“Security Considerations on this Film Were Everywhere, All the Time”: Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing on Her Sundance-Debuting doc Midwives

With grace and humility, Midwives, the feature debut of Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, puts a nuanced human face on a complicated conflict long flattened by the Western press. Back in 2012 the director returned to her birthplace in Rakhine State, an area of Myanmar now infamous for the ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya population, yet also a place where Buddhists and Muslims lived in harmony at the time Snow was growing up. There she met two equally complicated women: Hla, a Buddhist midwife and the hardened business-minded owner of a medical clinic, and her young apprentice Nyo Nyo, a dreamy strong-willed Muslim who also works as a translator for the Rohingya women that Hla likewise serves (often at risk to the controversial clinic itself). What Snow uncovered was a tale of clashing ambitions, tough love tinged with casual racism, and the highs and lows of motherhood, all set against the backdrop of societal expectations, competing armed forces, and ultimately a military coup. Just prior to the film’s January 24th world premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at this year’s online Sundance, Filmmaker reached out to the director to learn all about her 6-year-long project, including how in the world she avoided arrest while shooting in an authoritarian-controlled police state. Midwives was just picked up by POV out of Sundance.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Wanted to Enchant the Birds, and the Increasingly Poisonous Skies They Fall Out Of”: Shaunak Sen on His Sundance-Debuting doc All That Breathes

"You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics. Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air.” Those are the poetic words heard in the closing voiceover of Shaunak Sen’s mesmerizing All That Breathes. World-premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition (January 21) at this year’s Sundance, the film’s an ambitiously intricate study of the intersection of environmental collapse, religious tension, and the love of two Muslim brothers for a feathered scavenger unnervingly falling from a smoggy Delhi sky. With stunning cinematography and utmost attention to the tiniest detail (down to mosquitos buzzing over a puddle), Sen (Cities of Sleep) follows Wildlife Rescue cofounders Nadeem and Saud (and their equally dedicated volunteer Salik), self-taught bird doctors on an increasingly Sisyphean quest to save the black kite, a meat-eating raptor that can’t be treated at the local animal hospital because it’s “non-vegetarian.” And do so amidst funding woes and power outages, choking pollution and political clashes in the streets. It’s a tale of high drama in which the avian stars serve as canaries in a toxic global coal mine soon to engulf us all. Filmmaker spoke to the New Delhi-based director and film scholar, who focused on “urban ecologies” during a 2018 Cambridge fellowship, to learn all about All That Breathes and the lessons he took away from an unheralded bird of prey.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“LDS Folk Are the Same Whether They’re North Americans or Finns”: Tania Anderson on Her Sundance-Debuting Doc The Mission

World premiering January 24th in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance, The Mission marks the feature-length doc debut of Helsinki-based writer and journalist Tania Anderson, who, on a cold winter day back in 2016, happened to pass by a pair of English-speaking young men in familiar suits discussing the perils of temptation. Which prompted the open-minded British-Swiss-American to wonder not, “What the heck are Mormon missionaries doing in Finland?” (my first question), but “What makes them tick?” And from this combination of curiosity and accidental eavesdropping the idea for The Mission was born. To find out more about the film, which follows four American LDS teens from home, to the Church’s Provo, Utah training center, to a staunchly secular nation half a world away – and also how exactly the non-LDS director and her crew managed to gain such unprecedented access – Filmmaker reached out to Anderson a week before the doc’s online festival launch.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Who Does Visibility Serve and Who Does it Harm?”: Chase Joynt and Morgan M. Page on Their Sundance Doc Framing Agnes

Framing Agnes, the title of Chase Joynt’s (No Ordinary Man) latest genre-queering film – world premiering in the Next section at this year’s Sundance – refers to a controversial trans woman who, in the 1960s, participated in a groundbreaking gender health research study at UCLA. It also refers to the fact that, historically, trans people have never been allowed to leave the frame. Or, paradoxically, enter the frame (if not a blond beauty like Agnes or Christine Jorgensen). So how does Joynt place Agnes in his cinematic frame without framing her? The answer is with an abundance of artistic ingenuity and a little help from his friends. (Who happen to be deep-thinking trans stars , including Zackary Drucker, who plays Agnes, Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Max Wolf Valerio, Silas Howard, and Stephen Ira.) Just prior to the film’s (January 22) virtual debut Filmmaker reached out to Joynt and his co-writer Morgan M. Page (the London-based creator of the trans history podcast “One From the Vaults,” and EP of the Wondery investigative podcast series “Harsh Reality: The Story of Miriam Rivera”) to find out how they learned about Agnes and came up with the docu-fiction’s innovative talk show element, and whether gender fluidity might soon usher in a golden age of genre fluidity.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

