“We Underestimated the Violence of the Regime”: Lina on 5 Seasons of Revolution

Like most conflicts heavily documented by Western media, the ongoing Syrian civil war is one in which nearly all nuance has been left on the cutting room floor. Fortunately, Lina’s 5 Seasons of Revolution, a revelatory Sundance debut from a Damascus video journalist who (for safety reasons) goes simply by her first name, shatters the trend. Currently based in Europe, Lina spent 2011-2015 filming her country’s path from high revolutionary hopes to ultimately shattered dreams. But even more importantly, she did so in the most personal and truthful way, by turning the camera on herself and four of her closest friends — all educated, anti-regime, cosmopolitan twentysomethings in the capital city (and al-Assad stronghold) who find themselves surrounded by folks who’d just as soon look away. Until, of course, they — along with the rest of the world — could not. With the help of documentary heavies like producer Orwa Nyrabia and EP Laura Poitras, Lina has transformed that material into the most poignant of coming-of-age tales. To learn about her journey from college grad to accidental war journalist, Filmmaker reached out to the director soon after the film’s Sundance World Cinema Documentary Competition premiere.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“What Remains in the Body”: Maite Alberdi on The Eternal Memory

Oscar nominee and Sundance alum Maite Alberdi (with 2020’s surprisingly lighthearted The Mole Agent, which followed an endearing octogenarian with no private investigative skills on an undercover mission to expose retirement home elder abuse) returned to Park City this year with a much different follow-up. While The Eternal Memory likewise deals with both the joys and indignities of aging, Alberdi trains her lens this time on a dynamic duo who’ve been together for a quarter century, much of it in the media spotlight. Paulina Urrutia was (and still is) an actor and former State Minister, while Augusto Góngora was one of Chile’s most famous TV personalities. A fearless cultural commentator, he had the audacity to spotlight the brutalities of the Pinochet regime and upon its fall build an “archive of memory” so that his fellow countrymen would never forget. The ironic tragedy is that Augusto was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease nearly a decade earlier, which is where Alberdi picks up the baton and camera – following the still madly in love couple on their day-by-day journey into discombobulating territory. A few days after The Eternal Memory’s January 21st World Cinema Documentary Competition debut, Filmmaker reached out to the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Academy Award to learn all about this latest (Pablo Larraín-produced) project.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“This Film Is Not Just for Disabled People, It Is for Anyone Who’s Ever Felt ‘Other'”: Ella Glendining on Is There Anybody Out There?

While many non-white, non-straight folks have long lamented underrepresentation in cinema, Ella Glendining has literally never seen anyone that looks like her on-screen — or off-screen, for that matter. (Yes, other similarly bodied people are indeed out there; along with fixit freaks like a Miami-based doctor who seems to have cornered the market on “limb lengthening.”) But this truth culminates in the biggest revelation of Is There Anybody Out There?, Glendining’s personal and illuminating non-fiction film: There truly is nobody out there quite like her, nor is there anybody out there quite like you or me. Filmmaker reached out to the acclaimed writer-director — named one of Screen International’s Stars of Tomorrow 2020 (and who seems right on track to fulfill that prediction) — just prior to her film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition debut on January 22 at the Sundance Film Festival.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Independent Media Can Strengthen Tribal Sovereignty”: Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler on Bad Press

While freedom of the press has certainly been a newsworthy topic these past few years, those of us in the US can at least take comfort in (i.e., take for granted) the fact that our First Amendment firmly protects this inalienable right. That is, unless you happen to likewise be a citizen of one of the sovereign nations sprinkled throughout this occupied land — aka Indian Country — where only a handful of tribes have seen fit to enshrine such a guarantee into their constitutions. Which is a problem not just for the average, truth-seeking Native populace at large, but especially for a dogged reporter like Angel Ellis — the hard-hitting star of Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler’s Sundance-debuting documentary Bad Press — and her often embattled colleagues at Mvskoke Media in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Just prior to the film’s January 22 premiere as part of the festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition, Filmmaker caught up with the co-directors to learn all about their under-reported journey down a rabbit hole in our own backyard; one in which independent media, and even elections, can be too easily coopted by government leaders behind closed doors.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Realized That a Sauna Is Not Just for Cleaning the Body, but Also the Soul”: Anna Hints on Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Debuting January 22 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is an intimate look at a tradition that UNESCO has added to its “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” This might appear to be a heavy designation for a way to sweat out stress. Unless, of course, one happens to be South Estonian like director Anna Hints, who grew up with the knowledge that for centuries smoke saunas have also been a place of life (birth) and death. For the small group of women that have generously allowed Hints to serve as a cinematic fly-on-the-wall witness to a sacred space of power, smoke saunas also offer freedom and healing where one can bond through joyous laughter and traumatic confessions — with both one another and themselves. To learn more about this unusual project, Filmmaker reached out to Hints, the film’s equally unique director — also “scriptwriter and composer with a background in contemporary art, photography and experimental folk music” — whose bio additionally notes that they are an “active dumpster diver” that currently calls India their second home.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Was Blind to My Own Blackness by Apartheid’s Design”: Milisuthando Bongela on Milisuthando

