Another Angle On: NATCHEZ

Natchez, Mississippi has a wealth of history, and a history of wealth – perhaps the only two facts its residents can agree on. Throughout much of the 19th century Natchez was one of the richest areas in the US thanks to the cotton boom – and the enslaved labor that kept its capitalism wheel churning. Today the small town is wholly dependent on tourism, especially its century-old tradition of “Pilgrimage” – when twice a year an onslaught of overwhelmingly white visitors descend upon the antique-packed antebellum mansions to gaze at pretty objects; and to hear the houses’s history, delivered by docents in full Scarlett O’Hara drag. It’s a romanticized account that includes benevolent white plantation owners like “Dr. Duncan” who “was good to his people.” At least according to one hoop-skirted guide featured in Suzannah Herbert’s captivating cinematic chronicle Natchez, a patient and unobtrusively-lensed look at a complicated community through the myriad characters that call the place home.

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

“We Will Be Passing Out Little NOT AI Buttons to Our Audiences”: Valerie Veatch on Her Sundance-premiering Ghost in the Machine

Until now, the Silicon Valley hype cycle has defined the terms of the artificial-intelligence debate, with advocates predicting universal affluence and the end of all diseases while critics worry that computers will steal not only our jobs but our creative pursuits too. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine proposes a different possibility altogether: that “AI,” if you can even call it that, is just the latest in a long line of grift-y attempts by powerful, exclusionary white guys to remake the whole world in their own image. Connecting the dots between AI’s origins and such lamentable historical low points as the discredited racist eugenics movement of a century ago, and shining a light on the all-too-human work force grinding out content-moderation for dismal pay at the bottom of the AI stack, Ghost in the Machine argues that the only proper response to this would-be revolution is radical resistance. Divided into eight hard-hitting chapters with provocative titles (“Chapter 8: Slopoganda”), set to a stirringly dystopian soundtrack, and filled with rapidly moving images that are helpfully labeled “AI” and “NOT AI” (one can’t help wishing some of it was in fact hallucinated), Ghost in the Machine enlists a wide array of speakers—from philosophers to linguists to critical thinkers—to take the air out of the AI hype machine, and sound the alarm about its creators’ objectives. Just prior to the film’s Sundance debut in the NEXT section, Filmmaker interviewed Veatch, the film’s director, writer, producer, and EP, whose HBO docs Me at the Zoo (2012), co-directed with Chris Moukarbel, and Love Child (2014) likewise probed crucial friction points between society and technology.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

‘Cookie Queens’ Review: A Slick and Skeptical Documentary Explores the Cutthroat World of Girl Scout Cookie Season

Alysa Nahmias’ “Cookie Queens” (EP’d by the real-life royal duo of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle) follows an ethnically and economically diverse, too-cute-for-words quartet of girls, ages five to 12, during Girl Scout cookie season. It’s that most consumerist time of the year when troop members race to hawk as many Thin Mints and Do-si-dos over a six-week period in order to reach their individual predetermined sales goals (and thus win prizes, including international trips for the highest earners).

To read the rest of my review visit IndieWire.

Honey on a Razor’s Edge: Alysa Nahmias on Girl Scout Capitalism in ‘Cookie Queens’

Equal parts delightful and disturbing, Alysa Nahmias’s Cookie Queens is a behind-the-scenes peek at an annual ritual as ubiquitous as caroling and trick-or-treating: Girl Scout Cookie season. The film follows four adorable U.S. troop members, ages five to twelve (and from different cities, ethnicities and economic circumstances), all determined to meet their individual capitalistic goals in a whirlwind six weeks of pitch-honing, social media strategizing, and practiced salesmanship.

To read my interviw with the film's award-winning director Alysa Nahmias (Unfinished Spaces, The New Bauhaus, Art & Krimes by Krimes) visit Documentary magazine.

“Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever

"It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor — who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke for her acclaimed 2022 short Love, Barbara — in her Sundance-debuting feature Barbara Forever. Fusing Hammer’s poetic words and striking images with her own experimental editing approach, O’Connor takes us on a riveting ride through one woman’s boldly adventurous life and the larger frame of queer history, from the lesbian and gay rights movement of the ’70s through to today’s more inclusive and expanded awakening. Ultimately, Barbara Forever is a heartfelt portrait of an individual who wasn’t afraid to embrace life on her own terms, holding lessons for humans of every profession and persuasion. A few days before the film’s January 24th Park City premiere, Filmmaker caught up with O’Connor, an award-winning artist in her own right whose “work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

NYC Inc.: Emergent City review

Jamestown Properties, the Atlanta-based global behemoth responsible for One Times Square and Chelsea Market, takes a star turn as Robert Moses 2.0 in Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s Emergent City, an exhaustively lensed (over a decade in the making) fly-on-the-wall look at the myriad costs and maybe benefits of urban development with an Instagram sheen. For rather than driving out the artists to make way for the traders and tech bros (so Giuliani/Bloomberg passé), the savvy capitalists behind Sunset Park’s Industry City – New York’s largest privately owned industrial property – are actually attempting to lure them in.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

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