‘Cutting Through Rocks’ Review: A Sharp Documentary Profiles a Motorcycle-Loving Woman Who Takes on the Patriarchy in Rural Iran

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s precisely lensed “Cutting Through Rocks“ is a deftly shaped work of cinematic nonfiction that opens with a literal bang, as we cut from a black screen to a middle-aged, headscarf-clad woman wrestling with a metal door that’s become unhinged; eventually she decides to buzzsaw through the surrounding stone enclosure to make it fit back in. It’s an apt metaphor for the formidable Sara Shahverdi, a longtime divorcee in a deeply religious region of northwest Iran — a woman who’s spent most of her life flouting gender norms and giving the finger to convention. The former midwife is also a vocal advocate for the empowerment of women and girls, which includes access to education and an end to child marriage. And, of course, she’s also an advocate for the right to ride a motorcycle, her greatest passion of all.

To read the rest of my review visit IndieWire.

“Societal Failures Are Dictating What People Do”: Reid Davenport’s ‘Life After’ Connects Assisted Dying With a Fear of Disability

I interviewed Reid Davenport for the Doc Star of the Month column in 2022, the year the Stanford-trained TED fellow nabbed the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at Sundance for his remarkable debut feature, I Didn’t See You There, which he termed a doc “about disability from an overtly political perspective.” Now the award-winning director returns to Park City with Life After, another doc about disability from an overtly political perspective —though the politics are complicated when the subject is assisted dying. As Davenport himself put it in his director’s statement: “I’m a filmmaker in New York City, living in a progressive milieu where conversations about the ‘right to die’ hinge on treasured values of choice and bodily autonomy. But as a disabled person, I can sense people’s undisguised fear of disability just below the surface. What’s a hot-button dinner party topic for some is utterly sinister for me, as I see people in my life exhibit a higher tolerance for the deaths of disabled people than for non-disabled people.” It’s through this personal lens that we’re introduced to the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, a disabled Californian who in 1983 sought the “right to die” in a courtroom, sparking a media frenzy that morphed into a contentious national debate. And then, as so often happens with human beings hijacked for causes, she up and disappeared. This mystery prompted Davenport, who like Bouvia has cerebral palsy, to set out to investigate her whereabouts today. Through her story, Davenport explores the contemporary legal status of assisted dying and how legislation is crafted while disregarding input from disabled advocates. Documentary caught up with Davenport the week before the film’s U.S. Documentary Competition premiere on Life After’s aesthetic choices, the necessity of disabled perspectives in storytelling, and the political entanglement of the “right to die” with the refusal to support conditions of life.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“Making Films in Iran Is Not an Easy Task at All”: Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni on their Sundance-debuting Cutting Through Rocks

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks follows Sara Shahverdi, a middle-aged divorcee in a remote and extremely conservative region of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What makes the scenario rather remarkable that Shahverdi is neither pariah nor wallflower in her tiny town. On the contrary, the onetime midwife, who quite literally brought an entire generation of her village into the world, is also a loud motorcycle-riding rebel who ran for a seat at the government table and won. And now, as the first elected councilwoman, a woman who finds herself at the center of an incompetent bureaucracy, one in which the proverbial glass ceiling just might be made of stone. A few days prior to the film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition debut on January 27th, Filmmaker caught up with the married co-directors to learn all about their seven-year journey with Shahverdi, including staying safe through the “rare knowledge” of their formidable star.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Tip Jar

All tips appreciated!

“It Was More Pointedly a Satirical Look at …’The Peace-Building Industry'”: Amber Fares on her Sundance-Premiering Coexistence, My Ass!

