Zay is as complex and richly layered as it is troubling and compelling. An Austria/France/Madagascar co-production from an Austrian male director and a French female filmmaker of Malagasy origin, this unusual hybrid is not quite doc, not quite fiction, neither shamelessly colonialist in its gaze, nor entirely free from the outsider’s POV. Taking its title from the roll call response («It’s me!») given by inmates in the real Madagascar prison where much of the film is set, the experimental project is also less focused on the men (and, towards the end, women) behind the proverbial bars than in the visual springboard their faces and bodies provide for the daydreamy narrative (which is accompanied by a lyrical voiceover, written by a French/Malagasy writer).

To read the rest of my critique visit Modern Times Review.

Errol Morris Gets Lost In A WILDERNESS OF ERROR

Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated Marc Smerling’s (Capturing the Friedmans, The Jinx) true crime docuseries A Wilderness of Error, which debuts on FX September 25, is completely addictive and utterly disturbing (and accompanied by an equally riveting and unnerving companion podcast, Morally Indefensible, out now). Based on the 2012 book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald by the OG of investigative doc-making Errol Morris, the five-part series is a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, a former Army surgeon and Green Beret still serving time for the 1970 murders of his wife and two young daughters – a nightmarish crime he blames on Manson Family wannabes to this very day. It also contains the added bonus of serving as an accidental expose of Errol Morris himself.

And to read the rest of my own Errol Morris reexamination visit Hammer to Nail.

“An Outsider in that Testosterone-Driven Climate”: Laura Gabbert on Her Food Doc, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles

Sundance vet Laura Gabbert (No Impact Man, Sunset Story) is no stranger to the foodie world, having directed 2015’s City of Gold, which follows the Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold on his culinary excursions throughout LA. Now, with Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, Gabbert turns her lens to the other coast and across the pond, globetrotting through time and space with seven-time NY Times bestselling cookbook author and renowned restauranteur Yotam Ottolenghi. Though the Israeli Jew (whose business partner is a Jerusalem-born Muslim) is based in London, he’s invited by the Met to curate an edible, cake-centric exhibition inspired by the decadence of Versailles. So of course Ottolenghi does what any modern-day man of the world would do – takes to Instagram to assemble a culturally diverse team of the most cutting edge pastry chefs one can find.

To read the foodie interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“An Opportunity to Look at How True-Crime Storytelling Can Affect Reality”: Marc Smerling on Reinvestigating Errol Morris’s Reinvestigation in A Wilderness of Error

Marc Smerling’s true crime docuseries for FX, A Wilderness of Error, debuting September 25, is a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, who has spent the past nearly four decades serving time for the 1970 killing of his wife and two young daughters – a gruesome triple homicide that the onetime Army surgeon and Green Beret blamed (and still blames) on Manson Family copycats. The five-part series is based on Errol Morris’s non-fiction book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case – specifically the case laid out by both prosecutors and the famed journo Joe McGinniss in his own 1983 book Fatal Vision. Which in turn was made into a two-part TV miniseries. And if your head is spinning, buckle up. Smerling – one of the prolific forces behind Capturing the Friedmans, The Jinx and the Crimetown podcasts – has crafted one rabbit hole of a ride. (Along with an accompanying eight-episode podcast, Morally Indefensible, available now, which follows the McGinniss angle and questions whether the journalist ultimately got too unethically close to his subject.)

To read my interview with the prolific, Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated producer/writer/director/DP visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Cardboard Cutouts Don’t Grow Old, They Don’t Die”: Jan Oxenberg on Criterion’s Rerelease of Her “Docu-fantasy” Thank You and Good Night

Jan Oxenberg was a thorn in the nonfiction establishment’s side long before hybrid doc-making was a thing (or even a term). Case in point: Her feature-length (Sundance ’91) debut Thank You and Good Night, a restoration of which will hit the Criterion Channel this week (along with two of the queer pioneer’s earlier shorts, 1973’s Home Movie and 1975’s A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts, accompanied by a new director’s intro). Though Thank You and Good Night has been described as a “docu-fantasy” it’s also a very real time capsule of sorts. The film takes as its starting point the looming death of Oxenberg’s grandmother, which prompts the radical filmmaker (who has since, counterintuitively, become an established writer/producer for mainstream TV) to pick up her camera and record as much as she can in a race to the inevitable end. That includes no nonsense interviews and daily interactions with her mother and siblings, a cousin, even some of her grandmother’s friends – who together form a beautifully sad and unexpectedly funny, Borscht Belt-infused mosaic of NY secular Jewish life. Which brings us to the “fantasy” portion of the “documentary” – embodied (?) by the film’s narrator and spiritual guide. Who happens to be a cardboard cutout named Scowling Jan, the director’s five-year-old self.

