“Directing When You Are an Editor Feels Like Cheating”: Cinque Northern on His Telluride Doc Short Angola Do You Hear Us?

Having already made the prestige fest rounds to great acclaim this year — from Tribeca to the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage outdoor film series just this summer — Cinque Northern’s Angola Do You Hear Us? is now a must-catch at Telluride. The documentary short follows the incomparable actor and playwright Liza Jessie Peterson on her artistic and spiritual mission to bring her one-woman show The Peculiar Patriot to none other than the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The film also explores all the baggage, bureaucracy and ultimate blocking that was met with a work centered on racial injustice (that deftly connects the capitalistic dots between slavery and the incarceration industrial complex) at a plantation-turned-prison. So to learn all about this outside the box project (which even includes some evocative animation) Filmmaker reached out to the short’s director/editor — and 25 New Faces alum — the week before the film’s Telluride launch.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.