There is a certain spectacle to which the bullfight—or the corrida de toros , the sport’s less colloquial Spanish name—lends itself, which is at once literary, artistic, operatic, cinematic. Irish-born artist Francis Bacon produced one of his most well-known works in 1970, Study for Bullfight No. 1 , one that parallels the corrida’s own three stages. Against a backdrop of golden ochre, both toreador and toro are a whirl of movement, man and beast entangled in a dance of death. Though Bacon’s focus would largely remain with such thematic motifs as religious figures and mythological furies, he
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Reed Martin is a documentary filmmaker from Carlsbad, California. While completing his BFA in Film & TV Production at USC, he directed A Hand to Hold, an award-winning documentary short aired on PBS SoCal.
Victor Tadashi Suárez’s essential tools span run-and-gun shoots to intricate sound stages.
State restrictions in Cuba have turned independent filmmaking into a challenge, but with Chronicles of the Absurd, Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz show that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Coyula, the director, uses clandestine recordings of Cruz and others in encounters with authorities inside Cuba, whether when trying to hold a screening, or when asking evasive hospital staff for information about her father’s sudden decline in health. Instead of relying on video or explanatory interviews, Coyula lets the riveting audio tell the story, augmented with speakers’ avatars, text, stills of Cruz, and a little animation, plus music ranging from Cuban classical composer Ignacio Cervantes to the punk rock band Porno Para Ricardo. After its world premiere at IDFA, Chronicles of the Absurd was awarded the Best Film in the Envision Competition. Earlier in the festival, I spoke to Coyula and Cruz earlier in their first interview about the film.
Working from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, Mexican director Paul Leduc (1942–2020) built a multifaceted oeuvre, ranging from agitprop pamphlets to unconventional biopics of Frida Kahlo and John Reed; from self-funded militant documentaries to sumptuous period pieces; and from monumental ethnographies to computer animations. Leduc remains very little known outside Latin America, though his films were selected for Cannes and Berlinale several times. In October, in partnership with Cinemateca Portuguesa, Doclisboa organized a huge retrospective of his work. The Portuguese international
In the Winter 2024/2025 cover essay of Documentary magazine, No Other Land’s collective of Palestinian and Israeli co-directors imagine a reciprocal, shared future in front of and behind the camera.
“ As filmmakers we do not set out in search of definition. We consider that the daily life of these men, their stories and the culture they have created... are more important. ” These words appear close to the beginning of De bateyes , Sara Gómez’s poetic 1971 short about the lives of workers on Cuba’s sugarcane plantations. Spoken in voiceover by the director herself, they serve as a kind of mission statement for a filmmaker whose short but remarkable career was built on empathy and curiosity. Across the span of approximately a decade, from the early 1960s up until her untimely death in 1974
International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the recipients of the 2024 IDA Open Call that included IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund and IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund. In addition to cash grants, IDA provides artist support and professional development guidance to all grantees.
In The Propagandist , Luuk Bouwman walks us through how Jan Teunissen, a wealthy Dutch scion, went from directing the first feature film in the Netherlands to Nazi collaborator and propagandist. Bouwman’s ace in the hole is a long oral history with Teunissen from the mid-1960s in which he holds forth with smarmy candor about his life as a civilian and then as a Nazi official in the Netherlands. Excerpts are nimbly interwoven with other vividly preserved materials—home movies, letters—and the reactions of the historian who conducted the interview, Rolf Schuursma. It’s a jaw-dropping story of
For the past eight years, the making of Shiori Ito’s feature debut, Black Box Diaries, has consumed the majority of her life. A riveting portrait of the journalist’s pursuit for some semblance of justice after her sexual assault by powerful colleague Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the film also broadly critiques Japan’s deeply ingrained rape culture. The film’s edit took four years, which entailed sifting through troves of Ito’s intimate video diaries, courtroom footage of the lengthy legal battle against her assailant, covert recordings of a guilt-ridden detective and, in one of the film’s earlier