"I Wanted To Go Deeper Than Just a Portrait of a Band”: Rita Baghdadi on her Sundance-Premiering doc Sirens

Trying to make it as a twenty-something in a band is hard enough. But when that band is Slave to Sirens, the Middle East’s first all-female metal group, the stakes and the obstacles can seem off the charts. Which is exactly what makes Moroccan-American director and cinematographer Rita Baghdadi’s Sirens, world-premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance, so engrossing. The film focuses on the band’s co-founders and guitarists Lilas and Shery, who over the course of a brisk 78 minutes navigate friendship and sexuality, artistic vision and international fame – all within the explosive confines of Lebanon’s often misogynistic and homophobic society. (And then the Port of Beirut literally blows up.) Luckily, Filmmaker got the chance to catch up with Baghdadi (My Country No More) just prior to the doc’s January 23rd debut to learn all about Sirens and Slave to Sirens – and creating an environment in which Arab women can become the stars of their own true stories.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“It’s a Huge Responsibility Working with Children, Especially after Filming Ends”: Simon Lereng Wilmont on his Sundance-Debuting doc A House Made of Splinters

A House Made of Splinters is Simon Lereng Wilmont’s exquisite followup to The Distant Barking of Dogs, his likewise stunning feature debut (that was awarded Best First Appearance at IDFA 2017, and went on to be Oscar shortlisted two years later on these shores). With this latest, world-premiering January 23 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, the Danish director returns to the suddenly-in-the-headlines front line of Eastern Ukraine to once again focus on the youngest victims of an endless war. This time he trains his lens on Eva, Sasha and Kolya – three children temporarily removed from substance-abusing parents and placed (for up to nine months) in an orphanage while the state decides their fate. This house of last resort, however, is not one of Dickensian gloom. On the contrary, it’s filled with singing and dancing, bubbles and teddy bears – and most crucially, a loving and supportive staff. Social workers steadfastly determined to return the simple joys of childhood to those forced to grow up far too soon. A few days prior to the doc’s virtual launch Filmmaker caught up with Wilmont to learn all about following kids forced to live in a Ukrainian battle zone – and why he chooses to do so film after film.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Christine [Choy] Has Always Been a Person Who Puts Her Ideals into Action”: The Exiles Directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein

The first rule of documentary film? “Lie to everyone.” This from no less an authority (and anti-authority) than Christine Choy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) and educator (NYU, Cornell, Yale, etc.), founding director of Third World Newsreel, and straight-shooting (no pun intended) civil rights rabble-rouser. (Once during the US Film and Video Festival – soon to be rebranded Sundance – Choy even pulled Robert Redford aside to bluntly ask what was up with all the white people and white snow.) And now she is the cigarette-puffing central character in Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles, which is executive produced by Violet’s father, the filmmaker Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus and Steven Soderbergh. In the duo’s auspicious feature debut (world-premiering in Sundance’s US Documentary Competition), Choy serves as guide to a horrific buried history – purposely in China’s case, narcissistically in ours (a “self-interested nation” is Choy’s candid assessment of her adopted homeland). That’s the history of the 1989 Tianamen Square protests and subsequent massacre in Beijing. It was during this upheaval that the Shanghai-born Choy decided to train her lens on the leaders of the fledgling democracy movement, specifically three men of different ages and backgrounds: a firebrand student, a prominent academic and a corporate CEO forced to flee to the US. Thirty years on Choy tracks down the trio (now living in Taiwan, Maryland and Paris, respectively) to share with them footage from the project she eventually abandoned. And to find out whether the personal price they’d paid for what would turn out to be an international political betrayal had ultimately been too high. Fortunately, Filmmaker was able to catch up with the co-directors just prior to the film’s January 21st Sundance launch to learn all about shooting The Exiles, the exiles, and the iconoclastic whirlwind at the center of it all.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Do Younger Israelis Care at All About This History?”: Alon Schwarz on His Sundance-Debuting Doc Tantura

