GET THE INTERNATIONAL FILM CRITICS’ VERDICT ON THE DOX:AWARD FILMS

How do the international film critics rate the main competition at this year’s CPH:DOX? Ekko’s jury grid gives you an overview. Filmmagasinet Ekko, the popular Danish film magazine, has assembled a team of international critics to rate all 13 world premieres in the DOX:AWARD competition at this year's CPH:DOX. The 6 members of the Ekko jury grid are as follows: British Wendy Ide covers CPH:DOX for leading industry publication Screen Daily, but she has also been reviewing films for Ekko for a long time. Carmen Gray is covering the festival for the European documentary magazine Modern Times Review; while Lauren Wissot represents the acclaimed American Filmmaker Magazine. The British magazine Sight and Sound, one of the world’s most respected film publications, has sent their reviewer Nick Bradshaw to cover CPH:DOX; while Vladan Petkovic from Serbia is covering the festival for Cineuropa. Finally, Ekko’s own editor-in-chief Claus Christensen completes the panel.

And the winner is...

A numbers game: Three Thousand Numbered Pieces

DOCUFICTION / After an unofficial five-year filmmaking ban, Hungary's Ádám Császi continues to oppose the authoritarian Orbán regime. «What you call realism is just you exploiting our misery. And what you call absurd is just plain racism», says a male member of an all-Roma theatrical troupe, confronting the white director of a play titled Gypsy Hungarian. To which a female thespian jumps in with, «And you call this «deconstruction.» Do you know what you’re deconstructing? Your own racism. And a deconstructive racist is still a racist.» (Ouch.) In other words, this collaborative work, based on the actors’ real-life experiences (which in today’s Orbán-land includes homelessness, juvenile delinquency, heroin addiction, rape and all manner of abuse), is a good-faith effort that has clearly gone off the rails. Strangely, something that tends to happen not under (non-collaborative, bad faith) authoritarian regimes but only in the wokest of white liberal spaces. Ay, there’s the rub! Fortunately (and unfortunately), Ádám Császi, the visionary director behind Three Thousand Numbered Pieces (and the next Ruben Östlund by my lights), knows a thing or two about working in both.

To read the rest visit Modern Times Review.

“…The Costs of Turning Yourself from a Three-Dimensional Person into a Two-Dimensional Brand”: Miranda Yousef on Her SXSW-Premiering doc Art for Everybody

One of the most surprising revelations about the painter (and multimillion-dollar mass marketer) Thomas Kinkade, “the most successful artist of his time” according to the synopsis for Miranda Yousef’s SXSW-premiering doc Art for Everybody, is not that he was, well, “the most successful artist of his time.” Nor that after his death a decade ago from a drug and alcohol overdose his family discovered a secret trove of rather dark and sometimes disturbing work, images at complete odds with the sugary sweet depictions of small-town life that once graced the walls of the Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery franchises, a ubiquitous presence at US malls throughout the ’90s. No, it’s that Kinkade was much more than some Trump-style showman, hawking branded kitsch on QVC. Ignored by the (white) art world cognoscenti and beloved by the (white) working class masses, Kinkade was likewise a dedicated family man and a practicing evangelical since college. Painfully earnest to his core, he was a man bent on fulfilling a populist mission to create art for everybody (or “Art for Anybody,” per the catty title of Susan Orlean’s 2010 New Yorker profile), one which, unfortunately, would lead to the “Painter of Light” (a lofty moniker originally given to J.M.W. Turner that Kinkade coopted and trademarked for himself) irrevocably flaming out. Just prior to Art for Everybody’s (March 13) SXSW launch, Filmmaker caught up with the first-time director (and veteran editor) to learn all about her impressively enlightening debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“The Inspiration To Donate a Kidney Was Not a ‘Project’ To Begin With”: Penny Lane on Confessions of a Good Samaritan

The drive to donate a kidney to a stranger is not a desire I — nor the majority of the population, for that matter — can relate to. (But then again I’ve personally no great love for humanity in general, as arguably the planet would be far better off had we gone the way of the dinosaurs. And luckily for Mother Earth, we still may!) Which puts me at philosophical odds with veteran filmmaker (and main protagonist) Penny Lane, whose latest doc Confessions of a Good Samaritan is a deep dive into the science as well as ethical implications behind altruistic donation. It’s also a surprisingly self-deprecatingly funny quest to discover why one person’s blatantly obvious decision can be another’s sign of inexplicable insanity. To learn all about the unusual project, I reached out to the altruistic donor director herself just prior to the film’s SXSW premiere on March 10th.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

A LOOK BACK AT CPH:CONFERENCE At CPH:DOX 2022

Last year’s hybrid CPH:CONFERENCE at CPH:DOX, curated by The Catalysts and moderated by that multimedia consultancy’s founder AC Coppens, featured the theme “Business as Unusual” – an outside the box invitation to nonfiction filmmakers to boldly rethink an entire industry anew. Over three afternoons and under a trio of separate programs – “Claim your Story!”, “Follow the Money!” and “Shaping Success.” – veteran insiders down to novice directors (few from the white male demographic) came together to both debate best practices and to forge a status quo-upending future.

To read all about it visit Hammer to Nail.