All posts tagged: Documentaries

Sean Penn Wants Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump To Watch His New Documentary, Black Sunflowers

Sean Penn Wants Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump To Watch His New Documentary, Black Sunflowers

Published by Sam Flores

In the middle of the film, Trump revokes USAID and you see how it affects the gay soldier and then the people who use the grants for amputees. Do you think that is one of his greatest crimes as president? Penn: Oh yeah. I mean, a kind way to put it would be negligent homicide, but we’ve been told not to use those terms. It’s not polite, which is ironic. We are accepting a great degree of denial and we still believe that we’re bulletproof. The kids sort of have a funny reaction to Trump when they watch him. What was the Ukrainian youth’s overall attitude toward him? Haney: I was really surprised at how receptive they were to Trump in the beginning, and it all comes into that one quote, “I’ll end the war in 24 hours.” So when you, as a Ukrainian, you’re not growing up with the context, the nuance of growing up in America and Trump every day. When you hear that in the news as a Ukrainian, that’s the best …

Anti-Trumpists Are Suddenly Progressive Documentary Funders

Anti-Trumpists Are Suddenly Progressive Documentary Funders

Published by Daniella Wilson

Anti-Trumpists have emerged as a new and growing source of financing for embattled political documentary makers. Richard Lorber, president of Kino Lorber, on Friday told a Toronto Film Festival panel on connecting audiences to non-fiction movies that progressive, or politically-oriented, documentaries are drawing on “civic-minded citizens with significant contributions, which allow them to get made and give viewers a chance to go to the theater.” Beyond such “impact partners,” the TIFF: The Market panel centered on how to get documentaries financed and released as they make slow return to theaters after the pandemic. “The only thing you can count on in releasing quality art house specialty films is disappointment,” Lorber argued, even as he has had recent gains with theatrical docs like the Oscar-winning Mr Nobody Against Putin and the summer arthouse hit Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. That theatrical success offered Lorber proof of “a ray of light that you’ve suddenly activated, a sleeper cell of fans who you didn’t know even existed.” mTuckman Media principal Michael Tuckman had his own recent success …

Laura Poitras, Rachel Lauren Mueller on ICE Documentary They’re Here

Laura Poitras, Rachel Lauren Mueller on ICE Documentary They’re Here

Published by Daniella Wilson

Life under ICE is like a horror movie. That’s the message of Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, whose new short documentary They’re Here chronicles how Immigration Customs Enforcement troops invaded and occupied Minneapolis last year, and the anonymous residents who resisted. Poitras co-directed They’re Here with Minneapolis-based journalist and documentarian Rachel Lauren Mueller. Using dashcam footage, ground-level filming and crowdsourced data visualizations, they reconstruct the resistance network and their tactics to track, document, and combat ICE’s masked agents. Stylistically, the film draws from horror and sci-fi cinema to depict how a picturesque American Midwestern city is turned into a dystopian nightmare. Men in balaclavas in unmarked cars drive down quiet snowy streets. At the Minneapolis airport, American vacationers gaze out the windows at shackled prisoners being dragged onboard planes nearby. A husband and wife hide in the trunk of a car as their son tries to sneak them past ICE officers. They’re Here is Poitras’s first project since her Nan Goldin documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the festival’s Golden Lion in 2022 …

Wim Wenders on Peter Zumthor Documentary ‘From Inside Out’: Venice

Wim Wenders on Peter Zumthor Documentary ‘From Inside Out’: Venice

Published by Daniella Wilson

Wim Wenders has spent much of the past three decades building portraits of other artists — the Cuban musicians of Buena Vista Social Club (1999), the choreographer Pina Bausch in Pina (2011), the photographer Sebastião Salgado in The Salt of the Earth (2014), the German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer in Anslem (2023). The first three were Oscar-nominated. All were critically acclaimed. But none has taken him as long as From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, the German auteur’s 3D documentary on the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect, has been 14 years in the making. It started small. David Chipperfield, curating the 2012 Venice architecture Biennale, asked Wenders to make a short film on Zumthor. That became a two-day shoot in the architect’s modest office in Haldenstein, high in the Swiss mountains, and the 2012 short Notes on a Day in the Life of an Architect — along with the nagging sense that he had barely scratched the surface. “At the end, we shook hands on ‘doing something real together,’” Wenders says. “Little did we know …

Slavoj Zizek on The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias exclusive trailer

Slavoj Zizek on The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias exclusive trailer

Published by Daniella Wilson

Slavoj Žižek is back. The Slovenian Marxist philosopher and leftie provocateur, who has become the internet’s most unlikely social media star, returns to cinemas with The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, the third documentary from director Sophie Fiennes — after The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) — that seeks to filter Žižek’s thinking through the lens of cinema. In her new documentary, which will have its world premiere in Venice on Sept. 7, Fiennes again stages Žižek in re-creations of scenes from the films and TV series being discussed, dropping the philosopher into the cinematic frame, so to speak. He lies in a bathtub in a wedding dress, like Kirsten Dunst, to discusses Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic drama Melancholia (2011). Debates the dystopian vision of Hulu’s A Handmaid’s Tale, lying flat on his back on a bed, draped in a red robe. Žižek’s hot takes and critical interpretations, on cinema and philosophy, are often counter-intuitive and seemingly contradictory, but never boring. The hidden message behind James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta (2006), he opines …