Alon Schwarz’s Tantura takes its title from a particular Palestinian village that was depopulated – by any means necessary, including through a still-contested massacre of civilians – during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence (aka “Al Nakba,” the Catastrophe, if you hail from the occupied side). Yet the doc is less a history lesson than a deep-dive investigation into the stories a nation chooses to tell about itself. Schwarz’s (Aida’s Secrets) own story began when he got access to over 100 hours of shockingly candid audiotaped interviews that the (government and academia-silenced) researcher Teddy Katz conducted decades ago with former soldiers of the Alexandroni Brigade (as well as with Palestinian witnesses to their potential war crimes in Tantura). Schwarz then continued down a rabbit hole that includes his own contemporary on-camera interviews with the now-frail Katz, and with many of these last remaining soldiers as they listen back to their unguarded testimonies and subsequently come to terms, dismiss, or even laugh off chilling admissions that this generation of Holocaust survivors would, rather ironically, now prefer to forever forget. Prior to the film’s January 20th world premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition section of this year’s online Sundance, Filmmaker caught up with the director (and brother of longtime Sundance vet Shaul Schwarz) to learn all about his country’s My Lai-reminiscent incident, and whether the untwisting of truth could ever lead to actual reconciliation.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

A Portrait of the Artist through an Audiotape: The Capote Tapes and Billie

Nearly a quarter century ago, legendary journo and The Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton published “Truman Capote: In which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career.” But it’s only been recently that the raw material behind that candid oral history has come to light – and formed the basis of filmmaker (and onetime Obama White House adviser) Ebs Burnough’s entrancing 2019 doc The Capote Tapes (available for streaming on Amazon Prime). By combining mesmerizing archival footage, an era-appropriate soundtrack, and the titular audiotapes of interviews that Plimpton conducted after Capote’s death – boxes of which Plimpton’s widow in turn handed over to the director – Burnough crafts a welcome revisitation of the rebel scribe who lived (and died) by the mantra, “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

To read more on my recommendation for an all-archival double feature visit Global Comment.

Celebrating Diverse Voices at the 2021 SCAD Savannah Film Festival

For me the 2021 SCAD Savannah Film Festival, held both online and in person (masks and vaccine mandates strictly enforced) this past October in lovely Savannah, Georgia, was undoubtedly one of the highlights of a pandemic stressful year. Chock-full of movie stars and critics’ darlings, as in years past all invited guests (even low-glitz journos like myself) were provided with gratis gourmet buffets of breakfast, lunch and dinner. (And I do mean gourmet. In fact, the daily five-star-level menus served up on the rooftop and in the restaurant of our charming Drayton Hotel paired nicely with the celebrity wattage.) Less surprising – at least to someone fairly familiar with the film festivals of the Deep South – was the choice to program the Celebrating Diverse Voices Panel, presented in conjunction with Georgia Power. Contrary to popular perception, it’s the liberal fests down south that tend to be the least segregated and most inclusive, at least compared to those up north. (The North never really having been forced to reckon with its own history of racial apartheid the way the South has. Why address insidious redlining when there’s headline-grabbing segregationists like Alabama’s Bull Connor around to unleash some dogs?) And the event’s participants were indeed diverse. On hand at the cozy Gutstein Gallery venue were SAGindie executive director Darrien Gipson, actor and producer Imani Hakim (Dinner Party, Mythic Quest, Everybody Hates Chris), actor, writer and producer Chris Naoki Lee (Dinner Party, Mythic Quest, The Terror), and actor, writer and producer Aizzah Fatima (Americanish, The Good Wife, High Maintenance).

To read all about it visit Global Comment.

The Year in Nonfiction Cinema: 21 Highlights of 2021

Read my highly personal hodgepodge of interviews, essays, coverage and quotes that stayed with me throughout (despite) this information overloaded year at Filmmaker magazine.