Documentary Magazine Fall 2025 Issue

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DOCUMENTARY MAGAZINE

(ISSN # 1559-1034) is the publication of the International Documentary Association, a nonprofit organization established in 1982 to promote nonfiction film and video and to support the efforts of documentary makers around the world.

Magazine Staff

Abby Sun / Editor

Marlene Head / Copy Editor

Maria Hinds / Art Direction & Design

Janki Patel / Advertising Manager

Zaferhan Yumru / Production Manager

magazine@documentary.org

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IDA Staff

Colin Arp / Office & Administrative Coordinator

Catalina Combs / Marketing & Communications Manager

Melissa D’Lando / Grants Manager

Mary Garbesi / Director of Finance & Administration

Grace Gordon / Publication Intern

Anisa Hosseinezhad / Membership & Individual Giving Program Manager

Katy Hurley / Funds Coordinator

Janki Patel / Advertising & Sponsorship Manager

Gabriella Ortega Ricketts / Communication & Events Manager

Maria Santos / Artist Support Manager

Lilla Sparks / Fiscal Sponsorship Program Coordinator

Abby Sun / Director of Programs

Bethany Weardon / Fiscal Sponsorship Program Manager

Dominic Asmall Willsdon / Executive Director

Zaferhan Yumru / Director of Marketing, Communications & Events

Armando Zamudio / Events & Content Program Officer

IDA Board

Ina Fichman / Co-President

Michael A. Turner / Co-President

Chris Albert / Secretary

Maria Agui Carter / Treasurer

Bob Berney

Paula Ossandón Cabrera

Inti Cordera

Toni Kamau

Grace Lee

Orwa Nyrabia

Chris L. Perez

Alfred Clinton Perry

Nathalie Seaver

Amir Shahkhalili

Joel Simon

Luis González Zaffaroni

David Osit discusses how Predators stealthily reflects both true crime and documentary commodification of human suffering Abby Sun

Mstyslav Chernov transforms war reporting into immersive cinema in 2000 Meters to Andriivka

Sonya Vseliubska

Brent and Craig Renaud risked their lives to make vérité documentary journalism—after Brent’s death, Craig honored his life with a new film

Lauren Wissot

Heaven Meets Earth

Petra Costa’s new documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics explores the “fatal marriage” between Christian nationalism and authoritarian politics

Bernardo Ruiz

Price of Recognition

Two award-winning incarcerated filmmakers discovered that their success at the first San Quentin Film Festival came with strings attached, when the nonprofit that provided their equipment demanded they sign away all ownership rights

Steve Brooks

Tribeca 2025: What Lies Beneath

Amid the festival’s commercial wrappings, three docs from rising filmmakers plumb the depths of American inequity

Natalia Keogan

Philadelphia’s beloved festival for Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers explores themes of inheritance and artistic lineage

Tayler Montague

Producer’s Diary: In Waves and War

Robin Berghaus

Screen Time: Checkpoint Zoo

2+2=5 Paris Calligrammes Riefenstahl

Apocalypse in the Tropics. (p. 40)

Image credit: Busca Vida Filmes Courtesy of Netflix

Cover image: Petra Costa, director of Apocalypse in the Tropics (p. 40)

Photo by Bron Moyi Location: Vista House, Los Angeles

Brent and Craig Renaud. Iraq, 2004. (p. 32)

Image credit: Brent Stirton Courtesy of the Renaud family

Predators. (p. 15) Courtesy of MTV Documentary Films

Dear Readers,

The risks documented in this issue’s thematic strand of “Dangerous Territory”—physical danger, political pressure, institutional exploitation—are not aberrations of our current moment. They have persisted since the earliest days of documentary practice. When the Lumière company sent camera operators to French colonies to record travelogues, they worked in a world with an established visual economy of organized conflict, from war photography to muckraking. Robert Flaherty risked hypothermia to protect his cameras while filming Nanook of the North. Before they made King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack trekked hundreds of miles for Grass, and faced a stampeding elephant in Chang Joris Ivens dodged fascist forces to make The Spanish Earth during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, the success of these early documentaries benefited from the danger the filmmakers experienced while making them.

Our editorial line does not attempt to glorify the threats that filmmakers face today; rather, it seeks to explain them. This issue’s cover feature on Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics places her in conversation with Bernardo Ruiz, another filmmaker who has also deeply investigated the evolution of an electorate across multiple election cycles. Costa was publicly denounced by Brazil’s then-President Jair Bolsonaro for “slandering” her country. In this interview, she describes why she nonetheless chose to make a film on the religious forces that brought Bolsonaro to power.

The three other articles in the “Dangerous Territory” strand feature other filmmakers under fire. Mstyslav Chernov’s transformation from war reporter to filmmaker is chronicled by Sonya Vseliubska, who is interested in how 2000 Meters to Andriivka employs cutting-edge camera and sound technology. Lauren Wissot’s profile of the Renaud brothers, Brent and Craig, illuminates the price of their vérité approach to conflict journalism, which is also covered in Craig’s recent mid-length film, Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud Journalist Steve Brooks investigates how even nonprofits designed to nurture mediamaking can become sites of exploitation. Brooks, the former editor-in-chief of the San Quentin News, also details how the appropriation of two incarcerated filmmakers’ creative labor echoes decades of similar struggles inside California’s prisons.

While the methods of censorship, financial exploitation, and violence might differ now, the entanglement between vulnerability and profitability remains. Outside of the thematic strand, I interviewed David Osit on Predators, his slippery exposé of the crime sting journalism of To Catch a Predator, after finding the film to be a compelling, unexpected critique of true crime— and the limits of personal documentaries.

Our recurring segments include two festival dispatches. Natalia Keogan considers independent documentaries amid Tribeca’s rampant commercialization, while Tayler Montague returns to BlackStar, which has become a vital U.S. stop for BIPOC filmmakers. For “Producer’s Diary,” Robin Berghaus gathers the ups and downs of Bonnie Cohen and Jon Shenk’s In Waves and War, a Participant-funded film caught in the middle of the company’s shutdown, from Cohen, Shenk, and producer Jessica Anthony. And “Screen Time” continues with capsule-length reviews on notable new releases.

Until the next issue,

Editor, Documentary

Abby Sun

The pieces in this issue on filmmakers under fire continue a conversation this magazine has been having for decades. Many years ago, for example, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Laura Almo wrote:

Danger comes in many forms. There is the geopolitical danger of a country in the middle of a war, or that has been ravaged by war and is politically destabilized. There is also the sociopolitical danger of filming in a totalitarian state, where subjects address the camera at their own peril—and that of their family and friends. And there is the danger of repercussions to the filmmaker once the film is out in the world. (“Documenting in the Face of Danger,” Documentary, February 2002)

Today, the dangers are as great as ever, and they take many forms. Our field is under attack. Filmmakers face rising censorship, funding cuts, and political threats designed to silence dissent. Through this magazine and our wider communications, IDA will continue to share insights and perspectives on the escalating threats.

More than that, we will defend filmmakers from these threats. As an advocate for documentary practice, IDA is committed to defending the rights and safety of nonfiction filmmakers across the United States and around the world.

IDA has been involved in advocacy work for many years. We have had success with such issues as public records access, fair use, and legal protections for sources. We have worked with longtime partners such as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Knight First Amendment Institute to bring legal actions in the interests of documentarians. But we need to do more. We are doing more.

This month, IDA is announcing a broader, deeper commitment to advocacy. This includes a more powerful and sustained practice of strategic litigation—we are currently exploring options for our third legal action against the Trump administration’s visa rules. We will provide fast and accurate interventions on behalf of filmmakers and film organizations at risk from harmful government and business dealings. We are creating emergency funds and pro bono legal support for filmmakers in danger, and developing education and resources related to legal affairs, safety, and security. And we want to do even more.

We are not alone in this work. There are great organizations advocating for documentarians in other countries. As a field, we need to be globally connected and work with many partners because the issues are shared across borders. Given that many technology and business interests are based in the U.S., it is important that there is a U.S.–based advocacy entity that is globally connected. IDA is positioned to be that.

Other fields of cultural practice have long-standing and effective advocacy organizations: the Authors Guild, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Artistic Freedom Initiative, and many others. Documentary filmmaking has IDA. We who work at IDA and you as IDA members need to make sure we can provide the advocacy that documentary needs and deserves.

We need your help. By being an IDA member, you support this critical work.

Executive Director

Dominic Asmall Willsdon

In Waves and War

(March 2019–July 2025)

By Robin Berghaus

In Waves and War opens with a scene at Stanford University’s Brain Stimulation Lab, where combat veterans tell a research scientist why they’re leaving the U.S. to try a controversial therapy. They’ve endured depression, PTSD, and traumatic brain injuries. After exhausting medical treatments in the U.S. that weren’t effective, some considered suicide.

Marcus Capone had been in their shoes. Feeling desperate, the Navy SEAL veteran traveled to Mexico to undergo a regimen of psychedelic medicines, including 5-MeODMT and ibogaine—the latter is what the veterans in the Stanford study would try. These naturally occurring psychedelics are illegal in the U.S. but have been used abroad for centuries by Indigenous communities.

Capone described in an interview how psychedelic therapy helped him alleviate stress and anxiety. “The medicine cracks you open and gives you a new white canvas to paint whatever you want on there. It changed my life forever,” Capone said. But, he said, it’s a misconception that simply taking a pill makes everything better. The most difficult work, Capone stressed, follows the treatment. “You have to put a plan in place and conduct consistent integration sessions with an experienced coach/therapist to help process your psychedelic experience. Otherwise, you potentially can go back to the way things used to be.”

Capone’s years-long struggle is common among veterans but not often voiced in a military culture that stigmatizes asking for help. Buried trauma and insufficient treatments have fueled an epidemic in which members of the military are more likely to die by suicide than in combat.

So, when Capone finally experienced relief, he and his wife, Amber, founded Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS) to help veterans access psychedelic therapy. In Waves and War tells the Capones’ story and that of two Navy SEALs who welcome

cameras to document their psychedelic experiences. They share past traumas and hallucinations, which are illustrated by their personal archives and animation. Psychedelic therapy, they say, gave them hope and a capacity to heal.

When Diane Weyermann met the Capones in 2019, she knew she had found her next project. As Participant Media’s chief content officer, Weyermann cultivated

Robin Berghaus is a writer and filmmaker based in Austin, Texas.

Above: (L to R) Director Bonni Cohen, Executive Producer Justine Nagan, Producer Jessica Anthony, and Director Jon Shenk at Telluride. All images courtesy of Actual Films, unless otherwise noted

documentaries to inspire positive change in the world. But she needed the right filmmakers. So she tapped Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, founders of Actual Films, who for more than two decades have communicated how trauma, from sexual abuse (Athlete A, 2020) to genocide (Lost Boys of Sudan, 2003), affects the human experience.

Cohen, Shenk, and producer Jessica Anthony opened up about their challenges making In Waves and War, including how, after Weyermann died and Participant Media closed, they pivoted to carry out the impact campaign that Participant had promised. Now they’re building partnerships and events to destigmatize seeking mental health treatments and influence legislation that supports veterans unserved by America’s healthcare system.

March 2019

Bonni Cohen (Producer/Director): Diane Weyermann brought Marcus and Amber Capone to meet us at our San Francisco office. They described how Marcus’s PTSD and traumatic brain injuries had affected their family. Psychedelic therapy in Mexico was the last stop for Marcus after trying several other interventions. Because many Navy SEALs and their families had suffered similar traumas, the Capones founded VETS. Their nonprofit helps veterans afford psychedelic therapy abroad. But it felt like an injustice. Why should veterans who defended the U.S. have to leave it for medical care? This film, they hoped, would help inform the public about the crisis underway and convince lawmakers to support research on psychedelic medicines that could become FDAapproved treatments for trauma and other mental health conditions.

Spring 2019

Jon Shenk (Producer/Director): Participant contracted us to flesh out access and scope in a development deal, including funding for initial shooting.

Fall 2019

Cohen: Marcus and Amber opened doors to members of the SEAL community who are taught a code of ethics and to remain private. We were asking the SEALs to share some of their darkest secrets, so they had to trust us. Our relationship with the Capones was our only way in.

Early 2020

Shenk: We interviewed several retired SEALs who helped us understand what they endured during combat deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Among them was Greg Hake, whose best friend had died by suicide. Greg also considered suicide

(L to R) Marcus Capone, Matty Roberts, Bonni Cohen, and DJ Shipley.

before he tried ibogaine therapy. During his psychedelic journey, Greg recalls telling his deceased friend, “This experience is about you.” But Greg’s friend said, “No brother, it’s you.” Then Greg fell through a green tunnel that, to him, resembled a sequence in the science fiction film Stargate. Eventually, he got spit out in a basement, where, in real life, Greg had experienced abuse. A voice pointed out that the basement was now empty, so he could move on: “See, there’s nothing here anymore. There’s no one here.”

We had an epiphany that this was not just a film about soldiers getting over PTSD but that it would also get into the psychology of who they are and what led them to join the military to become “protectors.” We were stepping into intimate details of their lives that, in some cases, remained hidden even to themselves. We realized we would have to be mindful because these guys were doing deep psychological work. Greg’s story is not in the final movie, but

his vivid memories inspired our process, including an ambitious animation plan.

Spring 2020

Shenk: By the time we submitted the development materials, we had done some shooting. But we paused at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when the world got turned upside down.

June 2021

Jessica Anthony (Producer): We brought on Marcus and Amber as consulting producers to acknowledge their contributions. They added legitimacy to our work and continued introducing us to film participants and collaborators.

October 2021

Anthony: At the Capones’ house, we met Matty Roberts, a Navy SEAL veteran who was not yet considering psychedelic therapy. It was his first introduction to the film. Building our relationship with Matty would take a while.

Still from In Waves and War.

January 2022

Anthony: Marcus and Amber introduced us to Patsy and DJ Shipley after we heard DJ’s story on a podcast. DJ is a Navy SEAL veteran who had been to Mexico for psychedelic therapy. He saw the film as a way to help his community and jumped in. Patsy hesitated.

February 2022

Anthony: Jon, Bonni, and I flew to Virginia Beach. We had dinner with Patsy and DJ to get to know each other and talk about our film plans.

Cohen: Patsy had a lot to add but wasn’t sure that going public with her story would be the right thing for her family long-term. So we did something we’ve never done. We said, “Why don’t we film this interview, and then you can decide whether you want to sign the release. But at least tell your side because it’s as important as DJ’s.” We knew that any piece of Patsy’s story would be better than none. Both DJ and Patsy let us interview them on that trip.

April 2022

Cohen: We shared with Patsy her interview transcript. She struck a few lines that she felt were not totally accurate, and agreed to have her story included. We felt that collaboration was important—after all, it’s their life story.

Shenk: We realized that her freedom to speak openly, without that interview being final, allowed her to say things she might never have otherwise.

Anthony: We sat down for our first embargoed interview with Matty. He was still unsure about participating. He didn’t want this to be about him, but rather thought of it as a way to help his military brothers and prevent suicides.

We also began filming with several veterans enrolled in Stanford’s ibogaine research study before they traveled to Mexico for treatments.

November 2022

Anthony: Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, came on board as an executive producer. He was drawn to the stories in our film and saw its impact potential. Psychedelics helped Blake process difficult things in his life, and he has pledged to donate millions of dollars to support research into psychedelics as medical treatments as well as other initiatives, including a psychedelic documentary fellowship.

Early 2023

Anthony: We began working with Studio AKA on the animation. We went back and forth with our guys, asking granular details about battles and their psychedelic journeys. At one point, DJ sent videos of himself sketching on a whiteboard to block out a battle sequence, which the animation team referenced for the re-creation. I was constantly texting our guys to verify the right kind of night goggles, the proper aircraft carrier, and the exact visualization and feelings they had when under the influence of ibogaine and the 5-MeO-DMT. It had to be accurate.

