DIRECTING FOR A DOCUMENTARY/NONFICTION PROGRAM FISHER STEVENS
PICTURE EDITING FOR A NONFICTION PROGRAM
MUSIC COMPOSITION FOR A DOCUMENTARY SERIES OR SPECIAL (ORIGINAL DRAMATIC SCORE)
LEADER
TEAMMATE
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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
Arushi Khare / Publications Intern
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Zaferhan Yumru / Production Manager
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Cielo Saucedo / NAI Funds Program & Access Coordinator
Ranell Shubert / NAI Program Manager
Lilla Sparks / Fiscal Sponsorship Program Coordinator
Abby Sun / Director of Artist Programs
Bethany Weardon / Fiscal Sponsorship Program Manager
Dominic Asmall Willsdon / Executive Director
Zaferhan Yumru / Director of Marketing, Communications, & Design
Armando Zamudio / Public Programs & Events Coordinator
IDA Board
Ina Fichman / Co-President
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Chris Albert / Secretary
Maria Agui Carter / Treasurer
Grace Lee
Orwa Nyrabia
Chris L. Perez
Alfred Clinton Perry
Amir Shahkhalili
Marcia Smith
Cover image: Bill Morrison (p.42)
Photo by Camille Lenain
Michael
Jean-Marie Teno reflects on
Jean-Marie
Amid industry disruption, filmmakers search for marketing and data solutions in community
Anthony
In a world rent asunder, conference speakers thrust documentary ethics into reality
Sophie Brown
Arya Rothe, Isabella Rinaldi, and Cristina Hanes’s transcontinental indie outfit harbors collaborations and a patient cinema
Sundipto Sanyal
Bill Morrison’s films spin profound insights from degraded film stock and digital surveillance footage
Carmine Grimaldi
Lawrence Wright, Alex Gibney, Evan Lerner, Alex Stapleton, and Iliana Sosa share how they, with Richard Linklater, made God Save Texas
Robin Berghaus
Narcisa Hirsch’s oeuvre through documentary
By Lucía Requejo and Victor Guimarães
From the Reel World Dominic Asmall Willsdon
in
Victor Tadashi Suárez
Screen Time:
Vladan
Still from Dawson City, Frozen Time (p. 42) Courtesy of the filmmaker
NoCut Film Collective BTS on a current project (p. 36) Courtesy of the filmmakers
Jean-Marie Teno at Getting Real ’24 (p. 12) Photo by Urbanite LA
It’s the summer of conferences, conventions, and gatherings of all sorts, in so many different places. There are snap elections, presidential nomination conventions, the Paris Olympics, documentary conferences, and Thierry Fremaux’s wish to have a Cannes “free of polemics,” despite the presence of heavily armed gendarmes patrolling the streets and testing new biometric surveillance technology. In gathering, we create images and reports. Some of them are mundane. And some of them become talismans, like the photographs and videos of a former American president fist-pumping with a bleeding ear. But none of them, alone, are evidence of our togetherness or divisiveness.
Because these documents, such as documentary films, are not merely snapshots in time. These images—and all images—are, as stated by cinematographer and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson in her keynote address at Getting Real ’24, “ongoing relationships between the people who made them and the people who see them, as long as they last.” That is, it’s up to us, in the now, to negotiate what happens after gatherings. To bestow certain stories with the power of being told and retold.
Ten years ago, MoMA held a mid-career retrospective for Bill Morrison, whose entire practice is devoted to reimbuing meaning into discarded images. This year, film institutions are once again spotlighting his work in series and retrospectives. In the interim, his avant-garde excavations using degraded films as the source material, narrative spine, and object of critique have recently morphed to encompass digital archives. In our cover feature, Carmine Grimaldi examines Morrison’s body of work to draw a formal and political continuum between the old work and new.
A different type of retelling occurs in the transformation of Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker articles to the nonfiction bestseller God Save Texas, and then from page to screen. Robin Berghaus vividly pieces together the stories behind the making of the three-part docuseries, which is also named God Save Texas. Outside of the U.S., interest in Argentine experimental filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch’s oeuvre is undergoing a steady revival. Victor Guimarães and Lucía Requojo dive deep into the work of the maverick feminist filmmaker and writer, who passed away this May.
The “Making a Production” strand follows the last issue’s focus on creative documentaries with Sudipto Sanyal’s profile on NoCut Film Collective, a trio of young filmmakers whose solidarity and patience extends from their production practices to their critically acclaimed filmmaking. For “What’s in My Bag,” we asked Emmy Award–winning cinematographer Victor Tadashi Suárez to give us a peek at his tried-and-trues on productions of every scale, from intimate, indie verité to streamer-produced interviews on sound stages. Attorney Michael C. Donaldson returns to Documentary to notify us about U.S. legislation that could protect documentary films and outtakes from being subpoenaed in court. “Screen Time” continues with capsulelength reviews on notable new late summer and early fall releases.
To drop us a line, write magazine@documentary.org. Thanks for your continued readership and support.
Editor, Documentary
Abby Sun
Abby Sun
Abby Sun
The energy from Getting Real ’24 continues to resonate months after the event. Thousands attended in person and online, engaging in an extraordinary spirit of dialogue and collective inquiry. I hope you find that the conference reports in this issue of Documentary capture the event’s substance and feel. At its best, Getting Real offers something rare and necessary: a space for a community of practice and for the open contest of ideas. My sincere thanks go to all who participated, and also of course to all those who worked to produce the event. Abby Sun and I have already begun planning for Getting Real ’26, and before long we’ll be reaching out for input from the field.
This summer, IDA is embarking on an important endeavor: writing our first strategic plan since 2015. In looking to the future, we will draw on the essence of our longstanding programs—this magazine (which began as a newsletter in the 1980s), our IDA Documentary Awards (now in their 40th year), and Getting Real itself (which evolved from our International Documentary Congresses of the early 1990s). However, we need to adapt our organization to the profound shifts in both our field and the broader world. It’s time to reassess how we can best serve the needs and interests of documentary practice.
To shape IDA’s future direction, we’ve launched a comprehensive assessment. This includes surveying our members, evaluating our programs, analyzing our position within the broader ecosystem, and conducting in-depth interviews with a diverse range of stakeholders: filmmakers, producers, distributors, institutional leaders, critics, educators, and others from around the world. Our goal is to clarify our role and develop a renewed vision for IDA that aligns with our community’s current needs and the evolving nature of documentary filmmaking.
Looking ahead, we’re excited about several initiatives unfolding this fall. In December, the 40th IDA Awards ceremony will be a highlight, hosted at a magnificent, historic venue in the heart of Los Angeles. Before then, we’ll announce the recipients of our Enterprise Fund and Pare Lorentz Fund grants, supporting important documentary projects. Earlier in the fall, we will present public engagement events across the U.S. to support investigative journalism in documentary practice, reinforcing our commitment to fact-based narratives in this election season.
In our ongoing effort to better serve our community, we’re enhancing IDA membership with new benefits and opportunities. Beginning this fall and rolling out through 2025, we will implement the most significant improvements to IDA membership in more than a decade. Membership has grown in recent years, with IDA members now in 84 countries; we plan to expand this broad transnational community further. To our current members: your support is vital. You make our work possible, and we’re deeply grateful for your continued engagement.
This is a treacherous moment for documentary filmmaking, as it is for all truth-seeking artistic expression. As we navigate our field’s dynamic landscape, we remain committed to fostering creativity, integrity, and impact in nonfiction storytelling. We are with you; thank you for being with us.
Executive Director
Dominic Asmall Willsdon
Michael C. Donaldson is a Los Angeles–based entertainment lawyer and past president of IDA with more than 50 years of experience in copyright and entertainment issues. He has been called the Obi-Wan Kenobi of fair use by the American Bar Association Journal.
How the PRESS Act Will Protect Documentarians
By Michael C. Donaldson
By Michael C. Donaldson
On January 24, by unanimous vote, U.S. documentary filmmakers got a big boost from Congress. The House of Representatives passed the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act (aka the PRESS Act). It’s a journalist-protection bill that could easily have been called the Protect All Documentarians Act. Although the PRESS Act makes no specific mention of documentary filmmakers, federal courts uniformly include documentary filmmakers in their definitions of journalists. In fact, documentarians stand to be one of the bill’s biggest beneficiaries.
The government seeking outtakes and source material from documentary filmmakers is not an abstract possibility. It happens more often than you would think. Take the case of the 2012 documentary The Central Park Five by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns. Their documentary laid out the case clearly and convincingly that the five young Black men who were convicted of a rape that took place in 1989 in New York City’s Central Park were in fact innocent. The documentary also suggested that the case was prosecutorially flawed. Twelve years after the rape was committed, another man by the name of Matias Reyes confessed to the crime, revealing details that were not publicly known and adding a few details that he knew but the police did not know. Because the statute of limitations had passed, Reyes was not tried for that crime, but he is still serving a sentence of
33.5 years to life for other crimes (including rape and murder) that he committed in 1989.
The Central Park Five’s convictions were vacated with the support of the Manhattan DA. They sued NYC for their wrongful conviction. The corporation counsel of New York, who was defending the city in the civil case, filed a broad subpoena, asking for all the footage shot in connection with The Central Park Five plus all the filmmakers’ notes and any other paperwork. She wanted everything. Sarah Burns was shocked when the filmmakers were served and was torn. She certainly did not want to turn over all those materials but also felt that the filmmaking team had nothing to hide. However, during the course of the day, she came to realize that the question was bigger than whether they should turn over all the requested material. Whether such a subpoena was permissible was a matter of concern to all documentary filmmakers.
John Siegal of Baker Hostetler stepped forward to file and argue a motion in court to quash the subpoena, meaning to declare the subpoena invalid. Our firm, on a pro bono basis, supplied an amicus brief to the court supporting
the filmmakers. In a very carefully reasoned decision, the court agreed that the subpoena should be quashed. Good news, but it took just over a year before the court issued its final decision. Nothing you ever want to get caught up in. Ken, David, and Sarah prevailed because of New York state laws concerning journalistic privilege. During the same general time period, Joe Berlinger fought a similar subpoena from Chevron because his film Crude (2009) questioned Chevron’s environmental practices in the Amazon rainforest.
And it just doesn’t stop. As recently as April of this year, NBC fought a subpoena from Donald Trump’s lawyers seeking all material linked to the TV network’s documentary Stormy (2024). Trump’s lawyers unsuccessfully demanded all material related to the documentary about adult film star Stormy Daniels, who had received a payoff from Trump. They wanted the material as part of the former president’s defense in his hush-money criminal trial. The judge called the subpoena a “fishing expedition” and said Trump’s lawyers wanted to “rifle through the privileged documents of a news organization.”
Stormy Daniels in Stormy. Courtesy of Peacock
Left: The U.S. Capitol. Image credit: Yoko Design/ Shuttetrstock.com
Any documentary that upsets a large corporation or someone in power is under threat of this type of action. The PRESS Act is helpful and broad in the protection it gives all documentarians as journalists. It prohibits the federal government from compelling documentary filmmakers to turn over their outtakes except in limited circumstances such as preventing terrorism or imminent violence. This bill even protects not only the sources but also the records, contents of communication, and any other information obtained or made in the course of work. Outtakes contain a trove of information which may not be needed in the film but could be seen as valuable to the government.
The PRESS Act is helpful and broad in the protection it gives all documentarians as journalists.
Notably, it would also prevent technology providers from assisting in spy efforts with express restrictions on using phone, email, or other telecommunications providers. These communications are as important to protect as outtakes.
Even when records demands are allowed in cases of imminent violence, notice provisions ensure that documentarians can go to court to challenge the legal demand (again, with limited exceptions). The protections provided by state laws don’t reach this far.
Journalists currently have some protection via state shield laws, but these run the gamut from absolute privilege in Nevada—which provides that no filmmaker may be required to disclose any unpublished information or information regarding their sources—to Wyoming, which offers no protection.
In between are states that offer privilege except for certain circumstances. In California, the shield law must yield to a criminal defendant’s right to a fair trial. In Texas, a subpoena and evidence are necessary to produce materials. In Idaho, the courts rely on the state’s constitution to recognize a limited reporter’s privilege.
The January 2024 House passage of this legislation, co-sponsored by 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans, is a sign of hope. However, before any of these protections can happen, the act must pass the Senate.
At the time of this writing, there was not a final Senate version of the PRESS Act, but Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced a version in 2023 co-sponsored by Sen. Judiciary Chair Richard J. Durbin (D-IL) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
The Senate’s 2023 bill had the same language as the 2024 House bill. Hopefully, that means there won’t be significant changes offered by the Senate. However, lobbying and political pressures could have an impact. Also, certain senators want to remove broad language defining who is a “journalist” and their significant protections against the government.
Journalists aren’t seeking special treatment. Among the established legal privileges that protect confidential communications from being introduced in court are those between a doctor and patient, a client and lawyer, and between two spouses. The PRESS Act recognizes that many sources come forward at significant personal risk and that society benefits from such reporting.
The PRESS Act continues to languish in the legislative docket. If the PRESS Act and its language can be adopted broadly, it would increase and clarify protections for documentary filmmakers. So why is it stuck in committee? Good question, given the broad support in the House. Unfortunately, no senator involved seems willing to give a coherent answer to any question about the delays.
Our firm is preparing a letter to all the members of the Senate who are involved in the PRESS Act either as sponsors or because they sit on the Judiciary Committee overseeing the bill. The letter will be on behalf of the IDA, Film Independent, and Women in Film Los Angeles. If you would like your name added as a filmmaker or production company, just send us an email at mdonaldson@dcp.law. .
Stormy Daniels in Stormy. Courtesy of Peacock
What’s in My Bag
Optimizing for a one-person band on set
By Victor Tadashi Suárez
I’m an owner-operator, so for better or worse, I’m almost always shooting with what you see here. Whether as part of a run-and-gun skeleton crew embedding with agents freeing American hostages abroad or as part of a large crew on stages for Quiet on Set, I’ll show up with these same items every single time.
Sometimes it’s a lot more than this, but this is sort of the bare-bones minimum.
