Why trans bodies matter (hint: It’s the Patriarchy, Stupid)

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, leaving reproductive rights to be strangled by the groping hands of overwhelmingly male Republican state legislatures across the US, progressive activists demanded action. And the Democrat-controlled federal government, having dropped the ball on abortion and facing tough midterm elections this fall, swiftly responded with two bills: one which codified the right to same-sex (and interracial – an added fuck you/“dare you to overrule that” touch to Justice Thomas) marriage, the other the right to contraception. The former quickly passed the House – including with support from members of the party that killed Roe – while the latter seems DOA in the Senate. Which, perhaps unsurprisingly, led the professional political pundits to first express “shock” at both outcomes, and then to wildly hypothesize. How had an IUD become more controversial than gay marriage? And was this actually a silver-lined sign of progress? (Of course not.)

So to read the rest of my essay on how the political punditry got it so wrong visit Global Comment.

“The Story of the Borderlands Is Not Singular”: Cathy Lee Crane on Drawing the Line

Filmmaker last interviewed veteran multimedia artist Cathy Lee Crane about her first feature-length narrative film The Manhattan Front, which combined staged performances and archival footage from the National Archives in DC to present the strange but true entanglement of a WWI German saboteur with the progressive labor movement of activist Elisabeth Gurley Flynn. While Crane’s latest selection of works likewise resurrects buried US history, they tread territory even further back in time, all the way down to the border, and are currently being shown a continent away. Throughout the month of July, the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin will be showcasing several projects from their second American artist-in-residence (Kevin B. Lee was the inaugural invitee), including Crane’s multi-platform hybrid series Drawing the Line, a 14-channel work in progress that travels from El Paso to the Pacific Ocean to grapple with what the 19th century US and Mexico Border Survey Commission has wrought. To learn all about this sprawling mosaic that combines “staging, interviews, observational documentary, sonic records, and the archive in collaboration with those living in the shadow of the Commission’s arbitrary line” — as well as the feature-length doc Crossing Columbus (2020) and the short film Terrestrial Sea (2022) — Filmmaker reached out once again to the globetrotting (2013) Guggenheim Fellow.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Doc Star of the Month: Margaret Byrne, ‘Any Given Day’

Margaret Byrne’s Any Given Day is a half-decade-long ride on the roller coaster that those living with a mental illness face — on “any given day” — through the stories of four distinctly riveting individuals, three of whom the director met while investigating the treatment of detainees at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, which in 2014 had the dubious distinction of being the largest single-site mental health facility in the country. And these individuals are participants in the city’s diversionary mental health court probation program. (Which, unfortunately, is itself problematic, since a guilty plea is often the price of admission.) There’s Angela, a dedicated preschool teacher and single mother of four fighting to regain custody of her youngest. Also Daniel, who studied fashion before his dream of being a shoe designer got upended by his illness. And Dimitar, an author (State of Schizophrenia) and anthropologist who emigrated from Bulgaria as a boy and worked full-time to put himself through college. And rounding out the quartet is Margaret Byrne herself, a single mother and the founder-director of an all-female film collective called Beti Films — whose lifetime battle with depression nearly derailed her latest doc. Any Given Day premieres July 7 as part of World Channel’s America ReFramed series. In honor of BIPOC Mental Health Month, Documentary reached out to the Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker-protagonist, who agreed to put herself in the spotlight and serve as our July Doc Star of the Month — and to let us in on the one project that forced her “to challenge the stereotype that a person with a mental illness is an unreliable narrator."

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Safe sex scenes: Body Parts

SEX: Exploring the female body in Hollywood by tracing the making of sex scenes, the toll it takes on those involved, and what it means for women in the real world. For most of its history, Hollywood has been globally gaslighting the world, exporting the lie that the male gaze is somehow always benign or «neutral,» when of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. Fortunately, we now have Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s (Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines) eye-opening Body Parts, which world-premiered in the Spotlight Documentary section of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, to unpack both how we got to this patriarchal cinematic state and how those in the camera’s line of sight are now shooting back. Drawing from a sweeping range of classic film clips and knowledgeable voices on the subject of simulated sex onscreen – from film scholars to intimacy coordinators to Jane Fonda – the doc is, sadly, proof positive that it didn’t have to be this way; the «inevitably» of female objectification in the movies actually the result of a highly systematic manmade plan.