February 2023

Shenk: After Matty’s military brothers gave him their blessing, he began to feel more comfortable, and we filmed Matty going through psychedelic therapy treatment in Mexico. Two weeks later, we did an interview with him. We thought we had what we needed to finish the film.

April 2023

Shenk: Matty called and said, “I don’t think my story is done.” When we interviewed Matty shortly after his treatment, he was still recovering. But several months later, he began making tremendous breakthroughs, including a better understanding of his survivor’s guilt, childhood trauma, and lack of spiritual belief. He wanted this part of his experience to be documented for people who may not view ibogaine as an option. Because, he said, “I was that guy, too.”

July 2023

Shenk: So we filmed with Matty and his therapist. I just love that scene. It became the ending of the film. Matty was right!

January 2024

Anthony: Stanford’s research findings were published in Nature Medicine, a highly selective scientific journal. Most veterans in the study, and some we filmed with, said that a single ibogaine therapy treatment significantly improved their mental and physical health.

February 2024

Anthony: One of our executive producers, Geralyn Dreyfous, introduced us to Peter Palandjian and Eliza Dushku Palandjian, who joined our team of executive producers to support the production and impact campaign. They are very

involved in Boston’s mental health space, funding and advocating for psychedelic therapy research. Eliza herself underwent psychedelic therapy to help process and overcome PTSD.

April 2024

Shenk: Participant announced publicly that it would close, which seemed out of the blue. I think it took the employees at Participant by as much surprise as it did us.

Cohen: Participant financed the bulk of the production budget, along with funders brought in by Actual Films and Chicago Media Project. But Participant would no longer be producing the impact campaign. So, we took it upon ourselves to raise additional funds and build an impact team to do this work.

Still from In Waves and War.

Facing page: Jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen film in Mexico with Marcus Capone.

June 2024

Anthony: We completed the sound mix and color to finish the film.

July 2024

Anthony: Amber and Marcus introduced us to Waco Hoover, a Marine Corps veteran, who has advised our impact strategy. Waco chairs the American Legion’s “Be the One” campaign, which is focused on ending veteran suicide.

Cohen: Participant, which still exists as a business entity, chose Josh Braun at Submarine as the sales agent and made all the business decisions around how the film would go out into the world.

August 2024

Shenk: We premiered In Waves and War at Telluride. Several distributors saw it there, which got the conversation started. But we didn’t walk away with a sales offer that weekend. It has been twisty-turny with the distribution world imploding on us. We’re living in a period where business decisions seem to be taking precedence over art or social issues.

January 2025

Anthony: Netflix approached us to offer a hybrid licensing deal as part of an effort to acquire six documentaries that performed well at festivals.

February 2025

Anthony: We collaborated with the Capones’ nonprofit VETS to organize an In Waves and War screening for Texas lawmakers who would vote on a US$50 million bill to help bring ibogaine through clinical trials. Sherri Reuland, a Texas Ibogaine Initiative consultant, saw our film and wanted to use it to push the conversation forward. Her organization paid for the reception and our team’s travel expenses. That synergy was possible because everyone was after the same thing.

March 2025

Anthony: Amber, Marcus, Matty, Nolan Williams (who led the Stanford study), Jon, and I attended an In Waves and War screening with Texas lawmakers.

April 2025

Anthony: The Palandjians hosted a screening in Boston that raised over US$900,000 for Home Base, a nonprofit that provides healthcare for veterans at no cost.

May 2025

Anthony: Two months after our screening, the Texas Senate and House of Representatives voted to pass the ibogaine bill.

We hired Jamie Shor, president of PR Collaborative, to garner press around the issues of our impact campaign.

June 2025

Cohen: The Netflix deal was announced. In Waves and War will begin streaming in November. We are grateful, because the

Jon Shenk and team crew filming at Stanford’s Brain Stimulation Lab.

bottom line is that we hope our films get to be seen by the biggest audience possible.

Anthony: For more audience building, we screened In Waves and War at Psychedelic Science, a conference that attracts thousands of researchers and advocates in the psychedelic space.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the US$50 million ibogaine bill into law, which, according to advocates, is the largest state-funded psychedelic research initiative in history.

With philanthropic donations from about a half dozen individuals, we hired impact producer Chris Albert [current board secretary of IDA, which publishes Documentary Magazine] of Albert Media Group to build out an ambitious plan. Chris will remain on through the wide release.

July 2025

Anthony: We are planning educational screenings centered around World Mental

Health Day and Veterans Day. We are also collaborating with the American Legion and other veterans service organizations that will encourage their constituents to turn out.

We are organizing an educational screening on Capitol Hill in October before our Netflix release. Members from both parties—including Rep. Dan Crenshaw (TX) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY)—have been uniting around these issues, so we feel it’s the right time.

We’re also planning educational screenings at state capitols, including in California, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia, where lawmakers are considering legislation that would help fund and advance psychedelic therapy research leading to FDA approval. The Capones and VETS are helping us identify legislators who are interested in the topic, including members of the Armed Services and Veterans’ Affairs committees. We’ll

ask these lawmakers if they would co-host screenings and if insiders could spearhead the events.

It used to be that we would finish a film and get on to making the next one. But it’s hard to replace yourself when you’ve been the constant inside this journey and care deeply about both the subject and the participants who put so much on the line..

After the March 2025 private screening of In Waves and War for Texas lawmakers, this panel discussion featured conversation between (L to R) AnneClaire Stapleton (journalist), Amber and Marcus Capone (co-founders of VETS), Nolan Williams (director of Stanford University’s Brain Stimulation Lab), Bryan Hubbard (CEO of Americans for Ibogaine), Matty Roberts (a Navy SEAL veteran), Robert Gallery (former NFL player), and Jon Shenk (director/ producer of In Waves and War). Image credit: Robin Bergaus Courtesy of the writer

Sun is IDA’s director of programs and the editor of Documentary

The Mirror’s Edge

David

Osit discusses how

Predators stealthily reflects both true crime and documentary commodification

of human suffering

By Abby Sun

David Osit has built his filmography by asking uncomfortable questions about the stories we tell ourselves about progress. As a director-cinematographer-editor, Osit has consistently turned his lens toward subjects that resist easy moral categorization. His 2020 feature Mayor followed Musa Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah, as he navigated the absurdities of governing under Israeli occupation—a film that found dark comedy in bureaucratic dysfunction while highlighting the human cost of political subjugation. Earlier, in Thank You for Playing (2015, directed, produced, and edited by Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall), he chronicled a family’s decision to create a hit indie video game about their dying child, exploring how digital media mediates our most profound experiences of grief.

But Osit’s editing resume also includes work that directly connects his livelihood to the ver y phenomena his newest feature, Predators (2025), critiques. As one of the editors on HBO’s series The Vow (2020), he helped craft one of the streaming era’s most successful cult documentaries, turning the NXIVM scandal into television that attracted millions of viewers hungry for true crime content. His editing work on Hostages (2022, which won IDA’s award for Best Limited Series) further ensconced him within true crime media production, even as that series approached its subject of international kidnapping with more nuance than typical genre entries.

P redators emerges at the intersection of two dominant trends in different sectors of contemporary nonfiction: the explosion of true crime content and the rise of personal documentaries that prioritize the filmmaker’s own story and self-revelation. Here, Osit deliberately commingles the two. One effect is that Predators capably examines his own complicity and that of his peers in the documentary entanglement of exploitation and entertainment. Predators is not the first—this development has been noted by film critics in the rise of “prestige true crime”—but it is a uniquely fine-tuned and insightful example. The film takes as its starting point To Catch a Predator, the Dateline NBC series that ran from 2004 to 2007, hosted by Chris Hansen. The show’s format involved adult decoys posing as minors in online chat rooms to lure potential predators to staged meetings, where Hansen would confront them on

Abby

camera before the arrival of local police. The series became a cultural phenomenon in the U.S., spawning countless imitators and expanding the ethical borders of mainstream entertainment.

The film begins by examining Hansen’s journalism and the show’s influence, combining raw footage from To Catch a Predator with polished talking heads of police chiefs, an academic who provides a sociological reading, and two former decoys. Their testimonies reveal the psychological toll of participating in vigilante justice, including the show’s final case, where the suspect died by suicide after being exposed. Next, Predators follows, in observational style, current YouTuber Skeet Hansen (whose legal name is Ken Chambers), who has named himself after Chris Hansen and extended his confrontational style for internet videos. In the final act, Chris Hansen is given a chance to directly respond through a pivotal sit-down interview. Throughout the chapter structure, the documentary’s form fractures. What starts as recognizable reportage evolves into something more experimental and personal.

Central to the film’s compelling appraisal is Osit’s recognition that documentary filmmaking—including his own intimate portraiture and for-hire work—exists on a spectrum with true crime docutainment. Both practices involve pointing cameras at vulnerable people, promise to reveal hidden truths, and depend on the audience’s appetite for watching human struggle.

Predators’ final moments crystallize this central argument about complicity and choice. After examining TruBlu Entertainment’s corporate machinery’s ruthless packaging of Chris Hansen’s current To Catch a Predator spinoff and other true crime content, Predators concludes

by following Chris Hansen as he awkwardly exits the interview’s film stage and walks out the door—exercising the very choice his sting operations denied the men he caught. But the film then cuts back inside the studio to rest on Osit’s own face, surrounded by his film crew, teetering between confession and reckoning. It’s a moment that refuses easy absolution and risks aesthetic posturing.

Acquired by MTV Documentar y Films, Predators receives a limited theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles this month before expanding in October. In the following interview, Osit discusses the ethical challenges of making a film that critiques the medium in which it operates, the metatextual editing that serves his thematic investigation, and his enduring belief in documentary cinema’s power. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: You spend the entire film making an argument that society is a little bit sick for liking the undercover sting shows and true crime documentaries. Into the continuum of Chris Hansen and Skeet Hansen, you also place yourself as a documentary filmmaker. How much are documentary filmmakers aggressors or predators in our pursuit of stories?

DAVID OSIT: I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that documentary filmmakers aren’t part of the primordial ooze of finding stories and sharing them to advance certain ideas or mythologies. I believe that I’m doing good. I think most of us believe that we’re doing good work for a living—that’s true of everyone, really.

There are differences between me and Chris Hansen, Skeet Hansen, Joseph Pulitzer, and the yellow journalists at the turn of the 20th century, and there are similarities. Chris and I both make a living doing what we do. We are both incentivized to make what we do appealing to audiences. We also both feel confident that our opinion is one that we want to share and amplify. It’s not a judgment on other people. It’s just a basic fact of life in the modern media landscape, where you are inside a capitalist fight for eyeballs.

D: In the same way that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, there’s no ethical production either?

DO: I can’t really see how, if I am producing something in the context of it being bought and sold, that it could be ethical. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be good. We can care about what happens to the people around us, and we can have a code of conduct for how we operate.

There are certain rules that I would never intentionally break. I would never want someone to be harmed by a film that I’ve made. That feels like a line that I wouldn’t want to cross, and it’s one of the reasons why filming with some of the predator hunters in my film made me feel uncomfortable and call into question where I actually stood in terms of my moral ground.

D: During the Skeet Hansen sting, we see you start filming while hidden in the bathroom of a motel room, and you come out when a man is caught and reveal yourself as filming. Later in that same scene, there’s also a second reveal, when one of the producers of Predators, Jamie Gonçalves, also comes out of the bathroom and very gently explains to this man that the two of you are not part of the sting. Jamie presents this man with the choice to sign a release form—to decide to show his face or not, in your film.

DO: This particular moment wouldn’t have been a scene I included if it wasn’t standing in contrast to the people that I was filming, who were also making their own documentary and who weren’t asking for consent. As the film proceeds, it becomes increasingly personal, not just for me but for the human beings involved in these productions. In that moment, I really experienced what young people call cringe, which is that you see yourself through the eyes of somebody else, and you don’t like what you see. I don’t know who that man is; I don’t know his name. As far as I was concerned, in that moment through his eyes, there was no difference between me and Skeet. We were the same. We both had cameras pointed at him, and I felt this need to try to say that there was some sort of difference between us.

D: How did you cast Skeet Hansen? In this popular subgenre of internet crime sting videos, why was Skeet chosen as the representative?

DO: Quite simply, I cast Skeet because he’s the scion of Chris Hansen. He named himself after Chris Hansen, imitates him, and uses the folklore of To Catch a Predator as part of his routine. There are other predator hunters who don’t directly mimic Chris Hansen. But once I started filming with Skeet, I felt like I had gotten what I needed.

D: Another distinction we can draw is between an unscripted show’s host and a first-person perspective in a personal documentary. Near the end of Predators, you disclose your own personal connection to this type of material. Internationally, within the documentary industry right now, there is a lot of focus on making sure filmmakers are proximate to the subject matter, authentic in their voices, and representative of the community being filmed, which correlates to a rise in personal documentaries. This conversation isn’t reflected in general audience concerns. Do you think the personal aspect makes your film stronger, and why did you decide to include it?

DO: I’m not sure how much I want to talk about my personal connection for people to read before they see the film. I feel like it’s important to preserve how people come to that organically in the film.

There’s this explosion of true crime designed to propagate entertainment through nonfiction stories, and that’s really not what I fell in love with when I first got into documentary filmmaking in the early 2000s, at the dawn of the DV revolution. These films get made by anonymous filmmakers for anonymous reasons. There’s no motivating factor behind some of the nonfiction series on the major streaming networks except that they are profitable. We all understand people watch crappy TV; we all accept that.

And then there are documentaries that are designed to use all the catchphrases of “shine a light onto societal ills” and “hold a mirror up to our society.” I’m not trying to say that one is valuable and the other is not. But between the two, one of those types of documentary films is allowed to become personal, and one is actively discouraged from being anything but a commodity. I wanted to make a film that maybe jumped between the two, and to see what that did to an audience. In many ways, this film was trying to make a radical act of messing with your expectations.

I do wish more documentaries came with thought bubbles above them: Why does this exist? Why did the filmmaker want to make this? What’s interesting about it to them?

D: Are you trying to Trojan horse your way into an audience that might actually just want to watch a recap of To Catch a Predator?

DO: After I made Mayor, I got some emails and calls about true crime ideas, and I just wasn’t terribly interested in a lot of these approaches. And then I was like, “Why don’t I make a film about how much true crime bothers me?” That’s where Predators came from.

Ever since I started making P redators, this phrase you just used, “Trojan horse,” has become some sort of magic phrase that every network uses about what kind of true crime entertainment they want to make: “We really want to find a film that can be a Trojan horse and start as one thing and become something else.”

I do wish more documentaries came with thought bubbles above them: Why does this exist? Why did the filmmaker want to make this? What’s interesting about it to them?

I’ve never felt to this degree the way in which our world seems to be informed by how entertained we are. The people that I interact with will get their news from the most entertaining source, not the best source. And I think that the line really started to become blurr y from shows like To Catch a Predator—when entertainment became an outcropping of something that purported to be journalism.

This idea of this film being about how all of us, all filmmakers, audiences, journalists, are all part of this cycle of hurt, whether we want to be or not? I couldn’t go on that journey unless I built the house correctly, and the house had to look right. I don’t think a film can change your mind, but I think it can change something deeper inside of you than your mind.

D: You specifically address how journalism can shift in the structure of Predators. I’m referring to how the edit starts from a very straight broadcast journalism approach and later incorporates more vérité, plus a staged interview with Chris Hansen. You conducted an interesting exercise where you split the film into four parts and gave each to a different editor—Erin Casper, Robert Greene, Charlie Shackleton, and Nicolás Staffolani. It seems that the final film still keeps a lot of this form. What did you learn from this exercise?