Plus a Pelican case full of batteries. In total, when all packed away, this gear takes up four Pelican cases. That’s four relatively large and heavy cases that I have to schlep from home, into a car, through the airport, into another car, and then squeeze into a hotel room, enduring more than a few “Traveling light, huh? LOL!” comments throughout the day.
Victor Tadashi Suárez is a cinematographer and filmmaker in Los Angeles, working in nonfiction and commercial. He’s the winner of two Emmys and most recently was the DP for the series Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, Nesa Azimi’s Driver, and JoeBill Muñoz and Lucas Guilkey’s The Strike. He is known for his work on the FX/Hulu series The New York Times Presents, the ESPN 30 for 30 feature Infinite Race, and the PBS FRONTLINE film COVID’s Hidden Toll. Previously, he spent six years as the DP for the flagship Al Jazeera English series Fault Lines, for which he filmed 45 half-hour films and was nominated for seven Emmys. He studied economics-philosophy and history at Columbia University in NYC.
And more often, it’s seven or eight cases plus the true unsung hero of this whole operation, the Kartmaster HD 500 collapsible cart. I could spend this whole piece singing the praises of that cart. On the road, it is my best friend, my number one helper, my road dog.
It wasn’t always like this. When I was in my 20s, shooting for Fault Lines and Explorer, I prided myself on fitting everything into one single carry-on size Pelican and one duffel bag. Because it was just me and a producer, everything had to be as efficient as possible. I was shooting on a C300 and running sound right off of the camera’s XLR inputs. Those were the days of no rig and shooting almost everything on a little Canon still lens. We went all over the world like that.
Bit by bit, I would upgrade this and that— trading G3 lavs for the Lectros, a Zoom recorder for a Mixpre, the Canon lens for CP3s, and then for this Optimo zoom—and there was an explosion of cases when I traded up to the Alexa Mini. Eventually, I ended up with this hot mess in front of you.
Filming for an upcoming feature doc that follows efforts to free American hostages held abroad.
Photo by P3 Media.
Courtesy of the writer
The no-rig days are definitely behind me now, but the same shooting style and gear philosophy I was working with then still applies today. Every single item is optimized for a one-person-band workflow on set. All of this stuff can be worn by one person (plus a director taking the wireless video + IFB). And yes, there is a rig, but it’s not an Easyrig. The somewhat unconventional placement of the right handgrip on the Mini (the Arri MRW-1 Master Grip) is inspired by the no-rig handgrip placement of the original Canon C300. My shoulder pad of choice is still the same as 10 years ago (a piece of Pelican divider foam velcroed to the bottom of the camera). And the Cheez-Its are the same, of course: original flavor..
Arri Alexa Mini
Angenieux Optimo 28-76 lens
Arri Cforce Mini Motors Master Grip, OCU-1
Sound belt with MixPre-6 and Lectrosonic LRs
Lectrosonic LTs
Sanken COS-11D, DPA 6060
Wireless SmallHD Cine 7 director’s monitor
Lectrosonic M2Ra IFB
Leica M6 stills camera, Summicron 28, 50 lenses
Kodak Portra 800 35mm film
Pelican divider/shoulder pad
Glyph 4TB Atom SSD
Cap-It! medium and small bags (for rain)
AsteraBox CRMX transmitter
Advil, Zyrtec
Bubblebee Industries lav concealer tape
Arri Rota Pola, Hollywood Black Magic filters
Portable speaker (for intv setup vibes)
What’s in my bag. Courtesy of the writer
Jean-Marie Teno has been producing and directing social issue films on the colonial and post-colonial history of Africa for over 35 years for television broadcast and theatrical release. His films are noted for their personal and original approach to issues of race, cultural identity, African history, and contemporary politics.
Orwa Nyrabia is the artistic director of IDFA. Previously, he was a film producer, festival director, journalist, and assistant director.
On the Notion of Transmission In conversation with Orwa Nyrabia,
Jean-Marie Teno reflects on his beginnings and new film workshop
By Jean-Marie Teno and Orwa Nyrabia
Jean-Marie Teno is Africa’s preeminent documentary filmmaker. With a critical eye and a sharp wit, he questions the established truth, exposes the censored stories, and examines the past to comprehend the complex realities of Africa’s present. Teno’s films have been honored at festivals worldwide, and he has been a guest of the Flaherty Seminar, an artist in residence at CalArts and the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, and a lecturer at many universities. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ documentary branch.
Teno’s best-known film is Africa, I Will Fleece You (1992). Viewed now, the feature remains an astonishing, critical, and edifying excavation of the effects of colonialism on post-independence nation-building projects. Teno’s own narration guides us through the film’s focus on a century of Cameroonian history, contrasting insider-outsider views of nation-building, culture, and legacy. It’s regularly taught in third cinema and post-colonial studies classes. Although Teno has also produced films for other filmmakers for decades, in recent years he has turned his attention more squarely on the project of training documentary filmmakers. In 2018, Teno started annual months-long documentary filmmaking workshops under the banner of his Bandjoun Film Studio. Two years ago, he started construction on La’a Lom, a brick and mortar cinema and film center. In 2020 with film scholar Melissa Thackway, Teno co-authored a monograph of his own work and political cinema, titled Reel Resistance: The Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno.
On the last day of Getting Real ’24, Teno was interviewed for a keynote talk by Orwa Nyrabia, IDFA’s artistic director since 2018. Along the way, Teno dives into the innovative form of his early films, the many ways he’s moved resources and knowledge from European and U.S. institutions back to Cameroon, and his work leading documentary trainings. The following is an edited version of their conversation and audience Q&A. —Abby Sun
ORWA NYRABIA: I’m going to be having a chat with one of my heroes, and it’s a wonderful thing when one is invited to talk to one of those heroes. Jean-Marie Teno is a filmmaker. He makes brilliant films. And he made many films in his country of Cameroon that meant so much to me, growing up in film. He was always one of the few from the African continent who I was following, watching his films whenever I could.
At the time, it took a lot of work because you had to send endless emails to many people who did not reply, until somebody replied and promised you a DVD screener. Then you got the DVD screener, and then you discover Africa in a way that has nothing to do with the Africa one sees on television. It’s an Africa that is real, a filmmaker’s gaze that is organic and powerful, so loving, and that does not contribute to tropes and stereotypes.
The question of stereotyping, of looking at Africa and African people through problematic or colonial eyes is not there. So it is not that it is a decolonized cinema. It is a cinema that doesn’t care about the question of a colonial gaze or a decolonial gaze. It is African cinema. It is not anything else. So after all of that, I would love to introduce this wonderful hero to you.
Jean-Marie, I’m starting at the beginning. There was a young Jean-Marie in Cameroon heading to the airport. Why was he heading to the airport? And what did he want? What did he imagine on arrival after he took a plane out of the country?
JEAN-MARIE TENO: I found myself having a scholarship to go to Great Britain, and I boarded the plane and then it arrived, and it was 10:00 p.m. It was still daylight. I was just wondering, where the hell am I? Normally I know that at 6:00 p.m. it’s night where I grew up.
I discovered some obvious differences, and I didn’t even expect anything because we studied Europe in school—we knew so much about Europe and so little about our own country. So I was almost in a familiar space when I arrived in Great Britain. And then when I arrived in Paris, it was even more familiar because I knew almost everything about France, but so little about Cameroon.
ON: I remember that you did not first get this scholarship to study filmmaking.
Jean-Marie Teno (L) and Orwa Nyrabia (R) at Getting Real ‘24.
Photo by Urbanite LA
Jean-Marie Teno.
Photo by Urbanite LA
JMT: Yes. When you receive a scholarship, it’s almost like a pass that allows you to go, and it could be on chemistry, on physics, on anything. I received a scholarship to do electrical engineering, and I spent only one year in England because when I got to England I discovered the political movement in the student union and all these big discourses. And that was more interesting for me than going into doing these electrical things.
And the British consul was giving me a hard time. So I just said, okay, well, I’m returning home. So I returned to Cameroon when school started and I was in the neighborhood. People say, “You went to London, and you came back!” No one comes back. Why did you come back? So that was my first experiment, going to Europe and coming back and then starting from scratch, working for the radio station and really enjoying being in the neighborhood.
ON: And then film happened.
JMT: And then film happened. There was a television station that was starting in Cameroon. I was among those who were selected to go to France to train for television. And when I finished, the television was not in Cameroon yet. So I was working in the television station in France in the technical part. I bought a 16-millimeter camera secondhand. I started making my own films on 16mm, processing them in a lab and going back and forth. We had a newspaper with some friends in Paris called Bwana. And I was writing for film at that time without any real training, but I loved film, I watched film, and I was writing. I’m so embarrassed to even read the things that I was writing at that time, but we were writing about film.
ON: And then you took the 16mm camera back home?
JMT: No, I stayed in France actually. And because I was writing for film, I went to FESPACO in 1983, and there I met Ousmane Sembène, I met Souleymane Cissé, I met the first generation of African filmmakers. I had seen almost everything that was made on the continent by then. And I had a conversation with Souleymane Cissé, the one who did Finye (1982) and Baara (1978). And we had a half-hour conversation I recorded on a tape recorder.
And after the tape was finished, Souleymane said to me, “But you are not a journalist, you should be making films. You cannot be continuing to just ask these questions because the questions you’re asking about films are really not the questions that the journalists usually ask.” And he said, “We are not so many of us making films. You should be making films.”
And that’s when I left. I said, “If Souleymane Cissé, that I admire having seen so many of his films, says so, maybe there is something here.” And with the camera that I had, I started filming my friends in Paris, and that’s how a few months later I made my first film. After that, because I was working for the television, we had one month’s leave. I went
with that camera home, and I made my first short film, Homage (1985).
ON: I remember you speaking about how making your first film was in a way driven by a feeling of discomfort.
JMT: Yes, discomfort has always been present in motivating me into addressing issues. And my very first film, the discomfort was that my father passed away. I was the eldest son. They kept the funeral for five years for me to return home.
And then I came home with my 16mm camera, and I was filming what was happening. The discomfort was really trying to understand the kind of conversation we used to have with my father, trying to pay homage to him. And at the same time asking myself, “If I’m going to be making films, what kind of film am I going to be making? What footsteps am I going to trace?”
In African cinema there were not many people who were making documentary films. And at the same time, I had many good friends who were stand-up comedians. And for me it was a nice way to combine comedy, because I love comedy, and talking about the things that really matter.
In the film, I invented a dialogue between two people talking. You never see them. And in this dialogue, you have the everyday images. Then at the end, there is the twist that really says that one of the characters is me. And actually, the two characters are two faces of who I was: the one who stayed in the village, and the one who went to the city and then to Europe. And there was a confrontation between—what we were calling at that time—tradition and modernity.
I watched Homage again 30 years after, at a point when I was asking myself, “Do I really want to continue making films?” When I watched Homage again, I really understood why I wanted to make film and the kind of playfulness or amusement that cinema was. If I’m going to take one hour of people’s time, what am I going to be telling them? And this question became more and more important to the continuation of my career.
ON: The question of playfulness is often put in contradiction with the question of documentary. I can’t help but remember that brilliant phrase from Safi Faye, may she rest in peace. Safi Faye was a great Senegalese filmmaker who passed away less than two years ago. When she said that she believed that differentiating or separating fiction from documentary needs so much privilege, and that to her, no African filmmaker can ever do that—
JMT: Absolutely.
ON: We cannot see documentary as not fiction or fiction as not documentary.
JMT: Absolutely.
ON: So this question of playfulness and comedy there takes me here to the question of reality. There is a terrible reality in front of you, but you are processing it through sarcasm and irony and a certain joy, despite all of it. What can you tell us about this? Because it’s very clear in your first feature film [Bikutsi Water Blues, 1988].
JMT: We can also add the entertainment part because we grew up watching a lot of Bollywood films. In these films, there are always some moments where the dancing, the music, continue to bring the story. For us it was almost a way of telling stories and really allowing people to relax, [a way to] prepare them for something very harsh by giving them a little bit of amusement.
When you listen to storytellers, and when you even listen to old people talk in my village for instance, they always mix songs. It’s never a linear kind of conversation. People start something and when they want to digress, it can be a song, it can be a... All these elements contribute to storytelling and to telling the story that they want to tell at that moment.
And we approached film as Africans from a place where we always said, “What do we really bring to the narrative?” You cannot always be going through the three acts or five-act structure and all these that they keep teaching in schools. And so at one point you just say, “I want to tell a story.”
With telling the story, who am I to tell you that story? What are the elements you need to have for your story to exist? And then you start building it up. And from time to time you make pause, you prepare some effect. It’s just playing. And playing with the public, entering into a conversation, using the music in a way.
And in my first feature film, Bikutsi Water Blues, I had a band who was playing, so music was always a part. The fictional part was for me the element to allow the hard documentary part. Because people kept saying to me, “Well, you are going to talk about water, about trash. We see that every day. That cannot be a film.”
So I had to create a structure where a kid comes home and he’s telling what happened at school. And create the kind of narration that will allow people to enter into the film so that they can face their own reality without having the feeling that you are hammering it onto them. And you have to have one of the biggest crazy bands that existed at the time, Les Têtes Brûlées, with all these gimmicks on stage. And people were shocked to see them.
All these elements contribute to a way of entrusting people, challenging what they’re expecting, and giving them the chance to have a good time watching a documentary. Because they always thought, “When are you going to make a film?” And when I showed Bikutsi Water Blues in Cameroon in ’89, there was half an hour of trailers. There was Rambo, there were American action films. And then I show Bikutsi Water Blues.
And people are just saying, “When are you going to make a film like these films with fighting, with action?”
Poster for Bikutsi Water Blues. Courtesy of Jean-Marie Teno
Bikutsi Water Blues. Courtesy of Jean-Marie Teno
And I said, “You’re going to have the documentary.” But when the Les Têtes Brûlées were there, and suddenly... That was a long time ago, and people gradually started getting used to looking at their own reality. Especially in a place where censorship is so strong and when you’re not allowed to talk about what you’re seeing.
