Oscar Class of '16 (Photo credit: Image Group LA / ©A.M.P.A.S.)
In a week relatively quiet on the doc front, the topic of diversity and gender inequality within the filmmaking community as a whole once again reared its head. A pair of pieces found in Filmmaker Magazine via Esther B. Robinson (The Data Says, “We Have a Problem”) and doc filmmaker Katy Chevigny (Can She Pull It Off?) led the charge. Chevingny writes, “Just last month, in January, 2016, the Center for the Study of Women in Film and Television at San Diego State University released a new study that showed women made up a mere 9% of directors of films in 2015. Seeing that statistic — 9% — made me wonder anew: why haven’t women become more prominent among the ranks of directors? And more puzzling still, even if the numbers are low, why are they not growing? The numbers are staying put, hovering between 7% and 11% each year since 1998, according to the Center’s review of the top 250 top-grossing films.”
Adding fuel to the conversation, Variety publishd a piece by Addie Morfoot examining gender bias in the documentary world, while Anne Thompson celebrated the female-centric activism that took place at this year’s Sundance Film Festival at indieWIRE. In the same vein, Kate Erbland posted a piece titled 7 Films to Catch Up On at This Year’s Female-Powered Athena Film Festival, naming STF alum TRAPPED among the listed. And on a related note, indieWIRE is also currently a news editor for its regular Women and Hollywood column.
This coming week is somewhat special for us here at Stranger Than Fiction, as we have two screenings on our docket. Tomorrow we host directors Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin, along with video artist Skip Blumberg for a screening of their film HERE COME THE VIDEOFREEX, which charts the path of the titular underground video collective from their assignment on the counterculture beat for CBS News to their rupture with the network and creation of a radical pirate television station in upstate New York. Tickets for this screening are stil available here. On Thursday evening, Thom Powers will play host to the already sold out event, THE MAKING OF “MAKING A MURDERER”, a special 90-minute interview with MAKING A MURDERER directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, accompanied by clips, on how the project came into being. They’ll discuss the ten year process of reporting, editing and releasing the series.
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It was a busy weekend, with the ’16 Berlinale kicking off with Gianfranco Rosi’s FIRE AT SEA, the True/False Film Fest announcing this year’s lineup along with their ’16 True Vision Award Recipient, Mehrdad Oskouei, and the British Academy Film Award for Best Documentary being awarded to Asif Kapadia’s AMY! Looking further back in the week, writing at What (not) To Doc, Basil Tsiokos gave an overview of the non-fiction offerings in Berlin, as well as the latest additions to this year’s SXSW lineup, which included a handful of features and the whole of the doc shorts program. Daniele Alcinii also reported on the SXSW announcements at Realscreen, while the full lineup can be found here.
Tomorrow, Dawn Porter, the award-winning filmmaker of GIDEON’S ARMY, will make her first appearance at Stranger Than Fiction with her new film TRAPPED, fresh from winning a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. She’ll be joined at this screening by David Brown, staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who is one of the lead litigators in the Supreme Court case on abortion access. We here at Stranger Than Fiction also announced that we’ve added a special one night event, THE MAKING OF ‘MAKING A MURDERER’, to our 2016 Winter Season, a live 90-minute conversation between Thom Powers and MAKING A MURDERER directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, accompanied by clips, focusing on how the project came into being. On Thursday, February 25th, they’ll discuss the ten year process of reporting, editing and releasing the series. Tickets for this event are now on sale and going quick!
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Filmmaker Laura Poitras (photo by Damon Winter of New York Times/Redux)
In the wake of Sundance fever, it was Laura Poitras’ newly opened exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, ASTRO NOISE, that had the documentary world’s attention this past week. The co-founder of Field of Vision and CITIZENFOUR director’s personally revealing show on her own life experiences of FBI surveillence and beyond was the talk of the town, receiving features in The New York Times from Holland Cotter, Wired by Andy Greenberg, Vogue via Sara Corbett, and Russell Brandom of The Verge. At the POV Blog, Tom Roston said that experiencing the project is “like walking through a documentary…It’s a remarkable work, even more so when you consider, although Poitras once studied the visual arts, she’s primarily a feature documentary filmmaker.” The Guardian published a pair of pieces on the exhibition, one from Jason Farago, the other by Dominic Rushe. Artinfo’s Noelle Bodick wrote a piece outlining why the Whitney might be nervous about serving as a platform for Poitras and her repurposing of leaked classified images into politically charged works of art. While in Artforum, Stephen Squibb beautifully sums up the exhibition, “For Poitras, installation is a technology capable of staging a self-conscious relationship to method itself. She uses venerable tropes of cinema—which constitute a common language, a lingua franca of perceptible gestures—to bypass the contemporary tension between documentary and fantasy, credible and incredible, which today inheres in imperceptible and clandestine information as much as in visual or sensory phenomena.”
