What does “representation” mean in the midst of a historically tense election year? In her film Represent, filmmaker Hillary Bachelder sought to show the universal struggle to redefine repressive expectations for women in politics with a look at three women running for office in a male-dominated world. Originally from Maine, Bachelder went to Chicago for …
Filmmakers Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini both bring very unique artistic backgrounds to the drawing table that led to the fruitful collaboration for Feels Good Man, which is Jones’ feature film debut. Both are well-suited to tell the vivid tale of artist Matt Furie and his poor cartoon frog creation, Pepe, who went on a …
The Montreal-based filmmaker Stacey Tenenbaum‘s joyful film The Art of the Shine, which aired on PBS, took the director all over the world, from New York to Toronto, Paris to La Paz, Bolivia, to look at the forgotten profession of shoe shining. Now with her film Pipe Dreams, she brings the world to her hometown, …
Recorder filmmaker Matt Wolf talks about the enormous undertaking it was to comb through Marion Stokes’ archives and getting her family to tell her remarkable story.
It’s been a pretty impressive run for what was someone’s very first feature documentary. But then again, Rewind is no ordinary first film. After Sasha Joseph Neulinger finished film school at Montana State University, he discovered the raw materials that would propel him to tell the extraordinary story of his life. A very candid autobiographical …
Bill Haney brought all the hats he’s worn into play in making the documentary Jim Allison: Breakthrough. The award-winning filmmaker (he counts a Silver Hugo, an IDA Pare Lorentz Award, as well as a Marine Conservation Award, Genesis Award and awards from Amnesty International and Earthwatch in his multifarious collection of awards), Haney has also …
Toronto-based filmmaker Brett Story, whose previous film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes aired on Independent Lens in 2017, holds a PhD in geography and her unconventional storytelling style reflects both a geographer’s exploring eye and a listener’s empathetic ear. She approaches the interviews in The Hottest August as a way to learn from people and …
In his film Bedlam, Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, MD follows the lives of three patients who find themselves with a chronic lack of institutional support, while he also weaves in his own story of how the system failed his late sister, Merle, and her battle with schizophrenia. As Rosenberg wrote in a powerful op-ed for the …
Taking risks is nothing new for Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang. Her previous documentary I Am Another You, which was a SXSW Jury Award-winner and aired on Independent Lens, involved her having to live on the streets with the homeless subject of her film, and prior to that she became a target of the Chinese government …
By Kemberlie Spivey Australian-born independent filmmaker Patricia Zagarella has been creating documentaries for over ten years and co-produced the Emmy-award winning documentary Baring It All. That film followed fashion photographer David Jay into the worlds of four young breast cancer survivors, exploring their journeys as they were photographed for the SCAR Project. Patricia made her …
Independent filmmaker Jacqueline Olive, who has worked in non-fiction filmmaking for years and co-directed and co-produced the award-winning hour-long documentary, Black to Our Roots (PBS WORLD), makes her feature documentary directing debut with the searing Always in Season, which was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Moral Urgency at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. A …
Israeli filmmakers Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia have had films air on international television as well as here in the U.S. on HBO, MTV, Sundance, and PBS (Medalia has received four Emmy nominations and won a Peabody Award), and both women studied in the United States. So how did they end up making a film …
