Prolific documentary essayist Charlie Shackleton’s latest film focuses on one of America’s most notorious criminals, the Zodiac Killer. Or rather, it’s a film about the documentary he would’ve made about the serial killer, had he been able to secure the rights to California Highway Patrol Officer Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 true-crime book, The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up. As he describes the project that didn’t materialize, Shackleton pokes fun at the tropes that have come to define modern true crime shows. For Documentary, Shackleton spoke about weighing art against artifice and the ethical considerations of true crime.
Essay Docs
Ten years ago, on July 30th, 2014, the celebrated German filmmaker, writer, and artist Harun Farocki passed away. Farocki’s output spans short
How To With John Wilson is an 18-part series of comedic documentary essays framed as tutorials. In each episode, filmmaker John Wilson poses a question that is also the episode title, like How To Make Small Talk or How To Throw Out Your Batteries. The questions are very rarely answered directly, instead offering a free-associative portal into both Wilson’s life and those of the people he meets.
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Irene Lusztig's Richland ahead of its premiere in the Documentary Competition at Tribeca 2023
Jenni Olson's The Royal Road, which recently arrived on DVD and VOD via Wolfe Video, is a movie whose actual scale is nearly impossible to discern. It