When does childhood end? This slippery question becomes the crux of Chinese filmmaker Deming Chen’s second feature documentary, Always. The film, which won the top prizes at CPH:DOX and Jeonju over the past two months, centers on an 8-year-old boy, Gong Youbin, and his family in a small village in southern China’s Hunan province. Before the film’s North American premiere at Hot Docs, Chen and Producer Hansen Lin shared with Documentary the feedback they received at different labs and forums, the selection of poems for their film, and the approach of prioritizing emotions, rather than logic, in crafting the story.
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On April 27th, Pope Francis was scheduled to officially canonize the first saint from the Millennial generation. Before his untimely death from leukemia at age 15, Carlo Acutis (born 1991), had combined his enthusiasm for computers and his fervent Catholic faith by creating websites to document miracles. The film was produced by Castletown Media, which has in recent years found box office success in partnering with Fathom Events to release films touching on Catholic themes. Jesus Thirsts, for instance, was one of last year’s biggest nonfiction hits. We spoke with Castletown executive director Tim Moriarty, who co-directed and produced Roadmap to Reality, about the film, its funding, its release strategy, and how the Pope’s death has impacted the company’s plans.
For three decades, Chris Smith has profiled oddballs, eccentrics, and mavericks. Smith’s first documentary, American Movie— a darkly funny but
Qumra, the Doha-based industry event, named after the Arabic word believedto be the origin of “camera” and taking place from April 3–9, aims “to provide mentorship, nurture talent, and foster hands-on development for filmmakers from Qatar, the region, and beyond.” Out of the 49 selected projects, 12 feature-length documentary projects were presented in Doha: four in development, two in production, two Works-in-Progress, and four picture-locked. The line-up was rounded off by four short documentaries, all with Qatari involvement. Qumra is rooted in a fairly freewheeling format: at times, press and industry attendees mingle over lunches, mocktails, and networking events; at others, they follow separate paths. Nonetheless, the gathering unfolds across a limited number of venues, including the iconic Museum of Islamic Art and two luxury hotels in the brand-new district of Msheireb.
Encountering Sylvain George’s Obscure Night - Goodbye Here, Anywhere (2023) at the Locarno Film Festival two years ago was a revelation. The three
On January 14th,1996—his 21st birthday—Ricardo López started videotaping himself laying out his plot to attack the Icelandic popstar Björk. In this initial tape, López said Björk was a symbol of purity and innocence to him, an image which he said she destroyed by having relationships with two different black musicians, previously with Massive Attack’s Tricky and, at the time of his recordings, English music producer Goldie. Filmmaker Heather Landsman seriously considers López’s footage in her new film The Best of Me, which condenses the 20-some hours of tapes López produced into a hauntingly candid look into a deeply unwell and alienated individual. The Best of Me is being independently distributed by Landsman through the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, touring microcinemas.
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.
In December 2023, as part of the series Making a Production, Documentary profiled Meerkat Media, the New York-based cooperatively owned production company and media arts collective. As a radical experiment in shared authorship and ownership, Meerkat built a sustainable framework for making the kind of films they cared about, while still providing steady paychecks, health insurance, and medical leave to their members. Since the publication of their profile, the group has faced industry-wide challenges, including tightening budgets and shrinking opportunities. At the same time, they’ve experienced major creative high points. Over Zoom, Documentary caught up with Sterrenberg to talk about Meerkat’s recent creative highs, the challenges of balancing freelance work with collective production, and how Emergent City, which opens at DCTV tomorrow and will be broadcast on POV later this year, took shape within the group.
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
Marking its 20th anniversary this edition (March 27–30, 2025), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has established itself as one of the UK’s most boundary-defying festivals for the moving image. This commitment to dismantling hierarchies extends to the festival’s structure. Many of the featured works explore the body’s mnemonic capacities—how gesture, movement, and touch might commune with history, or reimagine how to engage with the unknowable: Underground, Black & Arab Encounters on Screen, Bounded Intimacy, an Eri Makihara program, and Nightshift.