In October 2023, as part of the series Making a Production, Documentary profiled the London-based production company Grain Media. As a small independent production company focused exclusively on documentary, they were managing to succeed, with difficulty, in a very challenging climate for documentary. At the end of 2024, the company’s Netflix documentaries The Lost Children and Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy achieved global prominence. At the same time, the company had to make its first redundancies, letting go of a handful of its long-serving staff. Documentary caught up with Grain’s founder and head Orlando von Einsiedel to discuss the ups and downs of the last year, and how they reflect what is going on in the global documentary industry.
Interview
Frederick Wiseman is a pillar of American documentary, yet much of his work has historically been difficult to view in a high-quality format. For the first 40 years of his expansive career, Wiseman shot each of his deep-diving, sometimes epic-length explorations of various institutions on 16mm, not transitioning to digital until the late 2000s. Over the course of five years and in collaboration between Wiseman’s company Zipporah Films and the Library of Congress, the Harvard Film Archive, the late DuArt Film Lab, and Goldcrest Post, 33 of his features—from his debut Titicut Follies (1967) to State Legislature (2006)—received 4K restorations. Beyond being a vital work of preservation for one of our most important documentarians, the effort has precipitated one of the biggest repertory cinema events of the year in cities on multiple continents. Amidst these retrospectives, we sat down to speak with Wiseman over the phone about the restoration process, his literary influences, and how newer audiences have received his work.
After presenting A Brief Excursion in 2017, Igor Bezinović returns to Rotterdam to showcase his latest documentary, titled Fiume o Morte!, in the Tiger competition. The Croatian director uses dramatic reconstructions and nonfiction interludes to explore the complex figure of Italian poet, playwright, and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). In his conversation with Documentary, Bezinović unpacks the making of his long-gestated project, its peculiar aesthetic choices, its ambitions, and its worryingly timely connections between past and present.
I interviewed Reid Davenport for the Doc Star of the Month column in 2022, the year the Stanford-trained TED fellow nabbed the Directing Award for U.S
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.
Noam Shuster Eliassi’s standup comedy show “Coexistence, My Ass!” is now the basis for a documentary of the same name, Coexistence, My Ass!, in which Lebanese Canadian filmmaker Amber Fares follows her through the COVID-19 pandemic, the anti-corruption protests in Israel, and the aftermath of the October 7th attack and Israel’s brutal retaliation in Gaza. Ahead of the film’s premiere at Sundance, we sat down with Fares over Zoom to discuss its long filming process and how October 7 shifted the tenor of the project.
For 15 years, Amy Berg wanted to make a film on Jeff Buckley. The joy of watching It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley then resides in witnessing Berg’s commitment to telling a known story and using rare archives, of the singer’s aching voice in elaborate voice messages he sent his loved ones. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and after, Berg spoke to me about the making of the documentary and whether her love for the artist altered in the process.
Isabel Castro’s sophomore feature centers the family band that catapulted Mexican American singer Selena into pop stardom. Given voice as never before through “hundreds, potentially thousands” of hours of archival footage, Selena Quintanilla constantly gushes about her band—sister Suzette on drums, brother A.B. on bass/producing duties, eventual husband Chris on guitar, and parents Marcella and Abraham as just about everything in between—as the key to her fame. I spoke with Castro a week before her film’s Park City debut, which was yesterday. We discuss the herculean process of combing through the Quintanillas’ archives, paying homage to Gregory Nava’s 1997 biopic and the filmmaker’s favorite Selena song.
In Third Act Tadashi Nakamura trains his lens on his father, Robert Nakamura, who is regarded as the “godfather of Asian American media.” Robert has played a key role as one of the first Japanese American filmmakers to represent the Japanese American experience through his films and images. Now in the third act of his life, he has decided to share his own. The documentary recently premiered at Sundance as part of the U.S. Documentary Competition. I spoke with Tadashi to understand how he went about shooting the film and if the process of filming Robert Nakamura was a veiled act of delaying grieving for his father.
Located only 200-odd miles from the Arctic Circle, Pasvik Folk High School in Norway offers teenagers on the precipice of adulthood an opportunity to get some distance from the fast-paced demands of modern society and immerse themselves in snowy survivalism. Longtime collaborators and co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp, Detropia) follow three students—the ever-determined Helge, socially awkward Bjorn Torne and keenly sensitive Romain—throughout the school year. While rooted in the filmmakers’ interest in unconventional educational institutions, FOLKTALES also marks one of their most ambitious projects yet, which necessitated a dozen two-day trips from New York to the remote Norwegian wilderness over a nine-month shooting period. Ewing and Grady spoke with me over Zoom the week before FOLKTALES premieres in Park City. Below, they shed insight on the origins of this project, the magic of finding one’s “dog twin” and embarking on a five-day shoot to secure the film’s poetic final shot.