From left, director Christian Delage and friend of STF Basil Tsiokos. Photo by Simon Luethi.
Screening in conjunction with an exhibition now on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, FROM HOLLYWOOD TO NUREMBERG is an essential look at how the machinery of the war effort and the machinery of Hollywood filmmaking combined to provide documentation of the horrors of war.
After receiving a Fulbright grant to study the archival footage stored in the Library of Congress for his 2007 film, NUREMBERG: THE NAZIS FACING THEIR CRIMES, director, curator and film historian Christian Delage became inspired to portray the stories of the three filmmakers, and to highlight the professionalism and preparation of their outfits.
In the post-screening question and answer session, Delage described the goal of his film: “This is not only telling a story of war and liberation of camps, this is definitely a story of three filmmakers. They realized immediately what was at stake. They worked as professionals, they had precise instructions and took their roles very seriously.” He received the full cooperation from the families of Ford, Fuller and Stevens to get access to the notebooks and personal artifacts of each director and discovered a shared friendship, made possible through their efforts in very different positions during the war.
Lee Hirsch’s film BULLY opened in theaters without a rating from the MPAA.
The Weinstein Company co-President Harvey Weinstein saw fit to stick his finger in the eye of the MPAA on Monday, when he announced that the company would release Lee Hirsch’s doc BULLY without a rating from the trade association. Weinstein’s decision followed a weeks-long effort to get the MPAA to reduce its R rating to PG-13, in order to make it easier for adolescents to see the film’s anti-bullying message. Hirsch had argued that eliminating the foul language that was the cause of the R rating would diminish the authenticity of the film.
The decision to allow BULLY to go to theaters unrated left some wondering whether kids would be able to see it. Theater chain AMC posted a note on its website saying that kids 17 or younger would be allowed to watch the film if accompanied by a guardian, or if they presented a signed permission slip. The U.S.’s largest movie theater chain, Regal Cinemas, for its part said it would also play the film, but treat it the same way it treated R-rated films. Bully opened at five locations in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, March 30, and is scheduled to go into wider release on April 13.
Reviews of the film thus far have been relatively strong. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott anointed the film as a NYT Critic’s Pick, calling it a “moving and troubling documentary about the misery some children inflict upon others.” At NPR.com, Bob Mondello said the film was “ a wrenching, potentially transformative look at an epidemic of adolescent cruelty and adult paralysis in the nation’s public schools.” Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said a “theme of parental difficulty in getting satisfactory responses from those in authority positions in schools is one of BULLY’s constant refrains.”
Alison Klayman’s AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY was announced as the opening film for Hot Docs last week.
The Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on March 20 announced the lineup for its 19th iteration, with 189 films from 51 different countries. Alison Klayman’s AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY is set to open the festival, which runs from April 26 – May 6 in Toronto, Canada. In honor of the festival, the folks at the D-Word will be hosting a five-day discussion with Hot Docs programmer Charlotte Cook, along with festival staffers Elizabeth Radshaw and Sarah Lancaster (D-Word registration required).
The Full Frame Documentary Festival, set to run April 12-15 in Durham, North Carolina, on March 20 also made several announcements. The two recipients of the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant are Jason Osder, for his film LET THE FIRE BURN, and Ben Powell for BARGE. The festival also announced additional programming celebrating the 40th anniversary of groundbreaking distro company New Day Films, as well as films celebrating the festival’s own 15th anniversary.
A campaign led by the revered distro/production house Kartemquin Films scored a win this week, after PBS on March 22 agreed to change the scheduling of the well-regarded independent doc series “Independent Lens” and “POV.” Kartemquin launched its crusade after news broke that the ratings for the new season for “Independent Lens” had dropped about 40%, after the show was moved from Tuesday to Thursday nights. The campaign to have the shows moved received a huge boost after esteemed journalist Bill Moyers gave it his backing. However, it still remains to be seen where, exactly, PBS will place the shows in its new schedule.
From left, GIRL MODEL directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon. Photo by Tony Voisin.
Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s disquieting film GIRL MODEL can easily be read as a scathing indictment of modern culture’s ever-narrowing definition of beauty, at least as it’s determined by the modeling and fashion industries. In its never-ending quest for a theoretical ideal of aesthetic perfection, the fashion world has seen fit to manipulate naive, teenaged aspiring models and their families, often by dangling the carrot of a huge payday that may never materialize. It’s difficult to fully comprehend the average consumer’s complicity in this process, which takes young girls from their homes and forces them to fend for themselves against uncaring agencies and clients (and in worst-case scenarios, sexual predators). The absence of any regulation or unionization leaves the young models exposed to rank exploitation by those willing to trade on their innocence for an easy buck. It makes sense, then, that GIRL MODEL relies on a color palette and score that sometimes reads tonally as something close to a horror film—horror is the only rational response to the sexualization of a child for profit. GIRL MODEL was co-presented with the PBS documentary series POV. Following the screening, POV Executive Director Simon Kilmurry spoke with directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon, along with model Rachel Blais and Model Alliance staff members Sara Ziff and Jenna Sauers. Click “Read more” below for the Q&A.
Jay Bulger’s BEWARE OF MR. BAKER won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at SXSW.
First-time director Jay Bulger’s BEWARE OF MR. BAKER on March 13 was named winner of South by Southwest’s Grand Jury Documentary Prize for his portrait of 70s drummer Ginger Baker, who played in the Eric Clapton-fronted Cream, as well as with Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti’s band. Bulger—a Washington, D.C., native—later told the Washington Post that he was so certain his film would not win any awards that he had arrived at the ceremony late. John DeFore at the Hollywood Reporter says the film “reveals a man (filmed mostly at home in South Africa) who is now ravaged by hard living and arthritis.”
Annie Eastman snagged SXSW’s Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature for BAY OF ALL SAINTS, a look at three single mothers living in poverty in Brazil. Eastman shared with the Wall Street Journal her motivations for making the film, telling the paper she became a filmmaker to tell the stories of impoverished families living on a polluted bay. Also, the Audience Documentary Spotlight award went to Katie Dellamaggiore for BROOKLYN CASTLE, a look at the effect of chess on I.S. 318 in Brooklyn. Sony Pictures and Scott Rudin Productions, in an unusual move, snapped up remake rights for the film before it secured a distribution deal for North America. Meanwhile, Joe Berlinger won the Audience 24 Beats Per Second Award for UNDER AFRICAN SKIES, which chronicles the classic Paul Simon album “Graceland.”
In other SXSW doc coverage, Mekado Murphy at the New York Times took a look at three films that caught his attention, among them TCHOUPITOULAS, by brothers Bill and Turner Ross. Basil Tsiokos of the What (Not) to Doc blog broke his coverage up into two posts, which you can find here and here. DeFore at The Hollywood Reporter also reviewed Jeffrey Kimball’s THE CENTRAL PARK EFFECT, a profile of several New York City amateur ornithologists.
