While the Venice film festival is widely treated as an awards platform for starry auteur-driven dramas, its little-known secret is a modest but strong nonfiction selection. Even without counting the Wang Bing film in competition, which screened too late for many critics (including this one) to cover, this year’s crop was remarkable for the breadth and variety of the nonfiction approaches.
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Bircan is a documentary filmmaker working between Scotland and Turkey. After a period in journalism, she found her true passion in creative documentaries. In 2019, she directed her first short creative documentary, My Name is Anik, as part of the Bridging the Gap programme at the Scottish Documentary Institute. After premiering at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the film was screened at international festivals and independent cinemas. Since 2019, Bircan has been working on her debut feature documentary, Your Honour, in collaboration with Bombito Productions, while continuing to make
That NoCut has no physical office, that it is registered in Romania and India (unofficially floating into Belgium), and that its members frequently navigate three different time zones to set up meetings, are all appropriate given its origin story. Rothe, Rinaldi, and Hanes met ten years ago as classmates in DocNomads, the Erasmus Mundus master’s program in documentary filmmaking. Run by a consortium of three universities in Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium, DocNomads is a fully funded course for students from all over the globe, with an emphasis on teamwork and coproduction, which explains why many of its graduates often end up working with each other later. Helping each other with student projects, the three women developed a working rapport even as they fell into a thick friendship.
Today, American Documentary (AmDoc) announced that award-winning independent filmmaker PJ Raval, known for directing stories of queer and Filipino communities, will receive the organization’s second Creative Visionary Award. AmDoc produces the independent PBS strands POV and America ReFramed , their robust educational and community screenings, and a suite of artist development activities. Last year, AmDoc’s inaugural awardee was producer Darcy McKinnon . Raval is a POV and America ReFramed alum with the GLAAD Media Award–nominated Before You Know It (2013) and Call Her Ganda (2018). The latter
What happens when three’s a crowd in a marriage? One possible answer, as Elizabeth Lo finds, is to sneak in a special fourth person. In her sophomore feature documentary Mistress Dispeller , Lo peers into a new “love industry” in China by following four individuals: a middle-aged married couple, a mistress, and Teacher Wang, a professional “dispeller” hired to discreetly end the affair. The film lives up to its promise of “ strikingly intimate access ,” which almost feels like an understatement—particularly in the participants’ Chinese sociocultural context, as a matter of saving not just a
Few filmmakers have as recognizable a style as Bill Morrison. Those with even a passing familiarity with his work will think of degraded film stock, an aesthetic of cinematic ruination. And in film after film, reviewers invariably use the same words: spectral, haunted, fragmented, poetic. This reputation may give the impression that his work, for all its beauty and mystery, is fundamentally repetitive, a mere cycling of similar ideas and feelings. It is almost as if Morrison foretold this reputation during his first feature, Decasia (2002), the film responsible both for his renown and the
In Holding Back the Tide , Emily Packer’s “docu-poetic meditation on New York’s oysters,” the humble bivalve becomes much more than the sum of its pearls. Indeed, the experimental filmmaker has inventively chosen to reimagine the once ubiquitous mollusk as a queer icon, and cast the gender-fluid creature alongside a host of other thought-provoking characters, both real and fictional. We’re introduced to folks like Moody “The Mothershucker” Harney (real), who’s bringing oysters back to the average diner through his cart, taking inspiration from Thomas Downing, the 19th-century Black Oyster King
When good intentions meet bad assumptions on the film festival circuit Editor’s Note: The writers are the co-directors and executive producers of The Ride Ahead (2024), a personal-meets-political documentary following Samuel Habib’s navigation into adulthood with the guidance of a community of disability activists. This article was updated on November 26, 2024, with news of the film’s screening at DOC NYC. In June, we had our Washington, D.C., premiere of The Ride Ahead at DC/DOX Film Festival, following screenings at Hot Docs, Seattle International Film Festival, Independent Film Festival
Today, Catapult Film Fund announces that longtime industry executive Tabitha Jackson is the newest member of its board. One of documentary’s most respected thinkers and funders, Jackson has a 30-year career spanning broadcast commission at the UK’s Film4 and Channel 4 and a relocation to the U.S. to direct the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program. At Sundance, she initiated the Art of Nonfiction Fellowship and received plaudits for decrying the “hegemony of story,” shifting the Documentary Film Program’s mandate toward formal innovation. After seven years in that post, Jackson
Jean-Marie Teno is Africa’s preeminent documentary filmmaker. With a critical eye and a sharp wit, he questions the established truth, exposes the censored stories, and examines the past to comprehend the complex realities of Africa’s present. Teno’s films have been honored at festivals worldwide, and he has been a guest of the Flaherty Seminar, an artist in residence at CalArts and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, and a lecturer at many universities. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ documentary branch. Teno’s best-known film is Africa, I Will Fleece You