For 15 years, Amy Berg wanted to make a film on Jeff Buckley. The joy of watching It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley then resides in witnessing Berg’s commitment to telling a known story and using rare archives, of the singer’s aching voice in elaborate voice messages he sent his loved ones. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and after, Berg spoke to me about the making of the documentary and whether her love for the artist altered in the process.
Interview
Isabel Castro’s sophomore feature centers the family band that catapulted Mexican American singer Selena into pop stardom. Given voice as never before through “hundreds, potentially thousands” of hours of archival footage, Selena Quintanilla constantly gushes about her band—sister Suzette on drums, brother A.B. on bass/producing duties, eventual husband Chris on guitar, and parents Marcella and Abraham as just about everything in between—as the key to her fame. I spoke with Castro a week before her film’s Park City debut, which was yesterday. We discuss the herculean process of combing through the Quintanillas’ archives, paying homage to Gregory Nava’s 1997 biopic and the filmmaker’s favorite Selena song.
In Third Act Tadashi Nakamura trains his lens on his father, Robert Nakamura, who is regarded as the “godfather of Asian American media.” Robert has played a key role as one of the first Japanese American filmmakers to represent the Japanese American experience through his films and images. Now in the third act of his life, he has decided to share his own. The documentary recently premiered at Sundance as part of the U.S. Documentary Competition. I spoke with Tadashi to understand how he went about shooting the film and if the process of filming Robert Nakamura was a veiled act of delaying grieving for his father.
Located only 200-odd miles from the Arctic Circle, Pasvik Folk High School in Norway offers teenagers on the precipice of adulthood an opportunity to get some distance from the fast-paced demands of modern society and immerse themselves in snowy survivalism. Longtime collaborators and co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp, Detropia) follow three students—the ever-determined Helge, socially awkward Bjorn Torne and keenly sensitive Romain—throughout the school year. While rooted in the filmmakers’ interest in unconventional educational institutions, FOLKTALES also marks one of their most ambitious projects yet, which necessitated a dozen two-day trips from New York to the remote Norwegian wilderness over a nine-month shooting period. Ewing and Grady spoke with me over Zoom the week before FOLKTALES premieres in Park City. Below, they shed insight on the origins of this project, the magic of finding one’s “dog twin” and embarking on a five-day shoot to secure the film’s poetic final shot.
To Catch a Predator (2004–2007), a periodic segment on the TV newsmagazine Dateline NBC, was one of the biggest nonfiction sensations of the 2000s. The new documentary Predators, recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, examines this and other ethical issues around the program. In particular, the film scrutinizes the host of copycat media operations that have arisen over the years, as well as the show’s broader influence on the true crime genre. Ahead of the premiere, we sat down with director David Osit over Zoom to discuss To Catch a Predator and its modern fan community, finding all the materials used in Predators, and the delicate balancing act involved in incorporating so much raw footage.
At the start of Violet Du Feng’s Sundance-debuting The Dating Game we learn that, due to the former one-child policy, China now has 30 million more men than women, an eye-catching number that presents dire implications for the country. But behind the cold facts are flesh and blood human beings—and potential clients for a dating coach named Hao. While the doc is specific to China, it’s also universal in its critique of how capitalism, consumerism, and social media collide to create a generation that assumes everyone is faking who they are and therefore concludes that they too must “fake it to make it.” A week before the film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition premiere today, Documentary reached out to Feng, whose Peabody and Emmy-nominated Hidden Letters (2022) tackled gender stereotypes from the female side. This interview has been edited.
In Ukrainian, the film is called Myrni lyudy, which literally translates as Peaceful People. It is a clever, polysemic title that simultaneously addresses Ukrainian civilians embedded in their native wounded landscapes and Russian civilians calling their loved ones who are taking part in the invasion of Ukraine. Those people on the other end of the phone are fascinated by the soldiers’ detailed stories of war crimes and trophy theft and get very upset when their interlocutors become disillusioned with Russian propaganda. First screened at Berlinale, Intercepted has travelled to numerous festivals and political venues over the past year, including at IDFA in the Best of Fests section. Documentary spoke to Oksana Karpovych before the festival.
With Film Independent, IDA hosted a work-in-progress DocuClub screening of New Wave in Los Angeles in December of 2022. While the feedback Ai and her team received from the screening was generally favorable, she nevertheless decided to overhaul the doc’s narrative in order to include intimate details from her family’s relationship with music—and each other—opening old wounds in the process, with particular emphasis on the filmmaker’s estrangement from her mother. The final version of the film premiered at last year’s Tribeca Festival, and is still seeking distribution. Documentary spoke with Ai via Zoom to discuss the shift in story subject over the course of seven years of development. This interview has been edited.
In 2018, Singaporean filmmaker Jason Soo boarded the Al Awda ( The Return in Arabic) with the intention of making a documentary about the surgeon
Darius Clark Monroe has been on my radar for a decade, ever since his feature debut Evolution of a Criminal , a revisitation of the robbery the