DO: I intrinsically understood that the way the film would work is if you, as an audience, could feel like you were on the journey with me. The thing that first compelled me was watching footage from To Catch a Predator and feeling this discord between the edited show, which has a dark comedy and reportage, and the raw footage, which is at times devastating, humanistic, and horrifying all at once. I knew that I couldn’t give you that experience without showing you both. Sometimes, the experience would have to mirror the experience I had watching all this raw footage—the same experience that any editor has when they’re sitting and watching rushes and they’re like, “What am I looking at? I can’t believe this.”

I gave certain chunks of footage to certain editors and didn’t tell them what the others were working on. For example, the first thing that got edited was a big chunk of the middle of the film, which is entirely archival footage, that I gave to Erin Casper. I said, “Make me a 20-minute true crime movie out of this. Cut it as though you would be watching any sort of true crime film.” What I got back was completely different tonally from what the rest of the film would be, but that’s what I liked about it. It helped me access a different rhythm of what the story could look and feel like.

The throughline ended up being me as the director and acting more like a supervising editor, hearing ideas from these four brilliant editors, who are all extraordinarily different from one another in their sensibilities but all with good taste and good passion.

Robert Greene, coming from this vein of films that are really about the construction of a film and the miseen- scène that goes into filmmaking [Procession, 2021; Kate Plays Christine, 2016]; Charlie Shackleton, having simultaneously been embroiled in his own true crime pastiche [Zodiac Killer Project, 2025]; Erin Casper, a brilliant editor [Fire of Love, 2022] who I just knew would be able to have an ability to make a true crime thing, which was the last thing I wanted to try to do on my own; and Nicolás Staffolani, a filmmaker [and editor of Cold Case Hammarskjöld, 2019] based in Copenhagen, who was able to look at the nuances of this show with fresh eyes and not see it as something American, but something truly alien. Having those four voices was vital for me because I couldn’t be on my own for this one.

D: This film is bigger than any of the other films that you’ve directed. You also worked with a team of producers, other cinematographers, and camera assistants on various shoots. What did this increased scale bring to this production?

DO: My next film is back to the way I made Mayor. It’ll be me, and I’m sure I’ll show cuts to a couple of friends down the road again.

Predators has to feel like a true crime movie, or else the illusion won’t work. So I genuinely just felt that I had to cosplay as a true crime film director. I guess that means I need to have a bigger team, have a DP shooting it instead of me, or rent lights.

This idea of this film being about how all of us, all filmmakers, audiences, journalists, are all part of this cycle of hurt, whether we want to be or not? I couldn’t go on that journey unless I built the house correctly, and the house had to look right. I don’t think a film can change your mind, but I think it can change something deeper inside of you than your mind.

D: Your film addresses why shows like To Catch a Predator are bad at helping viewers think differently. But for the really, really hard questions, documentaries are also bad at addressing the why. They don’t quite seem to be living up to the current moment. There are more documentaries being made than ever, and suffering persists. What exactly is the utility of the feature-length documentary form to you?

DO: Imagine if you swapped out the word documentary for the word art. What is the utility of art? What I mean is, what’s the utility of asking questions of the world we live in, of deciding that we’re not necessarily happy with how we treat each other, or questioning the idea that there’s not one moral stance about what is good and evil or right and wrong?

This film came from a place of deep disaffection with what the commodification of media has done. But it also comes from feeling a deep sadness at our society’s inability to find empathy for people and its desire to shun those who try to. Nothing is more indefensible than being a child predator. It’s not about whether we care about what happens to these people. How do we live in a society that can find a way to make someone into an evil entity? We’re doing that on massive scales all the time. There’s a genocide happening. We’re in a situation where all it takes is the side with power to be able to construct an identity of the people being killed and say that it’s justified.

I have to believe that we would be a better society if we saw people with nuance, and I think our media would be better if it did the same. I want to make more films that do that. The utility is that I’m just trying to make the world I believe in..

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These documentary filmmakers work in conditions where the act of bearing witness carries profound personal risk—from Mstyslav Chernov’s frontline transformation to Brent Renaud’s death in Ukraine to Petra Costa facing threats for documenting Brazilian authoritarianism. In California’s San Quentin prison, the power to document becomes contested terrain where institutional forces seek to control or exploit the stories being told. The four pieces in this section examine how documentarians navigate physical danger, political pressure, and systemic exploitation while maintaining their commitment to truth-telling, and how these extreme conditions are reshaping documentary practice itself.

Sonya Vseliubska is a Ukrainian film journalist and scholar based in the UK. She is a staff writer for Ukrainska Pravda , the country’s leading online newspaper. Her writings on film have also been featured in Modern Times Review, e-flux, Filmmaker Magazine, and Talking Shorts, among others. Her academic focus lies in Ukrainian war documentaries.

Metric of Loss

Mstyslav Chernov transforms war reporting into immersive cinema in 2000 Meters to Andriivka

By Sonya Vseliubska

Mstyslav Chernov always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker—but its realization came through time and tragedy. After he had spent years in fine art and documentary photography, the 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity redirected Chernov’s focus to conflict reporting, leading him to work as a freelance multiformat journalist for the Associated Press. In 2014, on just the third day of his assignment, Chernov captured the first images of the Russia-downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. Over the next eight years, he worked across continents documenting wars, genocides, political and migration crises, and epidemics— narrowly surviving, even when, in Mosul, a sniper’s bullet pierced his camera and lodged in his gear. But as he would later say in interviews, nothing was comparable to the siege of Mariupol.

In 2022, as Russian forces targeted residential neighborhoods with airstrikes and used starvation as a weapon, Chernov remained in Mariupol with AP colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko filming the living and the dead. Their work not only became the sole professionally documented visual record of Russian war crimes in the city but also brought Chernov international prominence and ultimate recognition with a Pulitzer Prize.

This footage also gave him the bitter opportunity to tr y filmmaking. The film that resulted from cutting together their onthe-ground reporting, 20 Days in Mariupol, premiered at Sundance in 2023. Basing the film on the most dramatic excerpts from the news, Chernov structures it as a 20-day diary, overwhelmed with footage of children’s deaths, makeshift graves, hunger, and shelling—all intensified by dramatic music and his lyrical reflections, both as a war reporter and as a Ukrainian. Its mission was to evoke deep empathy and force attention on Ukraine, which it did with exceptional success, crystalized by copious festival screenings and a number of awards, and eventually bringing the first Oscar for Ukraine. Yet there was a price for

The film is a triumph of digital-age documentary—a convergence of full-scale warfare and the full force of contemporary audiovisual technology, echoing the evolution of the tools used in modern war.

that attention. The film’s deliberate crossing of conventional boundaries in its depiction of human suffering and intentional blurring between journalism and documentary raised concerns among Ukrainian documentarians and some emotional fatigue among the international audience.

If one assumes Chernov simply found himself with unique footage in the right place at the right time—using documentar y as a convenient political vehicle, his new film, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, proves otherwise. When Chernov accepted his Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, he was already developing this new project, which was made with different methods and, unlike 20 Days in Mariupol, was conceived as a film from the very beginning.

Chernov’s second feature covers Ukraine’s 2023 summer counteroffensive, following a platoon whose mission is to cross a heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village. The protagonists are Ukrainian soldiers, whose perspective Chernov centers as the viewer is plunged into the trenches. The film is divided into chapters with titles that count down, by hundreds of meters, the soldiers’ advancement toward Andriivka. Using multiple types of cameras and perspectives, a haunting score composed from the sonic debris of war, and a seamless montage that fuses multiple temporalities, Chernov constructs a highly immersive and unsettling cinematic excursion into the harrowing spatial dimension of war in the heart of Europe.

The film is a triumph of digital-age documentary—a convergence of full-scale warfare and the full force of contemporary audiovisual technology, echoing the evolution

of the tools used in modern war. It also marks the transformation of a war reporter into a film director, whose talent and vision had long awaited their moment. Documentary spoke to Mstyslav Chernov about the incredible craft and personal importance of 2000 Meters to Andriivka. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: You started making 2000 Meters to Andriivka in the summer of 2023, when 20 Days in Mariupol was screening at many festivals and you were giving an enormous number of interviews and panels, followed by an Oscar campaign. Can you guide me through the timeline and how you managed to focus separately on the life of one film and the creation of another?

MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: The trajectory between these two films was strange, sometimes even absurd, as I existed simultaneously in two different worlds: the world of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the world of elegant venues where we premiered and screened 20 Days in Mariupol. The collision of these two worlds brought me to the necessity to make 2000 Meters to Andriivka. In the summer of 2023, people in the U.S. and Europe were discussing the Ukrainian counteroffensive—its scale, the kilometers gained, the names of cities, and the number of casualties Ukraine reported sustaining—but it was all so abstract and detached. I felt almost angry talking to them, as I couldn’t adequately explain how real the situation was. In those days, I would fly from the U.S. back to Poland, and from Poland drive to Kyiv. From Kyiv, I would take a train to Donbas, then a car to the frontline. All of this would happen within 24 hours. So you practically travel back to the other side of the

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planet, almost 100 years back in time. Visually, it felt like the First World War, and the soldiers’ experience also felt like that. Sometimes it felt like another planet.

I decided to focus my next film on the experience of soldiers. 20 Days in Mariupol was a film about the destruction of Mariupol and the impact of war on the civilian population. 2000 Meters to Andriivka is a film about the experience of those civilians who took up arms to protect my homeland. But it is very personal too, as Andriivka is a two-hour drive from my hometown, Kharkiv. Those fields and forests are also where my grandfather fought during the Second World War. It’s located near Bakhmut. Kharkiv Region and Donbas are places where my parents and I used to visit my grandmothers. So there’s a very personal connection to this native land, which has now been mutilated by bombs. It’s no wonder the film is about distance—not only the meters soldiers have to walk in the film, but also my own attempt to shorten the distance between the West and Ukraine.

Above: Suicide drone POV. All images: 2000 Meters to Andriivka. Courtesy of Mstyslav Chernov

Left: Helmet cam. Below: Drone.

D: You entered Andriivka fully aware of your role as a director—and that shift is palpable in the stark contrast of methods between your two films. In 20 Days in Mariupol, you demanded an overwhelming emotional response from the viewer, and it was hard to watch. In 2000 Meters to Andriivka, the subject matter remains just as harrowing, yet I found it more watchable—not because it’s any less urgent, but because you skillfully employ cinematic language to create an almost hypnotic effect. How did you develop the specific form of storytelling and the clear mediation with the viewer?

MC: Indeed, 20 Days in Mariupol began as a series of news dispatches that later became a film. This worked well because one of the themes of this film is journalism and its impact—or sometimes lack of it. In the case of 2000 Meters to Andriivka, it was conceived as a film and shot with filmmaking in mind, so it possesses a more cinematic quality.

If we are working with the medium of cinema, and we are aiming to show the film in theaters and targeting a wide audience, which is a very natural goal for a film director, it is

essential to make sure that people will not turn away. Fortunately, reality provided us with a clear dramatic structure, almost like in scripted cinema: there are protagonists who have a clear goal and there is time pressure and life danger. We just had to make sure that those elements are preserved. Our main goal was to engage the audience, to bring them into the trenches, to let them walk with the soldiers and with me, and to not let them go.

D: I’d like to unpack this immersive quality further by focusing on the use of video formats. Can you tell me how many types of cameras or recording devices you used in the film, and how you worked with that variety of footage during editing?

MC: The war is changing, weaponry is developing, and the tools available to documentary filmmakers attempting to adequately portray war are also expanding. Today, we can realistically portray the actual experience of the soldier on the front line. In the past, the way to portray the experience of a soldier going through, let’s say, the Battle of Verdun in the First World War, was through the paintings of Paul Nash or the writings of Remarque. But now we have tools that are pushing the boundaries of documentary cinema. But you can’t just drop the audience into the chaos of the battle, so we build up to it.

Together with Michelle Mizner, brilliant editor and producer, who has worked with me since 20 Days in Mariupol, we start the film from a very simple, single perspective, and as we go further, we add more and more cameras. By doing so, we are acclimating the audience to multiperception scenes. You can see that the third of “1,000 meters” has two different perspectives—we add the drone footage. The battle of “600 meters” has six different cameras. Two of them are on the battlefield: a bodycam and a 360-degree camera, allowing you to reframe the perspective of the shot in post. There are also two drones, one of which is a suicide drone; two cameras at the headquarters; and a camera on the injured arriving at the hospital. That’s actually seven cameras.

Camera at HQ.

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Drones, infrared, Sony mirrorless, 360 bodycam, GoPro, the occasional smartphone—all of these are in different formats and of different quality, but if introduced gradually, by the middle of the film the audience forgets there is a big visual difference between them.

D: Those camera qualities, combined with an almost fictional dramatic arc, bring us into the territory of the film theory term war spectacle. It can create the sense that we’re spectating a sort of video game. In addition, the use of inhuman, mechanical camera gazes risks dehumanizing the material. You seem aware of that risk and include personal perspectives of the soldiers and yourself. How did you practically deal with the risks of dehumanization and derealization during editing—and were there any ethical boundaries you set in postproduction?

MC: We searched for that thin line of engaging the audience while remaining respectful of all the pain. That’s why the film took so long to edit. War may seem thrilling, but it is a tragedy that should not be romanticized or made to look beautiful. The biggest crime a documentary filmmaker or war reporter can probably commit is to make the audience walk out of the cinema and say, “Ah, that was a beautiful film.” For me, that means they didn’t do a good job.

In that sense, the most difficult parts were, surprisingly, the bodycam footage scenes and its combination with GoPro footage. Initially, we thought that it would be the easiest part for the audience to connect with because you are literally “in the boots” of the soldiers, seeing the world through their eyes. But during the editing, we figured that was not the case. We struggled to find the right length and pace for those scenes. When they were too long, the audience became disengaged and bored. When we cut them too quickly, the audience detached from the experience and felt like they were watching a computer game.

The placement of the scenes within the film was very dependent on that feeling of detachment or attachment to the protagonist. The problem with bodycam footage is that you rarely see faces. There isn’t much talk on the

battlefield. We knew that if we don’t show the faces through whose eyes we later see the battle, the audience will not connect to them. That’s a problem. Especially for audiences who, unlike Ukrainians, have no stakes in this war. Add the fact that, to the untrained eye, soldiers in uniforms all kind of look the same.

The solution was to find those conversations that would reflect normal civilian life, something that is natural for us as humans to talk about, rather than big ideas or patriotic views. When you do that, then the rest of the film becomes more relatable, human. The audience sees a civilian who’s thinking about his cigarettes, about fixing the toilet at home, or the university that he has enrolled in and couldn’t finish because of the war. Small things to the world, but huge to us, and then everything else around just falls into the right place.

D: The music in the film clearly supports the audiovisual, never allowing the viewer to relax, since any kind of synchrony or catharsis only happens at the end. How did you work on the audio layer of the film in relation to the editing process?

MC: The original score was written by Sam Slater, an amazing composer, who is now a good friend. One of the first questions Sam asked me was, “What is the genre of this film?” I explained that for me, 20 Days in Mariupol is a horror film, so we searched for a composer who specializes in horror films, and Jordan Dykstra did amazing

work on it. In 2000 Meters to Andriivka’s case, I was searching for someone who could create an action thriller, but a highly realistic one. A music that would correspond to the auditory experience of being on the battlefield.

I love Sam’s work on Chernobyl (2019) and how he created music from the sounds of a nuclear reactor. I wanted 2000 Meters to Andriivka to have music that reflects what the war feels and sounds like. You don’t hear an orchestra on a battlefield. You hear the whizz of bullets, explosions, the buzzing of drones, and the radio crackling. We decided to incorporate all of those sounds into the score. Sam used the sounds of the battlefield as musical instruments; machine gun bursts became drum sequences, distorted radio transmissions replaced strings. For a while, Sam was looking for a signature sound that appears at the title card and then repeats throughout the film. He and Jakob Vasak, music producer of the film, created an entirely new musical instrument, the Kobophone [a DIY

feedback module that amplifies the percussive elements of the score and distorts sounds, turning them into chaotic growls].

