Filmmaker's 20 Most Read Posts of 2022

Well worth the end-of-year read! And not just because my interview, “We’re All Pornographers Now”: Juliet Bashore on Her 2K-Restored Kamikaze Hearts, was the top post of 2022. (Smart sex still sells.)

The Feedback: Arden Teresa Lewis' 'Leveling Lincoln'

At first glance, the story of the landmark 1961 desegregation case Taylor vs. Board of Education, which originated in New Rochelle, New York, might not seem like obvious material for a white, Los Angeles-based theater director-writer-actor to tackle for her feature doc debut. But then, Arden Teresa Lewis happens to be a native of New Rochelle — once dubbed the "Little Rock of the North” — and her childhood was shaped by a diverse community whose grassroots demand for change had led all the way to the US Supreme Court. And now with the help of film friends and family, including producer Kimberly Woods, another LA-based actress-turned-documentary producer; former New Rochelle students and parents (including Lewis’ own mom) who candidly share the ups and downs of being thrust into American history (not to mention the sharp gaze of giants like Justice Thurgood Marshall and journalist Mike Wallace); and the DocuClub LA audience that attended the virtual screening of Leveling Lincoln back in November 2021, the doc has reached another landmark stage: the US festival circuit. Which is why Documentary thought it the perfect time to check in with Lewis, fresh off final showings at the YoFi Fest in Yonkers, New York, to find out, among other things, how Leveling Lincoln has been playing from coast to coast (and in multiple locales in between).

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

High Art: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

For Nan Goldin “survival was an art,” photography “a sublimation for sex,” and the art world “bullshit. Times Square was real life.” These are just some of the insights gleaned from Laura Poitras’s (Citizenfour, My Country, My Country) latest likely Oscar contender All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a quietly poignant portrait of an almost accidental artist and reluctant activist; one who could never quite compartmentalize the personal and the political – to both the benefit of society and at heavy cost to her own mental health.

To read the rest visit Global Comment.

Battle royale: Non-Aligned & Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels

NAM / In a documentary diptych, Mila Turajlić examines the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement via an expansive unexplored archive of former Tito cameraman Stevan Labudović. The synopsis for Belgrade-born Mila Turajlić’s Non-Aligned & Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels straightforwardly portrays the award-winning filmmaker’s (2017’s The Other Side of Everything, 2010’s Cinema Komunisto) latest endeavour as a «documentary diptych of two feature-length films that take us on an archival road trip through the birth of the Third World project, based on unseen 35mm materials filmed by Stevan Labudović, the cameraman of Yugoslav President Tito.» But even that ambitious description doesn’t begin to capture the true breadth and scope of this multiyear journey back in time, one which led to the self-described «documentary filmmaker, archival artivist and spoken word performer» unearthing an anti-colonialist dream that very nearly came true; duly recorded on newsreels that were «a fake reflection of a true aspiration» (as Turajlić puts it in poetic voiceover). But instead, disintegrated into history, dissolving like celluloid. Like her country itself.

To read the rest visit Modern Times Review.