And to read my interview with the groundbreaking director visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Star of the Month: Pete Souza, ‘The Way I See It’

One of the more unlikely Instagram stars of our “Trump Show” era (with 2.3 million followers and counting), Pete Souza is likewise a surprising choice to star in a documentary. (Which of course is one reason Documentary has chosen Souza as our September Doc Star of the Month.) Having arguably spent more time around the Oval Office than any US president, the Chief Official White House Photographer to President Barack Obama (from 2009-2017) and White House Photographer to President Ronald Reagan before that (from 1983-1989), Souza now allows the spotlight to be turned on himself in Dawn Porter’s (Focus Features distributed) The Way I See It.

To read my first (and likely only) interview with a Chief Official White House Photographer visit Documentary magazine.

“Can a Psychopathic Institution Be Redeemed, or Should It Be Eliminated?”: Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott on Their TIFF-Premiering Doc The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel

I can still recall my red pill moment while watching Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar’s 2003 documentary The Corporation with my best friend, at the (pre-financial crisis) time an analyst at a big bank. “Corporations are people? What the hell?” I practically shouted. “Yup,” he simply responded with a weary shrug. For many clueless progressives like myself, unaware that corporate power had been spreading like the coronavirus, silently hijacking all branches of our government for decades, The Corporation was both horror film and wakeup call. The real deep-state conspiracy...Which is where Joel Bakan (who wrote the 2003 doc, based on his book) and Jennifer Abbott’s The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel picks up.

To read my interview with the deep-thinking duo visit Filmmaker magazine.

"As a Director I Want to Show My Own Failure, My Own Intrusion in the Films I Make”: Milo Rau on His Venice Premiering The New Gospel

Making its world premiere at this year’s — IRL! — Venice Film Festival, The New Gospel is the latest work of “utopian documentarism” from Swiss director/writer/critic/lecturer Milo Rau. (Though one might add “biblical provocateur.” As the newly installed artistic director of NTGent, Rau once took out classified ads in a Belgian newspaper seeking modern-day crusaders for a staging based on the city’s Jesus-themed Ghent Altarpiece. One read, “Did you fight for IS, or another religion?”) With The New Gospel, the multimedia artist tackles Italy’s ongoing migrant crisis through a most unusual form — by creating a contemporary Jesus film in Matera, the setting of both Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and before that Pasolini’s canonical The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

And to read my interview with the interventionist documentarian visit Filmmaker magazine.

Human Experience is the New Fossil Fuel: Jeff Orlowski on His Big Tech Critique, The Social Dilemma

From Arab Spring uprisings to Russian disinformation campaigns, social media platforms have swung from heralded saviors to all-purpose bogeymen with breakneck speed. So how did we get here? And can online life even be fixed? Was it all the inevitable result of a worldwide collective bargain with the Big Tech devil? (Nothing in life is free, and that goes double in Silicon Valley.) With Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma, which premiered at Sundance — as did the director’s 2017 doc Chasing Coral and 2012’s Chasing Ice — these consequential questions and more get addressed through a most unusual format.

To read my interview with the Sundance vet visit Filmmaker magazine.

Three true crime docuseries for end-of-summer streaming

With the summer theatrical blockbuster now a remnant of the pre-pandemic past, streaming services of every corporate stripe have rushed in to fill the void. And since the true crime genre has long been a surefire way to keep those eyeballs glued to screens, it’s no wonder we’ve seen a slew of docuseries suddenly come to a Netflix/Hulu/HBO/Amazon, etc. near you. So with the hot, dog days slowly subsiding, here are a few stranger-than-fiction, true crime picks well worth the episodic viewing.

To read my recommendations visit Global Comment.

“A Vindication of the Primal Nature of Creativity, Spontaneity, and the Uniqueness of Each Human Being”: Gustavo Sánchez on I Hate New York

For those of us who spent most post-midnight hours of the Giuliani years on the smoke-choked dance floors of places like Limelight and The Pyramid Club, I Hate New York, the debut feature of Barcelona-born journalist Gustavo Sánchez, is a walk down an age of innocence memory lane. A pre-9/11 time when nightclub royalty such as Amanda Lepore and Sophia Lamar were as ubiquitous as the flyers in the St. Mark’s record stores that showcased their names.