Lastly, to preser ve a feeling of “rawness” of the material, I decided not to use a sound designer on this film. Everything you hear is recorded by the cameras on the battlefield, which means the music takes on the weight of creating the sound landscape of this reality.

D: Speaking broadly about the whole experience of the post and production process—can you now trace your transformation from war reporter to film director?

MC: Before becoming a journalist, I always wanted to be a film director. Journalism felt like the right path when the Revolution of Dignity and then Russian invasion in Ukraine began. But my experience in Mariupol marked a turning point. It was just the right moment

Image credit: AP

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to transition from journalism to filmmaking. It wasn’t just about fulfilling a long-held dream; I feel that films in general are more impactful nowadays. Political, emotional, historical impact and the way we preserve memory. Journalism was attacked and keeps being discredited, and I see that people don’t trust facts anymore. But I see that people are still able to emotionally connect to the films. I guess that’s the medium I want to work with, and this is what I will continue to do.

D: I wanted to touch on the political comment you personally convey via voiceover about the exhaustion and even hopelessness of this war. Back in 2023, that would have been called pessimistic, but now I would rather call it realistic. How did this rhetoric build up, and does the condition on the frontline shape it?

MC: I believe this is a natural progression of what I felt about war and humans at war even before 20 Days. I have been through six wars—Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, NagornoKarabakh, and Ukraine—and I hate war with every fiber of my being. Yet I find it important to talk about it, though I have no illusions about what we can or cannot achieve with a camera. The only thing we can do is ensure that reality is recorded and reflected back to people. And this is not just a personal work but also the work of a collective. All the Ukrainian film directors we see this year at festivals are now engaged in this collective effort of preserving the country’s struggle and the transformation its society is undergoing. Everyone is bringing their brick to build this building.

Personally, I do not find 2000 Meters to Andriivka pessimistic; it reflects my dark view of the nature of war I experienced. I tried to balance my personal view of war with the very

Helmet cam. Image credit: AP

different, much more hopeful and stronger vision of Ukrainian soldiers fighting on the front line. Fortunately, they don’t see war as I see it. And if they did, there would be no Ukraine. Even though we know this is a war for our survival and Ukrainian soldiers are heroes, when we show war to the world, we have to walk on thin ice and maintain that balance between glorifying the war and honoring the experiences of Ukrainian soldiers.

D: And if we talk about the realistic state of the contemporary Ukrainian documentary and its collective work, as you describe it, what, in your opinion, is its strength today, and what challenges is it time for it to face?

MC: Fortunately or not—the discussion about the direction of Ukrainian cinema falls on academics and critics. But I think the world’s best art wasn’t created by attempting to be part of a movement, but rather by navigating in the dark, trying to figure out the way to express what artists lived through. Ukrainian cinema is now facing a difficult time for many reasons. Many filmmakers and members of their teams went to fight the invasion. Some were killed. Some left the country.

Another reason is our conscious rejection of the Soviet Union’s legacy. No cultural movement, especially cinema that so heavily relies on tradition, can exist in a vacuum. It exists as a flow. I feel that most of the Ukrainian documentary and fiction filmmakers are rejecting the Soviet Union’s legacy. We found ourselves in this strange position of starting everything from scratch. The demand is high, resources are available. However, we still need to develop our unique language. How do we speak about war? How do we speak about the transformation of society? Our traumas? And also, how do we speak about topics unrelated to war? How do we talk about love, friendship, identity, beauty? There are so many important things besides our fight for survival. And we need to learn how to talk about them when this war is finally over..

Lauren Wissot is a film critic and journalist, filmmaker and programmer, and a contributing editor at both Filmmaker magazine and Documentary magazine. She also writes regularly for Modern Times Review and has served as the director of programming at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.

Ripple Effect

Brent and Craig Renaud risked their lives to make vérité documentary journalism—after Brent’s death, Craig honored his life with a new film

By Lauren Wissot

Sacrificing one’s life for a higher cause is not a lone pursuit. Heroes are shaped and buoyed by supportive families who share the risks—emotionally if not always physically—alongside their loved ones. It’s a painful truth that resonates throughout Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud, a brutal and beautiful 37-minute tribute from Craig Renaud to his elder sibling and lifelong filmmaking partner, who was gunned down by Russian soldiers at the start of the fullscale invasion of Ukraine.

The film itself embodies the vérité principles the brothers championed throughout their career. Built from footage from the veteran filmmakers’ standouts, such as 2005’s 10-part Discovery series Off to War, it’s also heavily reliant on outtakes from projects like the Chicago-set 2015 Last Chance High and their reporting trips from Central America and Haiti. Due to their vérité commitment, outtakes were often the only way Craig could locate moments with Brent’s voice.

Unsurprisingly, Armed Only With a Camera unfolds without narration or much explanatory text, letting Brent’s work and words speak for themselves. The HBO documentary opens with Brent’s footage from their Central America reporting, as they followed desperate young migrants crossing the river from Guatemala into Mexico, alternating seamlessly between scenes captured by Craig’s lens and Brent’s GoPro. From there it’s on to Honduras, where Brent has a probing conversation with a backpackcarrying teenager, parentless and on his own since the age of 10, who’s fleeing north with the dream of starting “a new family.” As the boy leaves to scale a barbed-wire fence, Brent calls to him, “Be careful. We hope to see you again.”

Cut to a title card reading “Seven years later.” We’re now thrust shaky cam–headlong into “Ukraine 2022,” the sounds of bombs, barking dogs, and air raid sirens portending the tragedy to come. And yet, beyond such

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heart-pounding moments, the film is likewise a treasure trove of intimate glimpses, photos, Super 8 movies of their shared boyhood in the South, and Brent’s touching Nieman Fellowship speech, in which he speaks candidly about his autism. What becomes clear is that the Renauds’ collaboration is an intertwining of the personal and the professional, a partnership in which the two siblings became one, which makes the film’s most devastating sequence all the more heart-wrenching. Bravely, Craig has chosen to actually show Brent’s final moments through the lens of his brother’s own camera (which included speaking gently with shell-shocked civilians as they sifted through the rubble of their homes), followed by the aftermath: Brent’s body covered by a blue tarp on a Ukrainian street. Juan Arredondo, an American photojournalist, was also gravely injured during the same attack.

As Craig explained on a panel at SXSW 2025, where the film premiered, “it’s important to show what violence and war do to people. […] Why should it be any different for journalists?” He also discussed how the documentary traces Brent’s evolution from a quiet sociology graduate student to a fearless chronicler of human suffering. Their mother Georgann, a mental health professional, revealed how Brent’s autism allowed him to remain calm in war zones while finding Brooklyn dinner parties absolutely terrifying.

Top: Craig Renaud (L) and Brent Renaud (R) at a SXSW 2017 panel for Meth Storm

All images courtesy of the Renaud family

Bottom: Brent and Craig fishing in 1980.

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The spot- on title comes from DCTV co-founder Jon Alpert’s eulogy for Brent at his funeral (attended by family, friends, dogs, and documentary participants), which appears in the film along with footage of Alpert and Brent in Afghanistan for 2002’s Afghanistan: From Ground Zero to Ground Zero. Alpert, no stranger to losing beloved colleagues in the field, also served as the film’s hands-on EP—watching every cut through to final assembly, and helping Craig to “stay on message,” as the grieving sibling puts it. It was necessary to strike the right balance between the brothers’ work together as a team, and Craig’s journey to bring Brent home and continue on alone.

Even so, the documentar y expands beyond personal tribute into a meditation on all conflict zone journalists and victims of war; it becomes both a mirror of the brothers’ working methodology and a final collaboration between them, one that asks whether vérité work can survive in an era of increasingly dangerous and underfunded documentary work. Armed Only With a Camera airs on October 21, 2025. It’s a powerful end to the Renaud brothers’ award-winning oeuvre—recipients of Peabody, duPont-Columbia, and Edward R. Murrow awards—though thankfully for the world, Craig and Brent’s ripple effect carries on.

Top: Craig Renaud filming Dope Sick Love Image credit: Josh Miller

Bottom: Craig Renaud, Guatemala border. Image credit: Renaud brothers

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The mission ThaT would define both their careers began decades ago when the Little Rock–raised siblings discovered DCTV in New York, after Brent received his master’s in sociology from Columbia. They were drawn to what Alpert calls “the sort of everyday work” the center was doing within the community—a grassroots approach to storytelling that prioritized access and intimacy over production value and celebrity subjects.

“They struck me as ver y smart, very hardworking, and compassionate in an extraordinary way,” Alpert recalls, when Documentary caught up with him by phone after SXSW. “People could feel their compassion, which enabled them to do things others normally wouldn’t get to do.” This emotional intelligence became the brothers’ secret weapon, allowing them to gain the trust of subjects others couldn’t reach—from meth-addicted families in rural Arkansas to soldiers preparing for deployment in Iraq.

The brothers stood out among other reporters, who would “parachute in and be more concerned about themselves, their own face time, than the people who were really suffering,” Alpert notes. The Renauds’ approach was the opposite. They embedded themselves completely in their subjects’ lives.

Their compassion didn’t eliminate sibling rivalry, however. Alpert recalls the two bickering about who would accompany him to the most dangerous places around the world. While preparing for Afghanistan: From Ground Zero to Ground Zero, Brent “pulled rank” on Craig with the declaration, “I’m the older brother, so I get to go.”

Under Alpert’s mentorship, the brothers learned that true vérité filmmaking required more than just rolling cameras. “It’s not like, ‘add water and you’re a documentary filmmaker,’” Alpert continues. “You have to make lots of mistakes and paint yourself into corners and figure out how to get out of them.” The learning curve was steep, but the brothers proved themselves willing students, absorbing not just technical skills but the ethical framework that would guide their approach to filming people in crisis.

The turning point came with 2005’s Dope Sick Love, the Renauds’ gut-punch feature debut following drug-addicted couples on NYC streets. “That’s a really, really hard film to make,” Alpert stresses. “The main characters were fullthrottle drug addicts in the throes of their addiction. Their lives were filled with their own personal challenges, and that presents challenges when you’re following them.” The film required the brothers to navigate the unpredictable world of severe addiction while maintaining their subjects’ dignity and humanity.

Brent (R) and Craig (L) Renaud. Iraq, 2004.

Image credit: Brent Stirton

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Initially pitched to Alpert, who declined after the emotional toll of his own Life of Crime trilogy (the first two parts were finished in 1989 and 1998), he recommended the untested brothers to HBO’s Sheila Nevins instead. It was a gamble that paid off spectacularly, launching the Renauds’ career and establishing their signature style. As Alpert observes, the film has “no music, no narration, and no cards,” which was unusual for an HBO documentary. “Sheila was forcing us to write books at the beginning of these shows! I told them, ‘Guys, nothing. Nothing except what’s in front of the camera. You’ve got to figure it out.’ And they did. I thought that was amazing.”

This vérité approach defined the brothers’ methodology throughout their career, creating both their greatest successes and their most harrowing experiences. From Off to War—which Craig calls their most challenging project “second to the film about Brent”—to their duPont-Columbia Award–winning Surviving Haiti’s Earthquake: Children (2011) for the New York Times, the brothers consistently chose the most dangerous stories to tell.

Off to War exemplifies their immersive style and showcases the advantages of their Arkansas roots. The project was a nonstop two-year commitment: a full year embedded with the Arkansas National Guard in Iraq, six months of pre-deployment training, and six months documenting soldiers’ reintegration into civilian life. The hometown connection proved crucial for access. Despite the troops having Army-issued talking points for media encounters, “they would turn around and come up to us and talk like we were close friends,” Craig recalls, laughing at the memory.

The series captured not just the obvious drama of combat but the quieter moments that revealed character: soldiers calling home, struggling with equipment, forming bonds that would sustain them through trauma. It was the kind of long-form storytelling that required the subjects to forget the cameras were there, a trust the brothers earned through their consistent presence and genuine concern for the soldiers’ welfare.

Haiti proved even more emotionally and physically demanding. The brothers had been in the countr y covering upcoming elections for the New York Times when the earthquake struck. They were in the Times office putting final touches on a documentary about the country’s “turning a corner,” when the paper’s Dave Rummel, who was then the senior producer of news and documentary, asked them to return immediately for a vastly different story. This juxtaposition—from hope to catastrophe—would become emblematic of their career.

Craig found himself crossing the Dominican border into Haiti within 24 hours after the earthquake, before any

This vérité approach defined the brothers’ methodology throughout their career, creating both their greatest successes and their most harrowing experiences.

Top: Brent (R) and Craig Renaud (L) editing in Iraq, 2004. Image credit: Brent Stirton

Bottom: Young Brent holding a camera. Image credit: Renaud brothers

Facing page: Brent Renaud filming in Cité Soleil, Haiti. Image credit: Renaud brothers

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Western help had arrived. “There were bodies piled in the streets, and people with open wounds and amputations walking around, having no idea where to go,” he says, his voice still carrying the shock of that initial encounter. Meanwhile, Brent embedded with the Navy hospital ship Comfort, documenting the medical response from a different angle. The brothers’ ability to coordinate coverage while working separately demonstrated their mature partnership and shared editorial vision.

While other journalists focused on death tolls and political implications, the Renauds zeroed in on individual survival stories, specifically on two injured Haitian children who had remarkably lived through the disaster. These young survivors became flesh-and-blood embodiments of the nation’s resilience, their personal struggles illuminating larger truths about human endurance. “We always tried to find stories that took you much deeper,” Craig explains, a philosophy that required an emotional investment that took its toll on the filmmakers.

The Haiti assignment also revealed how the brothers’ compassionate approach sometimes led them into ethically complex territory. When Craig’s fixer asked if they might search for his family first, the line between journalism and

humanitarian aid blurred. These moments—captured in their footage but rarely discussed publicly—demonstrated the impossible choices facing conflict journalists who care deeply about their subjects.

The broThers’ meThodology raises urgent questions about the future of conflict zone vérité journalism in America. Their approach required resources and commitment that seem increasingly impossible in today’s media landscape. Were any other American directors following in their “immersive narrative nonfiction” footsteps, as Craig has always categorized their work?

“I don’t know of anyone who’s done it as consistently and for as long as we were up until the point Brent was killed,” Craig admits, though he notes Sebastian Junger (Restrepo, 2010) had taken a similar approach to conflict journalism.

The scarcity of practitioners reflects the method’s demands. True immersive journalism requires serious time commitment, dramatically increasing both physical risk and financial cost—luxuries few independent filmmakers can afford in an era of shrinking budgets and shortened attention spans. “It only cost us a plane ticket

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and our time,” Craig stresses, but that simplicity belies the enormous personal investment required.

What set the Renauds apart was their complete selfsufficiency. “The ability to do everything ourselves” made their approach financially viable, Craig explains. From initial development and field production to postproduction and final edit, the siblings functioned as a two-person crew that never needed to hire additional staff. While this type of small production still exists, it’s become a far less common way of working in commercial documentaries slated for broadcast and cable. Though born of necessity, this efficiency became their competitive advantage, allowing them to stay in the field longer than crews dependent on larger budgets.

“Brent always said the edit is what makes the difference,” Craig highlights as another crucial aspect of their process. While many directors still choose to shoot their own footage, few also handle the complex work of story assembly. The brothers understood that their raw material—often hundreds of hours of footage from months

or years in the field—only gained meaning through careful editorial choices. “We don’t follow a schedule, we follow the story,” was another Brent mantra, according to Arredondo, emphasizing their commitment to organic narrative development.