Amber Fares’s Sundance-premiering Coexistence, My Ass! takes its fabulous title from a one-woman show of the same name, a piece developed (at Harvard of all places) by the doc’s star, “activist-comedian” Noam Shuster Eliassi. The daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and a Romanian Jewish father, Shuster Eliassi grew up in “Oasis of Peace” (Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam), a utopian community purposely comprised equally of Jews and Palestinians, where she would become “the literal poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process” and eventually a co-director of the UN’s Interpeace organization by the time she was in her early 20s. But then disillusionment with the impotence of institutions set in as well as her realization that, when you’re a Hebrew-Arabic-English-speaking,Mizrachi-Ashkenazi Jew often mistaken for an Arab — with a Palestinian best friend who could pass for Ashkenazi — you’re sitting on a potential comedic gold mine and perhaps a way to build bridges one punchline at a time. Until, that is, October 7th, 2023 put idealism itself to the test. Just prior to the doc’s January 26th Sundance debut, Filmmaker caught up with Fares (Speed Sisters) to learn all about the ups and downs of a five-year, multilingual, country-hopping journey with an Israeli wisecracker raised to defend peace at all costs.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“You’d Be Surprised How Happy People Are to Talk About the Best Times in Their Lives”: Elegance Bratton on His Sundance-Debuting Doc, Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

"A good party knows no fucking sexual orientation, no race, no socioeconomic background,” notes Vince Lawrence, the very first person to record a house song and the main protagonist in Elegance Bratton’s Sundance-debuting Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. That a global movement could be traced back to a rather nerdy Black youngster raised in the segregated world of Mayor Daley’s Chicago is just one surprising element in this lovingly crafted music history lesson. (Less surprising is the number of white folks who would also like to take credit.) But perhaps most remarkable is that through a combination of eye-catching archival imagery, dance floor beats, a wealth of interviews with the sound’s pioneering artists and DJs – and even reenactments – Bratton has managed to create a time capsule of an all-inclusive community, while keeping the party going loud and proud onscreen. The week before the doc’s January 26th (Premieres section) Sundance debut, Filmmaker caught up with the director-writer-producer-photographer, who was last on the festival circuit with his TIFF-premiering 2022 narrative feature The Inspection.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Editorially It Was Similar to Quilt-Making”: Brittany Shyne on her Sundance-Debuting Seeds

While “stunning directorial debut” is an overused description that seldom lives up to the Sundance hype, in the case of Brittany Shyne’s Seeds it’s also quite precise. The lush, B&W-shot doc is a gorgeous portrait of what may very well be the last in a long line of generational Black farmers in rural Georgia, one in which Shyne’s camera serves as both portal and means of preservation. By quietly and patiently embedding with two extended families in the small town of Thomasville, Shyne is able to capture everything from the languid rhythm of daily work, from harvesting cotton to repairing machinery; to a feisty elderly woman sharing sweets with her young granddaughter in the backseat of a car; to a touching moment of a sturdy octogenarian soothing his tiny great-grandchild to sleep. Though later we likewise see that same tender man express frustration bordering on outrage to Biden admin reps who are all talk and no financial help to farmers — unless they’re white. “I voted for Joe Biden,” he pleads in exasperation. (Black farmers now own but a fraction of the 16 million acres of land they had in 1910.) In other words, Seeds manages to encapsulate all the little things that add up to a heartbreakingly fast-vanishing — and rarely seen onscreen — way of life. A few days prior to the film’s January 25th U.S. Documentary Competition premiere, Filmmaker caught up with the Dayton-based director-cinematographer and recipient of the 2021 Artist Disruptor Award from the Center of Cultural Power to learn all about the making of Seeds (and learning from her mentors Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Filmed It, and I Posted It. Now, Watch”: David Borenstein on His Sundance-Debuting Mr. Nobody Against Putin

David Borenstein’s Sundance-premiering Mr. Nobody Against Putin stars Pavel “Pasha” Talankin (also credited as co-director), an “unlikely hero” in an even more unlikely collaboration. A jokey primary school teacher in his Ural Mountains hometown of Karabash (which has the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted cities on the planet), Pasha spends many days mentoring the kids who use the thirty-something’s open door office as a hangout/safe haven. That is, when he’s not documenting their young lives as the school’s videographer. Which is why things get rather complicated for this pro-democracy, but non-activist, educator. For once Putin decides to launch his “special military operation” life is turned upside down in this toxic mining town a world away, over a thousand miles from cosmopolitan Moscow — especially when a new “patriotic education” is mandated, swapping out the usual subjects for revisionist history, the singing of the State Anthem of the Russian Federation, and marching drills. All of which must be filmed by the school’s videographer, of course, as both proof of adherence and ammunition in the Kremlin’s propaganda war. Which is how Pasha found himself with a trove of truly remarkable footage, equal parts absurd and terrifying. And then he made the momentous decision to keep covertly shooting while smuggling it all out to an expat American filmmaker he just happened to get connected with online (after he’d pitched a Russian reality tv show seeking accounts of how the war had impacted everyday citizens) — a filmmaker who, in turn, shaped the story while gaining even more insight into his accidental protagonist through an exhausting, two years-plus of chatting over encrypted phone calls. Indeed, as Pasha succinctly puts it in his co-director’s statement, “Everyone was exhausted, but the orders kept coming: film it, post it. ‘Film it and post it.’ Well, I filmed it, and I posted it. Now, watch.” Filmmaker reached out to the award-winning, Copenhagen-based journalist and filmmaker (2016’s Dream Empire, last year’s Can’t Feel Nothing) a few weeks prior to the doc’s January 25th Sundance debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Playing Three-Dimensional Chess”: Balancing Personal Lives and the Status Quo in Violet Du Feng’s ‘The Dating Game’