ON: I will get to that soon, being not allowed. But I will start with a topic so dear to me, which is the three-act structure. You had a career of fighting with colonial funding. You’ve always been famously angry about colonial funders.
JMT: Yes. I’ve not always been angry with them. The thing is when I did Afrique, je te plumerai (1992)—
ON: The English title of this film is not as good as the French, but it is Africa, I Will Fleece You.
JMT: Yes. Or Africa, I Will Pluck You Clean. Many people translated it.
When I started, it was a film about reading—how writers witness their time during the colonial period. Someone told me later that when you want to address hard issues, just don’t present them too harsh. Just say you’re going to do something nice.
I had a lot of funding because it was about reading and writing. And of course the colonial funders really were champions of teaching us how to read and how to write. And gradually, when we started going a little deeper, when they saw Afrique, je te plumerai, they say, “What? This is where we put all this funding?” And it was really a shock and many people predicted that I will never get any funds from them anymore. But I just say, “Well, c’est la vie. So…”
And then fortunately with ARTE from Germany, ZDF, I had Eckart Stein, who is not there anymore. He had a slot called The Small Window where I was fortunate to have a few films that were commissioned by him. That allowed me to continue making films without depending on the institutional funders in France.
ON: If we put aside the role of Europe or colonialism and funding and go to what’s happening at home, the limitations of work—because these days we’re only talking about money, I think—there is no money for your work in Cameroon, no funding. But there is more than that. There is also pressure, limitations. How was this journey through the different changes in Cameroon’s political map?
JMT: The political map in Cameroon hasn’t changed much. Cameroon became “independent,” under brackets, in 1960. Since, we’ve had two presidents and the actual current president, who is probably 95, was previously the prime minister. He has been in power for almost 60 years. So, things haven’t been really changing.
And the political situation is that when we started making films in the late eighties and in the nineties, people
Poster for Africa, I Will Fleece You Courtesy of Jean-Marie Teno
would say, “No, you are exaggerating, you are showing trash. But no, that cannot be the reality.”
We’re talking about water in ’88, all the problems that water will bring. At that time there were still some public water supplies, but all of these have disappeared. And now everybody is supposed to have water in the house. But when I’m living in Cameroon, every morning you have to turn on the tap. If there is water, you put water in buckets and you save because you don’t know if in two or three hours’ time, they’re not going to cut water.
It’s almost like the shortage of the basic necessities have become a way to keep people under pressure. I think it’s a deliberate policy not to give that so people can live and can be productive and can move forward. Because Africa is a place where it needs to be the place of the absence, the place of need, where you don’t have things. Yet we are going back and saying we’re going to transform that. But to transform that, we need to have some responsible leadership.
There is some light coming up. Senegal, we didn’t think that in Senegal things could change. And yet you have a new generation arriving in Senegal. So these things are happening now, and we are hoping that it’s going to continue. This is probably one of the turning points.
ON: In the past two years, you’ve been working hard on a project that I believe is inspiring. That is you voluntarily taking the responsibility of starting a film school in Cameroon for the new generation of Cameroonians. Putting all your knowledge and what you have achieved in your life at the service of potential new filmmaking in the country. I’ll ask our friends in the tech control to show the slides about La’a Lom.
JMT: Yes, for this notion of transmission, there are ages. The age where you learn, the age where you enjoy, and the age where you start giving to others so that others can grow also.
In 2015, I was invited by some young filmmakers to be part of the group to lead them into documentary. They were trying to make documentaries, and I was appalled by the kind of subject that they were addressing. It was so complicated, so circumvoluted.
And I just sat there and said, “Look, let’s go for a walk in the street, there are so many things that you can talk about. Why is it that all your projects seem so absurd, so complicated?” And they said, “Well, we want a film that can have a chance to be at IDFA, at Berlin, at all these places.”
ON: [Laughter.] I trusted you, man.
JMT: And I said, “Well come on, that cannot be the…” And they said, “But that’s when people come. They all want us to do this kind of very complex thing.” And I said, “Well maybe I’ll come back again, and we work.” But when I said that, people started being scared, saying, “Oh, he’s going to make political film, you’re going to make political training.”
So someone said, “Well, why not do something about heritage?” That’s why I said I’m going to train people in making documentaries, but the topic was going to be heritage, our heritage. No one is talking about it, everything is disappearing. If you have a subject in relationship with the heritage, you come, and we train you into doing that. And of course in heritage you can put everything. Memory, history, political, all the questions.
For this notion of transmission, there are ages. The age where you learn, the age where you enjoy, and the age where you start giving to others so that others can grow also.
At that time I was at Wellesley College as a fellow. And at Emerson they were getting rid of HD cameras, and one of my friends was teaching there. They said, “Oh, we are getting rid all these cameras.” So I went and I applied, and I got 10 cameras that I brought home. And it’s with these 10 cameras that I started the training.
It was amazing because you had people who had a master’s in film production in the university who had never touched a camera. And so they came to my place and they held one. I did the first one—I was the only one working with them. There were five of them. We made five short films because I wanted everyone to make a film. It’s a threemonth workshop where you go from an idea, gradually define a film project, then they shoot, and then they come back to edit. And in the course of three months they make a film of between 20 to 30 minutes, maximum.
We did it the first year, the second year. And then there was COVID, and we started again in 2021. And now the fourth edition was 2023. That finished a few weeks ago. And in the course of four years, we have made 22 short films.
It’s free tuition. I raise funds and people come. We live in the same place. They eat, they sleep, and they watch films. Because I bring films from all over so that people can watch films. They go and they make their film, and at the end
they have one film that they can show to do applications for other projects.
The big part of my budget was always finding a place where we can all be living together, the food. And so I had this old barn where I grew up. Two years ago I just said, “Why not transform it and turn it into the center where everything will happen?” And the place where also I will store my work because Rochester—and many places in the U.S.— want to have all my archival work. And I’m saying, maybe it’s time for people to come to Cameroon and find my work where the work is based.
So this place is also going to be the place where my work will be. And I’m slowly building this place. We have put the roof on, there’ll be space for people to stay. There’ll be a place for working. We’ll have a small library. And then when we are not doing workshops, people can come and develop their projects. We’re trying to make... I’m not calling it really a school because school means you have a professor.
It’s just a place where those who have more experience are accompanying those who are starting, in a way like they are learning but not having a magistral course. They come with the idea to make a film. And you go through the different steps, and the theory comes gradually whenever you are encountering them.
We are doing a companionship, in a way. And I will be bringing people from all over the world to come and stay and share their knowledge and—
ON: —and teach how to make three-act films.
Jean-Marie Teno with Meghan Monsour.
Photo by Urbanite LA
QR code to the La’a Lom fundraising page.
JMT: And that will be challenging most of the time because whenever they come and make the theory, we’ll just say, “Okay, you do that, but this is a big storyteller from here. What does he think about this three-act thing?” And he might just come and say, “Fuck the three-act thing.”
ON: You can join us in the discussion. Raise your hand so that you get a microphone. And you’re very welcome to comment, to reflect, to ask a question. There.
At the beginning, people came to me when I was making films on urban Africa. It was also a time when there were very famous African filmmakers who were making the films about the village. And people would say, “But there are no cities, there are no people living in cities in Africa. Why are you bringing us all these questions about urban Africa? That doesn’t exist. We want the village, we want the calabash, we want all these. These are the Africa we want.” I just said, “Okay.”
It’s just a place where those who have more experience are accompanying those who are starting, in a way like they are learning but not having a magistral course. They come with the idea to make a film. And you go through the different steps, and the theory comes gradually whenever you are encountering them.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello, Jean-Marie, thank you so much. I’m originally from India and I’m based here now. I’m connecting so much to everything you’re saying because I grew up watching Bollywood, and for me, like for every Indian and everybody outside the U.S. who doesn’t know Bollywood, it does have a big impact on our lives.
One thing I wanted to understand from you is a challenge I’m facing as a filmmaker. In my head I have a certain idea of India and I have a certain way of thinking about my subjects. But then the Western world has a very different perception of my country. If I shoot it in a certain way, the way an Indian would shoot it, it wouldn’t really be acceptable to the Western eye.
How did you handle those kinds of emotions and that understanding? Because your understanding of Cameroon as a local is very different, but then portraying it to the Western eye just for the funding is also different. I feel we are always in a colonial flux. How did you handle that as a filmmaker?
JMT: Well, that’s a tough question. How do I handle that? But do I really handle that? At one point I just said, “Really, I don’t care.”
What else can you say when people say things like that? So I just went on and made films, hoping that one day things will change. And things have changed. At the same time, when I made films, my films were very critically attacked so often. It didn’t prevent me from making films because if I was waiting for their approval, to celebrate me, I would have stopped for a long time.
And there were some of my colleagues that I can consider were mediocre, but they were celebrated, completely celebrated. And that was okay, and we lived together, and so, everyone has to decide who he or she is going to be listening to.
Afrique, je te plumerai is a 30-something-years-old film. And when I finished that film, people said, “That’s going to be the biggest crap that has ever been made.” Some people said, “Oh, that’s just collage, it’s not cinema.” And even today people are watching it again. That’s how things go. Okay.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you so much for everything you shared. My question is about the image behind you and the work you’ve shared about bridging and connecting communities. I want to get more insight from you in terms of how you imagine this extending to the continent and to other countries around the continent, and how you potentially see this space being a wave that starts in other countries as well.
As a fellow African, Ethiopian, we’ve been talking about gathering spaces for the past few days, and I imagine that actually informs the location. And the dislocation of those spaces of gathering actually inform the nature of the conversation we would be having.
I feel very fortunate to be able to be here with you. I also question if the nature of our conversation and the nature of the presentation and everything would be different if we had these spaces on the continent itself. I really want to take your idea on this. Thank you so much.
JMT: Yes, yes. Actually, most of the things that are happening now, it’s almost like 30 years ago when African filmmakers gathered. And for me, I have a great example. You’re from Ethiopia. Haile Gerima has been so instrumental in working with us, really making us realize what cinema could be.
There were organizations on the continent, the FEPACI [Pan African Federation of Filmmakers], they were gathering. They even made this manifesto in Algeria in 1973. And I wish every young African filmmaker could
It’s happening here in the U.S., a place where no one wants to look at the reality. And I think Getting Real is taking us back to really questioning and talking about what is happening now. And we need to transform that by making images.
read that manifesto because it’s such an important... In Algeria in 1973, to really say what cinema should be for the continent and how we could be bridging, going from Senegal to Ethiopia, having this federation, and meeting at FESPACO.
These conversations have always existed, but it’s now that we are being gradually segmented. And of course, the arrival of Nollywood has brought a very important dislocation or disturbance in all this. Because Nollywood came and really said, “Well, the market.” But it was also salutary because they said that we have our market locally, we also have to not neglect that market. And they managed to find a way, a market locally. But at the same time, what was the kind of product that we were putting in that market?
So these conversations are going on, but the organizations carrying them, now we have probably DocA [Documentary Africa], which is trying to really revamp these kind of discussions. But the continent is big. And in different countries, the governments are not the same, are not allowing the same kind of space for people to express themselves. The conversation is on, actually. That’s what I can say about that.
ON: Do you know what FESPACO is? Raise your hand. Okay. Can you briefly say what FESPACO is?
JMT: Yes. FESPACO is the Festival Pan-African du Cinema de Ouagadougou [Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou]. It was created in 1969 by Sembène and a group of African filmmakers to have a space where they could show film, talk about film, and develop strategies so that cinema could occupy an important place in people’s lives—especially considering the level of illiteracy that came after the independencies. So cinema was supposed to accompany the countries in their development.
ON: And FESPACO still exists, still runs every year, and is a very strong African festival in Burkina Faso. I have to apologize, first to you, because we’re out of time. I hope that you can catch Jean-Marie outside. To everybody, thank you very much. Jean-Marie, it’s never enough.
JMT: Can I say one word? I have to say the last word because actually, coming here for me was really such a treat. Because having been making films that were always in the margin and going to all these festivals where documentary was always not really there, and then arriving here and being in the middle of a community of people sharing the same interest and challenges… really, it was something important. Getting Real was really an important moment for me.
It’s happening here in the U.S., a place where no one wants to look at the reality. And I think Getting Real is taking us back to really questioning and talking about what is happening now. And we need to transform that by making images. .
Saving Ourselves at Getting Real ’24
Amid industry disruption, filmmakers search for marketing and data solutions in community
By Anthony Kaufman
In the first days of Getting Real ’24, IDA’s biennial documentary conference, which ran April 15–18 in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo district, two major events crashed the proceedings. First, the event’s host location, a DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel, faced a labor action from UNITE HERE! Local 11. As dozens of documentary filmmakers picked up their badges at the DoubleTree, workers picketed the hotel lobby, marching for a fair contract. It was not a good look. Within a day, the entire conference picked up and moved. Hotel rooms were rebooked; in-person panels were relocated or shifted to Zoom; and what could have been seen as an organizational disaster and terrible inconvenience was quickly transformed into a radical act of solidarity and community.
Anthony Kaufman is a freelance journalist; film instructor at New School, DePaul, and Loyola Universities; and senior programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Doc10 film festival.
Conferencegoers between events, in front of the Japanese American National Museum Pavilion in Los Angeles.
Photo by Urbanite LA
The following day, there was a very different kind of disruption when news dropped that Participant Media, the film studio known for supporting some of the biggest documentaries of all time, from An Inconvenient Truth (2006) to Food, Inc. (2008), was shutting down. Its billionaire founder, Jeff Skoll, was getting out of the nonfiction business altogether, dealing a major blow to those committed to creating social change through media. But at Getting Real, reactions to this seismic shift in the nonfiction landscape were similar to the one that preceded it the day before. Filmmakers spoke of new opportunities, a younger generation of philanthropists and funders, rising distribution platforms such as Kinema and Jolt.film, various grassroots collectives, and finding new power within their own communities.
