“I would try to turn memories into touchstones, a pizza movie into a madeleine”: David Shapiro on Untitled Pizza Movie

Veteran doc-maker David Shapiro (Missing People, Keep the River on Your Right, Finishing Heaven) is an Independent Spirit Award winner whose work has been Emmy-nominated and Oscar-shortlisted. The born and bred New Yorker is also a visual artist, having exhibited at both the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA. Which is why a seven-part “pizzamentary” might seem an odd project for such an acclaimed filmmaker to pursue. Then again, Untitled Pizza Movie – the first three episodes of which debuted at last year’s Sundance, and is virtually playing in full at NYC’s Metrograph February 26 to March 14 – can perhaps more accurately be described as a stunningly crafted and heartbreakingly poignant love letter to a bygone city (and best friend), with pizza served up as red herring.

And to read my interview with the unconventional filmmaker and pizza connoisseur visit Hammer to Nail.

Dating While Distancing: Pacho Velez’s Sundance-premiering Searchers

“New York is a dysfunctional relationship itself,” a woman laments in Pacho Velez’s Searchers, a cinematic sociological study of online dating via the POV of a wide range of New Yorkers during the 2020 Covid-19 summer. (The doc by the co-director, with Sierra Pettengill, of 2017’s The Reagan Show – which I raved about on this site – premiered in the NEXT section at this winter’s likewise digital Sundance Film Festival.) She goes on to note that the one positive thing about lockdown is the chance to enjoy the apartment that you spent nearly all your income on but rarely use. (Which reminded this expat New Yorker that though I will forever heart NYC, it’s also a high-maintenance relationship. A realization that led me to the conclusion several years back that it’d likely just be healthier if we were to amicably live apart.)

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

Doc Star of the Month: Ollie Lucks, ‘There Is No "I" in Threesome'

There Is No "I" in Threesome is certainly a doc I would not have predicted to have world-premiered at the WarnerMedia Lodge at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Set for a pre-Valentine’s Day streaming debut on February 11 (as an HBO Max Original), the project is directed by and stars New Zealand-based filmmaker Jan Oliver “Ollie” Lucks. Lucks is the son of an Iranian-Indian mother and a German father, and only moved to New Zealand a decade and a half ago to pursue his craft. Once there, however, he met an actress named Zoe. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love and plan a wedding. And then boy and girl hatch another plan: open their sexual relationship to other boys and girls. And, most consequentially, record their entire polyamorous journey. What were they thinking? Well, that was just one of a multitude of questions Documentary had. Which is why we hatched our own plan to spotlight the sexually intrepid Lucks as our February Doc Star of the Month.

To read my probing interview visit Documentary magazine.

“This Film is a Call to Solidarity, Self-Organization and Resistance”: Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović on their International Film Festival Rotterdam-debuting Landscapes of Resistance

Filmmaker, video artist and “cultural worker” Marta Popivoda has spent much of her career focusing on philosophies and movements through a decidedly feminist lens. Her first feature, 2013’s Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, premiered at the Berlinale and went on to become part of the permanent collection at MoMA. And now with Landscapes of Resistance, which debuted in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2021, the Berlin-based filmmaker returns to her native Belgrade with her partner, and the film’s co-writer, Ana Vujanović. Together they gently probe and cinematically preserve the memory of Vujanović’s grandmother Sonja, who brings to life an astonishing account of her time as one of the first female partisans in Yugoslavia. A fateful decision that eventually landed her in Auschwitz, where she continued leading the resistance. Just after the film’s virtual run in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, Filmmaker reached out to Popivoda and co-writer Vujanović to learn all about WWII’s unknown heroes, being a Serbian in Berlin, and why the world needs more partisans right now.

To read my interview with the duo visit Filmmaker magazine.

"...Liz was Isolated as a Felon on the Run, Transitioning Alone”: Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker on Their HBO Docuseries The Lady and the Dale

Binge-worthy doesn’t even begin to describe The Lady and the Dale, Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker’s four-part, one-of-a-kind docuseries, premiering January 31 on HBO. Produced by the Duplass brothers, this twist-and-turning saga stars a three-wheeled car called the Dale (that may or may not have been viable) and its marketer extraordinaire, a visionary female entrepreneur (and longtime serial con artist) named Elizabeth Carmichael. With a promise of 70 miles to the gallon at a time when the 70s oil crisis was leaving Americans to linger at gas stations in Soviet-long lines, the Dale seemed to many a dream come true. And to others, too good to be true.

To read my interview with the filmmakers, who describe a head spinning journey back in time and down the rabbit hole, visit Filmmaker magazine.

Ruled by the blindspots: All Light, Everywhere

PERCEPTION: When an image speaks, who does it speak for? Any documentary that opens with its director examining his own retina while holding forth on the centrality of the blindspot – that black matter forever relegated off-camera and beyond the frame of our perception – raises a cascade of questions. The foremost being, «How does one make a film about what we don’t see, what we don’t want to see?» If you’re more abstract artist than a documentarian like Theo Anthony (Rat Film, Subject to Review), you acknowledge that limitation throughout the process, making the viewer constantly aware that the image onscreen is not a «reproduction» of reality, but a «producing of new worlds.» So this would be a good time to state that Anthony’s latest All Light, Everywhere – which just nabbed the Special Jury Award, Nonfiction Experimentation at the virtual Sundance Film Festival – is a nearly two-hour nonlinear collage (barrage?) of images, from archival to contemporary to computer-generated, and sci-fi sound design that interconnects a mind-boggling array of topics. A brief list would include astronomy, the birth of cinema, eugenics, mug shots, militarized pigeons, the «photographic rifle,» body cams from Arizona, and the surveillance state in Baltimore. Because the director, whose touchstones include Harun Farocki and Chris Marker, is attempting to be a sort of roving, all-seeing eye while exposing its constraints, I will try to do something similar – to give a partial approximation of Anthony’s approximation, blindspots included for us all.

