Expanding the Overaggressive Cops Conversation in 'Traffic Stop'

For decades now, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning team of Kate Davis (Girltalk; Southern Comfort) and her producer and sometime co-director David Heilbroner (Stonewall Uprising) have been giving voice to marginalized communities by listening closely to individuals, allowing their characters to express their own complicated truths — and thereby correcting the easy stories too often assigned to them by the media at large.

And now with their latest Oscar-nominated short, Traffic Stop, the duo have turned their lens — and once again upended accepted narratives — on the hot topic of police brutality through the story of Breion King, an African-American schoolteacher in Austin, Texas, whose entire life changed after she was stopped for a routine traffic violation by a white officer. What should have been an innocuous local encounter resulted in a hard-to-watch arrest — all painfully captured on police dash cam and subsequently broadcast to the wider world.

Documentary reached out to director Davis to discuss a broad range of subjects, from accessing police footage, to the dangers of cultural miscommunication, to the dire need to expand our current bad-cops-caught-on-camera conversation.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“In the Master’s Narrative, We Don’t Hear the Stories of the Oppressed, the Disenfranchised, of Women”: Director Cathy Lee Crane on Her SF Indiefest Premiere, The Manhattan Front

Developed with the support of a 2013 Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowship, The Manhattan Front is experimental filmmaker Cathy Lee Crane’s first feature-length narrative film in a career spanning over two decades. True to Crane’s hybrid art film roots, though, The Manhattan Front melds melodramatic acting on silent-film-styled sets with newly digitized archival footage of daily life in New York City and on the front lines during World War 1. Via this unconventional approach Crane presents the true story of how a German saboteur’s plans to prevent American munitions from reaching Britain during a period of official U.S. neutrality became entangled with the progressive labor movement of legendary activist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn, resulting in consequences that arguably reverberate to this very day.

The Manhattan Front had its U.S. premiere yesterday at SF Indiefest, and it will screen a second time, with a live score by local musicians, on February 14 at 7:00 PM.

Filmmaker recently caught up with Crane to discuss The Manhattan Front and what she calls her “poetic speculation” of history prior to the film’s SF IndieFest premiere.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.