The self-described South African “writer, editor, cultural worker and artist” — and now debut feature filmmaker — Milisuthando Bongela grew up under apartheid. Yet she also didn’t, at least not within the straightforward narrative of having witnessed a racist colonial regime heroically toppled by Black liberator Nelson Mandela. Indeed, the young Bongela wasn’t aware of her fellow Black countrymen’s struggle in cities like Soweto. But neither were most of the residents of The Transkei, an unrecognized Black independent region established by the oppressors to conjure the illusion that being “separate but equal” not only worked, but could provide Black people with a wonderfully blissful life. The problem was that for Bongela — and especially for folks like her grandmother, who expresses disdain for Mandela and his seemingly crazy race-mixing ideas — it actually did. So how does one process such a complicated legacy, one which includes the experience of being thrust into a sudden world of whiteness you never even knew existed? If you’re a thrilling new cinematic talent like Bongela, you make a documentary called Milisuthando, a wildly ambitious and deeply poetic five-part essay film that manages to be every bit as intimate and vulnerable as it is bold and historically sweeping. Filmmaker reached out to the multi-hyphenate director — who actually began her career in the fashion industry — a few days prior to Milisuthando’s World Cinema Documentary Competition premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“This ‘Space Problem’ Became Our Problem”: Ido Mizrahy on The Longest Goodbye

With NASA under “presidential orders” to land humans on Mars by 2033 — and the industry titans of Silicon Valley rushing to make space exploration sexy again (not to mention cash in on that lucrative action) — it might be a good time to stop and ask not when our long-mission astronauts will launch, but rather who should be going and how they will survive. And not just physical survival, but mental and emotional, for even the Trekkiest among us may give pause before signing up for a years-long journey that requires relentless isolation, being stripped of any semblance of privacy and deprived of social contact with family and friends. (Really, how sexy would confinement to a small and inescapable space with Elon Musk actually be?) Fortunately, award-winning director Ido Mizrahy (Gored) has not only pondered such otherworldly predicaments, but gone to some truly deep thinkers for answers. In his Sundance-premiering The Longest Goodbye, Mizrahy sits down with everyone from a potential Mars missionary and her earthbound husband to a longtime NASA psychologist in order to delve into the unvarnished reality behind sci-fi travel. Mizrahy found the time to answer some questions for Filmmaker just prior to the film’s Sundance debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“If We Wanted To Visualize This at All, We’d Have to Do It Ourselves”: Steve James on A Compassionate Spy

Steve James’s A Compassionate Spy is an unexpectedly charitable portrait of a man who betrayed his country for a higher cause. Specifically in the case of physicist Ted Hall — still a teenage undergrad at Harvard when, in 1944, he was tasked to help develop the atomic bomb — the greater cause of world peace. But unlike far more famous contemporaneous “traitors” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953, Hall managed to do something even more remarkable than simply smuggle secrets to the Soviets — he escaped accountability for his actions. FBI surveillance aside, he went on to enjoy a surprisingly normal life with his adoring wife Joan and their seemingly well-adjusted daughters, right up until his death in 1999. Interestingly, though perhaps not so surprisingly for a director who’s made a career out of crafting intimate portraits (from Hoop Dreams to Stevie to Life Itself), it’s this family aspect that James turns his lens to, represented by Hall’s widow Joan, an unwaveringly unapologetic champion of her husband of 50 years. Indeed, as James has acknowledged in a director’s statement (from the film’s world premiere in Venice back in September): “What first drew me to make A Compassionate Spy was Joan Hall who, in her 90s, still carried the torch for Ted Hall, the love of her life and a man who, for her, took incredibly courageous risks as a young physicist on the Manhattan Project.” This immediately led me to wonder: How exactly does a filmmaker shape a documentary about a controversial figure around a protagonist wearing a pair of permanently rose-colored glasses? In search of answers to this big picture question and several more — including why the veteran director (who followed up his nonfiction blockbuster Hoop Dreams with 1997’s Jared Leto-starring Prefontaine) chose to weave dramatic recreations into this latest — Filmmaker reached out to James a few weeks prior to the doc’s January 9th screening at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Being an Outsider to Palm Springs Was an Asset”: Sara Newens, Mina T. Son and Courtney Parker on Racist Trees

Sara Newens and Mina T. Son’s provocatively titled Racist Trees begins as an innocent investigation into the root (no pun intended) of a half-century dispute over a line of 60-foot tamarisks separating a historically Black section of Palm Springs from its historically white (and now overwhelmingly gay cisgender male) neighbors on the other side of a city-owned golf course. The film morphs into something much more shocking than merely another example of systemic inequality and the longstanding “polite” racism of white liberals who prefer gaslighting to admissions of culpability. Indeed, in the slyest and boldest of moves, the white and Korean American filmmaking duo (along with their Black co-EP and DP) have taken what appears to be an average tale of two cities and transformed it into a laugh-and-cringe, Jordan Peele-style, comedy-horror doc. Soon after catching the film during its world-premiering IDFA run back in November, Filmmaker decided to reach out to the team — director-producer-editor Newens, director-producer Son and co-executive producer Courtney Parker — as they prepared for their doc’s North American debut January 7th, appropriately during the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.