That was Getting Real ’24—a reality check, indeed. The only people coming to save independent documentaries were independent documentarians themselves. With nary a streaming executive or corporate suit in sight—and with keynote speakers such as Jesse Wente, the Indigenous Screen Office’s first executive director; Jemma Desai, a curator, cultural worker, and programmer of next year’s Flaherty Seminar; Cameraperson (2016) filmmaker and cinematographer Kirsten Johnson; and veteran Cameroonian doc-maker Jean-Marie Teno—the conference was almost singularly focused on those working outside the commercial system and how to bring power back to the filmmakers.
Consider the event’s “Meet the Funders and Buyers Lunch,” which included dozens of nonprofit organizations like Chicken & Egg, Firelight Media, CAAM, and the Southern Documentary Fund in attendance; the only real buyers were from U.S. public television. This was the anticorporate doc conference.
Above: Sandwich board at Getting Real ’24. Photo by Urbanite LA Right: Jesse Wente. Photo by Urbanite LA
At a panel titled “The Hot Seat,” billed as a chance for filmmakers to question gatekeepers, Bryn Mooser, head of XTR, the only studio speaking at the conference, offered a sobering picture of the larger commercial doc market. “There were funders out there who were reliable longtime documentary investors who had put millions of dollars into [projects] and those films didn’t end up anywhere. They lacked distribution,” he told the crowd, explaining the abrupt shifts in funding that affected his own company the previous year. “Philanthropists don’t mind losing money,” he added, “but to both lose their money and to have their film sit in a hard drive somewhere is very hard.”
But across panels, conversations, and convenings, there was a general refusal to accept defeat. At “Build Your Own Breakout” sessions on the final day of the conference, impromptu groups were formed to build community and hash out a host of issues, including a discussion about a post-Participant, postphilanthropic funding landscape for docs. Looking for solutions, this particular breakout group brainstormed ideas around financing media by focusing on key issues (rather than individual film projects), new “donor activist” groups such as Solidaire, and aligning with efforts and organizations centered on an anticapitalist “solidarity economy.”
Below: “Build Your Own Breakout.”
Photo by Urbanite LA
Above: (L to R) Luis Ortiz, Bryn Mooser, Kiyoko McCrae, and Mads K. Mikkelsen during “The Hot Seat.”
Photo by Urbanite LA
X. Courtesy of
At a game show event titled “What’s the Deal?”, multiple-choice questions reflected 2020 statistics from the last State of the Documentary Field survey, which reported 42% of respondents did not make any revenue from their projects, 50% said their main source of revenue was educational distribution, and the second largest source of funding (after grants) was their own money—constant reminders that filmmakers have long had to navigate their own ways. Getting Real even contained a “Sources of Income” confessional booth in which attendees could anonymously post the ways they financially stay afloat— which gathered over 80 responses ranging from “Airbnb host” to “DoorDash” to editing corporate videos.
Keith Wilson, producer of Reid Davenport’s acclaimed 2022 documentary I Didn’t See You There and one of the “game show” contestants, relayed some positive news about the film’s distribution travails in the absence of the hopedfor and now increasingly scarce all-rights deal. There was a TV sale to POV (“not a ton of money, but good exposure”); a solid film festival run via Film Collaborative; educational rights via Good Docs; and licensing to six airlines, the latter of which netted them $45,000. But he also divulged a disheartening story about paying a few thousand dollars to an aggregator to get it on streaming platforms, followed
by months of struggling over accessibility issues key to the film. The film is now selling on transactional VOD for just 99 cents, “which I’m not happy about and the revenue is so minimal,” he admitted, “but it is out there and can be seen.”
But such old models, as producer Amy Hobby, one of the co-founders of Distribution Advocates, said during a breakout session on the collective’s new Marketing Innovations Fund, needed “a multipronged critical intervention.”
“How can we grow audiences for inspiring and thought-provoking films?” Hobby asked the gathering of some 40 filmmakers in IDA’s conference room. One of Distribution Advocates’ answers is to provide funding for innovative marketing campaigns for independent releases and then take the data and experiences of those releases and create new models for the field. With a four-pronged approach—grants, education, case studies, and the power of the collective—the collective is planning a way forward. (Postconference, further details released at Hot Docs revealed that Distribution Advocates will provide grants
Sonya Childress, co-moderator of “From Concept to Catalyst (with A-Doc and BGDM).”
Photo by Urbanite LA
Below: (L to R)
Left: At the podium, Jeanie Finlay (L) and Suzanne Alizart (R) deliver their presentation for “Here’s What Really Happened: Your Fat Friend.”
Photo by Urbanite LA
Gary Byung-Seok Kam, Keith Wilson, Daresha Kyi, and Vinay Shukla during “What’s the Deal?” Host Chase Whiteside is not pictured.
Photo by Urbanite LA
But outside the talks, at the Japanese bakeries, or taco trucks, or sunny plazas, the some 750 in-person attendees appeared undeterred by the bleak landscape—of the industry and world events— and ready to fight.
ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 to independent distributors working with film teams, starting with 4 to 15 releases this year.)
At Color Congress, an organization that serves nonfiction organizations led by people of color, member organizations choose to devote collective resources to similar distribution plans. During a presentation at the conference, Color Congress’s Sonya Childress publicly announced a new “collective distribution project.” With an initial annual budget of US$300,000, they will support the release of 10 to 15 films directed by filmmakers of color and supported by member organizations over the next two years. “Designed as a series of experiments intended to seed the infrastructure needed to collectively market a range of films,” Childress explained to Documentary, the initiative would “secure new audience data and identify best practices that can inform new distribution pathways to center filmmakers and audiences of color.”
In addition to marketing, data was another buzzword at this year’s conference. During a “fireside chat,” former Sundance Institute CEO and Walter Shorenstein Fellow Keri Putnam discussed some preliminary research for her upcoming report on the documentary industry, which sifts through hundreds of interviews and data points. And like Distribution Advocates and Color Congress, she came to similar conclusions.
“One of the big findings,” she said, “is that a lot of these independent spaces—whether it’s an individual film team releasing their film on their own, or community releases, or art house theaters and film festivals—don’t actually have sophisticated marketing that actually enables them to use data to know their audience and then reach their audience.” Putnam also relayed drops in average monthly reach and digital users for PBS, despite relaying robust “audience demand” for the POV and Independent Lens strands.
Meanwhile, Barbara Twist, executive director of the Film Festival Alliance, shared similar concerns about the exhibition of documentaries in theatrical settings. “We are still in recovery,” she admitted, noting a 25–30% drop in the theatrical audience for independent documentaries. “Our revenue sources are somewhat reliant on donations and support from the community. But we do also rely on ticket sales, so we are still struggling,” she added.
But outside the talks, at the Japanese bakeries, or taco trucks, or sunny plazas, the some 750 in-person attendees appeared undeterred by the bleak landscape—of the industry and world events—and ready to fight. At the conference’s closing remarks, even IDA’s new Executive Director, Dominic Asmall Willsdon—who oversaw his first Getting Real conference and “first en masse experience of this community”—seemed to be taken aback by the can-do optimism on display. “I am genuinely moved by the experience of this past week,” he said. “I can’t believe just the emotion and the dedication and the concern for the field that is expressed throughout this conference by everybody who attended.” .
“Meet the Funders and Buyers Lunch” at the Japanese American National Museum’s Aratani Central Hall.
Photo by Urbanite LA
Sophie Brown is a writer, film programmer, documentary funding reviewer, and lecturer. She was recently shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & Lewitt Studios Essay Prize.
Presence/Absence at Getting Real ’24
In a world rent asunder, conference speakers thrust documentary ethics into reality
By Sophie Brown
“In
the last few months,
more
than ever, it is clear how little integrity—in any sense of the word—the documentary or any creative field can claim in its current infrastructures.”
—Jemma Desai
Ethics and evolving forms of best practice in the documentary field are at the heart of Getting Real. For the documentary industry, this has been a year of splintering. Since the genocide began in Gaza last October, it has been an intense six months of both calls for direct action and business as usual; of statements and letters circulating, of filmmakers withdrawing their work. It confirms there is not an overarching shared reality in the documentary industry, and that the stakes are indeed different for everyone.
Getting Real hovers above this rupture, feeling like an ideological utopia, a space where adaptability, care, thoughtfulness, and deep listening are foregrounded. When this year’s gathering at the DoubleTree Hotel in downtown Los Angeles was interrupted by hotel workers demanding a new contract for their labor, it became evident that the organizers of Getting Real would need to regroup, and fast. The protest roared and hooted into the center of pass-pickup, and the conference immediately, expensively transfigured. The guests were rehoused at the Biltmore—a historical beacon of decadence on the doorstep of Skid Row, whose walls are steeped in secrets, dreams, and despair. Renowned for being the last place the Black Dahlia was seen alive, you can grab a US$30 cocktail named after the victim at the hotel bar, but it won’t taste like what it feels like to be an unemployed woman, relying on predatory men for a place to sleep and a bite to eat. You
At the podium, Jemma Desai delivers her keynote speech at Getting Real ’24. Photo by Urbanite LA
Kirsten Johnson delivers her keynote speech at Getting Real ’24.
Photo by Urbanite LA
step out of the high-ceilinged, fountain-featured marble lobby, where she made her last desperate calls, into a homeless community waking up, vulnerable people wideeyed and looking for the next route to survival.
The dissonance between these neighboring realities is a microcosm of the cognitive gymnastics required to live in the now. For me, it is jarring to be in a hotel I couldn’t afford without the invitation to cover the conference, and to have tried and failed multiple times over the past six months to publish an article about complicity and performativity in an industry that prides itself on making the world a better place by acting as a stage for progressive politics but that can’t even acknowledge a genocide.
All structures have their ghosts, from the Biltmore to the documentary community. And with every utopian dream, there are lost futures. There are the films we wanted to make, the jobs we hoped we’d get, the ways we wanted to contribute, and the networks we thought would hold this work we do. Within every organization there are the injustices we choose to see, those we can’t see, what remains invisible, and the politics that keep a status quo.
GettinG Real opened with Keith Wilson’s performance of Moore for Sale, a desktop cinema séance of a documentary that would never be. As Wilson grapples with questions of power and positionality around the access to performance artist Frank Moore’s story and disputed
ethics within the archive footage itself, he is also faced with the labyrinthine hurdles of funding applications— the sometimes bewildering word counts for answers that can act more like barriers than suggested guidelines. Wilson’s timing is excellent, with bursts of technological intrusions and failures that destabilize the lines between past and present, performance and reality. To tell a story is a performance, to meet the asks of a documentary funding application is to perform well, and to question the performativity of documentary ethics is an interesting path to explore.
At the same time as the performance, the organizers were reconfiguring how the next few days would work without the DoubleTree as the conference hub. Ensuring all sites would be accessible for the talks and panels meant a stripping down of the in-person events. In a world that has been built predominantly by and for nondisabled people, keeping events accessible often means moving online. Half of the conference became virtual, while the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) became the physical anchor of Getting Real.
On the first morning at JANM, filmmaker and FWDDoc co-founder Jim LeBrecht shared an anecdote as part of his talk with Barbara Twist about the Film Event Accessibility Score Card they had developed for film festivals. He recalled the Filmmaker’s Lodge at Sundance and its inaccessibility; how over the years the festival
Keith Wilson performing Moore for Sale.
Photo by Urbanite LA
has stubbornly continued to use this space, and the only resolution offered to LeBrecht was to watch via video link—a suggestion that his industry knowledge and presence have no value. I think of funding applications I’ve read for documentary films. While the questions in these applications can seem exhausting and daunting for filmmakers—as comically addressed in Moore for Sale —they can also be a valuable litmus test. Many applicants have a superficial understanding of what accessibility means, but some question the need itself. One applicant wrote that their film would not be relevant for audiences who had accessibility needs, and that instead of experiencing it in cinematic form, they could perhaps read an article about it instead.
There is a long history of the film industry being unable to recognize how it marginalizes and ghosts, recorded in the histories of public statements and letters, by organizations or to organizations. For fairly recent, dynamic research, Jemma Desai’s This Work Isn’t for Us renders clear its logic. Sometimes the visible decision makers are puppets to the values or whims of boards, sometimes their hands or voices are tied by government funding, sometimes their own privileges make it hard to grasp the realities of others. Sometimes they simply aren’t that deep.
In her keynote speech closing the second day of Getting Real, below a screen illuminated by a carousel of her
Instagram stories from the last six months, predominantly concerning the relentless attack on the people of Gaza, Desai shared the words of a Palestinian poet, Mohammed El-Kurd:
Distracting questions feed the discursive loop that prioritizes a conjectural “day after” over the material present [in our field about open letters, who has or will sign them, where history must begin, who wears a pin to the awards, who boycotts, or does not, who uses their platform to speak]. But here, in the present, there are more pressing questions: What are the mental and muscular consequences of being forced to transform a taxi into a hearse? What becomes of the nurse whose shift is interrupted by the arrival of her husband’s corpse on a stretcher? What about the father carrying what remains of his son in two separate plastic bags? What happens to him after all of this death, once he is alone and away from the cameras? What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother’s limbs in a bag grow up to be?
“What El-Kurd witnesses for himself and his people,” Desai went on to illuminate, “is that what we are constituted of is not what the nation-state and its structures of knowing say is real but from the knowledge
(L to R) ASL interpreter Bob LoParo, Barbara Twist, and Jim LeBrecht at “Morning Presentations: New Industry Initiatives 1.”
Photo by Urbanite LA
Top left: (L to R) Lailanie Gadia, Cindy Chuong, and Nicole Tsien at the Asian American Documentary Network booth during the “Industry Expo Lunch.”
Photo by Urbanite LA
Bottom: (L to R) Laura Kloeckner, Abishek Nilamber, and Jemma Desai in front of the map they presented during the “An Experiential Conversation About How We Gather” workshop.
Photo by Urbanite LA
Top right: (L to R) Ainslee Robson, Kidus Hailesilassie, and Charles Burnett after “Fireside Chat: Charles Burnett.”
Photo by Urbanite LA
production of our spirits and what we feel to be real. We are our perceptions, our senses, our sense-making which happens through our bodies, and through our experiences of the world, and of each other. We are all, filmmakers or not, film industry or not, implicated in making the real for each other.”
