‘Cutting Through Rocks’ Review: A Sharp Documentary Profiles a Motorcycle-Loving Woman Who Takes on the Patriarchy in Rural Iran

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s precisely lensed “Cutting Through Rocks“ is a deftly shaped work of cinematic nonfiction that opens with a literal bang, as we cut from a black screen to a middle-aged, headscarf-clad woman wrestling with a metal door that’s become unhinged; eventually she decides to buzzsaw through the surrounding stone enclosure to make it fit back in. It’s an apt metaphor for the formidable Sara Shahverdi, a longtime divorcee in a deeply religious region of northwest Iran — a woman who’s spent most of her life flouting gender norms and giving the finger to convention. The former midwife is also a vocal advocate for the empowerment of women and girls, which includes access to education and an end to child marriage. And, of course, she’s also an advocate for the right to ride a motorcycle, her greatest passion of all.

To read the rest of my review visit IndieWire.

“Societal Failures Are Dictating What People Do”: Reid Davenport’s ‘Life After’ Connects Assisted Dying With a Fear of Disability

I interviewed Reid Davenport for the Doc Star of the Month column in 2022, the year the Stanford-trained TED fellow nabbed the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at Sundance for his remarkable debut feature, I Didn’t See You There, which he termed a doc “about disability from an overtly political perspective.” Now the award-winning director returns to Park City with Life After, another doc about disability from an overtly political perspective —though the politics are complicated when the subject is assisted dying. As Davenport himself put it in his director’s statement: “I’m a filmmaker in New York City, living in a progressive milieu where conversations about the ‘right to die’ hinge on treasured values of choice and bodily autonomy. But as a disabled person, I can sense people’s undisguised fear of disability just below the surface. What’s a hot-button dinner party topic for some is utterly sinister for me, as I see people in my life exhibit a higher tolerance for the deaths of disabled people than for non-disabled people.” It’s through this personal lens that we’re introduced to the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, a disabled Californian who in 1983 sought the “right to die” in a courtroom, sparking a media frenzy that morphed into a contentious national debate. And then, as so often happens with human beings hijacked for causes, she up and disappeared. This mystery prompted Davenport, who like Bouvia has cerebral palsy, to set out to investigate her whereabouts today. Through her story, Davenport explores the contemporary legal status of assisted dying and how legislation is crafted while disregarding input from disabled advocates. Documentary caught up with Davenport the week before the film’s U.S. Documentary Competition premiere on Life After’s aesthetic choices, the necessity of disabled perspectives in storytelling, and the political entanglement of the “right to die” with the refusal to support conditions of life.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“Making Films in Iran Is Not an Easy Task at All”: Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni on their Sundance-debuting Cutting Through Rocks

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks follows Sara Shahverdi, a middle-aged divorcee in a remote and extremely conservative region of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What makes the scenario rather remarkable that Shahverdi is neither pariah nor wallflower in her tiny town. On the contrary, the onetime midwife, who quite literally brought an entire generation of her village into the world, is also a loud motorcycle-riding rebel who ran for a seat at the government table and won. And now, as the first elected councilwoman, a woman who finds herself at the center of an incompetent bureaucracy, one in which the proverbial glass ceiling just might be made of stone. A few days prior to the film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition debut on January 27th, Filmmaker caught up with the married co-directors to learn all about their seven-year journey with Shahverdi, including staying safe through the “rare knowledge” of their formidable star.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“It Was More Pointedly a Satirical Look at …’The Peace-Building Industry'”: Amber Fares on her Sundance-Premiering Coexistence, My Ass!

Amber Fares’s Sundance-premiering Coexistence, My Ass! takes its fabulous title from a one-woman show of the same name, a piece developed (at Harvard of all places) by the doc’s star, “activist-comedian” Noam Shuster Eliassi. The daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and a Romanian Jewish father, Shuster Eliassi grew up in “Oasis of Peace” (Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam), a utopian community purposely comprised equally of Jews and Palestinians, where she would become “the literal poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process” and eventually a co-director of the UN’s Interpeace organization by the time she was in her early 20s. But then disillusionment with the impotence of institutions set in as well as her realization that, when you’re a Hebrew-Arabic-English-speaking,Mizrachi-Ashkenazi Jew often mistaken for an Arab — with a Palestinian best friend who could pass for Ashkenazi — you’re sitting on a potential comedic gold mine and perhaps a way to build bridges one punchline at a time. Until, that is, October 7th, 2023 put idealism itself to the test. Just prior to the doc’s January 26th Sundance debut, Filmmaker caught up with Fares (Speed Sisters) to learn all about the ups and downs of a five-year, multilingual, country-hopping journey with an Israeli wisecracker raised to defend peace at all costs.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“You’d Be Surprised How Happy People Are to Talk About the Best Times in Their Lives”: Elegance Bratton on His Sundance-Debuting Doc, Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

