By Pendarvis Harshaw The Independent Lens documentary Charm City brings to mind the long list of urban American cities that fall into the same category as the Baltimore seen in that film: Detroit, Newark, Compton, and Oakland, to name a few. They’re all post-industrial towns, where the closure of factories, underfunding of public education and …
Balancing Along the Thin Blue Line, Filmmaker Captures Police Force at an Explosive Time
A follow-up to his acclaimed, Independent Spirit Truer than Fiction Award-winning film The Waiting Room (Independent Lens, 2013), Pete Nicks’ The Force is part of a trilogy of films he’s making which are ostensibly about Oakland, where he’s based, but in a much larger sense are also about wholly American institutions — a hospital emergency room (and …
Seven Years Filming the Homeless of Oakland
The filmmaking team of Amir Soltani and Chihiro Wimbush both come from incredibly varied backgrounds, and bring an abundance of talents and interests to the table for the first feature documentary film for both as directors: Dogtown Redemption, which won the Audience Favorite Award at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Among many other hats, Soltani …
How Homeless Recyclers Make a Living Redeeming Recyclables
It is 7 a.m. on a clear spring morning in San Francisco and the lines at Our Planet Recycling SF are already 25 people deep. The customers, queued up in rows of four, stand among a collection of rubber garbage cans, shopping carts, and large garbage bags, filled with glass and plastic bottles, and aluminum …
The Waiting Room: Interview with Filmmaker Peter Nicks
With health care on the minds of all Americans these days and with discussions happening for better and for worse, it’s easy to lose sight of the human element. The Waiting Room goes a long way toward changing that. Read our exclusive interview with its filmmaker Peter Nicks on the challenges of shooting in a busy hospital and on what influenced him.
American Graduate Shorts: I Really Want to Make It
We continue our look at the American Graduate shorts with I Really Want to Make It, a film by Ray Telles and Angela Reginato. Sharon Montano of Oakland decides to go back to school at age 20 after several years of substance abuse and other struggles. When she discovers Civicorps Academy, where she meets other young people who have …