I wonder, what do we choose to make real for each other? Is it that some people are granted access, and some are not? Is it that institutional structures are required for how we need to exist? Is it that some lived experiences have hierarchy over others? Is it that documentary has a purer form of truth than other forms of storytelling? Is it that personal experience must be left out of journalism?
Unlived experience can offer a cold shortcut to lacking accountability to others, as Kirsten Johnson evoked the following evening in her keynote, talking of the digital panopticon we inhabit and Artificial Intelligence, which, despite its prolific image making and simulations of human thought, does not know lived experience: “How can you understand the stakes of what it means to be in a body if you don’t have one?”
Johnson wondered “how we can build more safety for all bodies” in her lively interactive performance lecture, which demanded attention as deeply as she, in her career as a cameraperson and filmmaker, has paid attention. Time, bodies, stakes, and images were the keywords for deep dives into the lived experience and presence of every member of the audience, both those viewers in the present moment and those of the future. As audience members, we turned and looked into our neighbor’s eyes for a minute, in which time expanded. It is an intense experience to lock eyes and contemplate someone giving all their presence to you; to witness with care, and to feel vulnerable in another’s gaze. It is also easy to do so, in a fun, low-stakes environment where the shared space is one of safety. Johnson expressed how she was feeling for other people around the world who are giving all their attention to filming what’s happening to other people’s bodies: “We can be attentive right now to what’s happening to other people’s bodies, right now, all around the world.”
Desai’s keynote also considered how truth is formed and embodied, and questioned convictions surrounding the nature of the documentary form. She shared the statement published by the ten Hot Docs programmers who resigned en masse earlier this year:
Films are the penicillin to what ails the world because they hold the mirror up to our shared experience: Fiction lets you escape, documentary confronts. We can’t dream, change, or do better until we see who we are.
Desai wondered about this assumed weight of truth in narrative building, of how narratives built to confront could seem more truthful than the narratives we build to escape. Is it also not true that documentary allows us to escape? Again, as El-Kurd asks, “What happens when the cameras go away?”
At what point do these calls for care, presence, and attention become realized as opposed to being consumed by the industry as performative chess pieces, enticing provocations, or the “healthy debate” which film festivals postulate? What will it take for business as usual to stop and an embodied reality that considers these truths foregrounded?
“Strategies, Networks, Access” was the theme of this year’s convening. But whether the values and ideas trickle out into the decision making and praxis of the wider community is yet to be seen. Beyond this space, programmers continue to select “heartwarming” documentaries about disabled people made by nondisabled filmmakers; film festivals strategize how to be platforms for progressive work without being explicitly political, especially if politics means speaking out against what their funders support; a documentary participant is tortured to death because his identity was not protected.
The furious gatekeeping of what documentary is, or illusions of what it should be, or even what it does, reeks of limited thinking. Of people who need borders and hierarchies. Who is in, who is out, who decides. There is no ghost of colonialist thinking because it never died. We all know this; we’ve always known this. At what point do these calls for care, presence, and attention become realized as opposed to being consumed by the industry as performative chess pieces, enticing provocations, or the “healthy debate” that film festivals postulate? What will it take for business as usual to stop and an embodied reality that considers these truths foregrounded? To borrow from the thinking of artist Susan Hiller, collectively we are haunted by what we refuse to see. It begs the question, what are we making real for each other, in our films, in our networks, in our strategies? .
Sudipto Sanyal is a writer in Bangalore who wants to revive his old pirate radio show, but the cats keep getting in the way.
NoCut Film Collective
Arya Rothe, Isabella Rinaldi, and Cristina Hanes’s transcontinental indie outfit
harbors collaborations and a patient cinema
By Sudipto Sanyal
“My job is to finish the translations,” Arya Rothe, 34, said near the end of a NoCut Film Collective production meeting, “and”—with a big chuckle, bringing up a grant disbursement of their current film-in-production—“to inform you guys that we have four Euros left.”
“Well, it’s good that it’s not minus four,” interjected Isabella Rinaldi, 38.
“We will go into minus because I have to feed our translator,” Rothe continued, throwing a spanner in the works. “I try to feed him really nice food so that he keeps coming back.”
“Nice!” Cristina Hanes, 33, mumbled sardonically as she moved her cat out of the way and rolled another cigarette.
For the better part of two hours, the three foundermembers of NoCut Film Collective waded through backache-inducing questions of business (last-minute applications to film markets), art (“I don’t want to now stress ourselves with this,” Rinaldi said, looking extremely stressed, “but we really need a title for the new film”), other people’s art (swimming eyeballs from hours and hours of rough cuts), and even strategies of emotional support (for suffering directors).
This, it seems, is what a typical production meeting is like in the non-offices of NoCut—boiling over with energy, enthusiasm, and a dedication bordering on desperation. Despite the confabulations through the ether of Google
and Zoom, their kinship shines through. Every one of these virtual meetings is stuffed with an overwhelming array of topics, evidence of the extensive support that NoCut provides every production it works with, from pitching festivals and navigating grant applications to handholding filmmakers through the creative process and after (at a meeting some weeks later, for instance, they spend half an hour tearing their hair as they try to find a festival home for a film that’s been in the works for years). To keep track of all these tasks, they need multiple Excel sheets of metadata, lists of deadlines, and confusing content pages for projectrelated documents. With so many balls in the air, these sessions can sometimes feel dizzying, and everyone sounds wiped out by the end. But there’s work to be done, so they decide to power through and schedule more for Sunday.
How to Start a Nonhierarchical Collective
That NoCut has no physical office, that it is registered in Romania and India (unofficially floating into Belgium), and that its members frequently navigate three different time zones to set up meetings, are all appropriate given its origin story. Rothe, Rinaldi, and Hanes met ten years ago as classmates in DocNomads, the Erasmus Mundus master’s program in documentary filmmaking. Run by a consortium of three universities in Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium, DocNomads is a fully funded course for students
from all over the globe, with an emphasis on teamwork and coproduction, which explains why many of its graduates often end up working with each other later. Hanes and Rothe became housemates in their first semester in Lisbon; in the next, in Budapest, Rinaldi moved in. Helping each other with student projects, the three women developed a working rapport even as they fell into a thick friendship.
Once their graduate program ended in 2016, the trio returned to their respective hometowns, but they wanted to carry on working together. “We didn’t want to lose this common understanding we’d garnered together in those two years,” Rothe told me, on another video call. “And at that moment,” Rinaldi jumped in, “the most obvious thing was for Cristina and me to go to India.”
With vague ambitions of finding something to film together and very little planning, Hanes (who lives in Transylvania) and Rinaldi (who moves between Brussels and Rome) decamped to Rothe’s house in Pune, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. For three months, they spitballed ideas, scouted locations, and came up with a name for whatever it was they were trying to do: NoCut Film Collective.
The name expressed their desire for a nonhierarchical production setup engaged in a patient cinema capable of expressing reality directly. “We always knew it would be a collective and not a company,” Rothe said. “The ‘no-cut’ was close to our idea of cinema.”
In India, the three filmmakers started visiting settlements of surrendered Naxalites, Maoist rebels who had been engaged in armed resistance against the Indian state’s sustained policy of dispossessing Adivasis and poor locals in the name of development. One erstwhile rebel in particular captivated them: The day before they were to leave the jungles of central India, they met Somi, who fell in love with her husband Sukhram in a Naxalite commando unit. The couple had traded in their guns a few years earlier, under the State’s “capitulation-cum-rehabilitation” policy, to try and start afresh. After months of scrounging for funds, NoCut returned to film the couple’s newfound currents of domesticity and their entanglement within the fluctuating tripwires of a neglectful state. The end product, Rothe said, “consumed us for three years.”
A Rifle and a Bag (2020) documents Somi and Sukhram as they aspire to the regular flows of the quotidian in the face of the continuing scrutiny of an incompetent bureaucracy and the vagaries of an insensitive society. With a name like NoCut, it is not surprising that the collective’s first film uses a static camera that meanders through long takes of the couple raising their kids, navigating the constant distrust of other villagers, and trying to procure a caste certificate so their son can stay in school. An
impressionistic and empathetic portrayal, the film is shot through with Somi’s articulate voice even as it confidently effaces the voices of its authors.
At first, this may seem ironic, because NoCut is drawn to distinctive authorial voices and creative visions that have compelling stories to tell. Indeed, it is one of the ways in which they decide, if invited, to jump aboard someone else’s film as coproducers. But Rifle’s willingness to foreground the voices of its subjects instead of its authors is also in some ways a feature of many films that come out of the DocNomads program, which encourages a reflective and personal approach to documentary filmmaking that is grounded in a participatory and observational sensibility. Despite not having parlayed their frequent festival presence into more directly commercial gigs (something I’m not sure they want to do in the first place), NoCut has been quietly making a name for itself in the documentary and independent film communities. They receive fellowships and grant funding consistently, and their films play at most
Top: Still from A Rifle and a Bag. Courtesy of NoCut Film Collective
Bottom: Still from No Winter Holidays. Courtesy of NoCut Film Collective
top-tier documentary festivals. But their true triumph may well be an embodiment of the DocNomads ethos—a genuinely collaborative and transcultural practice that is rooted in its genius loci even as it transcends continental borders.
“They really helped us refine our funding proposals and the edits of our film,” Rajan Kathet, an old DocNomads classmate of the trio, told me. “Their emotional support— which we need the most during our years of filmmaking— was invaluable.” Kathet got in touch when NoCut was making Rifle, hoping they would collaborate on a film he was codirecting. Familiar with his student work, NoCut signed on. “We didn’t know in the beginning what shape our collaboration would take,” Hanes said. “In the end, it took this shape of a coproduction.”
The resulting film, No Winter Holidays (2023), shares a certain affinity with Rifle, a sense of gazing silently into the stiller corners of people’s lives, where the bits of crumpled paper and the detritus of dreams lie. No Winter Holidays is about the two old caretakers of a deserted Nepali village in the unforgiving Himalayan winter who also happen to have each been the “other wife” to the same dead husband. As in Rifle, the camera peeks into intimate spaces—bedrooms, kitchens, clotheslines, backyards. And like Rifle, No Winter Holidays is composed primarily of long takes; we keep
seeing the two old women sitting by a fire or on a balcony in the company of unrelenting snow. Not much moves. NoCut, it would appear, is deeply invested in authorial voices that know how to mute themselves. As Miles Davis once said, “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.”
How to Operate as a Transcontinental Indie Doc Outfit
NoCut has a starkly equitable structure, almost a nonstructure when seen in relief against standard industrial filmmaking in India, and especially Bollywood, with its clearly demarcated production roles and crew structures. The collective, Rinaldi explained, “can take any configuration according to what the project needs, based on personal skills, logistics, availability, and even just intention, like, the willingness to do something.” Once someone’s role has been defined, though, it usually stays that way for the rest of that project.
For an example of these shifting roles, consider their first film, A Rifle and a Bag, for which all three members shared writing, directing, editing, and production credits. However, because Rothe lives in India and could communicate with the characters in Hindi and Marathi, she did more of the daily production work, while Hanes and
Rinaldi handled sales and the administrative officialdoms of the festival circuit once the film had been made. Now, in the middle of shooting the sequel to Rifle, they’ve decided to stick to the configuration of the previous film. Hanes will remain, for all practical purposes, the cinematographer, while Rinaldi, who oversaw Rifle’s sound, has decided to continue handling that aspect of the new production.
This unorthodox setup appears to be as beholden to empathy and trust as it is to efficiency and order. With the sequel, said Rothe, “our characters are also used to seeing us in certain roles because it’s further along in the same story and they’re the same characters. So, we didn’t want to really shift from that, because we wanted to pick up the intimacy from where we left off.” By prioritizing their off-screen relationships with their characters so that Somi, Sukhram, and the children are never uncomfortable, the filmmakers have decided to balance operational productivity with the emotional needs of their subjects.
The NoCut coproduction universe is one of switching constellations. Since Rifle, the collective has been working on producing or coproducing four films by other authors.
Rinaldi and Hanes were more involved in No Winter Holidays and received official co-production credits (three other production houses were also involved in that film), while Rothe officially co-produced, with the Belgian company Clin d’Oeil Films, Kinshuk Surjan’s Marching in the Dark (2024), a documentary about grief and resilience amidst the phenomenon of escalating farmer suicides in rural India.
Initially, the three members watched the research material for No Winter Holidays and Marching in the Dark together, like they do for all their projects. Next, they concluded that while No Winter Holidays required the kind of creative inputs that Rinaldi and Hanes were better suited to provide at the time, Marching needed an Indian producer on location to help the filmmakers. Thanks to NoCut’s fluid structure, though, Rinaldi ended up watching more recent cuts of Marching, despite Rothe having been much more involved in the project as it was being shot.
For a significant chunk of one of the meetings I attended, the three producers were busting a gut trying to figure out what was best for Surjan and his film, and where
Left: Still from A Rifle and a Bag. Courtesy of NoCut Film Collective
Above: Christina Hanes (L) and Isabella Rinaldi (R) filming the sequel to A Rifle and a Bag. Courtesy of NoCut Film Collective
to premiere Marching in the Dark. (It eventually premiered—and won a Special Mention in the new Human:Rights Award category—at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, one of the largest documentary festivals in the world.) NoCut helped make visa appointments for the film’s protagonist, Sanjivani (the widow of a farmer who committed suicide in the face of mounting debt and crop failure), who was present for the premiere in Denmark.
Surjan, another Doc Nomads alum, also values NoCut’s noncommercial thrust, which is geared entirely toward the filmmaker’s needs. “Arya, Cristina, and Isa follow an egoless process, a perfect synergy of three distinct minds, each with their strengths,” he told me in an email. “Their shared passion for cinema drives them to craft unique, unconventional stories that may not be easy to tell or sell.”
The collective, in its endeavor to help other filmmakers realize their artistic visions, gravitates toward collaborations with emerging directors, ideally engaging with a project as close to its nascent stages as possible.