For those not steeped in trans-fabulous NYC lore, the aforementioned Lepore is best known as the longtime (Jessica Rabbit-esque) muse of David LaChapelle, while (Lepore’s former friend) Lamar is a no-nonsense refugee from Castro’s Cuba who began her reinvention as an avant-garde artist during NYC’s punk heyday. For over a decade (2007-2017), Sánchez tagged along with each on their various East Village excursions, as well as followed trans and AIDS activist Chloe Dzubilo, lead singer of the pioneering punk band Transisters, and activist/DJ/rapper T De Long. The resulting film, a clear-eyed downtown history lesson, is distilled from hundreds of hours of interviews, fly-on-the-wall observations, and VHS-style footage. From contemporary Tompkins Square Park to flash-from-the-past SqueezeBox, I Hate New York is also, thankfully, more nostalgia-free love letter than cinematic poison pen.

On the day of the film’s September 1st digital release, Filmmaker caught up with Sánchez, who in grade school became the youngest radio host in Spain, to find out why and how he decided to document the dogged survivors of a long corporate-coopted underground scene.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Star of the Month: Carla the Bounty Hunter, 'Love Fraud'

The first time an episodic series was programmed on opening day of the Sundance Film Festival happened a lifetime ago — i.e., just this past January. And the series to be awarded the unusual distinction was similarly unconventional. Love Fraud is unsurprisingly well-crafted, considering that the Oscar-nominated duo of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp; Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You) are the filmmakers behind this four-part docuseries premiering August 30 on Showtime. The series takes an often noirish approach to the inspired feminist takedown of the truly bizarre Richard Scott Smith. An identity-thieving bigamist who spent a whopping two decades conning lovelorn, mostly middle-class women out of their money and sense of self-worth, Smith is transformed from dating-site predator to targeted prey when the ladies he duped join forces to find, capture and ultimately bring the pathological fraudster to justice.
 
And zealously leading the chase is one no-nonsense, tough-as-nails chick — who has never even met Smith. Indeed, the filmmaking team’s secret weapon, a scene-stealing bounty hunter named Carla, is every bit as determined to put a stop to Smith’s heartbreaking and bank account-draining as any of his actual victims. Which is why Documentary is excited to spotlight this uncompromising, unorthodox victim’s advocate as our August Doc Star of the Month.

To read my first-ever interview with a bounty hunter visit Documentary magazine.

“Cinema is Prophecy — It Creates Truth”: Hubert Sauper on his Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Epicentro

"What kind of future does tourism portend?” wonders a Cuban character rhetorically in Epicentro, the latest work of cinematic nonfiction from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare, We Come as Friends). “None! It is only devouring the future,” the Havana man declares. Indeed, it devours the “past and the culture,” rendering everything “superficial.” But then comes the real multimillion-dollar question, “How much does cinema resemble tourism?”

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at this year’s Sundance, Epicentro — an allusion to the northern Caribbean island’s place at the epicenter of the Americas, both geographically and politically — is a visually intoxicating and profoundly insightful exploration/interrogation of Spanish colonialism, US imperialism, and cinema as myth-making propaganda tool. And all set against the stunning backdrop of today’s Cuba, a “paradise” of ’50s nostalgia, where American sightseers — or “human beings in their worst possible form” as one character puts it — snap photos of kiddie locals as if at a human zoo. (No wonder so many indigenous folks historically viewed photography as soul stealing.)

Just prior to the film’s August 28th virtual launch through Kino Marquee, Filmmaker caught up with Sauper — a globetrotting master of sociopolitical doc-making who was born in the Austrian Alps and raised amongst a population that had lived (and served) in Nazi Germany — to discuss his astonishingly grand take on a territorially tiny, globally significant nation.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

In Opposition to “A Very Particular Mode of Transness”: Isabel Sandoval On Lingua Franca

The struggles of outer borough working class folks is nothing new to NYC-set dramas. But, in the outsider eyes and busy hands of director/writer/producer/editor/actress Isabel Sandoval, one of the newest auteurs of Filipino cinema — who makes her English-language debut in her adopted city with her third narrative feature Lingua Franca — classic tropes are updated to reflect our current intersectional reality.