Their mentor’s influence remained constant throughout their evolution. With Alpert as their guide, the goal was to be “as pure vérité filmmakers as we could possibly be.” This uncompromising technique extended all the way to 2017’s Meth Storm, their final major collaboration, in which the brothers maintained their immersive approach while adapting to new realities. The project found them deeply embedded with two sides of the drug crisis in rural Arkansas—from intergenerational users and dealers to the local DEA agents who knew them all by name. But this time the story was in their “backyard,” allowing Craig to go home at night, given his growing responsibility to his young family and a recognition that the physical and emotional toll of their work had accumulated over two decades.

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Craig and a rredondo plan to continue as filmmaking partners, but Craig has no immediate plans to return to conflict zones. But “never say never,” he allows, acknowledging that his trip to Ukraine to retrieve Brent’s body was a nightmare no one could have predicted. The hedged response reflects both the unpredictable nature of global events and the magnetic pull that conflict journalism exerts on those who understand its importance.

Arredondo himself embodies the continued commitment to this dangerous work. After undergoing 13 operations in the span of a year following the attack that killed Brent, he jumped at the chance to take on a New York Times assignment in his home country of Colombia, taking his colostomy bag along without telling the Times His determination validates Alpert’s observation that “once you see the horror of war, it gets inside you like nothing else can. And you’re determined at any cost to help people understand the horrors of war.”

March 13, 2025, marked the third anniversary of Brent’s death, but for Craig, who created Armed Only With a Camera both as loving tribute and psychological survival

mechanism, it has felt like one continuous three-yearlong day. The film serves multiple functions: memorial, manifesto, and maybe most importantly, a master class in the vérité approach that fewer and fewer filmmakers are willing or able to practice. In an era of remote interviews, archival storytelling, and docutainment, their commitment to physical presence and emotional investment seems almost quaint. Craig’s decision to show the ultimate cost of their chosen profession ensures that Armed Only With a Camera functions as both celebration and warning. The pool of practitioners willing to risk everything for the story grows smaller with each passing year..

Facing page: Brent Renaud filming in Ukraine, 2022. Image credit: Juan Arredondo

Brent Renaud in 2011. Image credit: Renaud brothers

Petra Costa’s new documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics explores the “fatal marriage” between Christian nationalism and authoritarian politics

By Bernardo Ruiz

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Bernardo Ruiz is a three-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker and recent Documentary Film Fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. For IDA’s Documentary he has previously interviewed Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar on The Silence of Others and Everardo Gonzalez on The Devil’s Freedom.

In the opening moments of Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics (2024), a short history of Brazil’s capital, Brasília, representing the country’s hopes of modernity and progress, is immediately followed by a scene of evangelical members of Brazil’s Congress gathering in the main chamber of the National Assembly. Around a dozen members hold hands as they pray for the impeachment of then-President Dilma Rousseff and her “evil” government. The scene, filmed during the production of Costa’s previous documentary The Edge of Democracy (2019), becomes more than prophetic. Released globally on Netflix on July 14, Apocalypse in the Tropics traces the explosive growth of Christian nationalism that would help sweep Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency and threaten the country’s democratic institutions.

Through voiceover, Costa argues that evangelical Christianity, which has grown from 5% of Brazil’s population four decades ago to more than 30% today, is a political force that has fundamentally reshaped Brazilian politics. The film follows the bombastic evangelical pastor Silas Malafaia through vérité sequences on his private jet, at home sipping coffee, and boasting how he has pressured former President Bolsonaro. The scenes reveal Malafaia’s role as a behind-the-scenes kingmaker who helped engineer Bolsonaro’s rise.

Costa’s narration weaves through these contemporary scenes with a voice that shifts between historical analysis, poetic reflection, and personal confession. Different chapters in the film guide viewers through the theological roots of Christian nationalism (a throughline from 19thcentury Ireland to Billy Graham and his historic visit to Brazil); Costa’s own earnest study of religious theory as someone raised without religion; and the suppression of liberation theology—a Catholic movement popular in Latin America that championed the poor—and its replacement with prosperity gospel messaging. Asked by Costa about why evangelical Christianity has experienced such tremendous growth in Brazil, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva offers the following story:

A worker loses his job and goes to the union. The union leader says, “Comrade, you need to get organized in the factory. Once we’re organized, we’ll have to go on a strike, and we’ll have to fight, and protest because of capitalism...”

The worker says, “I came here because I lost my job, and this guy wants me to start a revolution.”

So he leaves… and visits the Catholic Church… The priest says, “Yes, my son, you must suffer on earth to gain the Kingdom of Heaven. That’s life. Heaven belongs to the poor...”

Facing page: A toppled statue in Brasília on January 8, 2023.

Image credit: Busca Vida Filmes All stills courtesy of Netflix

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The worker says, “I just came here to say I’m unemployed.”

Then the guy goes to Prosperity Theology church, where [the pastor] explains in two words: “The problem is the devil, and the solution is Jesus. It’s so simple. You’re unemployed because the devil has entered your life, but Jesus will fix it for you.”

And the guy is comforted because someone says he has a chance.

The competing visions of the evangelical promise of earthly favor for the faithful versus liberation theology’s call to aid the oppressed are made clear in the documentary’s most harrowing sequences, which document Brazil’s catastrophic response to COVID-19 under Bolsonaro’s leadership. Combining found footage and archival material with her narration, Costa shows how evangelical pastors simultaneously provided aid to desperate communities while spreading pandemic denialism, resulting in over 700,000 Brazilian dead. Apocalypse in the Tropics builds toward the January 8, 2023, attack on Brazil’s federal government buildings in Brasília by a mob of Bolsonaro supporters—a scene that will feel strikingly familiar to U.S. viewers who witnessed and experienced similar scenes at the U.S. Capitol two years earlier. Further cementing these parallels are President Trump’s summer 2025 announcements of 50% tariffs on all Brazilian imports, partly in response to what he sees as a “witch hunt” against his political ally Bolsonaro, who currently faces criminal charges for allegedly plotting a coup after losing the 2022 presidential election.

Costa’s narration weaves through these contemporary scenes with a voice that shifts between historical analysis, poetic reflection, and personal confession.

As with Costa’s Oscar-nominated The Edge of Democracy (which broke viewership records on Netflix Brazil), the film operates on both intimate and epic political scales, examining how an anti-democratic far right reshapes individual lives and national destinies. A day after Trump’s tariff announcement, I spoke with Costa about the theological underpinnings of authoritarianism, the global reach of American evangelical influence, and why she believes “courage is demanded from us” in defending democratic institutions. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: What is the connecting thread between The Edge of Democracy and Apocalypse in the Tropics?

PETRA COSTA: Brazilian democracy and I have almost the same age, and I thought that in our 30s, we would be standing on solid ground. Not only was I mistaken and a huge crisis in Brazilian democracy began at that moment, but that crisis has just intensified in the years after with the election of Bolsonaro [in 2018] and with the rise of a theology that we’ve been investigating, which is called dominion theology, that wants to basically take over the three branches of government.

During the filming of The Edge of D emocracy, I filmed Pastor Silas Malafaia performing what he calls a prophetic act in front of the National Congress. One prophecy in this act was that God would take over the three branches of government.

I had promised myself that I would not make a sequel about B olsonaro’s government because it’s really exhausting for the soul. But in 2020, when the pandemic began, I could not help but film that moment. I think it was the most tragic moment in our history that I have witnessed, where 700,000 people died. Half of those deaths were completely avoidable. What became evident was the omnipresence of evangelical pastors. They were giving assistance to people, like physical medical assistance and spiritual help in this moment of despair. But some pastors were also really going into a denialist speech, keeping their churches open, saying that Jesus would cure COVID. Many of them were inspired by that same pastor I had filmed in front of Congress, Silas Malafaia.

Facing page: Petra Costa in July 2025.

Photo by Bron Moyi Location: Vista House, Los Angeles

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D: In that section of your film, during the early stages of the pandemic, in response to concerns about COVID, President Bolsonaro says, “Well, we’re all going to die.” It immediately brought to mind how U.S. Republican Senator Joni Ernst, a member of an evangelical church, recently responded to constituent concerns about Medicaid cuts. She said, “Well, we all are going to die.”

PC: This is why I wanted to make this film, because I wanted to understand how Christians can back a president who shows such little regard for human life. And what the investigation of this film took me to was the Book of Revelation, the foundational book for Christian fundamentalism, and specifically a reading of it by a 19thcentury Irish pastor, John Nelson Darby. Before Darby, many Christians believed that they had to create peace on earth for Jesus to return. Darby shifted that reading and said, “No, the world is going towards chaos and doom. And Jesus will arrive the faster the apocalypse arrives.” That

created an apocalyptic thought that really spread through America after the Civil War, specifically in the South, and would then go to Brazil and shape our politics.

In this vision, Christ is not that compassionate savior of love thy neighbor, but he’s actually coming down to the earth as a general who will banish all the nonbelievers to hell and send the true believers to this dome in the sky. That thought has coalesced with a far right that also believes the weak should perish and the strong should survive. And that’s the fatal marriage that we’re witnessing.

President Jair Bolsonaro, running for reelection, during a live interview at the headquarters of SBT television. Image credit: Francisco Proner

The film has three layers. One of the layers is Brazilian politics and this marriage of religion and politics as it played out in the last four years in Brazil. Another layer is why did it come, and what is the theological thought behind it? And inside that layer is the genesis of how it came from the United States to Brazil.

D: What about liberation theology as a countervailing force to the Christian nationalist right? There is a section about it in the film.

PC: The film has three layers. One of the layers is Brazilian politics and this marriage of religion and politics as it played out in the last four years in Brazil. Another layer is why did it come, and what is the theological thought behind it? And inside that layer is the genesis of how it came from the United States to Brazil. And that’s completely tied to the story of liberation theology and how liberation theology was spreading in the ’60s through Latin America. Liberation theology is very tied to several progressive movements, Leftist movements. In Brazil, it’s very tied to the origin of the Workers’ Party. Lula himself was friends with many liberation theology priests. Their vision was of a Jesus that is there to help liberate the oppressed from inequality, from the horrible conditions of life, which is the case in Brazil until today. When we investigated, we found that both Kissinger and Nixon stated that liberation theology was a threat to American interests in Latin America. The pope even silenced many liberation theology priests. The movement kind of died, but then these counter-movements surged.

Most people say these are just conspiracy theories, but this is a discovery from our investigative journalist, Nicolás Iglesias from Uruguay. Working with us, he found these unreported documents showing that “the fellowship,” also known as “the family” [a conservative Christianity that wields influence in Washington], was sending missionaries to the Brazilian Congress to evangelize. And there’s that trip by Billy Graham to Brazil in 1974 that, by the order of the military dictatorship, was shown on all TV channels. That’s one of the reasons why you see a surge in evangelicals. Some call it the fastest religious shift in history outside of wars and revolutions.

D: In terms of the vérité material, why does someone like Malafaia want to participate?

PC: Malafaia speaks often to the press and to all kinds of press. I think he sees himself as an evangelist who has to spread his gospel, whatever form it takes, and for that reason he was happy to give us access throughout this entire time. It was harder to get access to Lula, even though Lula appeared in The Edge of Democracy. Our intention was also to accompany Lula during this time, but that proved impossible. It took us a year and a half to get one interview.

D: The film shows Lula going from saying he doesn’t want to “campaign in the church” to being prayed over by evangelicals, including a child pastor. How critical was that support to his election win?

PC: All the polls show that that support was critical, and that if he didn’t do that gesture he would probably have lost. Though it didn’t change that much because in the end, 70% of evangelicals voted for Bolsonaro. That’s more than any other segment if you include race, gender, class. Evangelicals continue to disapprove of Lula’s government because prominent evangelical leaders in Brazil continue to be very aligned with the far right, as no other president gave them so much access to power as Bolsonaro has.

D: On the one hand, this is a political story with global implications. I’m thinking of [Argentine President] Javier Milei, President Trump, and Elon Musk, for example. But you also have a very specific POV and a reflective or meditative approach to the story.

PC: Yes, my films were very personal. My first film, Elena (2012), is about the death of my sister and my coming to terms with that grief, that pain of losing a sister, and the trauma. My second film, Olmo and the Seagull (2014), is

It’s in these times that the most courage is demanded from us, even if we’re going to be called traitors of the nation, even if they will call for prison.

An evangelical revival meeting.

A smashed window in Brasília on January 8, 2023.

Image credit: Busca Vida Filmes

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about the confusion of becoming a mother, even though I wasn’t a mother when I made it. You can think of my most recent films as films about how you lose your own identity and how to come to terms with that.

B oth The Edge of Democracy and Apocalypse in the Tropics are about losing democracy and the pain of losing your own democracy. I saw many people around the world expressing that feeling. I am thinking of a British author called Tom Whyman expressing his pain of living through Brexit, a citizen who thought democracy was their birthright, who thought the future would be one where we would have more, and suddenly we’re entering a rabbit hole that is taking us back. Not only to times of fascism as we as humanity lived in the 1920s, but to the Middle Ages—presidents are trying to become divine rulers and pushing our countries toward theocracy.

D: Are there lessons that we can draw from the recent experience of Brazil?

PC: The main lesson is do not capitulate. It is leaning into fear and not backing away from it that has led humanity to bend towards justice. It’s in these times that the most courage is demanded from us, even if we’re going to be called traitors of the nation, even if they will call for prison. The more we capitulate, the faster they will manage to really execute what they want, which is censorship..

Presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at a campaign event with evangelical Christian supporters. Image credit: Francisco Proner

Steve Brooks is an award-winning journalist with bylines in TIME, Prism, Bay City News Foundation’s Local News Matters, Sports Illustrated, and more. He is the former editor-in-chief of San Quentin News, a fellow with California Local News Fellowship, and a cofounder of the People in Blue, a group of incarcerated people who helped create Governor Newsom’s Reimagine San Quentin report.

The Price of Recognition

Two award-winning incarcerated filmmakers discovered that their success at the first San Quentin Film Festival came with strings attached, when the nonprofit that provided their equipment demanded they sign away all ownership rights

By Steve Brooks

Last October, Louis Sale and Bernard Raheem Ballard accepted awards for their films at the first San Quentin Film Festival. Like many emerging filmmakers, Sale and Ballard accepted their film festival awards with eyes wide open to the possibility of what these achievements signaled for the trajectory of their lives. The two were from the famous Media Center of San Quentin, California’s oldest prison.

After the festival, Sale was approached by a buyer who wanted to turn his film into a blockbuster movie. Ballard was awarded a US$10,000 grant for future film projects and learned that his film was under consideration to be shown on PBS.

A week later, that possibility evaporated.

The purpose of bringing a film festival inside San Quentin Rehabilitation Center was to give industr y insiders an opportunity to see the creativity and value of the work incarcerated people could create. The film festival also gave incarcerated filmmakers the opportunity to compete with people in the outside world to prove their value and get an opportunity to receive fair and equal pay and treatment from the film industry. With Governor Gavin Newsom’s promise of a California model, and California voters about to vote on a proposition concerning involuntary servitude, the political stakes were high.

San Quentin Film Festival was created by Cori Thomas, a longtime prison volunteer, and Rahsaan “New York” Thomas (unrelated), a formerly incarcerated person, two people who understood the importance of the political moment. R. Thomas had a lot of experience producing

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award-winning media while inside San Quentin. During the festival, he shared from the stage that

while incarcerated, I was a Pulitzer prize finalist with Ear Hustle podcast…[and] published 42 stories in 31 months in major publications through creating the Empowerment Avenue program. I co-starred in the documentary film 26.2 to Life: Inside the San Quentin Marathon, a film about the transformative power of the SQ 1000 Mile Running Club. I also produced my own documentary called Friendly Signs, which focuses on an incarcerated man who learns sign language to communicate with his brother.

