IDFA 2024: Winners and Winners

This year’s IDFA (November 14-24) starred Polish filmmaker Maciej J. Drygas’s Trains, a cinematic ride through 20th century industrial revolution-propelled European history via a trove of archival found footage; it unanimously nabbed Best Film in the International Competition. And while the doc is undoubtedly a tour de force of editing and sound design (unsurprisingly, it also took Best Editing in the International Competition), not to mention hypnotically reminiscent of the work of Bill Morrison, it was actually the other B&W archival-heavy film in that section that I just couldn’t shake.

To read the rest visit Filmmaker magazine.

“The Film Is Not About AI, Not About Werner Herzog, and Never Aimed To Embrace AI Technology”: Piotr Winiewicz on His IDFA Opening Night Doc About a Hero

Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero is as mindbogglingly complex as its eye-catching logline is simple: “A murder mystery – unwittingly starring Werner Herzog.” More precisely, the Polish filmmaker’s doc is actually an adaptation of a script in which the aforementioned cinematic maverick travels to the fictional Getunkirchenburg to investigate the strange death of a local factory worker named Dorem Clery. Even stranger, that screenplay was written by “Kaspar” (as in Kaspar Hauser), an AI trained on the Herzog oeuvre. With a look inspired by the work of German photographer Thomas Demand, the film, shot mostly across northern Germany, also features “real” sit-down interviews with scientists, philosophers and artists; along with AI-generated visuals and a Herzog voiceover (artificially created by machine learning models naturally). There’s even a deep fake Herzog, albeit one that registers as more creepy than real. (Though perhaps that makes it extra Herzogian.) So to learn all about this meditation on “originality, authenticity, immortality and soul in the age of AI,” Filmmaker reached out to the Copenhagen-based director (and artist and production designer) just after the film’s debut as the opening night selection at this year’s IDFA (November 14-24).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Grow as I Make a Film”: Nanfu Wang on Her HBO Documentary, Night Is Not Eternal

It’s a bit surprising to think that when I last interviewed Nanfu Wang it was for her six-part HBO docuseries Mind Over Murder, which revisited an infamous case of justice gone haywire in a small town in Nebraska back in the 1980s. Which, in terms of subject matter, is a far cry from this year’s followup (also for HBO). Night Is Not Eternal is a deep character study, a format the acclaimed director has long embraced, that charts the rise of Rosa Maria Paya, daughter of Oswaldo Paya, a five-time Nobel Peace Prize-nominated activist assassinated by the Cuban government in 2012. Over seven years, as Paya takes up her late father’s mantle, eventually becoming a respected freedom fighter in her own right, Wang follows the often fraught journey while being keenly aware of its many similarities to her own experiences in China and as an exile in America. Only to find, quite unexpectedly, that the differences between herself and her heroine might need to likewise take centerstage. Filmmaker caught up with the globetrotting documentarian, also a busy mother of two young sons, a few days before the film’s Nov 19th release.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Doc Filmmaking Can Be a Very Weird Process of Interpersonal Negotiations”: Debra Granik on Conbody vs Everybody

Though Debra Granik is no stranger to Sundance — 2004’s Down to the Bone, 2018’s Leave No Trace and 2010’s Oscar-nominated (in four categories) Winter’s Bone all premiered in Park City — I was a bit surprised to see the indie vet’s name attached to a project at the fest’s 40th edition earlier this year. Unlike the director’s prior critically-acclaimed films, Conbody vs Everybody is neither narrative nor a traditional feature doc, but a documentary in five chapters (six at Sundance, of which only parts four and five were screened) that took Granik and her longtime collaborators, EP Anne Rosellini and EP/editor Victoria Stewart, close to a decade to make. Over eight years the team followed Coss Marte, a man on a Herculean mission to “de-stigmatize the formerly incarcerated community, ease their integration back into society, and change the systemic inequity of the criminal justice system,” according to the website for ConBody, the business Marte founded based on his self-invented, prison-style fitness method; and also the ConBody instructors, all formerly incarcerated individuals like Marte determined to defy both statistics and preconceived notions. Needless to say, many days bring an uphill battle, especially since Marte, a native son of New York’s Lower East Side, is doggedly waging it on his now privileged-white-gentrified (on steroids) home turf. To learn all about this unexpected, longitudinal cinematic study Filmmaker caught up with Granik soon after the project’s Sundance (Episodic program) debut, and again prior to its DOC NYC premiere on November 17th. (Parts one and two of the newly revamped version will screen in the Metropolis Competition.)