Wim Wenders on Peter Zumthor Documentary ‘From Inside Out’: Venice

Trailer for Wim Wenders’ Peter Zumthor documentary From Inside Out

Published by Daniella Wilson

The Hollywood Reporter can exclusively unveil the trailer for Wim Wenders‘ From Inside Out — The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, the German director’s 3D documentary on the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect, 14 years in the making. Filmed across more than a dozen locations over fourteen years and shot in cutting-edge 3D, From Inside Out moves from Zumthor’s early works, including the 1988 St. Benedict’s chapel, to the newly completed David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) — the architect’s largest building, commissioned nearly two decades ago. Rather than presenting Zumthor’s work through drawings or conventional architectural documentation, Wenders trains his camera on the people who encounter, inhabit and build these spaces, letting the buildings unfold from the inside. Poster for ‘From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor’ Courtesy of HanWay Films The trailer centers on one of the film’s most striking passages: novelist Siri Hustvedt‘s first encounter with the Steilneset Memorial, the structure Zumthor built above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway to commemorate the 91 people burned at …

Oldenburg Fest to Open With Wordless Elbe Island Doc Strange Neighbors

Oldenburg Fest to Open With Wordless Elbe Island Doc Strange Neighbors

Published by Daniella Wilson

Strange Neighbors, an art-house nature documentary with no narration, no interviews and no human protagonists will open this year’s Oldenburg Internationales Film Festival, the first time a doc has launched the German indie fest. The directorial debut of cinematographer Mi Steinbach, Strange Neighbors was shot over three years on Schwarztonnensand, an island and nature preserve on the German Elbe river, smack in the middle of one of Europe’s busiest waterways. The island, just over 2 miles long, was created in the late 1960s from sand dredged during the deepening of the Elbe shipping channel that serves the port of Hamburg, then left to itself and gradually planted over. It lies directly on the fairway line, closer to the shipping lane than any other land on the river, so container vessels pass within meters of it. It is a protected area. Humans are banned on the island, and Steinbach has banned them from her film. Strange Neighbors has no commentary track and no dialogue, though it features a soundtrack and sound design from Robert Nacken. “It …

Venice Adds Gaza Doc ‘NAZA’ to Competition

Venice Adds Gaza Doc ‘NAZA’ to Competition

Published by Daniella Wilson

The Venice Film Festival has added Naza, a politically-charged documentary from No Other Land filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor to its competition line-up for this year. The documentary claims to reveal in detail “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025. Naza was produced by The Guardian and James Wilson at JW Films in association with Placeholder Films and Unseen Hand. Wilson produced Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest. Glazer is an executive producer on Naza. According to the producers, the film’s title “comes from a military acronym euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike.” The doc will have its world premiere in Venice on Sept. 10. It is the only feature documentary picked for competition this year. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are two of the four co-directors of No Other …

Meghan Markle’s Girl Scouts Documentary Can Teach the US Government A Lot About Leadership

Meghan Markle’s Girl Scouts Documentary Can Teach the US Government A Lot About Leadership

Published by Sam Flores

To help spread her message of female-led ingenuity at the local level, Nahmias enlisted former Girl Scout Meghan Markle who, like Olive, was the daughter of her troop leader back when she sold cookies. Markle serves as executive producer on Cookie Queens alongside her husband, Prince Harry, and Chanel Pysnik, head of unscripted content at the Sussexes’ Archewell Productions. “What’s awesome is having all of our executive producers, including the duke and duchess, wanting to shine a light on young people and take them seriously,” says Nahmias. “We don’t often see girls represented three-dimensionally, where we can be ambitious and cutthroat—[but] also tender and vulnerable. Meghan got that from the beginning.” A source close to Meghan tells Vanity Fair that she was “moved by Nahmias’s vision for the project.” “Meghan was a Brownie and a Junior when she was younger, so there was also a personal connection. She speaks fondly of her time as a Girl Scout and the lessons it taught her about entrepreneurship and confidence,” they added. Earlier this year, Markle and Prince …

Melania Trump Is Giving Documentaries Another Try Despite Her Film’s Flop

Melania Trump Is Giving Documentaries Another Try Despite Her Film’s Flop

Published by Sam Flores

For Melania Trump, a flop isn’t a reason to give up. Despite the disappointing results of her first documentary, Melania—which reportedly grossed just under $17 million, while Amazon MGM Studios reportedly spent nearly $75 million—the First Lady has decided to try again. This time, it’s a multi-episode documentary series, expected to premiere on Prime Video next fall. The announcement was made by Marc Beckman, Melania’s exclusive senior advisor, during a Real America’s Voice appearance. While the first film followed the former model for about 20 days, offering a glimpse into “her private life, her marriage, her family,” per Beckman, this new series promises a “completely different” approach. Viewers will get a behind-the-scenes look at the early days of the 47th presidential administration. This new project is expected to resonate with Melania’s most loyal admirers, particularly among her supporters in Florida. The first documentary, in fact, earned a 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, driven largely by her most ardent followers. Around Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, where Donald Trump has owned his famous estate since 1985, …