According to Thomas, as a result of his media production work, after he was released from prison he had plenty of cash in the bank , which made for a much smoother transition compared to others who left prison with only the US$200 worth of gate money provided by the prison. Thomas affirmed that he co-created the San Quentin Film Festival in hopes of inspiring Hollywood elites to see the humanity and skill of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. He also challenged those present at the festival to help campaign for fair and equal opportunities for employment and pay, not only for those reentering society but also for those still in prison.

Last October’s first edition was a two-day premiere event. Guests included comedians W. Kamau Bell and Jerry Seinfeld, actor Kerry Washington, and Cord Jefferson, who won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction (2023). The infamous prison’s garden chapel was transformed into a darkened theater with a huge movie projection screen, where invited guests sat among a packed crowd of reporters, Hollywood insiders, prison volunteers, officers, and incarcerated people.

The crowd viewed critically acclaimed films about prisons, such as Sing Sing (2023), Greg Kwedar’s Oscarnominated adaptation of the true story of a theater troupe inside a prison; The Strike (2024, which was an IDA Enterprise grantee), JoeBill Muñoz and Lucas Guilkey’s film about a coordinated prisoner hunger strike that shut down one of the largest supermax facilities in the country; and Daughters (2024), Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s documentary about four little girls preparing for a dance with their fathers, who are incarcerated in a D.C. jail. An audience Q&A session with directors, producers, and even some actors followed each film.

The San Quentin Film Festival set itself apart from other prison education initiatives by including a competition section for films made by incarcerated

individuals. Many incarcerated filmmakers walked away as winners. Sale and Ballard stood out.

Sale won the Best Short Documentar y Film Award from IDA (which publishes Documentary) for his film Healing Through Hula, featuring shirtless men with glazed muscles in red pa’u skirts who chant, dance, and celebrate their culture while residing inside the barbed-wired Bastille by the Bay. Ballard won both the IDA Supported Artist Award and the American Documentary OSF Short Film Award for his film Dying Alone, which follows three elderly men who are seriously ill and have filed petitions for compassionate releases.

The undercurrent of D ying Alone is the rising health care costs of an aging prison population and questions about how public safety is served by keeping people locked up who are disabled and near death. The main protagonist is a frail Hispanic man lying in his prison cell with oxygen tubes in his nose. He has been given a diagnosis of less than a year to live. Another man needs a walker to get around, while still another needs a cane and wears a highvisibility yellow vest to alert staff that he cannot hear well and is mobility impaired. “The prospect of dying alone in prison inspired me to make this film,” said Ballard when accepting the award. He was 22 years into a 38-to-life sentence when he completed this film.

However, as soon as the movie lights turned back on, Sale and B allard were confronted with a harsh reality. From American Documentary (AmDoc), Asad Muhammad reached out to Ballard with the benefits of his award, which included digital distribution of Dying Alone via AmDoc’s website and Youtube channel, consultations for an impact campaign, and consideration for PBS distribution. But Ballard couldn’t accept. He explains, “I told our sponsor,

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Pollen Initiative, that I had an opportunity to get my film shown on a larger scale. They told me that I had to wait until I get out of prison.”

Sale was told a similar thing. In fact, someone allegedly tried to purchase his film before the film festival. But Sale declined to comment any further on the issue.

The Contract Controversy

Pollen Initiative, formerly known as Friends of San Quentin News, is the nonprofit organization that pays for some of the cameras and equipment the media workers use to make their films. According to several sources connected to the media center, who wish to remain anonymous, Pollen doesn’t want media tools they purchase used for any personal ventures that don’t benefit the organization itself. Ballard says he informed AmDoc’s Muhammad that due to institutional restrictions, he couldn’t fulfill any contract at the time.

What happened next concerned Ballard. An employee from Pollen Initiative allegedly came into the Media Center and told him to sign a contract. “They told me that the contract is just to prevent any future problems similar to what happened with my film and Healing Through Hula,” he said. “The contract required me to relinquish ownership rights and any right to compensation for my film in perpetuity.”

A copy of the contract from Pollen Initiative confirms Ballard’s concerns. The contract reads in part:

I understand and accept that any work created at San Quentin using the facilities, computers, cameras, and recording gear (and any other equipment that does not belong to me) is the property of the State of California. Furthermore, I understand that I am not entitled to any monies generated by these projects, now and in perpetuity.”

Ballard refused to sign.

“I own the film,” B allard says. “I am not signing any contract forfeiting my rights to the film.” Ballard also alleges that the Pollen employee then told him that those who refuse to sign the contract couldn’t present anything at the next film festival, nor could they be a mentor for the cohort presenting material to the film festival.

Pollen Initiative created the contract after the film festival. It was supposed to be signed by ever yone in the Media Center who planned to participate in any future filmmaking projects or film festivals.

According to Ballard, most Media Center workers refused to sign the contract. “I feel like they wanted us to sign our rights over so they can make money, while we get nothing in return,” he says. “No reentry fund, nothing to help me pay my restitution to my crime victims. Nothing. I could see a mutually accommodating agreement, but not a complete confiscation of my film.”

Incredibly, B allard was found suitable for parole on the same day he won his awards. He was within five months of his release date. “I’m making plans to pursue a relationship with POV/America ReFramed [the PBS strands programmed by American Documentary] upon my release,” he said.

When Documentary reached Muhammad for comment, he affirmed, “I plan to extend this timeline through 2026 to complete some of these offerings with Raheem.”

But before Ballard was released, Dying Alone was uploaded to YouTube, which appears to curtail any plans for a distribution deal due to its availability there.

The only organization with the ability to upload D ying Alone to YouTube is Pollen Initiative. Several anonymous sources say that Pollen’s executive director, Jesse Vasquez, uploaded the film. Pollen Initiative has declined to comment on what happened to Sale and Ballard and their films, and directed Documentary to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the state agency responsible for the operations of the prisons and parole system.

A CDCR spokesperson promised to respond, but as of printing Documentary is still awaiting a response.

Ballard was released from prison in March 2025.

San Quentin prison officials did not ask Ballard to create Dying Alone as part of his criminal punishment. But they did give him permission to create media content. Ballard took advantage of a unique opportunity and spent months being chaperoned around the prison with bags of camera equipment and a small crew of assistant media workers. He interviewed incarcerated individuals, prison staff, and medical doctors. He developed his story arc. He wrote his script. He found his protagonists. He sat at a computer practically seven days a week doing postproduction, editing, coloring, finding the right image and tone, mixing and mastering and engineering his artistic material to present to the film festival.

What led to the success of the San Quentin Media Center is the liberty that was once inaccessible to people who live in the prison. Pollen Initiative’s origins are tied to the San Quentin News, which was resurrected in 2008—after a 25-year shutdown—by Michael Harris, the founder of Death Row Records, while he was incarcerated at the prison. Before then-Warden Robert Ayers retired, he spoke to Harris about helping restart the publication

Bottling up the individual creativity of Black and brown and other underserved people in prison communities for the empowerment of some corporate entity should be concerning.

created in 1940. After Harris was released from prison, other incarcerated men stepped up to independently run the publication. The prison refused to financially support it. New leadership sought grants and donations. Eventually, a nonprofit organization was formed called the Friends of San Quentin News, which was rebranded as Pollen Initiative in 2023.

Other media productions inside San Quentin are also independently funded. In 2017, the Ear Hustle podcast was created by Earlonne Woods, who was serving a life sentence, and Nigel Poor, a prison volunteer. It quickly became an overnight success, winning awards and reaching 80 million listeners globally. In 2019, KALW Public Media’s Uncuffed podcast moved in next door. It was co-created by KALW, incarcerated individuals Greg Eskridge and Thanh Tran, and others who were serving life sentences and have since been released. Uncuffed recently won its highest honor from the Society of Professional Journalists. The only thing the State of California provides these media platforms is the space to operate. They do not support these platforms with state funds. Each platform raises its own grants and donations.

But CDCR and San Quentin do take credit for the success of these platforms. Countless tourists visit the Media Center on a weekly basis. High school kids, social justice groups, public defenders, prosecutors, politicians, and celebrities visit the iconic location. Many leave astonished to learn that those who work in the Media Center never return to prison once they are released. Governor Newsom, comedian Jon Stewart, ex-NFL football player Marshawn Lynch, Jelly Roll, Duck Dynasty cast members, and even Haakon, the Crown Prince of Norway, have been spotted there mingling with the media makers, praising their intellectual work.

In fact, Newsom nodded to San Quentin News and Ear Hustle as partial inspirations for both a state-of-the-art rehabilitation center he wants built in the prison and his

move to rename San Quentin State Prison the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. He made this announcement inside the prison in March 2023.

The ongoing US$239 million Nordic-designed education facility is set to open in January 2026. The plan is to scale up the innovative programs from the media center and other locations. Filmmaking is set to be one of the premier programs at the facility.

Having a film festival and scaling up filmmaking in a prison is forward-thinking. But at what cost? Ballard didn’t get to capitalize on his film. Sale didn’t get to capitalize on his film. Moreover, when the accolades came pouring in, the Media Center sponsors noticed that Ballard had made a film. When money became an issue, ownership became one. With the expansion of the media facilities, countless other incarcerated filmmakers will face this same predicament. Even worse, any future award may not go to the incarcerated individuals at all.

Bottling up the individual creativity of Black and brown and other underser ved people in prison communities for the empowerment of some corporate entity should be concerning. What will happen when the grassroots juke joint in the back of the prison’s education annex, known as the Media Center, scales up as part of the corporate machine? Will the mass production of rehabilitation films lead to more exploitation?

Precedent and Payments

This is not the first time San Quentin has tried to creatively annihilate and rebuild individuals as automatons who only help maintain the system. Understanding what happened to Sale and Ballard requires examining intellectual property rights, labor exploitation, and the line between rehabilitation and profit extraction within the American prison system.

In his book Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future, Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, formerly incarcerated at San Quentin, explains how exploitation happens in these creative spaces:

I’ve struggled to feel seen, and it left a hole that needed to be filled by other people’s love and validation. The nonprofit organizations that run many prison programs exploit this hole. I don’t think they do this intentionally; blinded by the imagination problem, they think they’re empowering incarcerated people.

Dangerous Territory

“An odor of totalitarianism infects the concept that any product of the prisoner’s mind automatically becomes the property of the state. While a free society recognizes the need for incarceration of offenders, it can claim no possession of the prisoner’s mind.”

DeWeaver is specifically referring to Marin Shakespeare Company, a nonprofit organization operating in San Quentin, that fuses drama and therapy to inspire public sympathy toward people in prison. DeWeaver performed in plays, wrote scripts, and played musical instruments for the program while incarcerated. He enjoyed the benefits of the attention. “The program allowed me to experience the connection I needed, and the impact of my performances and endorsements of Marin Shakespeare helped it generate donations. I happily made this trade-off, enjoying the benefits of being seen and celebrated, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t being exploited,” he says.

California law distinguishes between slave labor that is meant for criminal punishment and to maintain the system (working in the kitchen, hospital, yard crew, building porters, clerks, etc.) and intellectual labor of an incarcerated person’s mind, which is a product of free expression (writing a screenplay or manuscript, journalism) that is not being done to punish the offender. Thus, California law protects an incarcerated individual’s right to own and sell or convey personal or real property and artistic material, including written manuscripts and handicraft items made by the incarcerated individual (California Penal Code, Section 2601).

Almost 70 years ago, a San Quentin warden tried to prevent prisoner Caryl Chessman from selling his book The Face of Justice. In 1959, a Marin Superior Court judge ruled that the warden couldn’t do it. The court stated:

An odor of totalitarianism infects the concept that any product of the prisoner ’s mind automatically becomes the property of the state. While a free society recognizes the need for incarceration of offenders, it can claim no possession of the prisoner’s mind.

Pollen Initiative’s approach isn’t the only possibility. There are current models of creative ownership within San Quentin that treat incarcerated makers as full collaborators. For KALW’s Uncuffed, incarcerated podcast students also sign a contract. Unlike Pollen’s demand for an ownership

handover, the Uncuffed production contract is a licensing agreement created by formerly incarcerated individuals and UC Berkeley students that explicitly states that it is “designed to protect incarcerated people.” The contract language reads: “You (the incarcerated individual) own your story. You also own any recording you yourself make as part of this program. You can use those recordings later, anywhere, anytime, forever.” Similarly, Mount Tamalpais College, an independent junior college operating inside San Quentin prison, uses a licensing agreement to publish written articles, essays, poetry, and art on their OpenLine Blog and OpenLine Anthology platform.

“Nobody can just take your intellectual property and represent it as their own,” says Lamavis Comundoiwilla. He is an incarcerated individual who devotes most of his time to the William James Association (WJA), an arts and corrections program at San Quentin. WJA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering positive changes through the arts. Comundoiwilla uses their workshop to fuse pointillism and other painting styles to create portraits of African queens. He displays his finished products at art expos and transports them back and forth to different events inside the prison. He said he has donated many paintings to WJA and others. He also sells some of his art for a profit.

According to Comundoiwilla, incarcerated people’s creations, like all others, are protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This protection comes from Article 27 of that document, which mentions intellectual property rights as human rights. It states: “Everyone has the right to the protection of their moral and material interests resulting from any literary or artistic production, of which they are the author.”

There are also legal protections in the United States. Title 17 of the U.S. Code of Copyrights protects original works of authorship from unauthorized use, granting exclusive ownership rights to the person who creates the product or idea. However, these laws do not necessarily prevent infringement. Comundoiwilla says he was driven to address how common intellectual property disputes are:

Dangerous Territory

When I started hearing about the content created by my incarcerated peers being taken and used by others, I had this vision about creating a platform to help protect artists of all forms—painters, poets, musicians, journalists, and even filmmakers. I eventually reached out to some people who helped start Artworks Initiative, a nonprofit organization that is designed to protect our work and act as a private registry. It acts as a poor man’s copyright to protect content from unauthorized use.

Artworks Initiative (AI) created a private registr y and platform for a community of talented artists who are unable to protect and promote their own content. The artists are incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, or at-risk youth. AI claims to promote the work to benefit the artists and protect them by surveilling the internet for unauthorized users and then sending cease-and-desist letters.

The other contested question of the Pollen Initiative contract concerns compensation. Another section reads: “I understand that I will not be compensated for my work on any projects as part of the film program beyond that already agreed upon pay that comes with my work at San Quentin.” Media Center workers earn about 45 cents an hour out of the prison’s allotted budget to perform certain duties.

There are some barriers to compensation. Neither Pollen Initiative nor any other organization that is approved to operate in the prison can give incarcerated individuals any gifts, tips, compensation, or other payment without violating rules against overfamiliarity (California Code of Regulations, Title 15, Sections 3401 and 3425).

Approved prison volunteers are treated just like prison employees when it comes to these rules. For example, earlier this year, student researchers for a sociolinguistic labor study assignment concerning code-switching in a carceral educational setting performed more than 70 hours of intense intellectual labor. When a volunteer professor requested permission to pay the students for their labor, MTC, the prison’s contracted operator, denied the request. They couldn’t compensate the students without violating prison rules against overfamiliarity.

But this doesn’t mean incarcerated individuals cannot be paid in other ways—there are many historical examples of organizations paying incarcerated individuals for their creative work. The PEN America Prison Justice Writing Program has supported the creative works of incarcerated individuals for more than 40 years by providing cash prizes of US$150–$300 to incarcerated people for poetry, fiction, plays, screenplays, and memoirs. The Prison Journalism Project, which started around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, now pays about US$50 for

articles, op-eds, and essays. In fact, many publications pay incarcerated individuals for written essays and articles, including Solitary Watch, The Appeal, and Prism Reports, which created a Right 2 Write (R2W) platform specifically for incarcerated writers. The Appeal pays a dollar a word. Prism pays 50 cents a word.