“Especially with first-time filmmakers, we feel that’s when we can really contribute,” Rinaldi said. “It’s that first stage, where some filmmakers don’t know what to do. We can refine the way they present their project to the industry. Writing the synopsis, writing the treatment, editing the trailer, making a strategy for funds. That’s when we can be impactful, because we’ve been through it. We know the drill. And we also know the emotional struggle.”
“I think we all agree that the most important aspect is the gaze of the director,” Hanes elaborated, describing how NoCut tends to get invested in such projects. “This gaze should be genuine … inquisitive … and driven by a real curiosity about the theme or situation or characters that they are exploring.” Because a lot of their work is remote, this is not always an easy appraisal to pull off. It is where the initial research material has to do the heavy lifting.
“One of the biggest things is to actually see if we like the material, because that really, really speaks a lot
about things the director might not want to say out loud,” Rothe said. “And we often take a long time to watch a lot of material.” While this material varies depending on the project, it usually includes many hours of reviewing dailies, poring over audiovisual proxies of roughly edited scene assemblies, and going through a considerable number of rough cuts.
“We don’t subscribe to this idea that producers should only stick to making the budgets, making the financial mapping, because even to do that, we also need to know the film deeply.”
NoCut is drawn to those causes that many established production houses, with their algorithmically guided and focus-group-driven offerings, tend to abjure. “We don’t look for projects that are commissioned by bigger companies. These author-driven creative documentaries are not the kind of thing that OTTs like Netflix or Amazon would jump at.” Consequently, NoCut films end up on smaller streaming platforms that are aimed at niche audiences, like MUBI, GuideDoc, True Story, or the Doc Alliance’s DAFilms.
If NoCut produces your film, you get bespoke, not boilerplate. Even if that means they’re up all night working on the application for the grant that’s just right for you. “Our skill set is more aligned with applying for the grants and finding the money that’s actually accessible to the kinds of stories we like to work on,” said Rothe. “It’s not just because we are directors that we have this skill set. It’s because we have received a lot of the funds that are significant in, let’s say, the small creative documentary world. So that also helps us help other filmmakers.”
NoCut swims in diverse waters. Andreea Dumitriu met Rinaldi and Hanes while presenting a film plan at the fARAD Festival de Film Documentar in Arad, Romania, when they were all attending the fARAD Lab’s development and sound workshop. Dumitriu had filmed a kilometres-long queue of a few hundred thousand pilgrims in the Romanian town of Iasi and was thinking of producing a short film. NoCut offered to help find funds for postproduction, so Dumitriu decided to ask them to produce. “They understood and supported my artistic vision, and I had the trust that they could be a good sparring partner in the editing phase,” she informed me recently. “They had experience with applying to international funding and were ready to invest their time in doing that with my film.”
Logistically—and linguistically—it’s not easy being a transcontinental indie operation. In the films they’ve made or coproduced, you can hear Gondi, Hindi, Madia, Marathi, Nepali, Portuguese, and Romanian. When they first set it up in 2016, the collective was incorporated as an Indian entity under Rothe’s name. The next year, Hanes registered NoCut
Making a Production
Romania. The two have contracts with each other that are largely defined by the Council of Europe Convention on Cinematographic Co-Production. Rinaldi is fiscally registered in Italy as an EU freelance contractor paid by either NoCut Romania or NoCut India. Funds tend to be raised both individually and collectively at various stages of a project, and the contracts outline this process.
In some ways, NoCut exemplifies the increasingly globalized practice of co-productions between multiple countries, thanks especially to the European Union’s promotion of integrated markets for cultural exchange across borders. Operating in multiple countries is a way for the collective to broaden the reach of its films, collaborate with different artists, and explore greater funding avenues.
All their accounts are on one easily accessible spreadsheet, so everyone knows what’s going on in all three entities. “Even though we have blind trust between us when it comes to money,” Rinaldi told me unhesitatingly. Unlike a classic production house, NoCut raises money and makes its films in increments, getting enough funds to shoot a chunk and then repeating the process.
How to Pay the Bills During Creative Collaboration
I keep returning to the idea of an anarchist collective whenever I consider NoCut’s organizational plasticity. “But we are not fans of chaos,” Rothe insisted, describing their functioning as “disciplined fluidity.” There is no suffocating sense of an inescapable adhesion to the organization for any of its members. Every member also pursues individual projects outside of the collective. Rothe has completed several work-for-hire projects for streamers and broadcasters such as Netflix India and Prime Video; Rinaldi directed one episode of a Belgian anthology TV series, an international co-production led by Off World,
and held production and editing roles on other creative documentaries; and with Radu Stancu, Hanes oversees the production of all documentary projects at Romania’s deFilm. A complex, interconnected mixture sustains the daily bread.
On their own films, they make it a point to pay every crew member fairly. “The Indian film industry in particular is based on extreme hierarchy,” Rothe sighed. “Different crew members are paid, and treated, drastically differently, which we don’t agree with at all.” Whatever—if anything—is left over, they split equally.
“NoCut is perhaps one of the few production houses born from DocNomads that has carried on its spirit of egoless collaboration beyond any borders,” Surjan later wrote me. “In this long and lonely journey of making films, having friends like Arya, Cristina, and Isa, who not only provide constant advice and support as friends but also serve as coproducers, is truly invaluable. [In their case, it’s] even more remarkable since we have very different processes of making films.”
Splitting the pay, splitting the heartache. Despite being a small indie collective, NoCut seems to commit to industrial-scale emotional grunt work. I wonder if it’s because they are all women, running a production house unimpeded by testosterone. The unpredictability of documentary filmmaking and its affective riptides—“You end up feeling a lot more vulnerable on a documentary shoot,” Rothe said, “because you are dealing with real emotions, real people, real situations”—has for all three members become easier to navigate through collaboration. The collective has tethered them to an emotional anchor and sparked a sense of solidarity.
“What’s happening in the world, which is quite disturbing to be honest, also affects our storytelling,” Rinaldi grimaced. “And the collective helps us share, in some ways, the pain that we all feel in our world. And it gives—I mean, coming from the worst possible space—but it also gives us the motivation to keep doing what it is that we do. And in a way, it increases the stubbornness in doing this job.”
“The idea of resistance has become much more collective for me,” Rothe told me on our final call. “Even with our small film, we are still tackling all these big feelings. I’m not saying we are making a film that is great for the world, but it’s the other way around—making films helps us cope with what’s going on outside, together. This feeling would be, for me, very limited if I did not have Isa and Cristina by my side.” .
(L to R) Cristina Hanes, Isabella Rinaldi, and Arya Rothe. Courtesy of NoCut Film Collective
Matters
Life of and Decay
X. Photo by Camille Lenain
Bill Morrison.
Photo by Camille Lenain
Bill Morrison’s films spin profound insights from degraded film stock and digital surveillance footage
By Carmine Grimaldi
Few filmmakers have as recognizable a style as Bill Morrison. Those with even a passing familiarity with his work will think of degraded film stock, an aesthetic of cinematic ruination. And in film after film, reviewers invariably use the same words: spectral, haunted, fragmented, poetic. This reputation may give the impression that his work, for all its beauty and mystery, is fundamentally repetitive, a mere cycling of similar ideas and feelings.
It is almost as if Morrison foretold this reputation during his first feature, Decasia (2002), the film responsible both for his renown and the caricature that has come with it. Composed of decaying nitrate film stock, the film is an elliptical meditation on mortality, on the overwhelming beauty and melancholy of loss. In the opening fragment, we see a whirling dervish from the early twentieth century; in the next shot, we see a row of film reels all turning in synchrony. Viewed only on the physical plane, both instances may seem repetitive and inscrutable. But this simple spinning, Morrison suggests, can also generate the plenitude and profundity of human experience.
The dervish is an apt metonym for Morrison’s career: he has been engaging in the same form of dance, spinning around the same themes, histories, archives, and even footage, repeating similar gestures again and again. Yet this is not to say that each turn is redundant. Rather, each repetition accrues new meanings. And like the spinning of
Carmine Grimaldi is a filmmaker and historian.
Still from Dawson City: Frozen Time. All images courtesy of the filmmaker
the dervish, his work rarely feels static or rote—there is a dynamo that electrifies the films.
But how wide, exactly, is the arc of this dance? Particularly in recent years, Morrison’s style has been shifting in surprising ways. His recent austere short on police brutality, Incident (2023), was a surprise winner of Best Short Documentary at the 2023 IDA Documentary Awards—a far cry from his abstract beginnings. And this spring, Morrison had retrospectives of his work at the American Cinematheque’s This Is Not a Fiction festival and the Metrograph. The latter, a thoughtful selection spanning from his delightful The Film of Her (1996) to Incident, offered an opportunity to review his ambit. What emerges is a trajectory that is imperfect, for as Morrison knows well, perfection implies completeness, which is to say, stasis and death. And Morrison’s style is very much alive.
in inteRviews, MoRRison has dated his interest in making films to seeing Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi in the theaters in 1982. It was, he explained, a watershed moment in which he realized cinema need not have a narrative structure, that it can instead develop through association, feeling, and experience. Reggio would go on to become a close friend and supporter of Morrison’s work, serving as a producer on Decasia. The two shared not only an interest in working with music and associational editing, but also an abiding fascination with capturing the natural world.
It’s a revealing relationship, but less for what they had in common and more for what Morrison’s differences reveal about his radical style. For if films like Koyaanisqatsi seek to capture the beauty and human depredations of the environment, Morrison is working instead with the fundamental elements of nature, having it structure the very foundations of his films. In Decasia, for example, Morrison literalizes this through his selection of degraded
Sequence from Decasia, using A Tokio Siren (1920).
For celluloid, time and the environment are part of a single continuum, like spacetime in physics. Decay does not tick steadily with a clock, but bends its shape to temperature, its life measured by its gasses and acids, by its proximity to heat and the eruption of instantaneous conflagration.
films: water laps around a rocky outcropping as the film pulses and smears and bleeds as though it were itself one with the water; ethereal mist is shrouded by the mist of moldering film; microscopic animals wriggle on nitrate that appears eaten by termites; a Monarch butterfly’s patterns are echoed in the very medium capturing it.
Degradation in film, after all, is always a story of the environment. For celluloid, time and the environment are part of a single continuum, like spacetime in physics. Decay does not tick steadily with a clock, but bends its shape to temperature, its life measured by its gasses and acids, by its proximity to heat and the eruption of instantaneous conflagration. We are sensing time on a scale beyond the bounds of the human. These images of loss give us a glimpse of what it might be like to exist in a different, elemental temporality; his films create a sensation of a geologic or glacial time.
Morrison treats ruination as though it were a creative collaborator. In his earliest films, when he was at New York’s Ridge Theater in the ’90s, he had painted on archival film, but by the time of Decasia, he had begun to allow decay to do the painting. Morrison’s work is not mere celluloid ruin porn. Rather, it gives the impression that decay is uncannily animate: a boxer fights a cascade of rot; a campfire erupts into pulsing licks of decay, consuming those around it by its eerie glow. It is as though this force of ruin were trying to speak to us.
What exactly it wants to tell us, however, is never made totally clear. There is no Ouija board that can give us a definitive message. Instead, we must rely on the subtle feelings it evokes. And it is in this area that Morrison is an unparalleled guide. To go through Morrison’s oeuvre is to become alive to the many experiences possible in decay. In his magnificent short, Who by Water (2007), we see a series of portraits (some candid, some posed) of passengers preparing to embark on a ship. As we watch
them, the film stock’s subtle damage becomes increasingly conspicuous. Although restrained by Morrison’s standards, mostly streaks and flickering spots, it increasingly feels like a barrier between us, like looking through a dirty windowpane.
Accompanied by Michael Gordon’s unnerving score, the film becomes increasingly unsettling. The passengers’ fate on the sea is theirs alone. We can watch but not intervene; whatever tragedy will befall them is now irrevocable. By the time the film ends, I scoured the credits to see which tragedy this footage preceded: Was this the maiden voyage of the Titanic? Were they on the final voyage of the Lusitania? But no, it is simply footage culled from Fox Movietone Newsreels. “Who will perish by fire and who by water?” Morrison doesn’t tell us. We may think we can watch fate unfurl from a safe vantage point, but this is only the condescension of posterity. The barrier between us and them is total.
But if Who by Water is asking us to look out toward the sea, his stunning short The Light Is Calling (2004) throws us into its roiling waves. Here, the past is not something we peer at from a distance but is rather a force that overwhelms both viewer and viewed. The film is so damaged we can barely make out the fragments of images: a soldier riding
into a village, a woman peering through bubbling nitrate, and a heart-stoppingly beautiful entanglement between them, as she repeatedly evanesces into the decay. With such compelling images, metaphors seem beside the point, yet it’s easy to see this as a visual embodiment of half-forgotten memories, or of the bewildering power of desire.
Yet it is not so simple. As is often the case in Morrison’s work, there is a final sly twist. The footage is from the film The Bells (1926), in which an indebted innkeeper murders a traveling Jewish merchant, using the money in part for the dowry that consummates the marriage of the two lovers we see in The Light Is Calling. It may feel like a melancholic and sublime love story—indeed, it may be that to the two lovers, and for us—yet there are forces that shape this love that must also be hidden from sight.
This quiet theme of violence—and the way that aesthetic experience can occlude it—has long been a theme running through his work. It comes through most vividly in his medium-length film, Beyond Zero: 1914–1918 (2014), in which the degraded film stock uncannily parallels scenes from WWI. But for Morrison, latent violence is not simply a theme but the very material substrate of his projects. “Film was born of an explosive,” Morrison writes in Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), and since at least his early work
Left: Stills from Who By Water.
Right: Still from Dawson City: Frozen Time.
Photo by Kathy Jones Gates
Telling the history of this small boomtown begins to feel like a microcosm for the history of cinema, American politics, and even capitalism itself.
