By Ali Moosavi. In Razor’s Edge: The Legacy of Iranian Actresses, I showed their true worth and high place in the cinema. Some people who used to look down at these actresses from a high moral platform as cheap women, were crying at the screenings and saying how sorry they […]
One Family’s Dirty, Drunken Laundry: For I Know My Weakness
By Elias Savada. A raw journey into immersive filmmaking, asking for a wide berth when it comes to social ethics.” With over half-a-million homeless people in the United States today, most folks treat them as a plague. Some toss a few coins or dollars their way when they’re panhandling at […]
Facing the Consequences: An Interview with Michael Winterbottom on Eleven Days in May
By Yun-hua Chen. The idea from the beginning was that we wanted to be very simple, as a sort of a memorial for those children that died, and focus on their families, the mothers, brothers and sisters who loved the children, and focus on what they miss about the them […]
US Sport and Its Complexities: Filmmakers Tommy Walker and Ross Hockrow on Kaepernick & America
By Anees Aref. What makes this story one of those things you want to grab a hold of, is that you’re able to utilize sports, which a huge portion of our society spends an extraordinary amount of time diving into. So, if you can use that to bring in the […]
Resistance to Conformity: Eva Vitija’s Loving Highsmith (2022)
By Melanie Marotta. Ever since I was sixteen or seventeen, I’d – I’d get what is sometimes called creepy ideas.” (05:19-05:25) With Loving Highsmith (2022), writer and director Eva Vitija does what others have refused to do – she resists labeling Highsmith. Instead, by allowing her life to unfold, viewers […]
At a Concentration Camp, Two Women in Love: Magnus Gertten on Nelly & Nadine
By N. Buket Cengiz. “It was a mission that felt almost impossible, which is a good thing for a documentary filmmaker.” Once, Nelly Mousset-Vos is a successful classical singer, and Nadine Hwang, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Spain, lives in the bohemian circles in Paris. On the Christmas […]
Collective War Trauma and Moments of Fragility: An Interview with Hirotoshi Takeoka on Adamiani (2021)
By Yun-hua Chen. After the Chechen Wars, many changes happened. Refugees and guerrilla fighters from Chechnya had a major impact on the Islamic faith of the Kist people in Pankisi. Leila and her daughter, Mariam, represent these two generations before and after the Chechen Wars.” Adamiani, screened at the international […]
Eye on (and Off) the Ball: William Klein’s The French (1982)
By Thomas Puhr. Beyond just chronicling an event, Klein’s sports doc is a cultural artifact in and of itself – not about the time, but of it. With this year’s French Open making the rounds on the news, now is an ideal opportunity to revisit the tournament’s famous 1981 competition, […]
The Power of ‘Yes’: A Wakefield Poole Remembrance
By Andrew Repasky McElhinney. Poole’s life covers an enviable (at least in retrospect, at least to me) span of the post-WWII 20th century America…. [with] one of the first positive representations of Gay life and Gay sex in the U.S., and a talisman for the then emerging Pride movement.” I […]
An Adrenaline-Fueled Race to The Rescue
By Elias Savada. Unfolding with military precision, enhanced by a steady, determined pacing…. We can be an ingenious species. When bad things happen, there are any number of special people who come up with solutions to seemingly unsolvable, life-threatening problems. The crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft is often called mankind’s greatest feat of improvised […]