Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens: Ecosexuals

Since 2002, multimedia artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been exploring love, sex, and queer ecologies through filmmaking, performance, art exhibitions, activism, a book (Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover), and even walking rituals. It’s an unusual œuvre for a rather unlikely duo. Stephens has been a professor and two-time chair of the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz for more than thirty years. Sprinkle comes from a much different world that’s given her a higher profile. Starting in the ’70s, she was a sex worker and porn star for more than two decades, as well as a feminist performance artist and “pleasure activist.” (She also holds a PhD in human sexuality and has been inducted into all four adult film Halls of Fame.) The co-creators’ latest film Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is billed as “a joyous ecosexual documentary born from the ashes of California’s devastating fires.” It’s an apt if brain-twisting description of this conclusion to Stephens and Sprinkle’s trilogy of queer environmental docs, beginning with 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (the first queer environmental feature documentary, according to Susan Stryker), which was followed by 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure.

To read my interview visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.

Playing With Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency — Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens [Review]

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency opens with a bright red “WARNING. This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality and performance art.” It’s a playful start to a cinematic project prompted by a devastating event — a massive wildfire that ripped through Stephens and Sprinkle’s Boulder Creek community in Northern California. Though the pair, life partners and artistic soulmates for nearly a quarter century, returned to their refuge in the Redwood forest to find their home had been spared, not all their neighbors, plants and animals included, had been so fortunate. This in turn spurred the filmmakers to do what they’ve been doing since 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (hailed as the first queer environmental doc) and on to 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure: transform climate grief into radically joyful queer action.

To read the rest visit In Review Online.

It Goes That Quick

Moving at the speed of its title, Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus’ It Goes That Quick, which premiered at MoMI’s First Look last spring, is a beautiful love letter to the married filmmakers’ respective families. Though it’s crafted from footage the couple (Connor behind the lens, Stankus responsible for sound and editing) shot with their relatives over eight years, juxtaposed with home movies from their youth, the film isn’t a straightforward work of nonfiction but rather a sort of Seinfeldian doc.

To read the rest visit In Review Online's collective New/Next Film Festival coverage.

The Luxury of Meaning: Julia Loktev on ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile’

Julia Loktev’s NYFF and Venice-premiering My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile is, like last year’s NYFF-premiering My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, a brutally riveting five-chapter epic that follows a group of Russian independent journalists branded traitors and terrorists in the eyes of the Kremlin. Primarily female, they risk everything to report on Putin’s corrupt regime and his senseless war in an effort to simultaneously save Ukrainian lives and free their own propaganda-run homeland. As we learn from the opening text onscreen, this latest installment begins just two days after Last Air in Moscow ended, and also that a week before it was still possible to live in Russia and tell the truth, but now it seems “unimaginable this world ever existed.” Thus, Loktev decides to follow her “undesirable friends” as they dash to the airport, often on an hour’s notice, and into the great unknown of forced exile. In the process, she’s able to intimately document the new surrealities of daily life, like trying to stay under the radar of Kremlin assassins while finding a partner on Tinder. Just prior to the NYFF debut of My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, Documentary caught up with the acclaimed narrative and nonfiction filmmaker, who spoke about everything from shooting (in Prague, Tbilisi, Amsterdam, Riga, Kyiv and NYC) her abruptly rootless, peripatetic protagonists on an iPhone, to how Frederick Wiseman transformed her editing process, to thinking of meaning as a “luxury” in today’s chaotic times.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

CIFF 2026: Family Affairs

Having spent over a decade and a half mining cinematic nonfiction gems on the festival beat, only a handful of doc fests remain on my bucket list (Thessaloniki, I’m available). Which is why it was a bit of a thrill to finally be able to visit the Camden International Film Festival, an impressively content slop-free three-day event (September 17-20) in scenic Maine that takes place in an eclectic array of venues across Camden and neighboring Rockland, a 15-minute ride away. Fortunately for non-drivers like myself, the festival shuttle/school bus connecting the two towns ran frequently between the grand Camden Opera House, which also housed the Points North Forum, and the laidback YETI Lounge at the Yellow Barn in Rockland. (The Festival Hub at the Arctic Tern Sanctuary was also helpfully only a few minutes walk from the outdoor lifestyle brand-sponsored lounge, the spot to hit for free food, drinks and live music between screenings.)

To read all about it visit Hammer to Nail.

Social Landscapes

Jonas Meier’s Social Landscapes, which debuted at CPH:DOX earlier this year, is a fantastical cinematic trip to some of the most coveted and unexpected tourist spots around the world. It’s also a hilariously innovative dive into the minds of those who visit them — or rather review them as we’re all critics now. Indeed, while the images might be intoxicating (and Meier’s purposeful use of AI controversial) you wouldn’t know it from the entirely Tripadvisor-sourced narration, which includes critiques ranging from “they should cut all the trees down” (at a forest) to “the beach is too sandy.”

To read the rest and subscribe for free visit Beyond Nonfiction on Substack.

Black Zombie

“Turning someone into a zombie is like putting them back into slavery. Forever,” a Haitian voice says at the start of Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, a compelling and eye-opening investigation into the true story behind the pop culture monster. Combining clips from classic Hollywood horror films with fictional historic reenactments shot in dramatic B&W, the comprehensive doc, which opens in select theaters September 11th, also includes interviews with a diverse array of talking heads. Indeed, we hear from historians, Black and white alike; Vodou practitioners in Haiti, New Orleans and Montreal; and several zombie fans, including Zombie Walk founder Thea Munster and Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. (John Russo, co-writer of George A. Romero’s 1968 cult flick Night of the Living Dead, and Romero’s makeup and special effects artist Tom Savini even make memorable appearances.) It all adds up to a thorough retracing of the modern zombie narrative back to its birth in Haitian Vodou, and in the process transforms the rapacious creature from a symbol of irrational evil to that of resistance against enslavement.

To read the rest and subscribe for free visit Beyond Nonfiction on Substack.