Though cinema tinged surveillance should now once again lingering in the mind, Sundance is itself still being processed. At Nonfics, Jason Gorber listed his favorite documentaries of the festival, while Eric Kohn and Kate Erbland debated how this year’s best Sundance features might factor in next year’s Oscar Race at indieWIRE. Focusing in on the increasingly prevalent diversity debate, Paste published Shannon M. Houston‘s ’10 Black Directors to Watch in 2016,’ featuring Dawn Porter and Rita Coburn Whack, and NPR posted Monica Castillo in conversation on where Sundance fits in with Hollywood’s diversity controversy. Navigating within the same vein, Liz Garbus appeared this week on indieWIRE’s Women and Hollywood podcast to discuss her film WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE?, as Melissa Silverstein points out, “the sole woman-helmed documentary in the running for this year’s Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards.”
This week at the IFC Center, the 2016 Winter Season of Stranger Than Fiction continues with a 10th Anniversary screening of Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim’s North Korean conspiracy doc ABDUCTION: THE MEGUMI YOKOTA STORY. Special guest Robert Boynton, author of “The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’s Abduction Project,” will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A and book signing. Tickets for the event are still available here.
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Like everyone else, we’ve got Sundance on our minds, but this week we are most excited to kick off the 2016 Winter Season of Stranger Than Fiction tomorrow at the IFC CENTER with a screening Craig Lowy’s high-flying acrobatic doc, OXD: ONE EXTRAORDINARY DAY! Both Lowy himself and the central subject of the film, choreographer Elizabeth Streb, will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A. Tickets are still available and can be found for purchase here.
As the most prestigious launch pad for non-fiction cinema in the world (both Realscreen’s Kevin Ritchie and Brooks Barnes of The New York Times reported on this year’s distribution deals), the Sundance Film Festival continued to dominate nearly all media conversation this week. At the festival’s award ceremony on Saturday night, Josh Kriegman’s WEINER was given the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and Roger Ross Williams received the Directing Award for LIFE, ANIMATED, while Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s IDFA premiered SONITA took home the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize and Michal Marczak won the Directing Award for ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS.
At indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman wrote a roundup of the non-fiction offerings this year in Park City, noting the prevalence of funding from old-guard broadcasters, while acknowledging an increase in acceptance of formal experimentalism within both the U.S. and World Doc competitions with films like KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE, NUTS!, ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS and THE LAND OF THE ENLIGHTENED. Kaufman also took notice of Sundance’s announcement of a new initiative called “Art of Nonfiction,” which “will support innovative documentary filmmaking,” reports Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker Magazine. indieWIRE’s Chris O’Falt also looked at four Sundance films funded via Kickstarter, including Dawn Porter’s TRAPPED and Bob Hercules and Rita Coburn Whack’s MAYA ANGELOU AND STILL I RISE.
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Still from AJ Schnack's SPEAKING IS DIFFICULT
Despite the outrage over racial exclusion in this year’s Oscar nominations and the Academy’s announcement that they will be swiftly enacting a whole host of changes to ensure greater diversity in the make-up of future votes, in the doc world, all eyes have been fixated on this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. While Anthony Kaufman looked back at the films that had a lasting impact from last year’s fest in Filmmaker Magazine, everyone from Tom Roston to Christopher Campbell, through Kenneth Turan, Amy Taubin, Trevor Groth and Brooks Barnes have been listing their most anticipated films of the fest, each noting a variety of exciting docs on the horizon. At indieWIRE, Eric Kohn outlined why Sundance continues to be such an important beacon of cinema in a sea of international film festivals, while our own Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen spoke on WNYC this about why New Yorkers should care about the happenings in Park City this week.
Looking at the festival’s lineup as a whole, one will soon notice that this year’s hot button issue weaving throughout a whole host of films is that of domestic gun violence, and not the gratuitous action film type. Leading the conversation are non-fiction films like AJ Schnack’s SPEAKING IS DIFFICULT, Kim Snyder’s NEWTOWN, Stephanie Soechtig’s UNDER THE GUN and less directly, Robert Greene’s KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE. Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Steven Zeitchik explores the depths of this topical programming decision, noting, “When the Sundance Film Festival begins Thursday, it will do so with a rare accumulation of movies about the subject of gun safety. All of them hope to raise questions, if not provide solutions, in a place that has long been a ground zero for cultural movements.” Brooks Barnes of The New York Times awknowledged that “This year Sundance programmers, with deep commitment to freedom of expression, and their selected filmmakers seem to be taking a position that real guns, not the movie kind, ought to be more tightly policed.” Likewise at Nonfics, Christopher Campbell also took notice of the program, stating that “This time it’s about the issue of real gun violence in America — the problem with constant mass shootings and the debate over gun control and the 2nd Amendment.”
Back here at Stranger Than Fiction, we are ramping up for our 2016 Winter Season, which begins next Tuesday at the IFC Center with Craig Lowy’s high flying OXD: ONE EXTRAORDINARY DAY, about Elizabeth Streb’s Extreme Action Company and their attempt to perform on some of London’s most beloved landmarks. Season tickets, as well as individual tickets, are currently on sale. As an aside, I’d also like to point out that this week Thom Powers launched the online home of his soon to be released new documentary focused podcast, Pure Nonfiction.
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