“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.

The Edge of Nature

“I guess you could call that instinct – or insanity,” states the director-writer-environmental activist Josh Fox about his compulsion to build a high platform in the middle of the Pennsylvania forest where he’d gone to convalesce from long Covid. Later, after a monologue about deer trails being the precursor to roads, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker (for 2010’s Gasland) likewise notes that “Nature is an X-ray – upon which our entire system is a hologram.” Equal parts self-deprecating and painfully earnest, Fox serves as our passionate guide in The Edge of Nature, a documentary theater piece that recently premiered at NYC’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club to rave reviews (including from none other than Bernie Sanders, who’s long supported Fox through The Sanders Institute. Fox also wrote parts of the Democratic platform on energy and environment in 2016).

To read the rest of my review visit Hammer to Nail.

“A Deep Dive Into My Trauma”: Shiori Ito on Black Box Diaries

Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries is a film the Japanese journalist should never have had to make. Based on her international bestseller, the Sundance-premiering doc is a dogged investigation into a rape perpetrated by another Japanese journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a longtime friend of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose biography the offender penned as well. It’s also a somewhat surreal journey, given that the brave survivor in the purposely stalled case is Ito herself. Through an engaging mix of secret recordings, vérité shooting and confessional video, we’re invited along on an increasingly maddening odyssey through the shockingly antiquated Japanese judicial system; exposing a hidden world where, prior to production, rape laws hadn’t been changed for 110 years. As a result the minimum sentence for rape was shorter than for theft, and was provable not by a lack of consent but only by physical violence or threats. Add to this the chances of a female officer taking on your case being next to nil (since women make up less than 8% of the force), and the fact that you’ll likely have to re-traumatize yourself by reenacting the incident with a life-sized doll for the assigned policeman, and it’s easy to see why only four percent of violated women even bother to report the crime. That is, until an undaunted reporter suddenly decided to seek justice for herself and others by documenting everything, and calling BS on it all. Just prior to the October 25th theatrical release of Black Box Diaries, Filmmaker reached out to the gender-based human rights-focused writer and filmmaker, who in 2020 also made Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“The illusion of immortality”: A Photographic Memory

Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s A Photographic Memory is a very intimate investigation into the life of a globetrotting journalist (and photographer and filmmaker) whose interviews with legendary lensers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and Lisette Model formed the basis for a trailblazing audiovisual series you’ve likely never heard of. Though “Images of Man” was produced with the renowned International Center of Photography founder Cornell Capa and Scholastic, the eight-part program (each episode pairing a photographer’s images with descriptions of their philosophies in their own words) had been time-capsuled in the ICP archives since 1979; at the behest of the journo’s grieving widower, Time-Life photographer Brian Seed, who sent the raw materials to the center for safekeeping upon the sudden death of his wife at the age of 42.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

‘My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow’ Review: A Scary and Riveting Portrait of Russia’s Last Independent News Channel

“Sadism disguised with the lacework of words” is how Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist with TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news channel, describes Putin’s twisting of phrases in “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow.” And “being at the right place at the right time — or the wrong place at the wrong time,” is how “The Loneliest Planet” director Julia Loktev has described the circumstances that led to the documentary she’s made about Nemzer’s work. First conceived as a look at the daily lives of reporters who’ve been branded “foreign agents” by their own government, the essence of the project — now a five-part, five-and-a-half-hour epic — was profoundly transformed four months into production, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion against Ukraine.

To read the rest of my New York Film Festival review visit IndieWire.

Reality Show: Julia Loktev on ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow’

It’s been a while since the acclaimed director-screenwriter-video artist Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet, Day Night Day Night) last traversed the nonfiction landscape with her 1998 feature debut Moment of Impact. That Sundance Documentary Directing Award-winning doc, shot on Hi8 and edited by Loktev herself, dealt with the aftermath of an accident that left her father severely disabled and forced her mother to give up her career as a computer programmer in order to care for him. It was yet another life-changing event for the Russian immigrant couple who, along with their young daughter, traded Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) for northern Colorado. And now Loktev returns to her roots in more ways than one, with an epic doc titled My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow (part two is yet to be released). Unspooling in five discrete chapters, the film brings Loktev back to familiar territory to tag along with her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show journalist for TV Rain, and her fellow “foreign agents,” who are also independent media makers branded such by the Kremlin. They navigate the ever-twisting reality of dictatorship in the run-up to and aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A few weeks prior to the NYFF premiere of My Undesirable Friends, Documentary reached out to Loktev to learn all about the project.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.