Turbulence: Jamais Vu gracefully handles the balance of embodiment and empathy in its exploration of the feeling of disassociation that happens during a vestibular migraine. Wearing a VR headset, the viewer sits at a desk and is invited to interact with the objects as the narrator guides them through his experience. An edge detection filter and inverted image fed back into the headset distorts perception, and as the piece progresses, so does the disassociation. Immersive artists Ben Joseph Andrews (who experiences that condition) and Emma Roberts are creative collaborators who explore issues
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The intimacy and intricate care that BlackStar puts into the organization and accessibility of its annual film festival make it feel like a deeply considered project brought together by so many experienced and attentive organizers. The ability to facilitate joy and safety in a gathering can create exponential space for growth, a bending of space-time that gives folks true time to be free and travel across waves of distant visions. Amidst all the vibrancy and energy of the people of BlackStar, I tried to see as many films as possible and will mention here films that I saw for the first time with audiences. Like the talks, the focus of many of the films was survivorship—they asked how we propel ourselves through truth and ethical pursuit in an age of disintegration and global instability.
Phantoms of the Sierra Madre Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes made his name with confrontational documentaries in which he explores the motivations of questionable characters, such as in Golden Dawn Girls (2017), which enters the dark and confused world of women from the far-right Greek nationalist party. At one point, he leaves the camera running when the protagonists think it’s off, which results in the most revealing segments of the film. In The Name of the Game (2021), he follows a popular Norwegian politician whose rise is halted by accusations of sexual harassment. Bustnes uses the
For so long, much about Russell Tyrone Jones, known to the world as Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Ason Unique by others, earned both public awe and unfortunate judgment. From the 1990s until his untimely death in 2004, he was a symbol of—and a living allegory for—the self-destructive celebrity in America. His life was marked by defiance against conventional fame, illustrated through stories of lifting Ford Mustangs off 4-year-old girls to bum-rushing Grammy award stages—a precursor to Kanye West’s later antics. ODB gave power to unorthodoxy in both his music and life, embodying a rebellion that
The Academy of Motion Pictures of Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced its new members recently. We congratulate ten IDA members who joined The Academy this year joining 600+ of our members who were already AMPAS members.
Ten years ago, on July 30th, 2014, the celebrated German filmmaker, writer, and artist Harun Farocki passed away. Farocki’s output spans short political films with an agitational edge, sharp essay films critiquing the ideologies behind image production in television from the inside, observational documentaries that extended this critique to the broader economic sphere, critical texts that both accompanied his own work and investigated that of others, editing the journal Filmkritik for a decade, teaching at Berkeley, and collaborating with Christian Petzold. Producing a study that properly
On January 24, by unanimous vote, documentary filmmakers got a big boost from Congress. The House of Representatives passed the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (aka the PRESS Act). It’s a journalist-protection bill that could easily have been called the Protect All Documentarians Act. Although the PRESS Act makes no specific mention of documentary filmmakers, federal courts uniformly include documentary filmmakers in their definitions of journalists. In fact, documentarians stand to be one of the bill’s biggest beneficiaries.
Martha Coolidge made her mark in Hollywood directing films like Valley Girl, Real Genius, and Rambling Rose, but before all that, she was breaking ground with reenactment in documentary decades before most other filmmakers broached such high concepts. Her 1976 debut feature Not a Pretty Picture sees her recreate a date rape she suffered in high school, and cuts between this film within a film and the discussions she holds with the actors about the experience, drawing out their thoughts and personal experiences within this issue. The film went under the radar for decades before being brought to
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Advik Beni is a South African filmmaker and curator currently based in Los Angeles. Through a practice steeped in South African traditions of orality, their work aims to create imagined spaces for marginalized people to express grief and trauma.