The Venice International Film Festival 2019-premiering movie follows live-in caregiver Olivia (Sandoval), who, in the course of looking after an elderly Russian resident of Brighton Beach (Lynn Cohen), becomes romantically entwined with the woman’s ne’er-do-well grandson Alex (Eamon Farren), who labors under his uncle in a meatpacking plant while struggling to get his life back on track. The fact that Olivia is trans and undocumented while blending into her Brooklyn surroundings as cisgender female and assimilated makes the story all the more complicated — not to mention heartbreaking against a political backdrop in which pushing the marginalized back into the shadows and closet has become US government policy.

The day after the film’s August 26th Netflix release, Filmmaker caught up with Sandoval to learn about her project.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

"There is No Expiration Date on Your Sexuality”: Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard on Their Fantasia Festival-Debuting Doc Morgana

The bored and lonely housewife embarking on a life of erotic pleasure has been a porn-movie trope since at least the days of the 8mm-stag film. But the Belle de Jour-style protagonist is never an unhappy Australian mom who goes from planning suicide, to radically reclaiming agency by hiring a male escort, to soaring to international fame as an award-winning feminist pornographer. Until now. Meet Morgana Muses, the unlikely star of Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard’s Fantasia Film Festival-premiering documentary Morgana.

Hess, a filmmaker and pornographer, and her co-director Peppard, who is also an animator and visual artist, began collaborating on what eventually became an unusual, feature-length character study in a likewise unconventional way — at Morgana’s 50th birthday party. As a gift to herself, the self-invented sex symbol had asked the duo to document the celebration — specifically her naked body suspended in Japanese rope bondage. And thus the idea of a film about an artistically defiant, middle-aged porn star was born.

Prior to the doc’s August 20th virtual fest debut, Filmmaker caught up with the Australian directors to learn all about following the Pornfilmfestival Berlin darling — whose fans include everyone from Petra Joy to Stoya, just two of the many erotic pioneers appearing onscreen to sing Morgana’s praises — on her journey from rural Victoria to urban Germany and back. And from the depths of misery to ageless body positivity.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Very Much Like Short Cuts, and the Medfly was Duterte — That Was My Pitch”: Ramona S. Diaz on A Thousand Cuts

While recent right-wing attacks on the free press here in the US have rightly been sounding alarm bells, in a global context they are merely wake-up calls. Sure, Trump deeming the “lamestream” media “fake news” is dangerously juvenile, but it’s also a far cry from, say, the Duterte administration finding the founder and CEO of the Philippines’s top online news site Rappler guilty of “cyber libel” — a travesty of justice that happened just this past June. And the politically orchestrated verdict comes with both a hefty fine and potential prison time for “2018 Time Person of the Year” Maria Ressa along with a former colleague.

Though it’s not hard to see why Ressa, a superhumanly dogged journalistic force (with a default mode set to unbridled optimism), might get under a murderous strongman’s skin. What’s less immediately apparent is how Ressa has even managed to survive for this long within a system determined to sentence dissent to death by “a thousand cuts,” as the title of award-winning director Ramona S. Diaz’s latest documentary suggests.

Fortunately, Diaz, a Filipino-American filmmaker, has been a longtime observer of the complicated country and its culture — from 2004’s Imelda to 2017’s Motherland — so she’s able to shine a big-picture light on both Ressa and the wider context that her team of investigative journalists are forced to operate in. Indeed, A Thousand Cuts goes beyond providing an intimate journey alongside Ressa and her heroic Rappler reporters as they relentlessly battle to expose Duterte’s corrupt war on drugs for the war on poor drug addicts that it actually is (even while they themselves serve as targets of the government’s highly effective, social media disinformation campaign). Smartly, Diaz also turns her lens to the politically savvy, pro-Duterte side, by tagging along as government secretary Mocha Uson, a onetime pop star, and General Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, a retired Police General, spread a message of intolerance and hate — online and on the stump — in the most upbeat, crowd-pleasing ways. Which renders the dark side even darker.

