“She Withheld Empathy From Everyone But Herself”: Andres Veiel on Riefenstahl

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl is an arresting and deeply disturbing all-archival portrait of the titular Third Reich actor-director, responsible for some of the most innovative filmmaking of the 20th century as well as horrific war crimes (though Riefenstahl would go to her grave insisting she knew nothing of the mass murder taking place all around her, let alone the power of her propaganda). That said, Hitler’s cinematic mouthpiece would undoubtedly agree that great art requires great sacrifice — just not her own. The film is made up entirely of materials excavated from the 700 boxes Leni Riefenstahl bequeathed to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, which arrived only after the death of her husband Horst Kettner (40 years her junior) in 2016. That’s when the doc’s producer Sandra Maischberger reached out and struck a deal with the Foundation: her Vincent Productions would undertake an initial examination of the estate for the right to use the contents for a film. What her team ultimately discovered was a never-before-seen goldmine of personal photos and intimate letters, startling recordings and even home movies. All of which, when pieced together by Veiel’s innovative artistic hand, prove what Maischberger (also a prominent journalist in Germany who conducted one of the last interviews Riefenstahl gave before her death) calls the “Riefenstahl principle.” While it’s pretty easy to tell if someone is lying to your face, it becomes nearly impossible when the person has told that lie to herself for so long she believes it to be the one and only truth. Filmmaker was fortunate enough to sit down in person with Veiel in the lobby of the Perry Lane Hotel at this year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 25 -November 1), where the German director participated in a post-screening Q&A and on the Docs to Watch Directors Roundtable.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“’We’re More Afraid of What Happens When We Stop Filming’”: Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman on The Alabama Solution

When Andrew Jarecki (HBO’s The Jinx, Capturing the Friedmans) and Charlotte Kaufman (a producer on The Jinx, Part Two) first stepped inside the secretive Alabama prison system they were there to shoot a revival meeting — an uplifting event that church ministries hold in prison yards throughout the state. What they stumbled upon instead was a far different story, one of horrific abuse, sweeping coverups and even murder at the hands of those charged to enforce the law. Making ample use of the evocative footage shot over six years on contraband phones by the incarcerated men who risked their lives to participate in this film, The Alabama Solution unspools in nail-biting real time, which gives the film a wrenching, can’t-look-away immediacy. The approach gives the film a refreshing feeling — that these human beings whose rights have been systematically violated for years, often decades, are finally in charge of the narrative and of their own lives. Filmmaker spoke with Jarecki and Kaufman during this year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where the pair participated in a post-screening Q&A on October 28th, and also on the Docs to Watch Directors Roundtable the following day. The Alabama Solution is currently streaming on HBO.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Hot Springs 2025: Uncertainty and Camaraderie

Riding from the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock to Hot Springs, Arkansas to cover the 3rd annual Filmmaker Forum at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, I asked the only other industry attendee in the car what he’d be doing at the upcoming event. His response was both startling and perhaps an unsurprising sign of today's federal rescissions times: He didn’t know. A 17-year veteran of Alabama Public Television, Chris Holmes had initially agreed to participate on a panel with other public media reps. Unfortunately, Holmes had also just been let go as Vice President of Production & Digital Studios at APT, thus he wasn’t exactly sure of his role at the three-day filmmaker/industry conference (or job-wise back in Birmingham for that matter). Fortunately, the doc vet would end up being in good company, as grappling with seismic uncertainty proved to be the theme of this year’s event as well.

To read all about it visit Documentary magazine.

“We Wanted to Run It Like a Normal Powwow”: Sky Hopinka on Powwow People

Sky Hopinka is one of those rare filmmakers who seems to possess an instinctual artistic eye. And his latest Powwow People is a “vérité-style documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering” according to its spot-on synopsis. It’s also a beautifully-crafted art film refreshingly not specifically made for the cinephile (i.e., East Coast liberal/Euro) gaze. Indeed, in order to avoid the extractive lens Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, purposely did not parachute in to capture a powwow “National Geographic” style (as the event’s MC Ruben Littlehead jokes to the camera early on). Instead the MacArthur Fellowship-winning director and his collaborators staged the assembly from scratch themselves. It’s a cinematic project handmade with loving care with and for one’s own community. An experience had from the inside out. Soon after the doc’s Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival premiere (a month after its TIFF debut and before its IDFA premiere), Filmmaker caught up with the visual artist and filmmaker, who was also one of our “25 New Faces 2018.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

