David Carr in 2008. Photo by Stephen Chernin of Associated Press.
With NBC news anchor Brian Williams losing the world’s trust over a pack of lies and the tragic death of 60 MINUTES correspondent Bob Simon in an automobile accident, this week has been rough for journalism, but the passing of beloved New York Times cultural commentator David Carr late Thursday evening may be the toughest to take for many in the documentary filmmaking community. His family at The Times have put together a loving tribute with various articles from co-workers like A.O. Scott and many links to video moments with Carr, while Andrew Rossi, the director of PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES, a film in which Carr came to the fore as the heart and soul of the newspaper, wrote his own memorial to the man who he inevitably became friends with following the film.
In the wake of the unfortunate news, Variety’s James Rainey wrote his own appreciative piece on Carr’s unlikely career in journalism and Realscreen’s Barry Walsh collected responses to the news from the documentary community. Just hours before Carr collapsed in the offices of The Times, he hosted a discussion with the team behind CITIZENFOUR – Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden – as part of the TimesTalks series hosted at The New School’s John L Tishman Auditorium in New York.
Looking up, Stranger Than Fiction continues tomorrow at the IFC Center with BEST OF EGG: THE ARTS SHOW (2000-’03), curating the cream of the crop from a show considered by many to be one of the best arts programs ever broadcast in America. The screening begins at 8pm with a post-screening Q&A featuring producers Jeff Folmsbee, Mark Mannucci and others to follow.
This post was written by STF blogger Jenna Belhumeur.
Freeway Rick Ross’s job in south-central Los Angeles in the 1980s was to get as many people high as he could. However, the crack he sold had a much bigger story behind it, linking Ross to the CIA and the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
In Tuesday night’s screening of FREEWAY: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM, audience members were introduced to Ross’s childhood, his booming drug empire, his demise, his redemption and a side story outlining his lawsuit with the famous rapper who shares his name. Getting involved with drug dealing early on in order to make a name for himself within a tough inner-city environment, Ross’s struggle to reclaim his name from the famed rapper by the film’s end seems fitting enough.
Following the screening, director and producer Marc Levin explained how he was first introduced to the idea about making a film exposing the U.S. government’s involvement in Los Angeles’s booming crack scene.
A media producer for Bill Moyers during the Iran-Contra affair hearings in the mid-80’s, Levin remembers hearing the chant, “CIA! Crack in America!” After meeting Gary Webb, the investigative reporter whose series of stories first examined the crack-cocaine trade’s links to members of the anti-government Contra rebels, he learned about Freeway Rick Ross.
Levin was eager to make a film about Ross, but there was one thing standing in the way: Ross’s life-in-prison sentence after purchasing 100 kilograms of cocaine from a federal agent in a sting operation.
“He was confident he was going to get out,” Levin said, while also admitting his own doubt in Ross’s capability of reducing the sentence.
However, against all odds, Ross’s case was brought to a federal court of appeals and his sentence was reduced to 20 years. In 2009, Levine received a call.
“Get your ass to L.A.,” Ross told him. “We’re going to make that movie.”
Levin explained how FREEWAY: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM is not only the story of a man who quite literally “finds the free way” during his path towards liberation, but also gives audiences a glimpse into how the system really works.
Some black men are still serving excessively long sentences in prison for minute possessions of cocaine in the 80’s which Levin describes as both a “tragedy and a travesty.”
“Part of the passion for wanting to [make this film] is because we are at a tipping point on the war on drugs and criminal justice reform,” Levin said. “It’s critical that as the #BlackLivesMatter movement continues, we understand what this injustice is rooted in.”
FREEWAY: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM will premiere in two parts on March 1st and March 8th on Al-Jazeera America.
Stranger Than Fiction’s Winter 2015 season runs from February 3rd to March 24th, taking place each Tuesday night at the IFC Center. The season features an eclectic mix of sneak previews and retrospectives, including appearances by filmmakers Marc Levin, Ian Olds, Liz Garbus and film subject Seymour Bernstein.
Jenna Belhumeur is a current student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. After graduating from UCLA in 2013, she moved to Thailand for 8 months to teach English and backpack around Southeast Asia. After Columbia, Jenna hopes to report internationally for a major broadcast network or pursue her passion for video through long-form documentary production. Follow her on Twitter @jenna_bel and on Instagram @jennabel.
Videography by Steff Sanchez, a filmmaker and designer based in New York City.
It seems that WNET’s plan to sweep documentary programming aside has been met with a litany of outrage from the filmmakers who’ve long enjoyed the support that PBS’s POV and Independent Lens have lent them over the years. Variety’s James Rainey has the story, in which “more than 2,000 documentarians” – the likes of Laura Poitras, Gordon Quinn and Tracy Droz Tragos among them – “have signed a petition saying they fear that the New York station’s action would lead to the shows being marginalized by PBS affiliates nationwide, slicing into their audiences and crippling efforts to raise money for often edgy, controversial films.”
In response to the criticism, the programmers at WNET have set up what they’ve called a “Listening Tour”, stopping in major cities and hosting public forums to discuss how they can better support filmmakers. At the POV Blog, you can find details on the New York City stop of the tour to be hosted on February 23rd at the SVA Theatre in Manhattan. If you’d like to attend the free event, RSVP here.
Also in NYC, the Stranger Than Fiction Winter ’15 Season continues tomorrow at 8pm at the IFC Center with FREE: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM. Following the screening, there will be a Q&A session with director Marc Levin.