So to learn more about documenting the heart of Duterte’s Philippines, and what her lead character’s recent guilty verdict means for both Ressa and the future of Diaz’s filmmaking there, Filmmaker reached out to the director a few days prior to the August 7th virtual release of A Thousand Cuts (through PBS Distribution and Frontline).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

White blindness: the original sin

When white people play the “I don’t see race” card they are either A) lying (to others and/or themselves) or B) being racist (as it follows that “not seeing race” literally means not seeing BIPOC as individual human beings with non-white lived experiences). The latter is a truism I’ve only recently been forced to uncomfortably confront even as protests against police brutality continue across the US by Americans of every color. (Though you wouldn’t necessarily know this by consuming the corporate news lately – as the liberal media prefers to hype the white-savior narrative provided by white suburban moms, the right-wing propaganda machine images of white “antifa” agitators, thereby erasing Black folks from their own story yet again. That is, when reporters aren’t focused on the overzealous federal forces, seemingly dispatched for the sole purpose of starring in the next “law and order” Trump campaign ad.)

To read the rest of my anti-racist take visit Global Comment.

“This Movie is a Cry for Help from the Members of Congress to the American People”: Daniel DiMauro and Morgan Pehme on Their HBO doc The Swamp

To call HBO’s The Swamp a thrilling character-based portrait of three conservative white guys might seem oxymoronic, but in the capable hands and open minds of co-directors Daniel DiMauro and Morgan Pehme (Get Me Roger Stone) it’s a completely apt description. The doc is an unexpected, up-close look at the daily D.C. lives of a trio of House members who few subscribers to HBO would ever conceive of voting for: far right-wingers Matt Gaetz (R-FL 1st District), Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District), and Ken Buck (R-CO 4th District). In other words, it’s exactly the caricature-busting film that progressives (like myself) really need to see.

With startling access, the filmmakers follow along as these Republican rebels fight — and usually fail — to “drain the swamp” through mundane bipartisan legislation that never makes the 24/7 news cycle but should. Gaetz and leftie Ro Khanna teaming up? Massie and liberal Barbara Lee? Yup, it happened while we were all trapped in the Trump twitter feed. DiMauro and Pehme are flies on the restaurant wall when Gaetz sits down with his friend Katie Hill — who he later defended in a tweet as her own Democratic leadership forced her to resign from the House in scandal — for advice on whether to forgo PAC money. The duo even capture pro-coal Massie charging his electric car! And all this as the Fox News heroes try to keep their heads above water in a “swamp” that includes “whoring” for dollars, performing impeachment outrage for the cameras (i.e., for Trump), and worrying that the slightest bucking of the MAGA line will result in a president-ordered primary challenge.


To break the system or fix the broken system? That has long been the question. To shine some light on this infuriating paradox and more, Filmmaker reached out to the patient co-directors prior to the doc’s August 4th debut on HBO.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Documentaries Need Stars Just Like Feature Films Do”: Tiller Russell on his Amazon Docuseries The Last Narc

To say that documentarian Tiller Russell has a knack for discovering unconventional characters is an understatement. From NYPD cops running a cocaine ring (2015’s The Seven Five), to a Russian mobster, a Cuban spy and a Miami playboy conspiring to sell a Soviet sub to the Cali cartel (2018’s Operation Odessa), the filmmaker has more than earned his gonzo doc bona fides. And the weird winning streak continues with the director’s four-part docuseries The Last Narc, premiering on Amazon Prime Video today.

The story catalyzing Russell’s latest is one familiar to any viewer of the first season of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico — the 1985 kidnapping and murder of DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. It was a case that ultimately fell to special agent Hector Berrellez, the heroic protagonist of The Last Narc, to investigate. What Berrellez uncovered, and relays with startling frankness to the camera, is a strange saga involving intricate layers of government coverup on both sides of the border, suggesting that the crime was never really meant to be solved (and leaving Camarena’s grieving widow, also prominently featured in the series, without closure to this very day). In fact, the special agent’s whole premise is so farfetched as to be easily dismissed as a crackpot conspiracy theory — if it weren’t for several other corroborating interviews Russell conducts, including with the informants who eventually came clean to Berrellez. Specifically, these are the three former, and still intimidating, Jalisco State policemen who served as bodyguards for the Guadalajara Cartel drug lords Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo (El Chapo’s onetime bosses).