The Film of Her, he has recycled the same footage to recount this history: We see the plantations where Black laborers pick cotton; the manufacturing of guncotton and its use in hand grenades; and finally, the mixing of guncotton and camphor to produce nitrate film. Violence built early cinema.
in one of his Most widely seen filMs, Dawson City: Frozen Time, Morrison most directly turned to early cinema’s history from an unlikely vantage point, that of a mining boomtown in the Yukon. The pretext for the film is classic Morrison. In 1978, a Pentecostal preacher and alderman of Dawson City, digging behind Diamond Tooth Gerties Gambling Hall, uncovered a load of 533 reels of film. These films were dregs twice over. They were left in Dawson City as their last stop in their theatrical tour, eventually deemed so worthless that they were dumped into an old pool that needed filling. Whereas nitrate archives like the Fox vault would inadvertently go up in flames, it is in the far north, at the seeming periphery of American culture and capital, that the center is preserved.
Top: Still from Dawson City: Frozen Time.
Middle: The Butler and the Maid in Dawson City: Frozen Time.
Right: Birth of Flowers in Dawson City: Frozen Time.
Above: Still from Dawson City: Frozen Time depicting Alice Brady in The Lure of Woman (1915), directed by Travers Vale, World Film.
Top left and right: Newsreel footage in Dawson City: Frozen Time.
But though the film’s pretext fits his usual mode, Morrison’s approach sharply diverges. While his earlier films withhold information and invite the viewer into an associational dream logic, here Morrison wants to give us information. He orders and disciplines the footage, editing it into a chronological narrative, gives us unceasing explanatory texts, and assiduously identifies every single clip with title and date.
One soon understands why he chose to do this. Telling the history of this small boomtown begins to feel like a microcosm for the history of cinema, American politics, and even capitalism itself. We have the history of Indigenous displacement, the capitalist cycles of boom and bust, and the exploitation of labor, as well as the environmental depredations of the extractive economy. But more surprising are the ways that so many strands of history, from the early twentieth century to now, seem braided through this outpost. It is not only the story of early mass film culture (Charlie Chaplin is here, as well as Sid Grauman, the creator of the still-open Egyptian and Chinese movie palaces of Los Angeles) but also the story of the Robber Barons (the Guggenheims visit) and even the Trump family (Dawson City, we learn, was near the origin of their wealth).
It is as if the form of the archive inflects the form of Morrison’s films. Many of his earlier features are built from discrete archives, and their closed and controlled spaces
Morrison’s films have always invited the medium to speak for itself, and to speak in a form that is distinctive to it.
seem to echo Morrison’s highly consistent formal choices. We watch many of his earlier films—such as Decasia, Miner’s Hymn (2010), and Beyond Zero—like a researcher exploring a new collection: a self-contained world of footage upon footage, without much explanation or context. In contrast, Dawson City is far more heterogeneous and expansive. Like the original dig site, in which the film was mixed with chicken wire, bottles, and broken curling stones, Dawson City incorporates clips from television, interviews, photographs, and newspapers. These archives, Morrison suggests, have their own dramaturgy.
Much of Dawson City appears wildly incongruous next to Morrison’s earlier work. The obsessive local pedantry of the film—chronicling every single nationally known figure to have set foot in Dawson and monomaniacally detailing every vicissitude of the Dawson Amateur Athletic Association—will be familiar to anyone who has visited a small town’s historical society. And this is exactly the point. Morrison is absorbing the way the place articulates its own history. If this interpretation seems like a stretch, he makes this sly, self-reflexive move evident at another moment in his film. Those familiar with his earlier work will likely be surprised to see ample use of the Ken Burnsian pan over photographs. It’s the first and only time Morrison
Onscreen text in Dawson City: Frozen Time.
has used this technique, and it gives the film a surprisingly conventional sheen. But, as is often the case with Morrison, style is not a choice but an organic feature of the subject. Later in the film, Morrison reveals that Dawson City was subject to the first use of the Burnsian pan, in the influential Canadian filmmakers Colin Low and Wolf Koenig’s 1957 documentary City of Gold. Dawson City—with all its messiness, pedantry, and conventional tropes—is, for these very reasons, a film that is radically rooted in place. It is, both literally and figuratively, an autochthonic history, a film born from the earth.
MoRRison’s Most Recent filM, Incident, reveals the extent to which he invites the archive and the material to shape his films. Based on footage acquired by journalist Jamie Kalven, Morrison compiles footage from body cams, surveillance cameras, and dashboard cams before and after the murder of Harith “Snoop” Augustus by Chicago police officer Dillan Halley. Even more than Morrison’s stylistic shift in Dawson City, here seemingly none of the trademarks one has come to expect from Morrison are present. Instead, Morrison offers us a simple collection of time-stamped footage, which is often split into four synchronized panels—like a surveillance monitor, or an old first-person shooter—accompanied by captions and explanatory text. There is no trace of the organic feeling of his earlier work. Time ticks by with brutal precision.
The film’s matter-of-fact presentational style might suggest that Morrison wants to repress any trace of himself in the footage. But this would miss what is so singular about Morrison’s work more generally, that his films have always invited the medium to speak for itself, and to speak in a form that is distinctive to it. And indeed, resting beneath the shift in the approach are the same preoccupations that have guided Morrison’s work for decades. His earlier footage of cotton plantations and guncotton and nitrate factories haunt this footage; racist exploitation and weapons have always been part of his story, and here it erupts most painfully. The cameras may be digital, but the material violence of the image is still here, only more cutting. Chicago police are instructed to turn their body cams on record “at the beginning of an incident.” That is to say, these images only exist when there is the potential for violence.
We have all seen these kinds of videos forensically analyzed by publications like the New York Times and Washington Post, with the decisive moment parsed in freeze frames and correlated with different angles. But Morrison, in line with his interest in discarded and ignored footage, gives most of his attention to the periods both before and after. These peripheral moments are particularly revealing of the structure of police violence: Augustus’s friends, neighbors, and acquaintances confronting the cops on the scene, giving voice to life under a de facto police state.
Still from Incident.
Another cop arrives on the scene and refers to Augustus as the victim. The car whisks Halley and his partner away, as his partner manically praises him, narrating a fantasy they desperately need to believe. It is during this last moment that the film also has one of its cruelly uncanny moments. “You good, you good… You are okay, you are okay,” an officer hurrying him away from the scene repeats, while at that very moment across the split screen, we listen as another officer asks indifferently, “Is he [Augustus] alive?” to which the paramedic flatly responds, “Probably not.” As in Morrison’s earlier work, life and death overlap. But while his films had previously felt haunted, here we sense something altogether more monstrous.
The film ends with one last, terrible irony. Officer Halley was cleared of any misconduct in the murder of Augustus. But he was suspended for two days. The reason? Not that he fired his gun too quickly, but rather that he didn’t turn on his body cam soon enough. His crime, in other words, was not in murdering a Black man but in failing to document it properly. Morrison’s theme has always been decay. Here, however, the decay is society’s. .
Sequence from Incident.
Holding On to a Good Story Lawrence Wright, Alex Gibney, Evan Lerner, Alex Stapleton, and Iliana Sosa share how they, with Richard Linklater, made God Save Texas
By Robin Berghaus
New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright remembers colleagues asking, “Why do you live in Texas?” when his location shouldn’t have been exceptional. Writers from all over the world contribute to the magazine. The difference, Wright says, is that Texas was perceived as “anti-New York.” Once a left-leaning state, Texas has swung far to the right. It’s one of the most polarized states in the nation.
After Wright’s editor, David Remnick, encouraged him to explain Texas, he thought, “Maybe it’s time to look at my home again and see what it is that keeps me here.” Examining one of the most important decisions that shape us all—where we choose to live, Wright authored “America’s Future Is Texas” and “The Dark Bounty of Texas Oil” for the New Yorker in 2017.
The following year, he finished God Save Texas, the book that inspired the 2024 HBO documentary series of the same name. In the trilogy, Texas filmmakers return to their hometowns with Wright to make sense of the Lone Star State’s past and present.
Robin Berghaus is a writer and filmmaker based in Austin, Texas.
(L to R) Iliana Sosa, journalist Monica Ortiz Uribe, and executive producer and author Lawrence Wright. Courtesy of HBO
Wright felt these personal Texas stories would resonate with wide audiences who want to understand the bellwether state. By 2025, Texas will have more residents than California and New York combined. “Because the state is so dominant politically, economically, and culturally,” Wright says, “whatever happens in Texas, happens to America. In some ways, it’s the future of the world.”
From Book to Screen
After publishing New Yorker essays on Texas politics and the oil and gas industry, Wright had a lot left to explore. But he needed to know where he was going, because a book about Texas could have many destinations. Wright realized the secret to making the book cohesive would be to cultivate a relationship with readers. His personal stories became the connective tissue that brings Texas history, politics, and culture to life.
When God Save Texas was published in 2018, HBO’s president of programming, Michael Lombardo, optioned the national best seller. Then Alex Gibney came on board as executive producer.
Wright and Gibney began their creative partnership in 2006. At that time, Wright faced months of promotion for his book The Looming Tower, which examines the events leading up to 9/11. Instead of a traditional book tour, he created a one-man play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, to share with audiences the ethical issues he confronted while reporting on the formation of Al-Qaeda.
Gibney, who had long admired Wright’s literature, saw his performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “I was knocked out by it,” says Gibney, who thought it would make an interesting film. In 2010, they released My Trip to Al-Qaeda as a hybrid documentary with clips from Wright’s play, archival footage, and interviews they filmed in Egypt and the UK.
They went on to produce the 2015 HBO documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and the 2018 Hulu series The Looming Tower, both inspired by Wright’s books. Going Clear, according to Wright, is among HBO’s most-watched documentaries. Gibney produced premium documentaries for years with his company Jigsaw Productions.
With confidence in the team, HBO greenlit God Save Texas without a predetermined script.
The book covers a lot of territory, so they could not simply illustrate it. With input from HBO, Wright and Gibney pared the series to three episodes that would focus on the border, the oil and gas industry, and one last topic, not yet determined.
Since Wright has a strong presence in the book, they wanted to reflect that approach while giving voice to the Texas filmmakers who would direct the episodes. As an executive producer, Wright would support the directors, on and off camera, helping them craft their stories throughout production.
Initially, Wright approached iconic Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater about directing all three episodes.
The two first met in 1990 at a vegetarian restaurant in Austin, where Wright interviewed Linklater about his breakout film, Slacker. They’ve maintained a friendship since.
Because Linklater’s wheelhouse is fiction, he couldn’t imagine directing the entire series. But there was a story he felt he could tell sincerely—one he had in mind for more than 20 years.
Episode 1. “Hometown Prison”
Linklater grew up in Huntsville, Texas. The city’s seven prisons are the main economic driver that touches all residents. For much of Linklater’s childhood, the state had not executed a single prisoner. But in 1982, Texas reinstated capital punishment. Today, it leads the country in executions.
The cruelty of the system became personal. Many of Linklater’s friends worked inside prisons. Others became incarcerated, joining one-quarter of Huntsville’s population that is behind bars. After witnessing the toll it took on loved ones, Linklater’s mother, Diane, became an activist and supported prisoners, which inspired Linklater.
In 2003, Linklater was drawn back to Huntsville in a panic. Delma Banks Jr. was scheduled to be executed, yet neither witnesses nor physical evidence tied him to the murder he was convicted of committing. Outside the prison, Linklater filmed protests and spoke with Banks’s family about what it would mean if an innocent man were put to death.
Evan Lerner, formerly the senior creative executive at Jigsaw and co-executive producer of God Save Texas, recalls Linklater mentioning the footage. “Rick said, ‘I filmed this 20 years ago. I’ve never done anything with it. Why don’t you guys take a look at it and tell me what you think?’”
Lerner, Wright, and Gibney were struck by it. They used this part of Linklater’s personal archive to build the film around the idea of incarceration and the death penalty. While Wright had not explored these issues in his book, Linklater’s story compelled them to devote an episode to the prison system.
Richard Linklater (L) with Eli Owens and Trey Owens. Courtesy of HBO
Before production began in 2019, Linklater compiled a long list of ideas and people he wanted to interview. As Lerner built the production team, he recalls wondering how the episode would come together, but Linklater always seemed to know how to connect the dots through his personal relationships.
The film’s structure shows how the system impacts everyone: families eagerly await the release of their loved ones, an evening guard describes how the lack of air conditioning makes the brick buildings feel like ovens during summers, and Linklater’s high school football teammate, Fred Allen, details how his opinion on the death penalty changed. Allen advocated for capital punishment while working on death row. Karla Faye Tucker’s execution changed his mind. He believes that Tucker, who had been rehabilitated, could have been a role model for other prisoners.
“Rick built the world of Huntsville with all these people,” says Lerner. “It was like a constellation, where the throughline ended up being the connection they had to Rick and Rick’s mom.”
In the film, Wright joins Linklater to process these issues and says Linklater’s conversations with friends were profound. “I don’t care what you think about the death penalty,” says Wright, “you can’t come out after watching it thinking exactly the same thing.”
According to Wright, Linklater had some anxiety about making a personal documentary and benefited from Gibney’s editorial feedback. But, Wright recalls, “Rick fought for the surprises.”
At the end of the film, Linklater demonstrates why he loves his hometown. He visits an exuberant church congregation whose members immigrated from Nigeria and are welcomed by their new community. Among them is a high school student, Tega Okperuvwe. Linklater captures Okperuvwe performing at a football game as Buzzy, Huntsville High School’s mascot. Classmates cheer for him with as much enthusiasm as they show for the athletes on the field.
“It was a total surprise and a delight,” says Wright. “Rick managed to bring humor to the story, which is something we tried with each one.”
Episode 2. “The Price of Oil”
As Linklater’s episode wrapped, the team began searching for a Texas director who could follow his tone by telling a personal story with a strong point of view, but about the oil and gas industry. Lerner says there wasn’t a search engine for that, so he began talking to agents. Tyler Kroos from Creative Artists Agency said, “I have the exact person for you.”
Huntsville, Texas. Courtesy of HBO
Days later, Alex Stapleton told Lerner about her Black family, which had lived in Texas for generations and was deeply ensconced in the oil and gas industry.
“Suddenly, it seemed like she was created to make this,” says Lerner.
