'Our Nixon' premieres in theaters August 30 through Cinedigm.
Archival Storytelling
'Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory' airs January 12 on HBO.
In its first edition under Artistic Director Isabel Arrate Fernandez, IDFA highlighted documentaries that cross borders both geopolitical and
Working with over 1,000 hours of archival footage, Ian Bell and Alex Megaro connect their record of Seattle’s 1999 mass protests, WTO/99, with present
In this interview, Mary Stephen reflects on decades spent shaping other filmmakers’ narratives before turning to her own family in Palimpsest: The
In this interview on Under the Flags, the Sun, Paraguayan director Juanjo Pereira discusses completing his archival excavation of former President
In this interview, Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory discusses how she abstracts and rewrites post-revolutionary Iranian cinema to reveal the queer
Close to the start of her hypnotic documentary The Memory of Butterflies, director Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski describes the moment that inspired the film. While looking through a selection of propaganda images taken by a company operating in the Amazon during the late 19th-century rubber boom, Sadowski came across a posed portrait of two young Indigenous men. In the image, the pair stands hand in hand dressed in Western clothes, stiff suits and ties, gazing at the camera with solemn, unreadable expressions: Omarino and Aredomi. Documentary spoke to Sadowski shortly after the film’s premiere at the Berlinale, where the documentary jury awarded the film a special mention, about the ethics of colonial archive, cinematic speculation, and sound as a threshold. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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.
Now a quarter-century old, the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight has developed into one of the most sharply curated showcases for nonfiction film in the United States. In a climate of festivals fixated on acquiring flashy premieres, MoMA’s programmers instead focus on finding the new and recent titles that interest them most to give New York a taste of the international doc scene. This year, many of Doc Fortnight’s picks significantly repurpose existing media to new ends: Eight Postcards From Utopia, B.F. Skinner Plays Himself, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, Give it Back: Stage Theory, Henry Fonda for President, and An Unfinished Film.