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Shifting Focus from Political Agendas To the Real Faces of Conflict”: Sareen Hairabedian on Her DOC NYC-Premiering My Sweet Land

Admittedly, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) was not in my geographic vocabulary before this region in the Caucasus Mountains took centerstage at last year’s IDFA, when first-time filmmaker Shoghakat Vardanyan nabbed top prize for 1489. The heartbreaking doc details the Armenian director’s real-time, smartphone-shot search for her brother, a young student and musician who’d been conscripted into the most recent war over their disputed homeland. And now we have Sareen Hairabedian’s cinematic, Gotham-supported My Sweet Land screening DOC NYC (where Emily Mkrtichian’s There Was, There Was Not, which follows four women in Artsakh, is also playing). Starring a bright 11-year old citizen of Artsakh named Vrej, it’s a coming-of-age story spanning years, always with the multigenerational war as backdrop; and it’s made all the more poignant by the Armenian-Jordanian filmmaker’s insistence on witnessing the up-and-down journey through her young protagonist’s all-to-aware eyes. Just prior to the film’s DOC NYC (U.S. Competition) premiere on Saturday, November 16, Filmmaker reached out to the US-based Hairabedian, whose directorial debut, HBO’s We Are Not Done Yet, received a Best Documentary Short nomination at the IDA Awards back in 2018.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

18 Recommended Titles at 2024’s DOC NYC

Wondering what to see at DOC NYC, "America's largest documentary film festival" (November 13-December 1)? Start with these titles at Filmmaker magazine.

“It Was a Process of Experience Meets Intuition Meets Dancing with the Unknown”: Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet on Their DOC NYC-Debuting Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other

Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet’s Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other is as breathtakingly understated as its title is arresting. The doc, which picked up a Special Mention: DOX:AWARD when it world-premiered at CPH:DOX last March, stars the celebrated and prolific photographer Joel Meyerowitz (a two-time Guggenheim Fellow and NEA and NEH awards recipient with 50-plus books and over 350 museum and gallery exhibitions to his credit) and his less famous partner of 30 years, the British artist-musician-novelist Maggie Barrett. It’s also an up close and personal (literally — the filmmaker couple lived with their protagonists during production) encounter with the highs and lows of a long-term relationship, staged in a manner more reminiscent of a theater piece. For now that Joel, in his mid-eighties, is forced to become caregiver to his 75-year old wife after she breaks her femur, the pithy phrase “in sickness and in health” is put to the test. What unspools over the next 100 minutes is a painfully raw and refreshingly honest reckoning with both a bumpy past and an uncertain future — and in Maggie’s case, thwarted ambition as a result of decades of living in the shadow of a creative giant. Until, that is, a talented duo enter with a camera and smartly shine a spotlight on the unsung heroine at the heart of this forever love affair. Just prior to the film’s DOC NYC (Metropolis Competition) premiere Filmmaker reached out to the British co-directing couple, both acclaimed photographers in their own right, to learn all about the bold and auspicious nonfiction debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

A Conversation With Svitlana Lishchynska (A BIT OF A STRANGER)

“I am afraid for the future of Ukraine only if Russia gets what it wants and shows the effectiveness of its system“ – Svitlana Lishchynska on A Bit of A Stranger. Ukrainian filmmaker Svitlana Lishchynska has been “a bit of a stranger” all her life. Growing up in Russian-speaking Mariupol under the Soviet regime, she became a dutiful mother there, but then took off to Kyiv in pursuit of a career in the newly independent Ukraine – leaving her young daughter in the care of her own mom back home. And now her adult daughter has her own young daughter, and is raising her with the Russian values (including support for its leader) she herself imbibed from living in the border town. If not directly from her skeptical if not cynical grandmother, whose own family ended up in Mariupol as a result of having been forcibly dispossessed by the Soviets. In other words, the intergenerational dynamics are complicated between these three very different women to say the least. And then came the full-scale invasion, which forced a reckoning with national identity and the Russian-colonized mindset for them all. Just after the film’s Berlinale debut I caught up with the director and screenwriter, who is also a veteran of the entertainment tv industry, to learn all about turning the camera on family, and grappling with existential questions in the middle of a war. A Bit of A Stranger most recently screened in the International Competition and In Focus: Ukraine programs at the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (November 6-13).