Incarcerated individuals also can profit from book sales. Decades after Chessman’s case, books by incarcerated writers are numerous, from The Redeemable by Sammie Nichols, a book of poetry; Last Time I Checked I Was Alive, written by Demiantra Maurice Clay, who was recently paroled; and Finding Freedom and That Bird Has My Wings (which became part of Oprah’s Book Club), written by Jarvis Jay Masters.

Incarcerated individuals also have the right to use a power of attorney to manage bank accounts, estates, and other property and assets.

Filmmaking is not just about holding a camera, editing, coloring , and checking for sound. There has to be a story to tell, and doing that includes storyboarding, mapping, and writing arcs and plots. Thus, the script writer is no different than a book’s author. They both own their work.

The mixing of images and sound is also an art form. Audio must be engineered to match the close -up shot of a face or the scream heard in the distance. Only a true native Pacific Islander can tell the story of Healing Through Hula and make people feel the cultural connection.

When D ying Alone was nearing its conclusion, everyone in the audience thought the main protagonist would die in prison. But the sadness suddenly turned to joy when a van pulled outside the gates of San Quentin and dropped him off to his family. Yes, he died. But he did not die in prison, and he did not die alone. The audience was happy and relieved. The creativity that generated those emotions belongs to Ballard.

Preparing people to go home from prison and be somebody’s neighbor takes more than a skill set. It takes opportunity. Ballard had a right to be released in five months with his film in hand to take advantage of a distribution opportunity. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?.

Tribeca 2025: What Lies Beneath

Amid the festival’s commercial wrappings, three docs from rising filmmakers plumb the depths of American inequity

By Natalia Keogan

Since its foundation in 2001 by Robert DeNiro, his longtime producer Jane Rosenthal, and her real estate investor and then-husband Craig Hatkoff, the Tribeca Festival has been increasingly dismissed by New York’s cinephile set as the home of subpar efforts from actors-turned-directors and fan-service pop culture documentaries.

Because its initial intent was to revitalize downtown Manhattan in the wake of September 11, it makes sense that the festival would platform broadly populist (i.e., profitable) offerings. The festival dropped the word film from its name altogether back in 2021, when pandemic-era anxieties caused an industry-wide lack of confidence in the future of traditional filmmaking. In particular, Tribeca set its sights on amplifying programming across disparate mediums, with concerted emphasis on categories that now include Games, Episodic, Immersive, Audio, and Tribeca X (which, bleakly, aims to “bridge the gap between entertainment and brand marketing”). Of course, AI has also been embraced by the festival. This year, Tribeca presented an entire shorts block of films created with OpenAI’s Sora, which spits out “hyperrealistic” images based solely on text prompts.

While the rebrand signaled the festival’s emphatic catering to commercial trends, the

Natalia Keogan is a critic and journalist based in NYC. Her bylines include Filmmaker Magazine, A.V. Club, Reverse Shot, and MUBI Notebook, among others.

In bypassing the glitzy allure of celebrities and their vanity projects, one can encounter documentaries that survey the rawest depths of this country, clouded by a rather flimsy veneer of extravagance.

2025 edition also served satisfying alternatives. Amid star-studded studio fare (including the “live-action” remake of How to Train Your Dragon and Miley Cyrus’s pop opera Something Beautiful, the latter of which saw scalpers selling US$800 tickets to confused fans), first-time feature filmmakers and indie stalwarts were particularly prominent in this year’s lineup of 118 titles.

Nonfiction projects were no exception. In the Documentary Competition, the ten worldpremiering selections included six helmed by directors making their feature debut. Though only comprising a small fraction of Tribeca’s feature film program, which is still the selfdescribed “core” of the festival, several of these titles also embody the necessity of plumbing below the surface. This is especially true of how one should approach Tribeca’s slate in and of itself; in bypassing the glitzy allure of celebrities and their vanity projects, one can encounter documentaries that survey the rawest depths of this country, clouded by a rather flimsy veneer of extravagance.

The most literal of these examples is Underland, the first feature from filmmaker Rob Petit. Based on the 2019 nonfiction book of the same name by Robert Macfarlane— with whom Petit collaborated on the short doc Upstream back in 2019—the film utilizes a variety of cinematographic devices to tour

seldom-seen crevices of Earth. These include LiDAR cameras that create image maps of tight spaces, drones capable of capturing UV light, and a fisheye-lensed camera affixed to the end of an ice bore. Many of these locales are farflung—including a cave system in the Yucatan previously traveled by ancient Mayans and Canada’s SNOLAB research facility located two kilometers underground—but the most socially sobering spaces are found in the U.S.

While Underland touts cinematic imagery of places previously inaccessible to film crews, it holds at a distance everyday people who may already interact with these sunken spaces in a clandestine rather than scientific manner. A co-production between Sandbox Films, Spring Films, Planet Octopus Studios, and Protozoa Pictures (Darren Aronofsky’s production company), the film’s concerted focus is on the experts and scientists who study the landscape underfoot. This feels especially congruent with Sandbox Films’ output, which features several documentaries that follow scientists as they break new ground in their diverse areas of study. As such, it would make sense for Petit’s film to prioritize the empirical perspective, though at times it feels markedly removed from the very real people who navigate the locations he and his team are probing.

The storm drains of Las Vegas embody the physical realm of the American underclass, which exists directly beneath the opulence and excess that the city is famous for. Guided by an experienced urban spelunker, Petit and cinematographer Ruben Woodin Dechamps traverse these subterranean channels, which are quickly revealed to contain makeshift shelters for a homeless population that has been intentionally relegated to the city fringes. While Underland never features any of these residents on camera, they were widely seen in a May 2025 NBC televised segment about the more than a thousand Clark County residents who reside in these storm drains. “I just try to stay out of sight, out of mind,” one unhoused man told the reporters. Indeed, Las Vegas has been increasingly enacting punitive policies targeting the destitute, including a US$1,000 fine and up to 10 days of jail time for those who are found sleeping in public.

Underland eschews filming the individuals who live there, but fills the ensuing space with a sensorial landscape. The immersive soundscape of this hidden world—echoing steps, audible drafts, the plop of fat water droplets hitting stone—is given priority, as to cater to a sense that is heightened by darkness. The visual finesse of

Underland.

All images courtesy of Tribeca

Dechamps’s camerawork is staggering in its own right, not only in terms of the natural splendor on display, but in its portrayal of the experts who usher Petit and his viewers underground. (The only subjects featured are those who, in some professional capacity, are drawn to studying these ecosystems.)

The storm drain segment has an exploratory air to it, meaning that anyone encountered by the film crew would have been caught offguard and, in turn, might have possibly had their personhood exploited. Yet when the crew stumbles upon a crude assortment of human possessions—clothes, a mattress, food wrappers, and refuse—the team becomes audibly uncomfortable, as if interacting with the owner of these objects would result in imminent danger. In truth, the tangible peril of navigating this space comes from the fact that if it were to suddenly rain on the surface, the tunnels could easily flood in a matter of minutes, a gnawing anxiety that eventually causes Petit, his crew, and their guide to swiftly evacuate at the first sign of dampness.

Another segment that illuminates the evil underbelly of the American project takes place in an abandoned uranium mine somewhere in the U.S. Southwest. The darkness feels even more

stagnant here, where the air itself presents a very real, if imperceptible, threat, which is so palpable that neither Petit, his crew, nor their guide physically venture into the bowels of the mine. A drone hums as it flies down the shaft, equipped with a camera that can throw UV light. The walls are immediately cast in a hue of neon green, signaling disastrous levels of radiation. As the drone continues, a dumping ground is revealed, where household appliances and other large, difficult-to-dispose-of items are piled high. While a note is briefly made of how this radioactive waste will leave a lurid legacy for generations to come, there is no tangible reference to the way that Native American communities have been poisoned as a result of the uranium mining industry and the toxicity it has spread to their communities.

The historical weight of America’s insidious inequity is more deftly confronted in Natchez, the sophomore feature from Susannah Herbert. Rightly awarded Best Documentary Feature at the festival, the film begins as a candid examination of this titular small town, the economy of which mostly relies on antebellum tourism, as it struggles to remain relevant amid the country’s ongoing racial reckoning. Tour guides don elaborate garments and show visitors

Natchez

Image credit: Noah Collier

around centuries-old mansions, going into granular detail regarding the ornate 19th-century decor that embellishes every room. The vibe momentarily sours when a guide must elaborate on the presence of slaves on these former plantations, even though most typically skirt around the topic.

“They use the word servant or help but these were slaves,” says Rev, a local Black activist who has established his own tour company that centers on how Natchez directly benefited from slavery and how Black Americans came to positions of power immediately during Reconstruction. The next scene cuts back to a tour provided by a member of the Pilgrimage Garden Club—an HOA-adjacent organization largely run by white women who sport hoop skirts and ensure all antebellum homes are preserved with utmost accuracy—wherein she refers to one of the former owner’s “favorite servants,” who they so graciously taught to read and write despite the time’s legal restrictions. “He was good to his people,” the guide concludes with a grin, as the all-white tour group nods in affirmation, despite the fact that the phrase “his people” clearly denotes ownership.

Shot by cinematographer Noah Collier (who lensed and co-directed the 2023 Southern-set doc Carpet Cowboys), there is a hazy visual quality to the film—achieved by what appears to be a smear of Vaseline on the lens—which at first feels intrusive, but eventually presents itself as perfectly apt for reflecting the blurriness between Natchez’s unvarnished history and the sanitized, glorified image that its white residents desperately cling to. The instinct to outright ignore the deep-seated racism of the city—at one time the second-largest slave market in the U.S.—isn’t the only tactic used by those who have transformed their familial homes into living exhibits. One such owner, David, prides himself on opening his home to the flourishing LGBTQ+ community in Natchez, often hosting salons for drag queens and similarly well-to-do queer elders.

Amidst the growing right-wing cultural backlash against queerness, David’s efforts at first seem admirable. During the film’s final moments, David, whose voice quivers as a result of his worsening Parkinson’s, channels every ounce of nigh-whispered vitriol he can muster when recounting a private dispute he once had

Backside.

with Hillary Clinton. He reasons that her stance on Black civil liberties caused her to lose the 2016 election. “That’s why she didn’t get elected,” he says, “too much ni***rism.” This frank, unfiltered view on the town’s increased accountability in regard to slavery and Jim Crow is akin to a sinister deathbed confession; it’s shocking that this is what he has decided to articulate for the record.

Herbert isn’t interested solely in capturing this country’s cynical truths. Integral to Natchez is the desire for residents and visitors alike to educate themselves and confront the repercussions of racism head-on. Rev’s tours tend to be frequented by white people, all of whom are shown to truly meditate on the blunt facts, figures, and anecdotes that he offers. Tracy, a guide at one of the more conventional antebellum plantations, becomes gradually more interested in understanding the roots of Natchez, eventually embarking on one of Rev’s tours herself. A local woman named Debbie becomes the first Black member of the Pilgrimage Garden Club after she purchases a former slave dwelling and begins to give tours focused on their lives. Tension may continue to fester within this broader political moment, but Herbert’s film is an exhilarating distillation of how clinging to traditionalist American values often belies an inherent bigotry. More observational in style, but still an overt condemnation of pomp and circumstance taking precedence over human lives is Backside, from director-cinematographer Raúl O. PazPastrana. In this case, the funky regalia and mint juleps associated with the Kentucky Derby are strewn aside in favor of the predominantly Latino grooms tasked with mucking stables, feeding, watering, grooming, and caring for the racehorses. While jockeys and trainers serve as the mostly white public faces of horseracing, the immense toil of workers—who probably spend more quality time with the animals than the jockeys, trainers, and owners combined—are given little conventional notice.

Although Paz-Pastrana filmed between 2021 and 2023, the staunch anti-immigration stance of Trump’s second term casts an anxious pall while viewing the film. It’s long been evident that the U.S. economically relies on cheap migrant labor, but requisite respect (including providing basic human rights) for these workers has not been normalized on a societal scale. In lieu of offering a political and cultural brief on the current climate for grooms, particularly those who are migrants, Paz-Pastrana employs vérité footage to acutely enmesh viewers in the intraspecies empathy formed from the daily drudgery of tending to

these horses. Prizes, fame, and glory may be reserved for those with recognizable positions within the sport, but the body language expressed by horse and groom conjures genuine care, trust, and love.

In the vein of Frederick Wiseman, PazPastrana also documents the Churchill Downs racetrack as an institution, allowing the minutiae of every function to speak for itself: staff announcements made exclusively in Spanish, an employee-organized procession for the Virgin of Guadalupe. Certain employees are also given the opportunity to address the camera, relaying their own experiences, which include near brushes with powerful hooves, struggles to unionize, and, in the most bittersweet scene in the film, one elderly gaucho’s insistence on feeding candy to his horse. His wistful smile gives way to a crestfallen expression when a companion reprimands him for spoiling the creature, noting that the groom at the next stable may not offer the same kindness, causing the horse to then crave what it cannot have. Another harsh reality of the job is that grooms often adopt a nomadic lifestyle, moving to different stables—and caring for new horses—across the country in preparation for the next racing season.

Though Backside does eventually document the Kentucky Derby, it does so with deflated interest. For a few short minutes, posh attendees are contrasted with the grooms who host an informal congregation for family and friends on the backside of the track. As the horses rest after the race before being carted to their next destination, the grooms exchange brief farewells. The final shot, which sees the stables completely unoccupied, meditates on the future of many industries if immigrants are cast out—without grooms, there is no horse racing. The filmmaker’s delicate yet intentional gaze allows for this stark truth to resonate without preachiness.

Underland, Natchez, and Backside register as refreshing departures within Tribeca’s documentary programming because the topics dissected are elevated by filmmakers flexing aesthetic and narrative finesse. Not content with simply pontificating an agenda, they embrace the potential for playing with the medium on an artistic level. As a ceaseless stream of commentary regarding this country’s staggering cruelty toward marginalized populations dominates airwaves, headlines, and social feeds, the idea of being fully immersed in these niches offers more insight than any barrage of statistics or talking head interviews ever could. The opportunity to enmesh ourselves in the quotidian realities of strangers remains radical..

Tayler Montague is a writer, filmmaker, film programmer, and native New Yorker. Her work can be found at www.taylermontague.xyz.

Blackstar 2025: Hallowed Ground

Philadelphia’s beloved festival for Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers explores themes of inheritance and artistic lineage

By Tayler Montague

At BlackStar, everyone is colluding to envision the future of filmmaking. The beloved Philadelphia film festival operates like a spirited convening in which industry veterans and firsttime cinephiles gather to watch films by Black, Brown, and Indigenous filmmakers.

The programming this year, as always, was robust in both thematic interconnectedness and quantity. Each day offered panels, screenings, and opportunities to prioritize wellness. It continued its longstanding recognition as the “festival to be at” among my cohort of film lovers. It was wonderful to run into faces old and new and politic in front of the various screening venues at the festival. This spilled into the city of Philly itself, going with groups to get coffee or lunch, cross-compare notes about what we saw, and engage in the kinds of unbridled cinephilia that allow you to achieve deeper interrogations of the form. The festival invites curiosity and camaraderie to absorb, to critique, to get a feel for the trajectory of Black, Brown, and Indigenous cinema and the artists creating it. Waiting in line for a screening could mean striking up conversation with documentary filmmaker Ada Gay Griffin or your former cinema studies classmate.

The importance of BlackStar is not lost on me as the industry slowly recedes in prioritizing the voices of marginalized folks in a world sliding into fascism. BlackStar’s continued expansion into year-round programming through BlackStar Projects—the Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab’s US$50,000 production grants for local filmmakers, the print journal Seen, the William and Louise Greaves Filmmaker Seminar—suggests the festival’s evolution from annual gathering into sustained infrastructure. At the festival, the sixth BlackStar Pitch awarded US$75,000 in production funds to a documentary filmmaker (this year’s winner was Kya Lou, for Hysterical).

