Requiem for a dream: The Last Relic

RUSSIA / The absurdity of life in Yekaterinburg and the clash between those longing for imperial greatness and a small group of dissidents standing against Putin's impending invasion of Ukraine. Marianna Kaat’s Hot Docs world-premiering (International Spectrum) The Last Relic is a work of thought-provoking – and often head-spinning – contradiction. Over the four years leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Estonian filmmaker embedded with several brave activists in the seemingly blissfully ignorant city of Yekaterinburg, where Tsar Nicholas II and his family met their grisly fate, and which now celebrates its imperialist past with extravagant balls and military marching parades. (Needless to say, an anti-Putin sign proclaiming «He is not our tsar!» is firmly in the minority position.) Divided into easily digestible, single slogan chapters («power,» «solidarity,» «secrets,» «rules,» «revelation,» «survival,» etc.), the film’s clear-eyed prescience is at times downright startling as is seeing the colourful and festive, and buoyantly youthful, anti-Putin protests that Kaat’s hyperaware eye captures. In fact, the tick-tock closing in of the state apparatus on these would-be revolutionaries basically renders The Last Relic a real-time docu-thriller.

To read the rest of my essay visit Modern Times Review.

Weaponising art: Rule of Two Walls

UKRAINE / The profound impact of art as a means of survival and resistance against cultural erasure. Culture is an «action and a product of a people,» stresses a character in Ukrainian-American writer-director David Gutnik’s Tribeca-winning (Documentary Competition Special Jury Mention) and Liev Schreiber EP’d Rule of Two Walls, a rivetingly meta look at the war in Ukraine through the narratives of defiant artists that have chosen to stay in their country and fight – by continuing to make their art. And that includes not just painters and musicians but even a sound recorder and an editor, a producer and a director, all banding together to develop a documentary drama ultimately named after the directive to stay in a windowless space between two walls when the bombs start to fall.

To read the rest of my essay visit Modern Times Review.

“A Call to Action for Everybody To Preserve Their History Before It’s Gone”: Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker on The Stroll

Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s Sundance-premiering The Stroll is a beautifully and lovingly crafted time capsule of NYC’s Meatpacking District that mostly spans from Giuliani’s infamous “broken windows” reign of terror through Bloomberg’s post-9/11 “gentrification on steroids,” as one knowledgeable interviewee ruefully reflects (seconds after I coincidentally yelled those same words at my screener). Unsurprisingly, our billionaire mayor did indeed view unrestrained capitalism as the solution to every problem, including that of the “undesirable” communities — starving artists and sex workers — that called the neighborhood home. For me, the most revelatory aspect of this heartfelt walk down memory lane isn’t that it’s offered from the POV of the mostly Black trans sex workers (including director Lovell) who made their money working the area nicknamed “The Stroll,” but that the filmmakers were able to track down so many that both survived and thrived (at least a dozen, with some whose time went all the way back to the early ’80s, remarkably enough). Clear-eyed and unapologetic, this band of sisters somehow managed to avoid the fate of famous activist contemporaries like Marsha P. Johnson (whose body was found floating in the Hudson River in ‘92) and Sylvia Rivera (who died of complications from liver cancer in 2002 at age 51). Just prior to the film’s June 21 release on HBO, Filmmaker reached out to the co-directors to learn all about the process of using cinema to set the record on queer sex work history straight.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“The Result of On-Camera Conversations Spanning 15 Years”: Christian Einshøj on The Mountains

Shockingly (as the films I adore usually fly under the radar) but deservedly, this year’s winner of the Best International Feature Documentary Award at Hot Docs, first-time feature director Christian Einshøj’s The Mountains, proved to be a prime example of my mantra that the smaller and more specific the story, the more universal the reach. Influenced by Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (it thrills me just to type that), and also Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, the doc is equal parts oddball charming and emotionally devastating. As the (very specific) logline puts it: “Armed with 30 years of home video, 75,000 family photos and three tightly fit superhero costumes, the director Christian ventures into landscapes of long-lost time, in an attempt to confront a 25-year old tragedy, and the hidden wounds left in its wake.” Which translates into a brave and beautiful film involving a questioning son, a restless father, a Danish-speaking brother, a Norwegian-speaking brother, buried grief, unbridgeable disconnection, a quarter century of silence — and finally, an embrace of the reality that boys do cry. A week prior to the film’s UK premiere at Sheffield DocFest, Filmmaker caught up with the self-taught director-editor, and two-time Hot Docs award winner (2018’s Haunted took Best International Short), to learn all about this highly idiosyncratic, cinematic trip.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Authenticity is More Important than Anything Else”: Maria Fredriksson on Tribeca 2023 Premiere The Gullspång Miracle