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

“Telling a Story Together Creates Another Story”: Milo Rau on the Utopian Documentarism in His ‘Antigone in the Amazon’

I first encountered the work of Milo Rau back in 2020, when his reimagining of the story of Jesus, The New Gospel, premiered in Venice. Set in the Italian town of Matera, where both Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ were likewise shot, the project was an on-the-ground collaboration with local residents, specifically African migrants locked in a real-life battle for human rights. Blurring fact and fiction, the film notably featured Enrique Irazoqui (Pasolini’s Jesus) and Maia Morgenstern (Gibson’s Mother Mary) alongside newcomer Yvan Sagnet, a Cameroon-born political activist and labor organizer who went from taking on the mafia in an agricultural workers strike to taking on the role of Jesus. And now the artist’s latest example of “utopian documentarism,” Antigone in the Amazon, has arrived on these shores, having recently played NYC’s Skirball Cultural Center. The multimedia piece combines theater and film, and stars professionals onstage (two Europeans and two Brazilians), along with members of the MST (Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement) onscreen. It also manages to deftly weave together the story of Antigone—played by the Indigenous activist Kay Sara—with an infamous 1996 massacre on Native land. It includes a harrowing recreation at the site of the military dictatorship’s crime by a “Greek chorus” comprised of several survivors and their descendants. But perhaps the most unexpected “act” of all is one of radical transparency, as the onstage participants recount the story of the process itself, narrating the making of the film as its images appear on the giant screen behind them. “The pavilion where we performed is actually a classroom” and “In Indigenous cosmology, the past is in front of you,” an actor explains, marveling at his faraway colleagues’ ability to seamlessly inhabit several worlds and times simultaneously. But there are also nods to Zoom calls during Covid, and the irony of Europeans traveling to the jungle in an anticapitalist, anti-colonialist creative pursuit. Mentions of “guilt complex disguised as activism” and “privileged self-doubt” likewise pepper monologues. As does a recollection from the Indigenous philosopher cast as the seer Tiresias, who once told a European journalist that he feared for the white people in this era of rampant environmental destruction as they had never experienced the Apocalypse. “I’m not afraid of the end of the world,” he states. “Our world died 500 years ago. And we’re still here.” To learn all about this physical and metaphysical journey, Documentary reached out to the busy Swiss director-writer-filmmaker (and lecturer, author, and TV critic), and founder of the International Institute of Political Murder, a theater and film production company. Rau’s also the former artistic leader at Belgium’s NTGent, and is currently the new curator of the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“The Streamers Have Eaten All the Bananas”: Behind Her Lens: Producers at the 27th SCAD Savannah Film Festival

The 27th edition of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival boasted a number of unexpected bonuses this year. First there was the eclectic,“Hollywood meets indie” mashup guest list to accompany the stellar program (much of which had recently premiered at the top tier fests). Actors in town to pick up awards at the sold out screenings included Amy Adams, Pamela Anderson, Kieran Culkin, Colman Domingo, Natasha Lyonne, Demi Moore, Lupita Nyong’o and Sebastian Stan among others; while the producers and directors attending to nab honoraries ran the gamut from Jerry Bruckheimer, Kevin Costner and Jason Reitman, to Richard Linklater, RaMell Ross, Pablo Larraín, and Sir Steve McQueen. (Though admittedly, I wasn’t really starstruck until I spotted James Carville, in town for Matt Tyrnauer’s Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid, in the lobby of the Drayton Hotel on Halloween. Naturally costumed as James Carville, complete with striped shirt and running shoes.) That said, it was the Behind Her Lens: Producers panel at the lovely Gutstein Gallery, perennially one of the highlights of the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” that far exceeded my expectations, particularly for providing a no holds barred assessment of the industry today.

To read the rest visit Filmmaker magazine.