To read my meditative take visit Modern Times Review.

“It Was Such a Jiggle of Consciousness, Such a Beautiful Monstrosity...”: Salomé Jashi on Her Sundance-Debuting Taming the Garden

Salomé Jashi is not a name I was familiar with before catching her exquisitely crafted Taming the Garden, which made its Sundance debut on January 31 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. That said, the Georgian director (and founder of not one but two production companies), whose 2016 doc The Dazzling Light of Sunset took top honors at Visions du Réel, is certainly a prolific filmmaker I’ll now be keeping an eye out for. With her latest, Taming the Garden, a “cinematic environmental parable,” Jashi weaves together a series of perfectly composed shots, containing the lush magical nature on the Georgian coast, with a darker reality sometimes glimpsed only in fragments within the frame. It’s the tale of a wealthy and powerful man (tellingly, he’s never named), who has been traveling to impoverished villages for years to pursue the oddest of hobbies — collecting majestic trees, many of which have been part of their communities for over a century, silently bearing witness from as high as 15 feet above the land. In exchange for allowing (though one wonders if this is ultimately a matter of free will) the man to take away their towering giants and transplant them to his faraway walled-off garden, the residents are left with less foliage and meager payments. Also ripped up roads, massive empty holes, and the destruction of more ordinary trees that had the bad luck of standing in the way of machinery’s progress. Fortunately for Filmmaker, Jashi found time the week before Sundance to fill us in on her film’s origin story, the multiple themes she was attempting to unravel, and what it’s like to pursue nonfiction filmmaking within the confines of a politically unstable nation.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“It Was Not Really Possible to Use Any Safety Precautions or Protocols”: Hogir Hirori on his Sundance-debuting Sabaya

Hogir Hirori’s Sabaya is a harrowing tale of heroism from a filmmaker all too familiar with the wartime struggles of those he documents. With his latest, the final piece of a cinematic trilogy that includes The Deminer (which nabbed the Special Jury Award for Feature-Length Documentary at IDFA 2017), the Swedish director, who fled his native Kurdistan in 1999, returns to the battle zone to spotlight the dedicated civil servants of the Yazidi Home Center. Putting their lives on the line 24/7, two brave men and a slew of extraordinary, anonymous female “infiltrators” fight, using phones more than guns, to save the Sabaya, the Yazidi women and girls held as sex slaves by ISIS. It’s a calling that leads them to Al-Hol in Syria, the Middle East’s most dangerous camp, where the brutalized hostages blend in with their perpetrators, rendering identifying, let alone extricating, them a herculean task. To learn all about this ongoing rescue mission and the film’s nail biting production, Filmmaker turned to Hirori, himself a man with a calling, the week before Sabaya’s January 30th debut in the Sundance Film Festival World Cinema Documentary Competition.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Complicity Comes in Many Forms”: Jay Rosenblatt on His Sundance Short About Bullying, When We Were Bullies

Jay Rosenblatt’s latest inventive short When We Were Bullies, world premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, originated with a stranger than fiction coincidence surrounding a guy named Richard and the making of Rosenblatt’s 1994 short The Smell of Burning Ants — which itself had been influenced by another Richard, who is likewise the spark for this film. Fifty years ago the director and the former Richard, fifth-grade classmates, had been on the bullying side of a bizarre incident involving the latter Richard — a moment in time subsequently frozen in both their minds in similar, yet distinctly different, ways. So to get at the heart of what truly happened at a Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn public school a half century ago, Rosenblatt travels back down memory lane, contacting classmates whose recollections of the collective attack range from the totally blank to the weirdly specific. (One former student even surprisingly recalls the teacher as being a bit of a bully. So of course Rosenblatt also reconnects with that now nonagenarian teacher.) As the meta, or perhaps circular, quest ensues revelations begin to build as do the questions. All of this culminates in Rosenblatt’s disturbing recognition that culpability lies equally with leaders and collaborators, a dangerous lesson we’ve all been painfully learning over the past four years, right through to this very day. Just prior to the film’s Sundance debut Filmmaker reached out to the acclaimed San Francisco-based filmmaker, who’s directed over 30 films in 40 years, to find out all about both When We Were Bullies and “the bully in all of us.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Paradise lost: Taming the Garden

ENVIRONMENT: A single man wields enough power to uproot the living artifacts of his country’s collective history and memory. Premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden is a multi-prism meditation that begins with the simplest (if strangest) of premises and slowly, nearly imperceptibly, expands to become a cautionary tale for all. Through a series of painterly images, the award-winning director, who was born in Tbilisi and whose 2016 doc The Dazzling Light of Sunset nabbed the Main Prize at Visions du Réel’s Regard Neuf Competition, takes us on a fairytale-like journey to the Georgian coast. It’s a magical locale where century-old trees, some the size of small skyscrapers, have stood watch over generations of villagers. But the trees are slowly disappearing – or, more accurately, migrating, being uprooted by force (not unlike the perpetually unstable country’s own citizens). This disturbing disruption isn’t due to climate change or as the result of any existential threat – unless you consider a single wealthy man with a destructively bizarre hobby an omen of things to come.

To read my critique visit Modern Times Review.