While I was away last week, the Toronto International Film Festival revealed an all-star lineup for its TIFF Docs program, including new works from Werner Herzog, Michael Moore, Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman and Rithy Panh, just to name a few. This past week, the festival’s Wavelengths program was unveiled and features experimental documentary from the likes of Wang Bing, Jodie Mack, James Benning and Roberto Minervini. And for doc professionals, the annual Doc Conference is set to kick off with a conversation between Werner Herzog and Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers. The full schedule is available at the link.
In other festival news, the New York Film Festival announced not only its experimental Projections program, but also its Convergence slate, which centers around VR and interactive experiences, reports Kate Erbland of IndieWire. Deadline’s Peter White reports that Sheffield Doc/Fest CEO and Festival Director Elizabeth McIntyre is to step down after three years in charge. Additionally, programmer and film critic Eric Allen Hatch has kicked off a new monthly column titled “Infinite Fest” in which he’ll be “tackling the state of cinema as expressed by North American film festivals”.
Bing Liu’s Sundance Special Jury Prize winner MINDING THE GAP (my favorite film of the year thus far) has finally arrived via Hulu on Friday and has been near universally lauded by critics thus far. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody elegantly praises the film, writing, “…the skating sequences of his documentary “Minding the Gap” (which opens today in theatres and streams on Hulu) have a surging, gliding, soaring, joyously speedy energy that offers a hypnotic whirl and rush. Those images of skating, however, are merely the background and context for the film, and the diverting thrill that they offer is crucial to the film’s substance. That substance—domestic trauma, systemic racism, and economic dislocation—is also the very stuff of society, and the near-at-hand intimacy gives rise to a film of vast scope and political depth.” Critics from Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com to A.O. Scott in The New York Times and Luke Hicks at Nonfics have all felt about the same in their warm reviews of the film. In promoting the film, Bing Liu himself has appeared in conversation with Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker Magazine, as well as with Alissa Wilkinson of Vox.
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After last week’s copiously populated memo this week’s feels a wee bit sparse, but by no means is that fact meant to minimize the loss of documentary filmmaker Alexander Rastorguyev and his colleagues cameraman Kirill Radchenko and journalist Orkhan Dzhemal, who, according to Deadline’s Nancy Tartaglione, were found dead about 300 kilometers from the capital of Bangui in the Central African Republic late Monday. She notes, “The trio’s driver has told Reuters they were ambushed by armed men outside the town of Sibut. Rastorguyev’s films have played at the Karlovy Vary and Cinéma du Réel festivals, among others. His credits include the 2014 award-winning doc SROK (THE TERM), about the opposition movement in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”
In festival news, the Toronto International Film Festival revealed its Canadian film premieres, including Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky’s ANTHROPOCENE, which “provides a cinematic meditation on humanity’s reengineering of the planet by following the research of the Anthropocene Working Group, an international body of scientists,” notes Daniele Alcinii and Selina Chignall at Realscreen. Other films announced include Rob Stewart’s final work, SHARKWATER: EXTINCTION, Ron Mann’s CARMINE STREET GUITARS, Barry Avrich’s PROSECUTING EVIL: THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF BEN FERENCZ, Astra Taylor’s WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?, Thom Fitzgerald’s SPLINTERS and Igor Drljača’s THE STONE SPEAKERS.
The ever diligent Basil Tsiokos pieced together previews of a handful of festivals at What (not) To Doc, including Kosovo’s Dokufest, the Melbourne International Film Festival, Philadelphia’s BlackStar Film Festival, and the Locarno Film Festival. The latter of these fests Daniel Kasman covered for MUBI’s Notebook, writing, “I’ve already found my favorite film, though it may be one others know about: Manfred Blank and Wolf-Eckart Bühler’s LEUCHTTURM DES CHAOS (PHAROS OF CHAOS), a happenstance documentary made in 1983 when Bühler tried to find Hollywood actor Sterling Hayden to get permission to adapt one of his books.”
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Shooting of MEETING GORBACHEV. Photo: Lena Herzog
If last week seemed unusually spare, this past week’s abundance of doc news surely makes up for it. Kicking things off with an enthusiastic bang, The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey makes the case in his must read of the week that the recent financial success of various theatrical doc releases “represent, if not a major moment, then at least a meaningful boomlet for theatrical documentary filmmaking, perhaps the culmination of almost 50 years of evolution and exposure for the form, stretching back to the Maysles brothers’ SALESMAN. It has been 40 years since Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST WALTZ, about 30 years since Errol Morris’s THE THIN BLUE LINE and Michael Moore’s ROGER & ME, nearly 25 years since Steve James’s HOOP DREAMS, 20 years since Spike Lee’s FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, and 10 years since James Marsh’s MAN ON WIRE. That half a century of meaningful work with increasing mass exposure has slowly redefined the form, turning what had been considered by some moviegoers a starchy, stiff form of storytelling into some of the most vital, sought-out films in the country.”
