Wonder Women Directors at the 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival

The 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 27 – November 3) featured a strikingly eclectic abundance of Specialty Series discussions and workshops this year. There was “In Conversation” (one with Barry Jenkins, another with Armie Hammer), a three-part Below the Line Panel Series (Casting, Costume Design and Production Design), and Animation Corner: Art in Motion. There was also the TV Sidebar (Starz’s Outlander was the focus, with creators and cast from the show in town — even a costume exhibit at the SCAD Museum of Art), and a Writers Guild of America-affiliated program (Writers on Writing:The Front Runner featured Jason Reitman). Exhibitions excitingly included one on Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, with its wonderful, outsider-art-style sets.

But the one panel I got up early for was the Wonder Women Panel Series: Directors, at the airy, light-infused Gutstein Gallery. Entertainment Weekly staff writer Devan Coggan moderated a surprisingly down-to-earth discussion that featured actresses-turned-directors Heather Graham (Half Magic), Polly Draper (Stella’s Last Weekend), Hannah Marks (After Everything) and Anna Martemucci, aka A.M. Lukas (One Cambodian Family Please for My Pleasure). Also present were this year’s Sundance Film Festival Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award-winner Christina Choe (Nancy) and elder indie stateswomen Karyn Kusama (Destroyer) and Debra Granik (whose powerfully nuanced Leave No Trace unfortunately didn’t screen during the fest).

To read all about what has (and hasn't) changed in Hollywood post-Time's Up visit Filmmaker magazine.

“There Are Unlikely Protagonists Everywhere”: The 5th Docs to Watch Roundtable at the 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival

Celebrating its fifth edition, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable is the number one reason I’ve been making the late October pilgrimage to Georgia’s charming city of (Spanish moss-draped) squares for the past few years. (That and the festival’s abundance of southern hospitality, of course. In addition to being the only fest I’ve ever been to that provides buffet-style breakfasts, lunches and dinners, guests are treated to some truly top-notch lodging. In my case, it was the lovely, Savannah River-adjacent Kimpton Brice Hotel, a mere five-minute walk from the fest’s Marshall House headquarters and the majority of the screening venues.)

Moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s extremely deft and knowledgeable columnist Scott Feinberg, Docs to Watch is, as Feinberg put it in his intro this year, a chance to hear from the documentary equivalent of his fantasy football team. This time around the lineup included a whopping 14 filmmakers hoping to score Oscar glory: Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), Tim Wardle (Three Identical Strangers), Matt Tyrnauer (Studio 54), Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster (Science Fair), Julie Cohen and Betsy West (RBG), Alan Hicks and Rashida Jones (Quincy), Nathaniel Kahn (The Price of Everything), Gabe Polsky (In Search of Greatness), Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo) and Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment).

To read all about it visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Sometimes You Abandon a Wrong Idea and It Comes Back to You in the Right Form”: Patrick Wang on His Four-Hour Double Feature A Bread Factory

Patrick Wang (a 25 New Face alum) takes a painstakingly nuanced, intimate approach to delicate subjects, specifically the ways in which we deal with — and don’t deal with — loss and the rippling effects in life after a death. His first feature, the breathtaking, Independent Spirit Award-nominated In the Family, and 2015’s Cannes and SXSW-screening The Grief of Others, which will finally be hitting theaters November 2nd, would make for a great marathon viewing alone. (Provided it came with a big box of Kleenex.)

And now Wang has created a work that is simultaneously lighter in tone, and his most ambitious undertaking yet — the two-part, four-hour, cast of 100 (including Tyne Daly in one of the leads) A Bread Factory, Part One: For the Sake of Gold and Part Two: Walk with Me a While. The film follows Dorothea and Greta, a couple fighting to keep their four-decade old, small town arts center open even as they’re being pushed out by Chinese performance art stars May and Ray (famous for their piece about the “hierarchy of furniture”) at the new FEEL Institute down the street. Not to mention the singing and tap-dancing techies (yes, it’s also part musical, which makes one wonder if Wang is a masochist for logistics) that invade the Bread Factory’s parking lot by the busload (selfie sticks firmly in hand).

Filmmaker had the chance to chat with the director — a Texas-born MIT grad, who is also the son of Taiwanese immigrants — about community, composing music, and the danger of accidentally contributing to the xenophobic viewpoint. A Bread Factory (Part 1 and Part 2) opens in theaters October 26th.

To read my interview with Wang visit Filmmaker magazine.

The Blessing brings a bright moral compass to a dark world

Watching The Blessing, Hunter Robert Baker and Jordan Fein’s exquisite portrait of one family on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, during the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival this month marked one of the rare times I’ve seen a doc that could have used a longer (theatrical) cut. So wrapped up was I in the everyday struggles of Lawrence Gilmore, a single father of five, and his nonconformist daughter Caitlin, that I could have used an added half hour or so of breathing space between scenes, some time to pause and take a break from this unrelenting, emotionally traumatic, complicated drama.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

Doc Stars of the Month: Rudy Valdez and Cindy Shank, The Sentence

Part home movie, part activist doc, Rudy Valdez's The Sentence is that rare film that can bring even the most jaded filmgoer (yes, that would be me) to tears. Indie cinematographer Valdez spent nearly a decade shooting hundreds of hours of footage to create a portrait of his own close-knit family in the aftermath of his sister Cindy Shank's incarceration — the consequence of what's colloquially referred to as "the girlfriend problem." Shank, who'd never before been in trouble with the law, was sentenced to 15 years — the mandatory minimum — on conspiracy charges after her boyfriend, a drug dealer, was murdered. (Basically, she ended up taking the fall for the crimes he'd committed.) Six years after his death — after she'd been cleared of any wrongdoing, after she'd turned her life around — the cops suddenly came calling, and simply whisked away the devoted mother from her three young girls and loving husband.

With Valdez's heartfelt visceral doc set to air on HBO on October 15, Documentary was fortunate enough to chat with the devoted siblings about their firsthand experience with the Kafkaesque entity we (ironically!) call the US justice system.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“What is Our Responsibility to Survivors?”: Alexandria Bombach on her Sundance-Winner On Her Shoulders

Recently announced Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nadia Murad, a survivor of the Yazidi genocide and a current human rights activist, is the star of On Her Shoulders, Alexandria Bombach’s Sundance-winning (both for Best Documentary and the U.S. Documentary Directing Award) portrait of Murad as she navigates a world that would be overwhelming and intimidating for any 23-year-old, let alone one who has experienced unspeakable crimes at the hands of ISIS. But speak Murad must — to the prying media, to the cold bureaucratic UN, to indistinguishable assorted government officials. And to the refugees at camps who look to her as a modern day Moses, heaven-sent to lead her people out of relentless misery.

Filmmaker caught up with Bombach to discuss the director’s fly-on-the-wall journey with this tireless yet strikingly fragile crusader prior to the doc’s theatrical debut (October 19 at NYC’s Village East Cinemas, October 24 for LA, with a national rollout to follow).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Call Her Ganda is an indictment of Western imperialism, transphobia, and injustice

PJ Raval’s Call Her Ganda is a film I’ve been raving about since catching it at Hot Docs last spring. It’s the story of Jennifer Laude – Filipina, trans and a sometime sex worker – whose 2014 murder at the hands of a US Marine stationed overseas might have gone unnoticed, like the vast majority of victims of violence fitting Jennifer’s many marginalized identities. Instead the 26-year-old’s death sparked not only a national outcry, but led to an international showdown over issues far beyond gender or sex – and straight into matters of unequal justice, unleashed militarism and American imperialism.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.