Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from longtime creative and life partners Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Playing With Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, the third film in the pair’s trilogy of queer environmentalist documentaries. Forced to evacuate a fire in the Northern California redwood forest sanctuary where Stephens and Sprinkle live, they channel their energy into their “ecosexual” art, a conceptual activist framework that reframes human relationships to nature to emphasize reciprocity. Playing With Fire premieres at Frameline, San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ film festival, this Friday.
docs by women
Suzannah Herbert’s Natchez is a multilayered, character-driven look at the titular town in Mississippi (U.S.), which is wholly dependent on a declining industry. In this case, the manufacturing is of whitewashed tales that have turned into hardened history. For generations, Natchez has been financially dependent on its antebellum tourism industry, in which hoop-skirted docents in grand mansions regale visitors with, as one knowing character puts it, a “Southern construct” that’s “used to sell tickets.” Just prior to the film’s Tribeca Documentary Competition premiere, Documentary caught up with Herbert (Wrestle) to learn all about her stellar sophomore feature. Last week, Tribeca announced that Natchez won not only the best documentary feature prize but also special jury awards for cinematography (to Noah Collier) and editing (Pablo Proenza).
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene, and Rob Grobman’s environmental documentary We Are Guardians (2023), which kicks off a U.S. theatrical screening tour this Friday in Los Angeles. The film, produced by Academy Award winner Fischer Stevens’s Highly Flammable in collaboration with Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, is a comprehensive examination of the ongoing deforestation crisis in the Amazon Rainforest.
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Sasha Wortzel’s debut feature River of Grass, which has been on a tear since its premiere at True
We Live Here delves into the present-day reality of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site—known during the Soviet era as the Polygon—and the enduring devastation it has wrought on those who still live there. Director Zhanana Kurmasheva centers the story on Bolatbek, an elderly man who has spent his entire life in a village just 30 kilometers from the Polygon. While the tragedy of the Polygon has been chronicled before, often in government-backed, TV-style documentaries, Kurmasheva’s work approaches the subject differently, elevating it to a kind of myth—a legacy that strangely defines who Kazakhs are. We Live Here is steeped in a sense of foreboding. We Live Here premiered at CPH:DOX. Ahead of the film’s North American Premiere at Hot Docs, Documentary spoke to Kurmasheva about what makes residents stay in such a contaminated area, the genius loci of the steppe, and the interplay of beauty and violence embedded within it.
A cramped room inside which most of Marriage Cops takes place becomes an effective metaphor for not only the stifling sensation of being trapped in an
Shot over three years, Flophouse America is the unflinching debut feature by Norwegian photographer-turned-filmmaker Monica Strømdahl. The documentary offers an intimate, often harrowing portrait of Mikal, a boy growing up in a crumbling motel alongside his parents, Jason and Tonya, both trapped in cycles of addiction and poverty. In her conversation with Documentary Magazine, Strømdahl reflects on the ethical challenges of filming such vulnerable subjects over an extended period, the responsibility she felt toward Mikal and his family, and how her background in photography shaped the film’s aesthetic. With Flophouse America, she not only delivers a powerful creative statement but also raises urgent questions about systemic neglect, resilience, and the role of the documentary filmmaker as both witness and storyteller.
While SXSW undoubtedly has its share of buzzy (i.e., some combination of the true crime, music, and celebrity genre) documentaries, navigating through the admittedly unwieldy program can also be a fun treasure hunt. In the end, you’re likely to be gifted with at least a handful of inspiring U.S. nonfiction films no one is talking about yet. This latest edition (March 7–15) began with the added bonus of a trio of female-helmed films, all focused in different ways on one virtually off-the-radar topic: motherhood and its intersection with the law: Baby Doe, Arrest the Midwife, and Uvalde Mom.
Makarenko, a public school in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, is the subject of Elementary , the latest vérité study from renowned French
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Beth Lane’s debut feature UnBroken , which won a prize for best documentary feature premiere at