"Global Warming ‘Knows No Ideology, No Political Boundaries'”: Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk on The White House Effect

Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk’s The White House Effect is an intriguing all-archival trip back in time to the precise moment in US politics when we arguably could have turned the page on climate change. From 1988-1992, Yale grad and oil company founder George H.W. Bush was commander-in-chief; not only did Bush. Sr. improbably make vocal his belief that global warming (“The Greenhouse Effect”) was real, but promised to employ “the White House effect” to counter it. Which included appointing as EPA chief Bill Reilly, an avid conservationist and veteran of Nixon’s Presidential Council on Environmental Quality and the World Wildlife Fund. Unfortunately, the 41st president would also employ as chief of staff former NH governor John Sununu, who Time magazine once called “Bush’s Bad Cop” and whose laser-like focus on the American economy likewise meant championing Big Oil at all costs. (It’s no spoiler alert to say the bad guy won. And we all lost.) The week before the doc’s October 31st Netflix release, Filmmaker reached out to the co-directing trio to learn all about digging into the late 20th century past to promote action today.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Where Life and Death Coexist: Vitaly Mansky on Time to the Target

The title of Vitaly Mansky’s Time to the Target refers to “the flight time of a missile or the interval between the departure of an enemy aircraft to perform a combat mission until it reaches the specified target of destruction.” (This we learn at the end of Mansky’s masterful three-hour epic. The text card is followed by the dedication: “With love to my hometown Lviv.”) But the Russian-Ukrainian director’s latest, which will next play IDFA, is much less a “war doc” than a grand cinematic study of a specific place, western Ukraine’s largest city Lviv, where life and death coexist out of necessity. It’s a place where selfie-taking fashionistas casually share the cobblestone streets with men with missing limbs. (“If you give the Russians a finger, they’ll bite your hand off,” scoffs a soldier.) Where gravediggers complain about working conditions, and a mother in a labor ward speaks of needing to replace the ones who are dying with the newly born. A musician in the Band of the Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Ground Forces Academy admits to having no plans for the future, since who knows what tomorrow might bring; indeed, he might very well be on the frontlines. And from there we cut to an outdoor dance party that could be a nighttime rave almost anywhere — if not for the little kid determinedly engaged in target practice. (Putin’s face has become the new bullseye.) And still, the funeral-tasked orchestra plays on. Two days before the February 17 premiere of Time to the Target in the Forum section of this year’s Berlinale, Documentary spoke with the award-winning documentarian (2020’s Gorbachev, Heaven, 2018’s Putin’s Witnesses) and founder of the original ArtDocFest, which was forced to cease activity in 2022 due to Russian censorship and the unjust war. Special thanks to Daria Buteiko for providing translation throughout the Zoom interview.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

Shooting from the Heart: Craig Renaud and Juan Arredondo on Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud

As I wrote in my capsule review for this year’s SXSW curtain raiser, Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud is a film that Craig Renaud, Brent’s brother (and my friend for the past dozen years, ever since I met the tight-knit siblings covering their now defunct Little Rock Film Festival) should never have had to make and instigated by an event no family should ever have to live through. And that puts Brent’s loved ones in the grieving company of untold numbers of families around the world — the very same people the award-winning conflict zone documentarian (alongside his younger sibling) dedicated his life to, a life he lost on March 13, 2022 while covering Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s a stunning 37-minute eulogy, made all the more palpable through Brent’s own words and cinematography, to a brother and lifelong filmmaking partner, a dogged journalist and ultimately a victim of war. In turn it’s also a powerful tribute to all conflict zone journalists and to all victims of our never-ending wars. The week before the doc’s October 21st HBO debut, Filmmaker caught up with Craig and producer Juan Arredondo, a Colombian-American photojournalist who was seriously injured in the March 13th attack, at the Hot Spring Documentary Film Festival (where Craig presented the siblings’ mentor Jon Alpert with the Brent Renaud Career Achievement Award) to hear all about cinematically honoring Brent, a multi-award-winning documentarian who like his brother preferred to remain firmly offscreen.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.