So to learn more about bringing Narcos fiction back to fact while simultaneously crafting a narrative out of the real-life hunt for Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht (Russell’s thriller Silk Road, which was set to debut at Tribeca, will be released later this year), Filmmaker reached out to the intrepid director a few days before The Last Narc episode one hit the small screen.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We Worked With as Many BIPOC Womxn Crew Members as Possible, Whenever Possible!”: Linda Goldstein Knowlton on We Are The Radical Monarchs

The Black Panther Party, with its firm commitment to nourishing and nurturing the children of Oakland’s barely served African-American community, was founded all the way back in 1966. So it’s a bit shocking that it took nearly half a century later for the Radical Monarchs to be born. Or maybe not. After all, historically, queer women of color — like the Monarchs’ tireless co-founders Anayvette Martinez and Marilyn Hollinquest — had never been given leading roles in the Black Panther show.


Fortunately, dedicated feminist and filmmaker Linda Goldstein Knowlton and her all-female team (including EP Grace Lee) are now shining a documentary spotlight on Oakland’s newest (youngest) activist movement: an alternative to the Girl Scout Brownies for girls of color that can go from toasting marshmallows to marching for Black trans lives in a single bound. Or as 8-year-old member Amia puts it at the start of the film, “Something about social justice that is fun is that we get to kind of make history — or “herstory” as we like to say it. And we get to be one tiny little part of it. ‘Cause we all know that a lot of tiny little parts can equal one big part.” (That said, by the time of the troop’s trip to the state capitol to lobby lawmakers at the end, it’s pretty clear these girls’ ambitions are far from tiny. Amia for one takes a spin on the marble floor and sighs, “I was meant to be here.” Out of the mouths of radical babes indeed.)

Filmed over three years, including both before and after the 2016 presidential election, We Are The Radical Monarchs follows not just the third-through-fifth graders as they earn their badges (in such subjects as “radical beauty,” “radical bodies,” and “radical roots”), but also goes behind the scenes with the scrappy cofounders who put their day-job skills in community advocacy and organizing to work. In other words, Hollinquest and Martinez have found a way to harness willpower in lieu of financing to expand BIPOC girl power into a nationwide revolution.

Prior to the doc’s July 20th airing on POV, Filmmaker reached out to the Emmy Award-nominated director to learn more about the inspiring project, including shooting with underage characters and ensuring diversity behind the lens.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

A Conversation With Elizabeth Radshaw & Dorota Lech (HOT DOCS Film Fest)

Elizabeth Radshaw, Industry Programs Director, and Dorota Lech, Industry Programmer and Hot Docs Forum Producer, were at the forefront of a swift shift to the online realm for all industry activities at this year’s Hot Docs. So what better pair to look back and provide a glimpse into what went right, what couldn’t be replicated, and what all participating parties might consider when looking forward to the festival future near and far?

Which is exactly why I reached out to the veteran industry duo with a handful of questions. (And in return received a variety of surprising responses, like how to avoid Zoom fatigue.)

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

Doc Star of the Month: Michael Martin, 'Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets'

Though Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets premiered in the US Documentary Competition at pre-pandemic Sundance back in January, I didn’t catch Bill and Turner Ross' heartfelt film until the festival world had turned upside down and digital. Fortunately, I was able to watch the unusual dive-bar drama during CPH:DOX's pioneering virtual edition, deeming it "the quintessential CPH:DOX film — i.e., designed to have doc purists tearing their hair out," and summed it up as follows: "Veering from the ridiculous to the poignant, often in the same scene, this collection of character studies shot during last call at a Las Vegas bar before it closes for good [but filmed in a New Orleans canteen that's still open] includes a patron named Michael, a washed-up actor who sweeps up and sleeps at the Sin City saloon. Played by Michael Martin [a former actor who really does sweep up at a Big Easy bar], he delivers drunken profound wisdom that sounds so good as to be scripted. And when he warns a young musician to 'get out' before he gets stuck because 'there's nothing more boring than a guy who used to do stuff and doesn’t do stuff no more,' it's simply devastating. An uneasy portrait of an actor who long ago lost a part of his soul to the roles he played."