"A good party knows no fucking sexual orientation, no race, no socioeconomic background,” notes Vince Lawrence, the very first person to record a house song and the main protagonist in Elegance Bratton’s Sundance-debuting Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. That a global movement could be traced back to a rather nerdy Black youngster raised in the segregated world of Mayor Daley’s Chicago is just one surprising element in this lovingly crafted music history lesson. (Less surprising is the number of white folks who would also like to take credit.) But perhaps most remarkable is that through a combination of eye-catching archival imagery, dance floor beats, a wealth of interviews with the sound’s pioneering artists and DJs – and even reenactments – Bratton has managed to create a time capsule of an all-inclusive community, while keeping the party going loud and proud onscreen. The week before the doc’s January 26th (Premieres section) Sundance debut, Filmmaker caught up with the director-writer-producer-photographer, who was last on the festival circuit with his TIFF-premiering 2022 narrative feature The Inspection.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Editorially It Was Similar to Quilt-Making”: Brittany Shyne on her Sundance-Debuting Seeds

While “stunning directorial debut” is an overused description that seldom lives up to the Sundance hype, in the case of Brittany Shyne’s Seeds it’s also quite precise. The lush, B&W-shot doc is a gorgeous portrait of what may very well be the last in a long line of generational Black farmers in rural Georgia, one in which Shyne’s camera serves as both portal and means of preservation. By quietly and patiently embedding with two extended families in the small town of Thomasville, Shyne is able to capture everything from the languid rhythm of daily work, from harvesting cotton to repairing machinery; to a feisty elderly woman sharing sweets with her young granddaughter in the backseat of a car; to a touching moment of a sturdy octogenarian soothing his tiny great-grandchild to sleep. Though later we likewise see that same tender man express frustration bordering on outrage to Biden admin reps who are all talk and no financial help to farmers — unless they’re white. “I voted for Joe Biden,” he pleads in exasperation. (Black farmers now own but a fraction of the 16 million acres of land they had in 1910.) In other words, Seeds manages to encapsulate all the little things that add up to a heartbreakingly fast-vanishing — and rarely seen onscreen — way of life. A few days prior to the film’s January 25th U.S. Documentary Competition premiere, Filmmaker caught up with the Dayton-based director-cinematographer and recipient of the 2021 Artist Disruptor Award from the Center of Cultural Power to learn all about the making of Seeds (and learning from her mentors Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Filmed It, and I Posted It. Now, Watch”: David Borenstein on His Sundance-Debuting Mr. Nobody Against Putin

David Borenstein’s Sundance-premiering Mr. Nobody Against Putin stars Pavel “Pasha” Talankin (also credited as co-director), an “unlikely hero” in an even more unlikely collaboration. A jokey primary school teacher in his Ural Mountains hometown of Karabash (which has the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted cities on the planet), Pasha spends many days mentoring the kids who use the thirty-something’s open door office as a hangout/safe haven. That is, when he’s not documenting their young lives as the school’s videographer. Which is why things get rather complicated for this pro-democracy, but non-activist, educator. For once Putin decides to launch his “special military operation” life is turned upside down in this toxic mining town a world away, over a thousand miles from cosmopolitan Moscow — especially when a new “patriotic education” is mandated, swapping out the usual subjects for revisionist history, the singing of the State Anthem of the Russian Federation, and marching drills. All of which must be filmed by the school’s videographer, of course, as both proof of adherence and ammunition in the Kremlin’s propaganda war. Which is how Pasha found himself with a trove of truly remarkable footage, equal parts absurd and terrifying. And then he made the momentous decision to keep covertly shooting while smuggling it all out to an expat American filmmaker he just happened to get connected with online (after he’d pitched a Russian reality tv show seeking accounts of how the war had impacted everyday citizens) — a filmmaker who, in turn, shaped the story while gaining even more insight into his accidental protagonist through an exhausting, two years-plus of chatting over encrypted phone calls. Indeed, as Pasha succinctly puts it in his co-director’s statement, “Everyone was exhausted, but the orders kept coming: film it, post it. ‘Film it and post it.’ Well, I filmed it, and I posted it. Now, watch.” Filmmaker reached out to the award-winning, Copenhagen-based journalist and filmmaker (2016’s Dream Empire, last year’s Can’t Feel Nothing) a few weeks prior to the doc’s January 25th Sundance debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.