This post was written by STF blogger Jenna Belhumeur.
The knight in shining armor? A local sandwich maker. The dragon? Restaurant management. The princess trapped in the castle, i.e. the ultimate goal? Basic workers’ rights.
Winner of DOC NYC’s SundanceNow Audience Award and shown as a part of the Stranger Than Fiction documentary series, The Hand That Feeds opens with a simple scene: a worker counting a stack of bills, the fruits of his labor. “$290 for 60 hours,” he says in Spanish.
In a classic underdog tale, Robin Blotnick and Rachel Lears’ documentary follows Mahoma Lopez as he, alongside his undocumented immigrant coworkers, adopts the activist mentality to fight against unjust working conditions at a popular deli in New York’s Upper East Side.
“If they don’t respond to our demands, we’ll escalate,” Lopez articulates in Spanish.
Lopez’s demands are simple: minimum wage, overtime, vacation days, safe working conditions and respect from managers known to fire employees for calling in sick. While immigrants are less likely to complain about working conditions for obvious reasons, Lopez decides to expose himself as an illegal immigrant to speak up on the issues faced by not only those at Hot & Crusty, but low-wage workers across all industries.
“You have to accept the reality and take the risk,” Lopez said following Tuesday night’s screening. “We need to show the issues immigrants are having.”
Lopez teams up with the Laundry Workers Center, a young lawyer, and even a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters to go against all odds and form an independent labor union, his key to legally demanding benefits.
In the Q&A session following the film’s screening, the directors stated their hope that the film provide a kind of organizing power for other workers in low-income jobs.
While the directors admitted that the chances of a fast-food restaurant actually forming an independent union and obtaining their first contract successfully is pretty unusual, they hope people takeaway from the documentary the importance of community support in these kind of campaigns. They’ve even started a Kickstarter campaign with the hopes that the film’s dramatic take on important issues like immigration, economic inequality, and rising social unrest can be widely shared in theaters and communities throughout the United States.
Today, Lopez still works at the deli on 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue, though under much better conditions. And how has the experience of having a documentary made about him affected his own life?
Lopez smiles at the question.
“Right now I’m not only a deli man at Hot & Crusty, I’m a labor-organizer,” he says.
Stranger Than Fiction’s Winter 2015 season runs from February 3rd to March 24th, taking place each Tuesday night at the IFC Center. The season features an eclectic mix of sneak previews and retrospectives, including appearances by filmmakers Marc Levin, Ian Olds, Liz Garbus and film subject Seymour Bernstein.
Jenna Belhumeur is a current student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. After graduating from UCLA in 2013, she moved to Thailand for 8 months to teach English and backpack around Southeast Asia. After Columbia, Jenna hopes to report internationally for a major broadcast network or pursue her passion for video through long-form documentary production. Follow her on Twitter @jenna_bel and on Instagram @jennabel.
Videography by Steff Sanchez, a filmmaker and designer based in New York City.
Comedian Tig Notaro hosting the 2015 Sundance Film Festival Award Ceremony
As is to be expected during a week in which Sundance, Slamdance and Rotterdam all run in parallel, an avalanche of wonderful coverage, interviews and reviews has been sliding out of Park City all week, but before I attempt to sort through the good, the bad and the ugly of that whole situation, I’d first like to remind you that the Winter ’15 season of Stranger Than Fiction is set to kick off tomorrow evening at the IFC Center in NYC at 8 pm with THE HAND THAT FEEDS. Directors Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick, as well as film subject Mahoma López are set to appear for a post screening Q&A. If you like, you can purchase tickets in advance here.
I’d also like to point out that a handful of non-fiction films, mostly shorts, quietly found their way onto the interwebs this week, most excitingly a new politically incisive, online-only BBC released feature by director Adam Curtis, entitled BITTER LAKE. Writing for RT, Tony Gosling examined Curtis’ prior work and the reasoning behind an online-only release. A new entry into the Profiles By Vice series entitled THE LEGEND OF CAMBO, directed by none other than Harmony Korine, also found its way into the world. For Newsweek, Stav Ziv highlighted the online release of ANATOMY OF A SNOW DAY, a short directed by a 12 year old named Zachary Maxwell, which had its world premiere last year at DOC NYC. A pair of shorts in Joe Callander’s MIDNIGHT THREE & SIX and Elizabeth Lo’s HOTEL 22 also made their debut as part of the ongoing New York Times Op-Docs series. And while on the topic of Op-Docs, Heather McIntosh of the POV Documentary Site Blog wrote a piece on the coming semester in which she intends to teach a junior-level course in news writing and reporting based around the series.
And lastly before we get to a wealth of festival coverage, a slew of great articles regarding the development and promotion of documentaries and documentary filmmaking were also published this week. Leading off, an article by Katharine Relth which was published on the IDA blog gives a list of helpful tips for creating a sustainable doc career. Director and critic Charlie Lyne took to his Ultra Culture blog to list 10 things he learned while self-releasing his raucously fun essay film BEYOND CLUELESS in the UK. In great news for doc development, Sundance has announced the groundbreaking new Transparency Project as part of their #ArtistServices Workshop “that will allow aggregated film financial data to be shared among producers and filmmakers using an online analytics tool”. Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker Magazine has the in-depth story. Lastly, as quoted from Adam Benzine‘s report at Realscreen states,”The Independent Television Service (ITVS) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have formed a partnership to encourage collaboration between journalists and indie filmmakers”. Exciting opportunities on the development horizon!