Meanwhile, as the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival began to roll out their big name fiction features, DOK Leipzig revealed that its 61st edition will open with Werner Herzog and André Singer’s MEETING GORBECHEV, which sees “Herzog and Gorbachev sit together in the former’s Moscow office, engaging in intense conversations about the past and the winding path of history.” Bragging of an A-List of docs out-of-competition alongside its much-touted fiction competition, the Venice Film Festival is slated to premiere new work by Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman, Victor Kossakovsky, Tsai Ming-liang, Sergei Loznitsa and Mark Cousins, just to name a few.
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Noteworthy documentary news was few and far between this past week, yet word that PBS’s Independent Lens revealed its fall/winter lineup was cause for celebration. Added to its schedule was DAWNLAND on November 5th, THE JUDGE on November 12th, MAN ON FIRE on December 17th, and RUMBLE on January 28th.
In lieu of actual doc news, there was an abundance of dandy pieces on new and recent releases, including Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s MCQUEEN, a bio “of designer Alexander McQueen, whose extraordinary gifts, dark preoccupations and tragic death make for a completely engrossing, compulsively watchable film,” writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. At RogerEbert.com Odie Henderson had similar thoughts, “This documentary is as welcoming to intense fashionistas as it is to gauche fools like me…it is drop-dead gorgeous to look at, so see it on the biggest screen you can endure.” Co-director Ian Bonhôte appeared at The Talkhouse in a piece discussing what he sees at the biggest challenges filmmakers face today, while in The New York Times, Roslyn Sulcas wrote about three recent fashion docs that aren’t necessarily about fashion itself.
David Edelstein launched into an excellent take on FAR FROM THE TREE at Vulture, “It takes a beat or so to register the audacity of the title FAR FROM THE TREE, a phrase that’s normally presented in a negative context, as in ‘One look at Eric and Don Jr. and you know the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’ (Nor do the worms, apparently.) Andrew Solomon’s stupendous 2012 tome and Rachel Dretzin’s boundlessly empathetic documentary (co-produced by Solomon) home in on the exceptions: children whose very existence leaves their parents wondering what happened between conception and birth.” Meanwhile at RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny concludes, “In a world that seems in many respects to be headed to hell in a handbasket, that’s a fact worth celebrating, and this movie does so in an appropriately humane manner.”
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The nominees for the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards were revealed last Thursday. Bryan Fogel (ICARUS), Brett Morgen (JANE), Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (THE VIETNAM WAR), Judd Apatow (THE ZEN DIARIES OF GARRY SHANDLING), and Chapman Way and Maclain Way (WILD WILD COUNTRY) are up for Outstanding Directing for a Documentary, while CITY OF GHOSTS, JANE, STRONG ISLAND, and WHAT HAUNTS US were nominated for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. The full list of nominees can be found here.
Outfest, Los Angeles’ annual LGBT festival, runs July 12-22 and features nearly 30 documentaries. At What (not) To Doc, Basil Tsiokos gave rundown of the festival’s non-fiction offerings, “Nearly half of the Special Events are nonfiction presentations, including Dante Alencastre’s AIDS DIVA: THE LEGEND OF CONNIE NORMAN, about a key figure in 1990s LA AIDS activism; and William Clift’s A LONG ROAD TO FREEDOM: THE ADVOCATE CELEBRATES 50 YEARS, an expansive overview of LGBT history.”
Since the release of Kevin Macdonald’s WHITNEY there has been much debate about the film’s merits and its comparison to last year’s WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME by Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal. While Alan Light‘s recent piece in The New York Times looked at the film’s production background, two other pieces examined if either film understood its subject. At MUBI’s Notebook, Simran Hans examines why “Kevin Macdonald’s WHITNEY and Nick Broomfield’s WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME fail to capture the legendary vocalist as a musician or woman,” as Manuela Lazic attempts to unravel “the quagmire of two Whitney Houston movies” at The Ringer. While folks continue to debate about Whitney, Corbin Reiff has listed his favorite music documentaries currently available on Netflix over at UPROXX and the IndieWire staff polled critics on their favorite biographical docs.
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