The Edge of Nature

“I guess you could call that instinct – or insanity,” states the director-writer-environmental activist Josh Fox about his compulsion to build a high platform in the middle of the Pennsylvania forest where he’d gone to convalesce from long Covid. Later, after a monologue about deer trails being the precursor to roads, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker (for 2010’s Gasland) likewise notes that “Nature is an X-ray – upon which our entire system is a hologram.” Equal parts self-deprecating and painfully earnest, Fox serves as our passionate guide in The Edge of Nature, a documentary theater piece that recently premiered at NYC’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club to rave reviews (including from none other than Bernie Sanders, who’s long supported Fox through The Sanders Institute. Fox also wrote parts of the Democratic platform on energy and environment in 2016).

To read the rest of my review visit Hammer to Nail.

“A Deep Dive Into My Trauma”: Shiori Ito on Black Box Diaries

Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries is a film the Japanese journalist should never have had to make. Based on her international bestseller, the Sundance-premiering doc is a dogged investigation into a rape perpetrated by another Japanese journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a longtime friend of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose biography the offender penned as well. It’s also a somewhat surreal journey, given that the brave survivor in the purposely stalled case is Ito herself. Through an engaging mix of secret recordings, vérité shooting and confessional video, we’re invited along on an increasingly maddening odyssey through the shockingly antiquated Japanese judicial system; exposing a hidden world where, prior to production, rape laws hadn’t been changed for 110 years. As a result the minimum sentence for rape was shorter than for theft, and was provable not by a lack of consent but only by physical violence or threats. Add to this the chances of a female officer taking on your case being next to nil (since women make up less than 8% of the force), and the fact that you’ll likely have to re-traumatize yourself by reenacting the incident with a life-sized doll for the assigned policeman, and it’s easy to see why only four percent of violated women even bother to report the crime. That is, until an undaunted reporter suddenly decided to seek justice for herself and others by documenting everything, and calling BS on it all. Just prior to the October 25th theatrical release of Black Box Diaries, Filmmaker reached out to the gender-based human rights-focused writer and filmmaker, who in 2020 also made Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“The illusion of immortality”: A Photographic Memory

Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s A Photographic Memory is a very intimate investigation into the life of a globetrotting journalist (and photographer and filmmaker) whose interviews with legendary lensers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and Lisette Model formed the basis for a trailblazing audiovisual series you’ve likely never heard of. Though “Images of Man” was produced with the renowned International Center of Photography founder Cornell Capa and Scholastic, the eight-part program (each episode pairing a photographer’s images with descriptions of their philosophies in their own words) had been time-capsuled in the ICP archives since 1979; at the behest of the journo’s grieving widower, Time-Life photographer Brian Seed, who sent the raw materials to the center for safekeeping upon the sudden death of his wife at the age of 42.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

‘My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow’ Review: A Scary and Riveting Portrait of Russia’s Last Independent News Channel

“Sadism disguised with the lacework of words” is how Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist with TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news channel, describes Putin’s twisting of phrases in “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow.” And “being at the right place at the right time — or the wrong place at the wrong time,” is how “The Loneliest Planet” director Julia Loktev has described the circumstances that led to the documentary she’s made about Nemzer’s work. First conceived as a look at the daily lives of reporters who’ve been branded “foreign agents” by their own government, the essence of the project — now a five-part, five-and-a-half-hour epic — was profoundly transformed four months into production, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion against Ukraine.

To read the rest of my New York Film Festival review visit IndieWire.