So now that Utopia has launched an online rollout of the provocative doc (it premiered July 10), Documentary thought it the perfect time to reach out to the riveting thespian at its center. And luckily, Michael Martin graciously agreed to take on the role of July's Doc Star of the Month — and to give us the scoop on how he managed to pull off one of the year’s most inspired performances in a documentary.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“His First Question To Us Was, ‘What Are Your Astrological Signs?'”: Cristina Costantini, Kareem Tabsch and Alex Fumero on Mucho Mucho Amor

Premiering at Sundance back in the pre-pandemic festival days (uh, January) Mucho Mucho Amor is a much-needed uplift in these trying times. Co-directed and produced by Cristina Costantini (Science Fair) and Kareem Tabsch (The Last Resort), and produced by Alex Fumero (I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson), the doc, which hits Netflix today, is a fascinating odyssey into the beautifully eccentric world of Walter Mercado. Combining the fashion sense of Liberace with the relentless positivity of Tammy Faye Bakker, the Puerto Rican astrologer, psychic and defiantly nonbinary pioneer spent decades spreading his mantra of “mucho mucho amor” to an audience of millions — 120 to be exact — of Latinx viewers across the globe. (That would include Lin-Manuel Miranda, who touchingly transforms into a starstruck schoolkid upon being granted an audience with the icon.) Until one day the bundle of energy just up and vanished from the TV.

Exhaustively thorough, the film mixes archival images with contemporary interviews with Mercado’s relatives, friends and former business partners, and even the hiding-in-plain-sight Mercado himself. Yet the doc goes further than just stitching together the mystery of what happened to this once ubiquitous ambassador for happiness. Indeed, Mucho Mucho Amor even reaches out to make a convincing case for why this relic from another era, an octogenarian at the time of production, matters today. For Mercado’s adamant refusal to discuss his gender or sexuality — while making it clear through his in-your-face appearance that he would never be confined to category nor closet — put him way ahead of his time. (Historically, LGBTQ folks went directly from being shamed into secrecy, to being shamed if they didn’t come out. Of course, being expected to proudly announce one’s identity is a burden that straight cisgender people have never been asked to bear.) And this unconventional spirit, who at one point declares to the camera that every morning he wakes up is the first day of his life, had no interest in living life on others’ terms.

So to learn more about Mucho Mucho Amor and its uncompromising star (though Mercado notes, “I used to be a star and now I’m a constellation”) Filmmaker reached out to the trio that rediscovered the legend and so much more.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

A (Brief) Conversation With Malene Flindt Pedersen (Fat Front)

One of the more unusual topics to be spot-lit at last year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam was the body-positive movement – specifically the “revolution in Scandinavia” that sparked it. Danish doc-makers Louise Unmack Kjeldsen and Louise Detlefsen’s Fat Front – now available on YouTube and Google Play – is the latest film from longtime female-focused producer Malene Flindt Pedersen. It’s a clear-eyed yet fun, upbeat look at four young Nordic women who have defiantly thrown off the oversized mantle of shame, and wholeheartedly embraced the word “fat.” The ladies also proudly display their stomach rolls, and shake their jiggly thighs, for thousands of enthusiastic Instagram followers around the world. 

In addition to premiering in the Frontlight program, Fat Front also arrived at the prestigious fest with an accompanying provocative photographic exhibition presented at Amsterdam Centraal. (Wake up, morning commuters!) And to discuss all this and more I sat down for lunch last fall with the thoughtful co-directors and their dogged producer – who I later followed up with via email – at the Danish Film Institute restaurant SULT while I was in Copenhagen just a few weeks prior to the doc’s international premiere.

To read my interview head over to Hammer to Nail.

Recalibrate the media, reconstruct the system, reimagine the police: pointing the way through movies (and a podcast and a web-series)

With trust in the media, in institutions, in each other at a depressing low, it’s important to know how we got here – and how to flip the script. Which is why I’ve compiled an eclectic “guide” to movies and more that have helped me make sense of our current moment, one in which the calculatedly-composed cultural narratives surrounding race, reporting, and policing have collided in the caught-on-camera murder of yet another unarmed African-American man. (And since racism should never be the burden of black and brown folks – it’s up to the people who built the system of inequality to participate in its dismantlement! – my following recommendations are also heavy on media-makers actively getting their own white hands dirty to right some deeply entrenched wrongs.)

To read on visit Global Comment.

Cannes Docs - Marché du Film & CPH:DOX on "Documentary Production now - and beyond!”

CANNES DOCS: Cannes Docs - Marché du Film & CPH:DOX provide the informative panel discussion "Documentary Production now - and beyond!"

The Doc Talk – CPH:DOX Panel titled "Documentary Production now – and beyond!" at this year’s virtual Cannes Docs – Marché du Film featured four of Denmark’s most knowledgable when it comes to navigating the suddenly upended documentary landscape. Stepping into the role of Zoom moderators were Katrine Kiilgaard, CPH:DOX Deputy Director and Head of Industry, and Tereza Simikova, Head of CPH:FORUM, posing their own questions, as well as some from the online international audience that tuned in live on June 22nd.

