“My Hope Is That the Film Itself Is An Impact Campaign”: Alex Hedison on Her Sundance Short Alok

“What lives outside of the frames of this camera and your own eyes?” is the question the poet/comedian/actor/public speaker Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the viewer to ponder at the very start of Alex Hedison’s Sundance-premiering short Alok. Currently on the Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour, and premiering at IFC Center on June 14th (with both the nonbinary star and Hedison, who also happens to be married to her EP Jodie Foster, in attendance), the doc is based on footage Hedison shot during the performer’s recent international tour and is supplemented with highly stylized interviews with the spiritually enlightened artist and their equally deep-thinking friends (including Dylan Mulvaney, who poignantly self reflects that “replacing fear with fascination” is what has made her life worth living). Indeed, for Alok, eliminating the binary between “us” and “them” is more important than the blurring of he and she. (Alok likewise stresses that the most controversial pronoun they have is “we,” which requires acknowledging our interconnectedness.) Transphobia is just another form of pain, they firmly believe. And by the end, as in the beginning, we’re faced with another potentially revolutionary question: “What would it look like if our weapon was love?” To learn more about Alok and Alok, Filmmaker reached out to Hedison, likewise an internationally-acclaimed artist and actor (and fine art photographer whose work has graced galleries throughout Europe); along with producers Natalie Shirinian and her wife Elizabeth Baudouin (also credited as music supervisor), who together founded indie production company Not All Films.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“A Shapeshifter in Constant Motion”: Sandi DuBowski Spent 21 Years Filming ‘Sabbath Queen’

It’s been 23 years since Sandi DuBowski’s groundbreaking Trembling Before G-d, which uncloaked the lives of Hasidic and Orthodox gays and lesbians, made its Sundance debut. Since that time DuBowski has built a career at the intersection of religion and queerness, social activism and filmmaking, always avoiding the binary choice in favor of the “and.” This insistence is a bond shared by the director-producer and the riveting Israeli-American star of his latest feature Sabbath Queen—a doc over 21 years in the making focused squarely on Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, a descendant of 38 generations of Orthodox rabbis. This member of rabbi royalty is also the creator of drag persona Rebbetzin Hadassah, the founder of Jewish congregation Lab/Shul, and a queer dad to three young kids. And also a Jewish Theological Seminary-trained Conservative rabbi with a loving family entangled in a heartbreaking war back home. In other words, it’s complicated. Which is why Documentary decided to reach out to the veteran activist-filmmaker to learn all about his Tribeca-premiering Sabbath Queen, the film’s unconventional lead, and embracing the messy nonbinary nature of humankind itself.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Moscow Syndrome: A Bit of A Stranger

"Everything has to burn, so that we live in the future not in the past.” These words come not from the Kremlin but from the elderly mother of filmmaker Svitlana Lishchynska, one of the four female stars (including the director herself) of A Bit of a Stranger, a Berlinale-debuting doc from Ukraine. The film, which fittingly just nabbed the Andriy Matrosov Prize “for its brave examination of identity issues” at Docudays UA, takes us on an intriguing (mind) trip to a Kafkaesque world – specifically the brainwashed headspace of the many Russian-speaking Ukrainians sharing the frontlines with their Russian tormentors.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

“I Was Shocked To Be the Only Person There with a Camera”: Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg on their Tribeca-Debuting Doc about Industry City Development, Emergent City

From Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, to Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union, to now Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s Emergent City (likewise EP’d by Stephen Maing), corporate takeovers of NYC and the inherent Gotham vs. Goliath battles they spawn seem to be in the documentary air this year. And while Flying Lessons and Union clearly cast entities like corrupt Croman Real Estate and anti-labor Amazon as the respective baddies, Emergent City is surprisingly not much interested in blaming Jamestown Properties, the conglomerate behind Industry City, the largest privately owned industrial property in New York, for the rapid gentrification of the Sunset Park neighborhood the longtime Brooklyn filmmakers call home. Indeed, the veteran duo prefer to play the fly-on-the-wall long game, over a decade actually, patiently turning their lens every which way, from the aforementioned developers of IC, to the area’s long-established Latino and Chinese communities, to the caught-in-the-middle council members, as each side publicly makes its case for the future of the Brooklyn waterfront. And by extension, the rest of NYC as well. A week before the film’s June 11th Tribeca premiere, Filmmaker reached out to Anderson, who’s been documenting gentrification in the borough since 2012’s My Brooklyn, and Sterrenberg, whose arts collective and production cooperative Meerkat Media is based in Sunset Park, to learn all about Emergent City and being part of the “creative class” Industry City caters to.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Production Was a Kind of Durational Epic”: Nesa Azimi Reflects on ‘Driver’

“No one enters trucking from charm school,” notes Desiree Wood, star of Nesa Azimi’s long-haul road trip film Driver, which follows the founder of REAL Women in Trucking as she works her minimum wage on (18) wheels job from coast to coast. Indeed, Wood, a forty-something who retired from stripping and now finds herself in a financially precarious gig (that puts her at far greater risk of sexual assault to boot), serves as our no-nonsense guide to a sightseeing-cinematic world hidden in plain sight. As another seasoned trucker attests, it’s a beautiful country and she gets paid to see it—though another veteran later caveats, “Seeing the United States is awesome—but it’s not a vacation.” Which makes sense if, like Desiree, you can’t afford to ever leave your home on the road. The day before the Tribeca premiere of Driver, Documentary caught up with Azimi, a TV producer who abandoned her own secure job to pursue her first independent feature from the cab of a truck.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“Our Film Highlights the Bravery of Those Willing to Stand Up to Putin Despite the Personal Cost, But It Should Also Act as a Wakeup Call”: James Jones on his Tribeca-Debuting Antidote

A real-life high stakes thriller from Emmy (and BAFTA and Cinema Eye)-winning filmmaker James Jones (Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, Wanted: The Escape Of Carlos Ghosn), Antidote follows a few brave men who have chosen to put their lives (and thus those of their families) on the line to bring down the Putin regime: a whistleblowing insider to Russia’s poison program; the twice-poisoned, Russian-British activist-journalist (and current political prisoner) Vladimir Kara-Murza; and Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev, last seen in Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning Navalny exposing the murderers who unsuccessfully poisoned the late activist before confinement to a Siberian prison finished the job. Which, inevitably and predictably, has now resulted in Grozev’s own name being added to the cascading kill list. A week prior to the doc’s Tribeca debut, Filmmaker reached out to the Russian-fluent British director — a onetime resident of Russia as well — to learn all about making this latest feature, including safety precautions taken and why it won’t be coming to any UK theaters soon.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Don’t Think We Ever Expected To See a Carbon Copy of China’s Industrial Experience [in Ethiopia], and We Certainly Didn’t”: Max Duncan and Xinyan Yu on Their Tribeca-Debuting Made in Ethiopia

While Max Duncan and Xinyan Yu’s Made in Ethiopia takes place in the titular country, it in many ways echoes last year’s Central African Republic-set Eat Bitter, co-directed by Ningyi Sun and Pascale Appora-Gnekindy, which similarly explored China’s capitalist push throughout the continent; and specifically from the POV of the shared personal toll it’s taking on individuals from very unalike cultures. In this case we’re introduced to an inexhaustibly optimistic woman named Motto, the upbeat Chinese head of a mega industrial park in a rural Ethiopian town. She’s also a true believer that the Chinese dream can be exported to provide a “win-win-win” situation for all. Unfortunately for Motto, a long-distance mom often unable to make it home even for the holidays, everyday Ethiopians — women like the underpaid/overworked factory employee Beti and soon-to-be displaced farmer Workinesh — are finding the promise of globalization to be closer to a curse. Which inevitably brings up the question of whether today’s rising tide of industrialization is only lifting yachts not boats. Just prior to the doc’s Tribeca premiere today, June 6, Filmmaker caught up with the co-directors to learn all about Made in Ethiopia (and of course, making a film in Ethiopia).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.