The Feedback: Emily Packer’s Many Forms of Hybridity in ‘Holding Back the Tide’

In Holding Back the Tide, Emily Packer’s “docu-poetic meditation on New York’s oysters,” the humble bivalve becomes much more than the sum of its pearls. Indeed, the experimental filmmaker has inventively chosen to reimagine the once ubiquitous mollusk as a queer icon, and cast the gender-fluid creature alongside a host of other thought-provoking characters, both real and fictional. We’re introduced to folks like Moody “The Mothershucker” Harney (real), who’s bringing oysters back to the average diner through his cart, taking inspiration from Thomas Downing, the 19th-century Black Oyster King of New York. And Pippa Brashear of SCAPE Landscape Architecture, which is harnessing the oyster to protect Staten Island’s Tottenville neighborhood through its Living Breakwaters project. Even former WNBA star Sue Wicks has gotten in on the mollusk action, having retired to her Violet Cove Oyster Co. farm (where she knows each of her bivalves by name). Between scenes with these colorful individuals in their natural environment are staged encounters with Packer’s gender-unbounded collaborators, who pass along the cinematic baton through striking visuals and lyrical words. A woman emerges from a shell on a beach. Diners feasting on oysters discover a new identity. Social constructs like race and binary categorizations fall by the wayside, ultimately swept out to sea by the power of “we.” Or as the director themself optimistically puts it, “We took inspiration from the oyster, which thrives when connected and fails when isolated.” Before its theatrical debut, Documentary recently caught up with Packer to learn all about Holding Back the Tide, from its Hurricane Sandy origins to the intersectional queer production process.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“With Viktor I Approached Sign Language Just Like Any Other Language”: Olivier Sarbil on His TIFF-premiering doc Viktor

One of the cinematic highlights of this year’s TIFF, Olivier Sarbil’s Ukraine-set (and Darren Aronofsky-produced) Viktor follows the titular protagonist, a Kharkiv resident who lives with his widowed mother and faces a most unusual conundrum. Desperate to defend his country, Viktor — a sword-loving giant of a man whose bible is Miyamoto Musashi’s The Strategy of the Samurai — is nevertheless blocked from joining the war effort because he just so happens to be Deaf. Fortunately, Viktor possesses the dogged determination of a noble warrior and manages to convince the local army to take him on as a volunteer photojournalist since he also happens to be an artist behind the lens, stunning B&W images his specialty. It’s a talent he shares with the film’s director/DP, a veteran conflict photojournalist who likewise has a knack for coloring in B&W; and like his riveting star has a hearing disability, having lost the use of his right ear while covering the civil war in Libya over a decade ago. A few days prior to the doc’s September 8th debut in the Platform section Filmmaker reached out to the Corsica-born, NY-based director to learn all about the intricate crafting of this “audiovisual experience,” a process that included members of the Sound of Metal team along with “Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, as well as individuals who are Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“My Father Started Using the Hidden Camera to Send Messages Expressing What Seemed Like Regrets”: Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc on their TIFF-Premiering Doc Tata

Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc’s TIFF-debuting Tata originated with a cry for help from a migrant worker being physically assaulted by his boss. The Romania-based filmmakers, partners in life and art, are both veteran investigative journalists in their region — Vdovîi an award-winning reporter from the Republic of Moldova who’s been nominated for the European Press Prize, Ciorniciuc a co-founder of the first independent media organization in Romania — so worker exploitation was a familiar beat. More troubling, however, was the familiarity of the man video messaging the duo from Italy: Vdovîi’s dad, a father who she’d long been estranged from, having grown up in a household rife with domestic abuse. Thus begins a fraught, country-hopping journey, one in which the pair go from simply outfitting Vdovîi’s dad with a hidden camera in pursuit of justice to deeply reckoning with a multigenerational past of toxic masculinity. And then somewhere along the way Vdovîi happily becomes pregnant, raising the stakes of truth and reconciliation ever more urgent and profound. Just prior to the September 7th world premiere of Tata (Romanian for father), Filmmaker caught up with the couple, last on the North American festival circuit with their Sundance 2020 Best Cinematography Award-winning Acasă, My Home.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

‘TWST — Things We Said Today’ Review: Beatlemania Is Big Again in This Head-Spinning Combo of Craftsmanship and Execution

“TWST — Things We Said Today,” the latest work of cinematic magic from the Romanian director and screenwriter Andrei Ujica, is both elaborately crafted and a heck of a lot of fun. With its title aptly referring to the 1964 Beatles song that McCartney described as a “future nostalgia,” the all-archival documentary leisurely begins with the band’s arrival in NYC for their August ’65 concert at Shea Stadium, and then propels fast and furiously forward, zig-zagging back in time and through multiple spaces.

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

Screen Time: Summer/Fall 2024

Lana Wilson’s Look Into My Eyes, an elegantly crafted portrait of seven NYC psychics, contends with the theme of connection — that of the psychics to their clients and to the loved ones those clients desperately want to reach. Everyone is also connected to the director herself, who has made the inspired choice of casting a very New York–type of cinephile psychic, who has likewise pursued a career as an actor, writer, or artist, and similarly views their clairvoyance as a creative calling.

To read the rest of my review visit Documentary magazine.

The Feedback: Amy Nicholson on Embedding in the Community of ‘Happy Campers’

Though veteran director-producer Amy Nicholson has crafted feature-length films (2012’s Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride, 2005’s Muskrat Lovely), she first appeared on my radar in 2016 with her memorable short Pickle, which was nominated for an IDA Documentary Award and the Cinema Eye Honors, and went on to be featured in the New York Times’ Op-Docs as well as on the Criterion Channel (alongside Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven no less). And while Nicholson’s latest work of cinematic nonfiction does include her trademark approach of “chuckling along with” (never at) her sometimes offbeat characters, Happy Campers is actually much more elegiac in tone. This is understandable since this 2023 DOC NYC debut follows the final years of the soon-to-disappear blue-collar community of Inlet View, an RV park off the coast of Virginia that the director herself embedded with (i.e., bought a camper and moved in); and has since been sold to developers looking to cash in on its multimillion-dollar locale. But rather than focus on any battle against The Man (spoiler alert: there is none), Nicholson instead chooses to train her lens squarely on the longtime denizens to be displaced, many of whom have been summering there for generations and have morphed into one big loving family. And thereby capture a view money can’t buy. Documentary recently caught up with Nicholson, fresh off the film’s festival run, to learn all about Happy Campers, which has journeyed from a 2022 DocuClub NY work-in-progress screening all the way to acquisition by Grasshopper Film. It plays theaters in NY and LA this month.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Wide Awake: dream hampton’s It Was All a Dream,

Filmmaker and cultural critic dream hampton was both shaping and reshaping the world around her decades before she was named in the TIME 100 most influential people list of 2019 (not coincidentally, the year Surviving R. Kelly, the Lifetime docuseries hampton executive produced, received an Emmy nomination – and kickstarted the downfall of the titular sexual predator). In fact, between writing her first opinion piece all the way back in ’91 for The Source, now the world’s longest-running rap periodical, and hanging out with folks like her neighbor Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G., hampton had both a front row seat to the birth of hip hop – and a seat at the table. Which is what makes It Was All a Dream, hampton’s “visual memoir” (EP’d by Biggie’s son C.J. Wallace) much more than a walk down an early 90s memory lane.

To read the rest of my essay visit Global Comment.