And answering those inquiring minds were veteran producers Monica Hellström of Final Cut for Real, and Sara Stockmann of Sonntag Pictures, both with impressive resumes and projects in the pipeline. Hellström, one of this year’s "Producers on the Move," is also one of the forces behind Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Cannes-selected Flee. In addition, she’s currently producing Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters, the Peabody Award-winning director’s follow up to his Oscar-shortlisted The Distant Barking of Dogs. While Stockmann is in production on Frederik Sølberg’s Hana Korea – which just won the Eurimages Award at CPH:FORUM – and is behind Jannik Splidsboel’s Being Erico, which nabbed the Nordic:DOX competition at CPH:DOX 2020.

To read all about it visit Modern Times Review.

Doc Stars of the Month: Cheyenne Adriano and Mari Timans, 'Unsettled'

Taking Best Documentary Feature Film at last year's Outfest, Tom Shepard's Unsettled, an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee, adheres to every fraught definition of its title. Debuting on WORLD Channel on June 28 (and available for streaming on WorldChannel.org through July 12), the film follows four newly arrived LGBTQ refugees and asylum seekers — Subhi, a gay man from Syria; Junior, a gender-nonconforming gay man from the DRC; and Cheyenne and Mari, a lesbian couple from Angola. Over several years, Shepard's camera captures this diverse foursome as they all figure out how to navigate life on these increasingly hostile shores — and in the process learn the true price of American freedom.

So for this Pride "Doc Star of the Month," Documentary is honored to spotlight two brave LGBTQ asylum seekers, Cheyenne Adriano and Mari Timans, who traded horrific threats on their lives for a more mundane form of US insecurity.

To read my interview with the persevering duo visit Documentary magazine.

“We Prioritized Hiring Trans Crew, and When We Couldn’t do That We Mentored Trans People on Set”: Sam Feder on Disclosure

Disclosure, directed by Sam Feder (Kate Bornstein is a Queer & Pleasant Danger) and executive produced by Laverne Cox, debuts on Netflix today, June 19th. And in the wake of the whiplash from the Trump administration’s decision to erase healthcare protections for trans people, followed by the US Supreme Court’s momentous ruling protecting those same folks from workplace discrimination, it couldn’t have arrived at a better time. The doc is an exhaustive and entertaining look at how trans individuals have historically been depicted onscreen through surprising archival footage (Birth of a Nation and Bugs Bunny make appearances) and insightful interviews with a diverse array of activists and artists (everyone from the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, one of the attorneys on plaintiff Aimee Stephens’ winning team, to directors Lily Wachowski and Yance Ford).

During the start of this chaotic Pride Month, Feder took a few moments to fill Filmmaker in on the project, including working with an all-queer crew and celebrating the wide range of trans men and women and gender nonconforming trailblazers (who look nothing like the white and wealthy Caitlyn Jenner).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“This Whole Movement is about Performance”: Daniel Lombroso on his Alt-Right Doc White Noise

White Noise, the first feature-length documentary from The Atlantic, often plays more like it was sprung from the mind of Christopher Guest. Director Daniel Lombroso, who’s traveled throughout the world to shoot award-winning shorts for the magazine’s website, exploring everything from Russian espionage to Israeli settlements, now trains his lens on the alt-right — specifically on three of its biggest stars. There’s Lauren Southern, who seems to be crafting herself into a sort of Ann Coulter for the YouTube generation. Also conspiracy theorist and sex blogger Mike Cernovich, who eventually dispenses with fascist ideology in favor of the more lucrative dietary supplements grift, a la Alex Jones. (I guess the sexy conspiracy theories market was a bust.) And then there’s the notorious Richard Spencer, who traded in his childhood dream of becoming an avant-garde theater director for a career in what can only be described as bizarre, racist and xenophobic performance art. (Honestly, I cannot watch Spencer give a speech without thinking of those old “Master Thespian” skits on SNL. That said, when it comes to avant-garde stunts, “Twinks4Trump,” the creation of Lucian Wintrich, who’s also featured in the film, is admittedly pure genius.)

A week prior to the film’s AFI Docs Film Festival virtual debut on June 20th, Filmmaker reached out to Lombroso to learn more about his four-year journey down the far-right rabbit hole.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.