In 2003, a group of eight artists covertly built a living space in an unused part of the parking structure for Providence, Rhode Island’s gargantuan Providence Place shopping mall. Upon the apartment’s discovery in 2007, it became a brief local news sensation, before the story was largely forgotten. Jeremy Workman has brought the group back together to tell the tale in his documentary Secret Mall Apartment. We sat down with Workman for a call to discuss the unusual art project, the footage his subjects captured, and how he gained their trust to make the documentary after they’d denied other filmmakers for years.
Online Feature
Yesterday, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner officially rescinded his recent proposal to defund and evict the government-housed and funded O Cinema for showing No Other Land. At a Miami Beach City Commission meeting on Wednesday, March 19, Meiner presented an alternate proposal, which would require the independent theater to “showcase films that highlight a fair and balanced viewpoint of the current war between Israel and the groups Hamas and Hezbollah.” “We were so very glad to see the vast majority of the commissioners speak up for the importance of free speech without government interference,” O Cinema co-founder and board member Kareem Tabsch tells Documentary, after the meeting concluded. “And grateful that Mayor Meiner listened to his community and his colleagues and withdrew the resolution.”
Makarenko, a public school in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, is the subject of Elementary , the latest vérité study from renowned French
By programming the Academy Award-winning documentary No Other Land , the Miami Beach-based O Cinema attracted the ire of Mayor Steven Meiner, who last
Sundance is a unique crossroads of industry and independence, where you are able to be surprised by films that you didn’t see coming—films that often end up disrupting the film industry’s ideas of marketability, contending for awards and being placed on all sorts of year-end lists, if they’re able to find the right support. As Sundance Film Festival looks to a future away from Park City, looking into questions of location, land, capital, culture, and evolution, I find myself attracted to the films in the 2025 lineup that seek context and answers to these same questions: Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Seeds, Free Leonard Peltier, and Khartoum.
In the weeks since the National Endowment for the Arts announced major changes to its application criteria, many nonprofits across the country have been anxiously awaiting clarity regarding what this might mean for their prospective Fiscal Year 2026 grants. In particular, in recent weeks nonprofit managers and filmmakers are scrutinizing how the NEA applies two recent Executive Orders aimed at shutting down DEI and LGBTQ+ programs.
The lineup of the 2025 Sundance World Documentary section was more expansive in its geopolitical interest than last year’s. This year the dissenting subtext assumed functional pointedness, with each work making a broader statement against hostile governments. The theaters went packed and audiences cheered as the snow-clad Park City lent an otherworldly, almost mythical safe space to the independent makers and their works. Although there is speculation of the festival moving out of state in 2027, it is difficult to imagine a setting more suited to Sundance than Utah. The inconveniences, like the high altitude and the extreme dry weather, somehow added to the charm and made me feel, albeit perversely, like I had earned the right to be an attendee.
APA members Debra McClutchy and Eugen Bräunig are eager to discuss the comprehensive new guidelines they’ve co-authored, “Working with Archival Producers.” From breaking down their roles during various stages of production to ideal onboarding scenarios, the document is, first and foremost, a means to advocate for a tangible job description and reasonable workloads. Despite the desire to establish concrete parameters for this work, there is also ample room for adjustment. In our conversation below, McClutchy and Bräunig discuss how they came to co-author this new guideline, how it complements the APA’s previous document on GenAI best practices, and member feedback.
Oleksiy Radynski is one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary Ukrainian cinema. Since his early shorts, Radynski has worked in observational documentary and archival footage. In films like his feature-length debut Infinity According to Florian (2022), he explores culture, historical memory, and community, particularly within Kyiv’s urban landscapes. The full-scale invasion shifted Radynski’s focus more decisively towards found footage, as he became increasingly engaged in the recovery of previously forgotten Ukrainian cinema. Ahead of its world premiere, Documentary spoke with Radynski about Special Operation’s challenging production, the semiotics of surveillance cameras, and the depiction of imperialism through landscapes.
Largely composed of artful, meditative shots that relish in quotidian minutiae—meal prep, bathtime, daily prayer—Sam Abbas’s Europe’s New Faces is a striking and emphatically humanizing portrait of African migrants residing in a specific Paris squat. Though the film’s 159-minute runtime seems somewhat daunting on its face, the filmmaker’s eye for exquisite detail quickly quiets the viewer’s roving mind. Below, our conversation covers his initial encounter with Parisian squats, how he acquired access to shoot an emergency C-section, and the process of enlisting The Beast and Nocturama director Bertrand Bonello for the score.