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

Subjective truth: Subject

DOCS: Some of the biggest non-fiction films of the past years go under the microscope, investigating the ethics of documenting trauma. As a film journo who’s spent the past half-decade interviewing the characters (or protagonists – as I’ve had a prickly aversion to the word «subject» since long before its colonialist connotation became generally accepted) in front of the nonfiction lens for my «Doc Star of the Month» column at Documentary magazine, Jennifer Tiexiera, and Camilla Hall’s Subject was a no-brainer to catch. And lucky for me, the tongue-in-cheek-titled film, world-premiering in the Documentary Competition at the 2022 Tribeca Festival (June 8-19), turned out to be one of those rare selections that actually lives up to its «essential viewing» synopsis hype. Tiexiera and Hall, who met at Tribeca Festival 2017 (with the premieres of A Suitable Girl and Copwatch, respectively), have now joined forces to highlight the highs and lows of the real-life, flesh-and-blood folks who’ve put their mental, physical, and emotional health on the line in five of the genre’s highest-profile (sometimes controversial) docs: The Staircase, Hoop Dreams, The Wolfpack, Capturing the Friedmans, and The Square; while also interviewing a wide array of insightful academics, experts and, most notably, fellow documentary directors (though, in the smartest of twists, none behind the aforementioned quintet).

To read my entire essay visit Modern Times Review.

“I Can’t Afford to Let Cliches Live in the Cinema I Make”: Leilah Weinraub on Shakedown

Leilah Weinraub’s 2018 Shakedown, which began playing Metrograph on June 17th (and has been held over through June 30th due to high demand), has been touted by Variety as the “the first-ever non-adult film” to be picked up by Pornhub. Yet it could also be called the sex site’s first-ever Berlinale-premiering and Tate/ICA/MoMA PS1/Whitney Biennial-screened acquisition. And likely the smut streamer’s first-ever labor of love release as well. Indeed, Shakedown is a film that defies any easy categorization. Ostensibly a longform cinematic exploration (crafted over 15 years starting in 2002) of the titular, mid-city, Los Angeles, Black lesbian strip club, the doc is likewise a study in the invention of identity, family and community — especially for those marginalized by both blood relatives and society. It’s also a heck of a risk-taking endeavor: Neither a feminist film nor an easily digestible depiction of Black women for that matter, the true (and unapologetically self-proclaimed) stars of the doc are just as comfortable expressing sexual fluidity (the legendary dancer Egypt reminisces about the time before she was gay) as they are popping a bare booty for the lens.

So to read my interview with the intersectional industry vet behind the lens - a NYC-based native of LA whose unconventional career has taken her from being mentored by Tony Kaye, to working with Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, to serving as CEO of the street-wear fashion brand Hood By Air - visit Filmmaker magazine.

True Crime Nuance: HBO’s “Mind Over Murder”

On its surface, Mind Over Murder – the titillatingly titled six-part doc series that debuted June 20 on HBO – might seem merely the latest addition to a bloated, true-crime juggernaut. And yet in the critically acclaimed hands of Nanfu Wang (In the Same Breath, One Child Nation, Hooligan Sparrow) the Vox Media Studios-produced project becomes infused with an element rarely seen in our current corporate documentary age: nuance. Indeed, this in-depth exploration of a notorious case in which six men and women – all poor and white with two struggling with severe mental issues – were convicted (and subsequently exonerated) for the 1985 murder of Helen Wilson, a grandmother and beloved member of the Beatrice, Nebraska community, contains neither heroes nor villains. Just a lot of sad and tragically imperfect human beings. So what led five of the “Beatrice Six” to confess to a crime in which not a shred of DNA evidence would ever be found to connect them? And why to this day is both the small town and Wilson’s family fiercely divided over their actual innocence? And why on earth would a filmmaker born and raised in China set out for the US heartland to try to understand the motives behind this horrific crime, its unorthodox investigation, and the decades-spanning trials and exonerations (followed by two civil suits)? Not to mention the making of the local playhouse’s production based entirely on court transcripts.

To find out read my essay at Global Comment.