The construction of subjectivity in first-person documentary is given serious consideration in The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First
Personal Docs
Gianluca Matarrese discusses his festival darlings GEN_ and I Want Her Dead, plus why “documentary probably doesn’t exist”
Pioneering video essayist Kevin B. Lee’s debut solo feature Afterlives critically reassesses his earlier work on extremist propaganda
In this interview, Mary Stephen reflects on decades spent shaping other filmmakers’ narratives before turning to her own family in Palimpsest: The
David Osit discusses how Predators, his house of cards examining Chris Hansen’s controversial sting show and its YouTube imitators, stealthily
Venice’s robust nonfiction selection revealed filmmakers grappling with inheritance—of land, literature, trauma, and the weight of documenting lives
Exclusive: Clip from Robb Moss’s Telluride-Premiering The Bend in the River
In this expansive interview, Robb Moss discusses longitudinal personal filmmaking, his influence as a teacher, and The Bend in the River
For her immersive artwork Burn From Absence, artist Emeline Courcier creates an archive where there was none. Using artificial intelligence, she recreates a family album, visualizing and verifying a history that has been hidden, documenting it from her perspective. In the four-channel installation, digitally created images illustrate an audio track layering her family members’ memories of life in Laos, the ‘Vietnam’ war, and new beginnings in France. After its premiere at IDFA last November, where it won the DocLab Special Mention for Digital Storytelling, Documentary spoke to Courcier about truth, archives, and working with deeply personal material.
In Imago, the Chechnya-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev journeys to a Chechen enclave in Georgia named Pankissi, where his mother has secured a plot of land for him to settle down. He spends time with his mother, with whom he’s close, and a hearty cousin and a friend, but he has barely seen his father since his parents divorced when he was nine months old. That’s on top of a childhood marked by his and his mother’s stays in Kazakhstan, Chechnya, and—when the Russians attacked Grozny in 1996—St. Petersburg, where she changed his Chechen name for his protection. After Imago won L’Œil d’Or, the best documentary prize of Cannes, Documentary interviewed Pitsaev about starring in a film about his life journey and the balance between pre-planning and responding in the moment.