At the start of Violet Du Feng’s Sundance-debuting The Dating Game we learn that, due to the former one-child policy, China now has 30 million more men than women, an eye-catching number that presents dire implications for the country. But behind the cold facts are flesh and blood human beings — and potential clients for a dating coach named Hao. Hao trains lovelorn males in the techniques of “strategic deception”, such as makeovers, enhanced social media profiles, and cagey communication skills. It’s into this faux glamorous world that three rural wife-seekers step. Zhou, Li, and Wu are all shy but willing to try as they take part in Hao’s fast-paced, week-long dating boot camp. They begin to question what to wear, who to pursue — and most importantly, how far on the spectrum between truth and lies they’re willing to go to meet their match. While the doc is specific to China, it’s also universal in its critique of how capitalism, consumerism, and social media collide to create a generation that assumes everyone is faking who they are and therefore concludes that they too must “fake it to make it.” As the film progresses, we learn that Hao’s just a village boy who made it in the big city, and even managed to land the stylish Wen (herself a dating coach for women whose advice couldn’t be more at odds with that of her husband’s). In other words, what Hao is really selling is the eternal rags to riches story, the forever elusive Chinese dream. A week before the film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition premiered today, Documentary reached out to Feng, whose Peabody and Emmy-nominated Hidden Letters (2022) tackled gender stereotypes from the female side.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“There Was a Fair Amount of Us All Killing Each Other”: Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls on Grand Theft Hamlet

Grand Theft Hamlet, which took the Documentary Feature Jury Award at last year’s SXSW, is groundbreaking cinema to say the least. The first documentary to win an Innovation Award at The Stage Awards in London back in 2022, the film’s production probably also marked the first time a filmmaker jumped into an online avatar and then shot her doc entirely within a video game (one in which conditions often resembled a war zone to boot). The project was born out of the UK’s third Covid lockdown in 2021, when abruptly out-of-work theater actors Sam Crane (who co-directed along with his veteran documentarian wife Pinny Grylls) and Mark Osterveen found themselves in existential distress, the former wondering how he’d support his young family, the latter physically and emotionally alone. Desperate for connection as many of us were, the two friends turned to Grand Theft Auto for camaraderie and escape, where one day they happened upon an amphitheater. Which led to a eureka moment that, safe to say, most of us never in a million years would have: Why not stage a full production of Shakespeare within GTA? Indeed, inside GTA all the world really is a stage. Which naturally only led to more questions (like how to cast a troupe. Or how to avoid getting gunned down during a soliloquy). Fortunately, Filmmaker was able to pose a few to the busy co-directors, both Oxford grads who cite Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I as a touchstone, to learn all about their inspired production process; and crafting a work perfectly balanced between the heartfelt and the poignant — while being also batshit crazy hilarious. Grand Theft Hamlet opens today in theaters from MUBI.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“It Was Crucial to Bring a Native Lens into Each Area of the Creative Roles”: Jonathan Olshefski and Elizabeth Day on Without Arrows