Maria Fredriksson’s astonishing feature debut The Gullspång Miracle isn’t just stranger than fiction — it’s batshit insane. In the broadest of outlines, the doc stars two devoutly religious Norwegian sisters, Kari and May. May visits Kari in Gullspång, Sweden, where Kari now lives. They go to an amusement park where they take a ride inside a fake whale. May finds herself stuck in Sweden for many months, so the two decide to go shopping for an apartment, and end up buying one based on a divine sign they witness there. At the closing, they meet the seller Olaug (formerly known as Lita), a woman who looks identical to the older sister (who also used to go by Lita) that committed suicide three decades before. And that’s when things get really bizarre. So they do what any diligent Scandinavians would do, I suppose — reach out to a documentary filmmaker. Which was likewise my compulsion, especially after realizing that this head-spinning yarn of a tale would not have unfolded (unraveled? gone off the rails?) at all had it not been for the presence of Fredriksson’s camera — a fact she makes unflinchingly transparent. So to learn all about collaborating with characters whose “desire to define their own truths becomes more important than knowing what is really true” (as Fredriksson claims in the press notes), Filmmaker caught up with the talented Swede just prior to the film’s Tribeca premiere.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“This Work is a Product of Survival”: Lea Glob on Tribeca 2023 Premiere Apolonia, Apolonia

Premiering in international competition at last year’s IDFA, where it took top prize, Lea Glob’s (2015’s Olmo and The Seagull) Apolonia, Apolonia is an intense character study of French figurative painter Apolonia Sokol. The Danish director met the artist, who is of Danish and Polish descent, while searching for the protagonist of her first doc while attending the Danish Film School, and then trailed her for the next 13 years. And while the bohemian free spirit, who was raised in a Paris underground theater founded by her eccentric parents (an old VHS tape Apolonia discovers comes with the written warning not to view before she turns 18, though watching one’s conception is arguably inappropriate at any age), is the star, Glob herself is also a main character, albeit mostly through the doc’s poetic narration. Indeed, the film is just as much about the evolving relationship between these two strong and vulnerable women on opposite sides of the lens as it is a “portrait of an artist.” And yet it’s also clearly a mash note from Glob to Apolonia, which likewise renders Apolonia, Apolonia a highly subjective, oftentimes rose-colored-glasses portrayal — transparently so. As Glob herself admits from the start, “No motif has ever caught my eye as she did.” Apolonia is this director’s muse and the film literally a cinematic following of one’s muse, no matter how long it takes, or to the unorthodox places — physical, psychological, emotional — such a journey might lead. Just prior to the doc’s Tribeca debut Filmmaker reached out to Glob to learn all about the passionate multiyear project, and the soaring highs and tragic lows of life itself she grew from along the way.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Cried a Lot During the Edit”: Jude Chehab on Tribeca 23 Premiere Q

Award-winning DP Jude Chehab’s cinematographic talents are on full display in her Tribeca-premiering feature debut Q, a haunting look at three generations of women whose lives were forever upended by a cult. In this case, the shadowy entity is the Qubaysiat — a matriarchal religious order founded in the Middle East, where the Lebanese-American filmmaker moved to from Florida at the tender age of 10 — and eagerly joined upon arrival in Beirut, having fallen under the influence of a particularly devout member – her own mother. Filmmaker reached out to Chehab, a 25 New Faces 2021 alum, to learn more about her powerful cinematic investigation not into the origins of the mysterious movement she was a part of, but into the end toll of sacrificing one’s personal narrative to any cause that demands all.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“A Ukrainian National Awakening on Multiple Fronts”: David Gutnik on Tribeca 2023 Premiere Rule of Two Walls

David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls, its title a reference to the best place to be between during bombing raids, is a unique take on an exhaustively mined (some would say extracted) story — that of the current war in Europe. Combining doc and fiction, the film follows Ukrainian artists who have chosen to stay and fight for their homeland by making art and preserving culture as a means of resistance. And that includes those involved in the crafting of this very film. To learn all about this meta look at creation in a time of destruction, Filmmaker reached out to the Ukrainian-American writer-director just prior to his (Liev Schreiber-EP’d) project’s Tribeca premiere.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

The White Savior Sin of A Still Small Voice

“Don’t just do something, stand there (or be there)” is the directive of Reverend David Fleenor, turning the “don’t just stand there, do something” admonition upside down. Or perhaps right side up. For attentiveness is crucial to this religious leader dauntingly tasked with supervising a group of aspiring chaplains, including a viscerally vulnerable protege named Mati Engel, as they undertake an emotionally exhausting residency in the spiritual care department of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital. But the mantra could likewise apply to award-winning filmmaker Luke Lorentzen (2019’s Sundance-premiering Midnight Family) who has a knack for bearing silent witness through his cinéma vérité lens. That said, the intimate collaboration that led to his Sundance-debuting followup A Still Small Voice — and also to Lorentzen receiving an “honorary certificate” at the end of filming the yearlong program (not to mention the US Documentary Competition Best Directing award in Park City) — is both extraordinary and somewhat troubling.

To read the rest of my essay visit Hyperallergic.