Early career filmmakers, many of them previously supported by BlackStar, returned to the program alongside those who carved a path for them to exist, such as Black cinema legends Zeinabu irene Davis and Charles Burnett, who presented restorations of their respective masterpieces, Compensation (1994) and Killer of Sheep (1978).

BlackStar demonstrates the significance of convening. There’s something lovely about being in a place where you can see new voices emerge and sit at the feet of their elders, many of whom joined in conversations on the Daily Jawn stage at the Kimmel Center, which acted as an important place of gathering for us all throughout the festival. To gather there felt like a salve in a world that deepens its attempts to seduce us all toward individualism, to which I resist, as the making of new worlds can’t be done in isolation.

Before you even see an image move at BlackStar, be it virtually or in person, you’re met with a festival bumper that includes a title card with a quote from The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986) by Toni Cade Bambara:

The original people who blessed the land were the Lenni L enape or Delawares, the eldest nation of the Algonquian Confederacy… Others would come to rename it— would claim it with their guns and their plows, their dreams. Africans came too— captive, but with dreams of their own.

To gather there felt like a salve in a world that deepens its attempts to seduce us all toward individualism.

Compensation.

Killer of Sheep.

Her position as an artist and multidisciplinary storyteller served to elicit change or, in her words, to “make revolution irresistible.”

This sets the thesis for the festival’s theme, Cinema for Liberation, one deeply reflected in the programming and in all of the films, not just the documentaries.

So it was only fitting that Louis Massiah’s documentary about Bambara’s life, TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, opened the festival. Massiah, a Philly legend in his own right, and founder of the Scribe Video Center, was also one of Bambara’s collaborators. The two co-directed and Bambara wrote the screenplay for the documentary The Bombing of Osage Avenue, a record of the bombing on MOVE’s house on Osage Avenue by the Philadelphia PD that killed 11 members (five of whom were children) and destroyed 61 homes. We who are cultural workers have much to learn from Bambara. It’s not easy to capture such an expansive life in a film, especially about an iconic figure in the pantheon of Black feminist literature, filmmaking, organizing, dreamweaving, and more. To do so, Massiah assembles a chorus of those who love her most to speak in tandem with her. Bambara’s voice narrates the journey of her own life, as do her childhood friends, sisters, and students. The resulting film shows that at every juncture of her life she sought to feed herself and her community a steady diet of art and education with great intentionality.

This page: TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing.

Facing page: Louis Massiah at BlackStar. TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing won Best Feature Dcoumentary.

“Art for people’s sake”—in one scene, we see Bambara’s name tag with “NOVELIST” typewritten and scratched out, replaced in her own handwriting with “cultural worker.” Her position as an artist and multidisciplinary storyteller served to elicit change or, in her words, to “make revolution irresistible.” Art’s accessibility mattered to her, an idea that still resonates today as we see fewer working-class people in creative fields. The film also chronicles her move to Atlanta’s Vine City, a lower-income area where, despite proximity to longstanding academic institutions, Bambara and her collaborators developed their own curriculums and spaces. Black bookstores and community centers— Timbuktu, the African Eye, and even the Neighborhood Art Center—became important venues to share art with folks in the community. Most striking was archival footage of Bambara speaking authoritatively about these spaces’ objectives, emphasizing not only the development of the next generation of artists but also the cultivation of a critical audience, a goal that still feels necessary.

These acts of convening, sometimes within her home through the Pamoja Writers Guild, opened doors for expanding consciousness. The breadth of workshop attendees is best explained by one participant: “Some of us were students, some of us were nurses. One was a bus driver who wanted to write.” For Bambara, being an artist meant being among your people—not isolated, fussing over details alone.

This principle carried over into her forays into filmmaking and beyond. As Zeinabu irene Davis recalls about Bambara’s approach to cinema, “Toni Cade Bambara was always about the untold stories. That was Toni to me: untold stories, unheard voices, or just the everyday folk you don’t get to hear all the time.” Her self-fashioning (adding Bambara to her name), emphasis on spreading knowledge, and creative drive are also hallmarks of other festival documentaries about Black visionaries charting pathways to greater realities. Like Bambara, they understood that they would often need to create entirely new worlds.

“If you find Earth boring/ just the same old same thing/ come on sign up with/ Outer Spaceways Incorporated,” June Tyson declares in Sun Ra’s song “Outer Spaceways Incorporated.” This invitation from Sun Ra reached my ears decades after his earthly death, when I first discovered his music for myself, proof his mission continues. Christine Turner’s Sun Ra: Do the Impossible chronicles his life as bandleader, Saturnian angel, and nurturer and creator of new realities. An opening title card lets us know that all the music in the film is by Sun Ra, demonstrating both his catalog’s breadth and its ability to collapse and expand time through, in part, his deep musical study. The documentary begins with his love of big bands like Duke Ellington, with whom he shared his work, and Fletcher Henderson, whom he later studied under. His audacious spirit emerges early.

Born Herman Poole Blount, Sun Ra was imprisoned for dodging the WWII draft after being inspired by the words of DuBois and Gandhi, decades before anti-imperialist sentiment around the Vietnam War popularized draft dodging among Black Americans, who were more likely to be drafted. This was incredibly brave, when Black men and women hoped military participation might ease the pressure of Jim Crow and secure equal citizenship, socially if not legally. That outcome of their service never materialized; racist violence awaited returning veterans. As I watched Sun Ra, Isaac Woodard, a World War II veteran attacked in South Carolina by police while still in uniform, came to mind. The heinous attack left Woodard permanently blind. After Blount’s release, now a social pariah, he heads north for Chicago, changing his name to Le Sony’r Ra— and as a musician, Sun Ra. Yet, as the film notes, “It is a mischaracterization to speak of one Sun Ra. At any given time, there was a whole bunch more.”

A lesser filmmaker might have felt compelled to match their protagonist’s experimentalism. Instead, by working in a more conventional documentary form, Turner crystallizes Ra’s mission. He states very clearly, in an interview used as voiceover: “I have to play everything. All emotions that human beings know. And I have to touch the parts of them they don’t know is part of them. That’s my mission: to touch the parts of them they don’t know they have.” Sun Ra achieved this mission through the Arkestra and his commitment to sonic innovation, creating what he called the “alter destiny.” As scholar Louis Chude-Sokei explains in the film: “The alter destiny is a very early articulation of the notion that the future is not only unfixed, but that we are trapped in notions of time that force us in places that we don’t have to actually go. We can step out of time and create another trajectory.”

The word trajectory resonates with Ra’s emphasis on lineage. I grew up hearing the adage, “If you don’t know where you come from, how will you know where you’re going?” Knowing where you come from—having that illuminated for you by way of mythmaking, another Sun Ra tenet—matters deeply. His myth creation solidifies Black folks’ legacy as an ever-present people, connecting past, present, and future.

Sun Ra mastered several musical genres—he wasn’t ahead of time, but perfectly timed, and timeless. Big band jazz, doo-wop (as heard in “Dreaming”), and reworked old standards like his rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” a favorite of his, which gained deeper resonance at his keyboards. His influence spans contemporary music and beyond. Early in Sun Ra, a montage spotlights contemporary artists echoing his aesthetic, which predates the term Afrofuturism itself. A segment of the film showcases his work pioneering electronic music. After being introduced to Robert Moog by way of music critic Tam Fiofori, Ra was one of the first musicians to adopt the Minimoog in the late ’60s/early ’70s. By acknowledging his own musical lineage, he timetraveled, mining histories of music, self, and previous civilizations for new sounds and a greater expansion of our mind’s eye by way of what we hear and see. The music is a gateway to true praxis.

Leading by example is integral to Sun Ra’s need to create a better world. One of my favorite anecdotes from the film: he arranged for a promoter to take the Arkestra to Egypt while touring Europe. Archival footage of Sun Ra and his musical family frolicking among the pyramids makes clear his ability to achieve seemingly anything, though bandmates’ stories add humanity to Sun Ra’s mythology. Even interplanetary angels get sleepy! One musician recalled Ra sometimes dozing during hours-long rehearsals.

Facing page: A live recording of The Daily Jawn, the BlackStar Festival podcast morning show. Sun Ra: Do the Impossible.

More compellingly, one bandmate describes him as having “a mother’s love,” not easily fitting standard masculinity or sexuality frameworks. His existence embodied a fluid Black futurity.

A beautiful screening moment came afterward when we realized that Marshall Allen sat in the audience. The sharp and quick-moving centenarian leader of the current Arkestra, still performing and fresh from releasing his debut solo album, made perfect sense as an attendee—his father sold Sun Ra the Germantown building for $1 where the band lived and worked, and where I believe Allen still resides, spreading the gospel.

Brittany Shyne’s Seeds evoked the dreaming Africans from Bambara’s quote. Dreams of self-determination required land of actualization. Documentary’s dispatch from Sundance covers the film’s interest in agricultural connections, and how it resonates in the current political context as well as its form. Here at BlackStar, the film joins the stories we’ve come to know, some of us intimately, about Black America’s relationship with dispossession and migration: dashed dreams of 40 acres and a mule; displacement from Southern and urban Black enclaves through white supremacist violence (like the Red Summer of 1919); or legal mechanisms like deed theft or eminent domain. From Brooklyn’s brownstones to California’s stolen beaches to Georgia’s man-made Lake Lanier, which flooded the homes and cemetery of the Black town of Oscarville, and where the supposedly vengeful spirits ensure their legacy through hauntings and drownings. Though Shyne’s film opens with a funeral, it focuses on people who are very much alive—elders who have been tending, tilling,

and farming the family land before Shyne (or I) was even a thought.

At times, this film felt dreamlike, in the best way, evoking hours spent sitting on my great-grandmother’s lap under her walnut tree. Shyne’s double duty as cinematographer-director captures intimate relationships with folks whose family land faces diminishing returns. The black-and-white cinematography and quotidian focus of Black life conjured films like Burnett’s Killer of Sheep Seeds’ sound design creates greater intimacy with the farmers’ labor. One of the most moving moments: Willie Head, Jr., showing us around his home, which he is working on to restore to its former glory, holding his mother’s portrait. “Who does she look like?” he asks, ushering his granddaughter closer to the frame. Their resemblance moved me. Head recounts dreaming of his mother before his granddaughter’s birth: “God sent my mother back to me.” Generations passing down ancestral faces is a beautiful inheritance.

Although the main farmers in the film are elders, children populate the frames—darting in and out, riding in the back of pickup trucks, up underneath their meemaws and pop-pops. They are the future, basking in the beauty of their inheritance, the love being poured into them by way of nurturing not only their minds and spirits but also the grass underneath their feet. This film testifies to existence across generations, including those no longer with us, like Ms. Jessie Mae Head. Day by day, I recognize more and more that the moving image offers our closest approximation to time travel.

See you next year, BlackStar..

Seeds.

Screen Time

Checkpoint Zoo

Following Ukrainian zookeepers’ attempts to evacuate 5,000 animals from Kharkiv’s Feldman Ecopark—just 30 km from the Russian border—Checkpoint Zoo strikes a fine balance between the tenderness these workers have for their animals and the ticking-clock terror of their working conditions through the ongoing invasion and constant threats of shelling. Sweeping drone shots chronicle the devastation wrought by the war, and reflective, poignant sit-down interviews are interspersed with urgent, firsthand phone footage captured by the park’s workers and volunteers documenting their real-time experiences. A wartime documentary focusing on subjects that have no comprehension of what war is makes for wrenching moments in which the zookeepers break down over their animals’ distress, knowing there’s no way to assuage their terror. That doesn’t mean Checkpoint Zoo is without moments of levity—in one scene, zookeepers dub their operation to evacuate the park’s big cats “Saving Private Lion.” Joshua Zeman’s documentary is a powerful testament to community and compassion, locating humanity at a time when it seems to be in short supply.

—Gayle Sequeira

Orwell: 2+2=5

Despite the thinness of Raoul Peck’s work since his 2016 tour de force, I Am Not Your Negro, his latest film, a biographical documentary of George Orwell, still manages to surprise in just how surface-level it remains. Specs are all highly polished. Orwell: 2+2=5 uses Orwell’s words—gleaned from his letters, diaries, and other deep research—which are seriously voiced by actor Damian Lewis; media archeology of film adaptations of his best-known novels; archival footage to illustrate Orwell’s life; and some newly filmed footage on Jura, the Scottish island where the widowed Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The feature provides a capable overview of Orwell’s politicization, and eagerly connects his observations about the constructed nature of truth, media politicization and polarization, and the human capacity of injustice to our present-day conditions. Despite this urgency, there’s hardly any friction; the film’s approach doesn’t further explain our current moment, only reaffirms that Orwell predicted it. Like all of the handsome, sturdy thinking person’s biographical documentaries made today for wide release, this film forgets that the timeliness doesn’t compel by itself.

—Abby Sun

Courtesy of Abramorama

Courtesy of Neon

Paris Calligrammes

A portal into Paris during the 1960s, Paris Calligrammes is German artist Ulrike Ottinger’s attempt to retrace the steps that led her to become the filmmaker and photographer she is today. Recounted through chapters organized by location, art movements, and political upheavals, the film surveys her encounters with cultural figures, including philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, painter Johnny Friedlaender, photographer Willy Maywald, and film archivist Henri Langlois. Narrating over archival footage and images, Ottinger reminisces about the cafes, jazz clubs, cinemas, plays, and galleries that she visited during her twenties, conjuring a vision of the city that is neither nostalgic nor romantic, but vigorous and, at times, turbulent, given the country’s colonial history in Algeria and Vietnam. Evoking the tenderness and sobriety of Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1962), the film offers a documentary memoir in the form of a peripatetic excursion that opens a contact zone between past and present.

—Winnie Wang

Riefenstahl

A popular documentary gambit is to open with a protracted air of intrigue and mystery, the better to hook the viewer with questions that the movie will go on to illuminate. This feels like a misguided approach for Riefenstahl, a recent examination of the filmmaker and Nazi propagandist who directed Triumph of the Will (1935). As the director Andres Veiel moves through Leni Riefenstahl’s biography—from actor in Alpine films to gushy Hitler acolyte to postwar profile in unrepentance, all the way up to her death at the age of 101—the mood of who-was-she-really discovery seems profoundly unsuited to the well-established nature of Riefenstahl’s offenses and her obsessive lack of contrition.

Benefiting from complete access to Riefenstahl’s estate, Veiel’s multimedia digging by no means seeks to rehabilitate her: he elaborates on her role in one of the first massacres of Polish Jews, her dragooning of Roma travelers from an internment camp for one film, her (inherently eyebrow-raising) recordings of phone calls from Germans expressing their support, and her chats with Nazi architect Albert Speer about lucrative interview fees. But the film wastes time and dilutes what point-of-view it does have by rehashing Riefenstahl’s denials about her complicity in talk shows, interviews, and wherever else—though this on-message discipline does rhyme chillingly with today’s latest models of media-gaming authoritarianism.

— Nicolas Rapold

Image credit: Ulrike Ottinger Courtesy of Metrograph

Image credit: Bavaria Media Courtesy of Kino Lorber

GO ODBYE C EREMON Y. H EL LO C ONN ECT ION .

Get ready for an awards event unlike any you've experienced before. The IDA Documentary Awards are flipping the script.

For three electric days, the celebration transforms into an immersive experience, bringing nominees, honorees, and guests together in spaces designed for conversation, connection, and discovery. You won’t just watch from the sidelines—you’ll be in the thick of it.

Meeting the minds behind the year’s most powerful documentaries. Trading ideas. Living the stories as they unfold.

December 4-5-6, 2025

Los Angeles

documentary.org/awards

#IDADocAwards