Asako Fujioka is an independent consultant and producer with a focus on strengthening the creative documentary genre in Asia. She has worked with the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival since 1993 as Coordinator, Director of the Tokyo Office, and now Vice-chair on the Board of Directors. She advised and served on the selection committees of the Asian Network of Documentary (AND) at the Busan International Film Festival, DMZ Docs Industry program, and Tokyo Docs, and has been on international juries of Berlin (Forum), Sundance, Hong Kong, and many other festivals. As head of
Latest Posts
Cullen Hoback has developed something of a specialty in chasing elusive cultural figures. In his 2021 HBO miniseries Q: Into the Storm, he examined the QAnon conspiracy theory, structuring the six episodes around an investigation into the identity of “Q,” who stirred up the phenomenon by posting cryptic “leaks” supposedly from within the Trump administration. Hoback does something similar with his new film Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery . A look at the history of the namesake cryptocurrency, it’s also a hunt for “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the original creator of Bitcoin who has managed to remain
Working as a volunteer nearly two decades ago, Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady lived in and traveled all around Mongolia for 18 months. She returned to the country eight years later to visit some of the herder families that she had stayed with on her travels in the countryside, only to find out that many had moved to the ger districts on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, having lost most, if not all, of their livestock and livelihoods to devastating climate disasters. Hearing their stories and seeing their new lives in the city planted a seed in Brady’s mind, one that eventually grew to
Today, the U.S. Department of State’s flagship American Film Showcase (AFS) announces its 2025 film slate of 43 documentaries. This “film diplomacy” program showcases new award-winning American documentaries in a year-round screening program organized by U.S. Embassies in dozens of countries. “AFS’s screening program is a global film festival offering international audiences a nuanced view of American life and creating space for cross-cultural dialogue,” said Rachel Gandin Mark, AFS Program Director, in a prepared statement. “We are incredibly proud of this year’s wide-ranging collection of
This year, Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) marked its 20th anniversary with—as described by its programmers—a lineup of highly political films. In their remarks on opening night, CIFF programmers Milton Guillén and Zaina Bseiso invited audiences to “enter into these films and figure out how we are compelled to build solidarity with other people as audiences.” CIFF stands out as one of the few festivals that both maintain a virtual component and take a clear political stance on the ongoing (mediatized) genocide in Palestine. Bseiso, who is Palestinian, prompted further reflection:
With films like The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011) and Concerning Violence (2014), Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson has become known for his televisual explorations of historical and political phenomena—predominantly from a distinctly Swedish perspective, for better or worse. Deeply rooted in the audiovisual archives of Sveriges Television (SVT), his films are the result of long and meticulous research, framed as thorough within institutional and ideological constraints. Premiered in the 81st Venice Film Festival’s Out of Competition section, Olsson’s latest archive-based documentary
In recent decades, the Locarno Film Festival has established itself as a premiere market for some of the more unusual experiments to come through the festival circuit. In some of the films, the image is composed of a heterogeneous mix of various formats and media; in others, the textures of the visual surface, from digital artifacts to film grain, supersede the content within. In a conversation with video essayist and film scholar Kevin B. Lee in 2023, Lee identified this proliferating tendency as a possible side effect of social media, which consists of sounds and images that are “less
New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright remembers colleagues asking, “Why do you live in Texas?” when his location shouldn’t have been exceptional. Writers from all over the world contribute to the magazine. The difference, Wright says, is that Texas was perceived as “anti-New York.” Once a left-leaning state, Texas has swung far to the right. It’s one of the most polarized states in the nation. After Wright’s editor, David Remnick, encouraged him to explain Texas, he thought, “Maybe it’s time to look at my home again and see what it is that keeps me here.” Examining one of the most important
It’s been a while since the acclaimed director-screenwriter-video artist Julia Loktev ( The Loneliest Planet , Day Night Day Night ) last traversed the nonfiction landscape with her 1998 feature debut Moment of Impact. That Sundance Documentary Directing Award-winning doc, shot on Hi8 and edited by Loktev herself, dealt with the aftermath of an accident that left her father severely disabled and forced her mother to give up her career as a computer programmer in order to care for him. It was yet another life-changing event for the Russian immigrant couple who, along with their young daughter
The story of solitary confinement is impossibly cruel—a collection of enduring deprivations that add up to a horror that can never be fully captured by mere stats. To describe it is to consider a place ensnared by windowless brick, with scarred and rutted walls depicting agitation, unease, and in some cases, the mania of a previous occupant. It’s another world, meticulously crafted to intensify the feeling of not being of this world. But while the practice comprises a ghastly visual mosaic of mistreatment, at best, there are still institutional symbols of resilience, as exemplified by the longest prison hunger strike in California history.