Delwin Fiddler Jr., star of Jonathan Olshefski (a “25 New Face” of 2017) and Elizabeth Day’s Without Arrows, grew up on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in South Dakota, where he found his calling as a grass dancer (which led to championships on the pow-wow circuit and eventually even international fame. His work can be seen not only in the film but also in a continual loop at the Museum of the American Indian in D.C.). And then he spent over a decade in Philadelphia, making more money if not a better living. Having had enough of big city life, Fiddler eventually decided to return home to rekindle relationships, particularly with his aging mom and dad, and to reconnect with his culture and absorb the family history. However that’s where things got complicated, for the rez is a place of beauty and unconditional love but also dark generational trauma. Remarkably, it was in this intimate space that Fiddler and his family allowed two outsiders with cameras to film for 13 years, one of whom (Ojibwe filmmaker Day) was born on the Leech Lake Reservation and raised in Minneapolis–Saint Paul. So to learn how the co-directors crafted a film that celebrates heritage without sugarcoating the inheritance of genocide, Filmmaker caught up with the duo the week before the doc’s PBS debut. (January 13th on Independent Lens.)

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

A year of surprises: my top 5 documentary film discoveries of the last 12 months

To read all about them visit Global Comment.

“Examining Their Eyes, Hands, Hair, Mouths, and Posture”: Darius Clark Monroe on the Intimacies of Docuseries ‘Dallas, 2019’

Darius Clark Monroe has been on my radar for a decade, ever since his feature debut Evolution of a Criminal, a revisitation of the robbery the filmmaker committed when he was a teenager and its impact on both loved ones and victims, which world premiered at SXSW back in 2014. (Later that year it took top honors at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, where I programmed the film.) Since then Monroe has been on an artistic evolution as well, continuing with such unconventional projects as the 2018 Tribeca-debuting short Black 14, once again EP’d by Evolution executive producer Spike Lee, which explored the story of 14 African American student athletes dismissed from the University of Wyoming football team back in 1969 for speaking out against racism in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and the doc quadtych Racquet, which played the Whitney Biennial the following year. Monroe’s eclectic CV also includes writing and directing for Terence Nance’s Peabody Award–winning HBO series Random Acts of Flyness (2018). Now Monroe has returned home, with the five-part docuseries Dallas, 2019 bringing the Houston native back to the Lone Star State for a “five week observation of the city of Dallas and its people.” Each episode tackles subjects ranging from environmental racism, injustice in the criminal justice system, to education and beyond, all through a chorus of characters that breathe life into those cold abstract concepts. To learn all about the series, which premiered over two nights on Independent Lens on January 3 and 4, Documentary reached out to the Brooklyn-based filmmaker.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

A Conversation With Josh Fox (THE EDGE OF NATURE)

While Josh Fox might be best known for his documentaries – from 2010’s Oscar-nominated surprise hit Gasland right through to 2017’s Awake, A Dream From Standing Rock (made in collaboration with Doug Good Feather and Myron Dewey, who also served as EP on this latest) – filmmaking for the veteran director-writer-environmental activist has always been more means to an end than conscious pursuit. Indeed, Fox is a live performer at heart, and continues to serve as the producing artistic director of International WOW Company, which he founded nearly thirty years back (and has since toured with throughout Europe, Asia and of course the US). Which makes The Edge of Nature, a documentary theater piece that had its world-premiering run at La MaMa in NYC, an artistic culmination rather than diversion. (A critically-acclaimed one at that. Reviews even included a “great work” quote from Bernie Sanders, who Fox wrote parts of the Democratic platform on energy and environment for in 2016; Fox also receives funding from The Sanders Institute.) It’s also a wildly ambitious, and surprisingly successful, attempt to connect seemingly disparate subjects: long Covid – which prompted Fox to seek healing in his beloved Pennsylvania woods, isolated with only a camera and a variety of forest friends; the Native American genocide (of which the late Myron Dewey of the Walker River Paiute Tribe was a survivor); the Holocaust (Fox’s father fled the Nazis as a child, thus making him a survivor); and ongoing environmental devastation (save for the period of the “anthropause,” the first six to eight months of pandemic lockdown that resulted in worldwide emissions being reduced enough to actually halt climate change. Yes, the environment can survive if we prioritize). The multimedia spectacle likewise includes an 11-member ensemble from International WOW, who along with the banjo-playing Fox, use American folk music (score by musician-composer-producer Dougie Bowne of the Lounge Lizards) to guide us through the first-person documentary journey that unfolds onscreen above the stage, hovering like a cinematic conscience for us all.

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.