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.