At the time, Stapleton had been living in Los Angeles and directing documentaries for more than a decade. In January 2020, she moved to Houston to develop the film. She met with Wright and Mimi Schwartz, a journalist who introduced them to scientists and experts in the oil and gas industry. Stapleton felt like she was in a graduate program studying the environmental impact and business side of the industry. But she hadn’t yet figured out how her story fit in.
Things began to click after Stapleton went on a tour that showed her the dark side of her city through someone else’s eyes. An environmental group took Stapleton through Houston’s East End where fenceline communities butt against large refineries and chemical plants. Residents face high rates of cancer and asthma caused by smoke and toxic waste.
They visited every neighborhood Stapleton’s family had lived in for the past 100 years.
“I knew the air smelled bad,” says Stapleton. “But to listen to someone who, through their research, showed me how to look at my neighborhood again, it was a huge lightbulb moment.”
Just as Stapleton was reimagining her family’s role in the film, the project came to a halt. Stapleton recalls eating dinner with Wright and Schwartz when her phone blew up. The mayor of Houston canceled the Livestock Show and Rodeo as news about COVID-19 surfaced. When Stapleton panicked, Wright calmed her down. He had been
researching how to survive pandemics for his new novel, The End of October, which would be published soon. “Larry said, ‘Listen to me. I know what’s going to happen,’” says Stapleton. “‘You need to go to the store and make sure you have lots of diapers for your son.’”
Without a roadmap for how to film during a pandemic, production paused. That reprieve was a blessing. Stapleton had time to reconnect with her mother, Scottie, the family’s historian. “She loves sharing new things she’s found, and her house is like a museum, filled with family photos,” says Stapleton. As they reviewed the archives, her story came alive.
In the film, Stapleton and her mother discuss their enslaved ancestors who built Galveston, a coastal city. After slavery ended, they moved to Houston, where Stapleton’s great-grandmother purchased a home in Pleasantville, the nation’s first planned community for Black residents. As the oil industry boomed, plants and refineries were erected next to Pleasantville and other Black neighborhoods. Home values dropped, and several of Stapleton’s family members developed cancer and other illnesses.
Through her family’s story, Stapleton examines racial injustice and questions who really profits from the oil and gas industry. It took Stapleton time to find industry workers who would open up on camera about the hazards; most remained silent for fear of losing their jobs.
Stapleton faced additional challenges. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri hit Texas. Hundreds died after the state’s electric grid shut down. The team used clips from the storm to address the vicious cycle: America’s reliance on oil and gas fuels climate change, and the resulting storms are stressing the industry’s infrastructure.
Alex Stapleton’s great-aunt, Lela Johnson. Courtesy of HBO
After production ended, Stapleton got a call from her great-aunt, Lela Johnson, whose home was being demolished that day. It was damaged during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Rather than repair it, the insurance company would rebuild a smaller version. The new home would no longer have the carport, where the neighborhood sheltered from the sun and gathered weekly after church and on every holiday.
With no time to hire a crew, Stapleton filmed the demolition with her cell phone. She captured her great-aunt seated in a wheelchair watching an excavator tear through the siding. “I can’t imagine the movie without that scene,” says Stapleton. “It shows what houses mean to people in fenceline communities who are told to just move.”
At the start of the project, when Stapleton watched Linklater’s episode, she thought his personal story made sense, because he is a prolific filmmaker. She wondered, “Why would anyone want to watch my story?”
While working closely with Wright, she realized her story’s value. “Larry had a way of pulling that out of us,” says Stapleton. “His book is semiautobiographical. In a really cool way, the series became a parallel experience.”
Episode 3. “La Frontera”
Lerner says the first two episodes started to “speak to each other,” and took on the same kind of director’s voice that wasn’t planned from the beginning. For the third, Lerner needed a director with a connection to the border.
In March 2022, Lerner saw What We Leave Behind, a documentary by Iliana Sosa. The El Paso native filmed her grandfather’s final trips from Mexico to the U.S. Every month, he traveled for 17 hours by bus to visit family there.
Lerner approached Sosa about God Save Texas after her film premiered. Sosa took seven years to complete her film, which took an emotional toll. She thought she was done with this kind of personal filmmaking. But Sosa recognized God Save Texas as another chance to tell an authentic story about people living on the border who are often marked by stereotypes.
Early on, Wright and Lerner spoke with Sosa about exploring the 2019 El Paso shooting. Before killing 23 people in a Walmart, the gunman confessed to targeting Mexicans in response to large-scale migration. Sosa agreed they should not ignore violence but didn’t want it to define the story. Her goal was to show what it’s like to live in a thriving bicultural community divided by an arbitrary fence.
“El Paso and Juarez are always in conversation,” says Sosa. “I wanted to talk about what it feels like to constantly be going back and forth.”
In the film, Sosa and her mother, Maria, have a deep conversation. Maria describes crossing the border to the U.S. for jobs that didn’t exist in Mexico. Beginning at age 14, she traveled every year in darkness over the Rio Grande, until she started her own family in El Paso. Sosa reveals that as a child, she translated the mail for her dad and helped her mother study for the U.S. citizenship test. When Sosa turned 15, she didn’t have a quinceañera. Instead, she went on a school trip. Growing up, Sosa felt like she was from two worlds but belonged to neither.
Wright joins Sosa to discuss the border as a region with a rich culture, rather than a manufactured line. El Paso is a city whose name means “the pass,” Wright says, where, for generations, people have crossed for better lives. “Their motives for coming are often very noble, but they are treated like criminals.” As the two sit outside, helicopters fly above. El Paso is a city under surveillance.
In the film, Wright and Sosa speak with several experts about immigration. Journalist Lauren Villagran explains how building a more expansive wall may ease patrols but pushes migrants into dangerous terrain where they are more likely to die. “What’s happening is painful,” says Sosa. “It’s a history that keeps repeating itself.”
Sosa explores this cycle with historian David Romo. He shares photos of Mexican migrants who, before being permitted to work in the U.S., were sprayed with pesticides later used in gas chambers during the Holocaust. Sosa, whose grandfather had been through this, tears up considering the indignities.
Iliana Sosa. Courtesy of HBO
Border wall in El Paso, Texas. Courtesy of HBO
Staying emotionally engaged while directing the episode was a challenge. Sosa trusted her producer, Danielle Mynard, to keep her on track by asking questions throughout the scenes. Sosa also credits her crew for creating a welcoming environment that helped her father Emilio gain confidence to appear in family scenes. “He ended up playing a bigger role than he thought,” says Sosa, “and was quite charismatic and funny on camera.”
As a child, Sosa says she felt shame coming from a working-class immigrant family. Now, she says her parents are “an immense source of pride,” and she is grateful to have told their story.
“What I found elevating about this series was that the filmmakers got very personal,” says Gibney, who consistently encouraged the directors to lean into their own truths. “When you dig deep into your own experience, it tends to have a universal quality.”
The Next Chapter
The God Save Texas team admits they just scratched the surface. If a second season were produced, they would welcome more Texas filmmakers to tell stories about the political map, guns, human rights, myths and lore, and arts and culture.
“Texas music is a big part of my life,” says Wright, who is eager to explore his city’s creative scene. Wright plays keys for WhoDo, an Austin blues collective. “It might not be in documentary form,” says Wright. “But I’ll find something.”
That’s a lesson to take from Wright’s career. When he finds a good story, he holds on to it, waiting for the right time and the right medium to tell it.
Last year, he published Mr. Texas, a satire about larger-than-life characters in Texas politics. Before writing the novel, he created different incarnations of the story, beginning the process in the mid-1990s, when the state’s last Democratic governor was in office. Wright’s screenplay and musical were not produced, but his play had a run in 2005.
Now, Wright and Gibney may turn Mr. Texas into a television series and a podcast. Wright has already written eight podcast episodes and co-written 53 songs with his son, Gordon, and Texas blues musician Marcia Ball.
In the meantime, Wright and each filmmaker have remained in Texas, despite its problems. “We’re fighting for space for our own voices,” says Wright, “and I think this shows that we can claim that space and make Texas more ours.” .
Lucía Requejo is a writer, teacher, and editor from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She runs the cultural section of the daily supplement Buenos Aires|12 and is a frequent collaborator with Con los ojos abiertos.
Victor Guimarães is a film critic, programmer, and teacher based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He is currently a columnist at Con los ojos abiertos (Argentina). His work has appeared in publications such as Cinética, Senses of Cinema, Kinoscope, Desistfilm, La Vida Útil, La Furia Umana, and Cahiers du Cinéma.
Cinema Is the Images We Can’t See Reading pioneering Argentine experimental filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch’s oeuvre through documentary
By Lucía Requejo and Victor Guimarães
At the bottom of page 49 in a 1993 edition of the fabled Argentine film magazine El Amante, there is a sidebar titled “Experimental Cinema,” written by Narcisa Hirsch. At that moment, Hirsch was already a well-established artist for those who had heard of, or rather, seen her work. In that fragment, she rounds up some definitions for cinema, but ends up caring about only one: “Above all, there is the luminosity of images, the images that, once projected, make visible the others, the internal, the kept ones, the dark and forgotten ones, in the beam of light that crosses the field just to tear us away from where we are seated and become fused in that light in an almost passionate surrender.”1
Hirsch is invoking both the primitive and classic images of the light that spills over the white screen and what happens afterward: The luminosity of the images passes through the interior of the viewers, revealing what is “kept” or hidden inside each one of us. As if cinema isn’t the images we can see, but the images we can’t.
The materialistic and sensitive concerns expressed by Hirsch in that brief text are in tune with her importance in the history of Latin American experimental cinema. Hirsch has long been considered a pivotal avant-garde filmmaker in the region, with increasing interest in her work worldwide in the last few years. Most recently, she had retrospective screenings at Viennale (2023), Los Angeles Filmforum (2023), MoMA (2024), Open City Documentary Festival (2024), and S8 in A Coruña (2024)—the latter being the first after Hirsch’s passing in May.
Her minimalist, structural films—especially Come Out (1971) and Taller (1975)—are the most critically recognized of her work as one of the pioneers of avant-garde cinema in Latin America. But Narcisa Hirsch should also be understood as an exciting, singular documentarian.
Hirsch’s approach to filmmaking is a personal, organic one. Her beginnings as a painter and illustrator in the 1960s took a turn when she needed to “go out on the street” (her own words), to make happenings. She only started filming because she needed to document her performances and public actions alongside her collaborators, Marie Louise Alemann and Walter Mejía. Federico Windhausen, like many other critics, praises the advent of the abovementioned structural avant-garde films in Hirsch’s filmography, celebrating the fact that she “eventually stopped focusing on relatively simple forms of documentation.”2 But these early films—and her later ones—would benefit from consideration within a documentary tradition.
Because of Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch’s tireless effort in preserving, restoring, and rediscovering some key elements of her filmography, it is now impossible to limit her most valuable outcomes to structural form. Hirsch’s vast and varied body of work is both precise and fluid, rigorous and spontaneous, with differences in tone—more than in nature— from one film to the other.
a diRect ReadinG of hiRsch’s woRk in the documentary tradition brings her interest in internal and secret meanings to light. Pesca de la centolla (1978) best illustrates Hirsch’s interest in playing with images in contrast to the expositional documentarian urge to dutifully transmit what’s being recorded. In the film, Hirsch’s camera accompanies a group of artisanal crab fishermen carrying out their work in the southern city of Ushuaia. With wide shots of the boats at sea and the men doing their work, the short film begins as a straightforward record of the fishermen’s routine from an observational distance, without their identities interfering in the process. But near the end, the fishermen leave and the image departs from the traditional documentary trend. Boats and men move away, leaving the remains of thousands of crabs at the seashore. As men dive into the horizon, a live spider crab walks among the carcasses, which wordlessly becomes a graveyard. The last frame is a groundbreaking orange sun setting between mountains. Tomorrow there will also be corpses. It is challenging to establish a common thread among Hirsch’s topics. Hirsch’s film Pioneros (1976), about Jewish immigration in Argentina, speaks in the most common tongue of expository documentary: At the beginning, the filmmaker’s voice tells us the story will be told “as engraved in the memory of their descendants.” Through interviews with the
immigrants’ offspring and using archival material, Pioneros develops as a traditional documentary about a historical phenomenon, illustrating a community in its own words.
Two years after completing Pioneros, Hirsch tells Argentine history differently, with her own distinct set of tools, in Mundial (1978). A film made in collaboration with Sergio Levin and Elías Cherñajovsky, in the context of a seminar run by the renowned underground filmmaker Miguel Bejo, Mundial centers Argentina’s victory in the 1978 World Cup as the host nation, turning the celebration into an illusion. The film makes explicit the subtext that the country was controlled by a civic-military government responsible for, naming just one crime, the disappearance of 30,000 people. The movie begins with an empty square as we hear the recording of a goal shouted over the radio. The hand-held camera indicates that there is no one near to hear it. Immediately, a title card appears, ordering: “Make a lady scream ‘goal.’ Film it.” Next, different women (including Hirsch herself) shout “Goal!” But there’s no sound. The goal is like a tree falling in a forest, calling into question its reality if no one is around to hear it.
Still from Mundial. All images courtesy of Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch
Still from Marabunta.
Silence as a form appears also in a later work, Warnes (1991), a short film that pictures the demolition of the Warnes Hostel, an illegally occupied building complex where 600 families had been living since 1951. Hirsch takes the din of the explosion out of it, as well as the conversations or noises of the audience of people watching the building go down. Two audiences remain in complete silence: the spectators of decadence, and the audience, years later, who watch the film. Similarly to Mundial, what Hirsch displays isn’t the action, but what that action and its sonic representation mask.
Other Hirsch films also disturb the evidentiary capacity of documentary. In Marabunta (1967), filmed by the great militant documentarian Raymundo Gleyzer, Marie Louise Alemann, Walter Mejía, and Hirsch fill up a giant human skeleton with different sorts of food and live pigeons, and then present it as a happening inside a movie theater. The members of the bourgeois audience of the Teatro Coliseo begin to eat ferociously and throw food at each other, releasing the flying animals in the room. For us, the camera doesn’t act “simply as a direct witness.”3 With the addition of Edgard Varèse’s
percussion-only Ionisation as the soundtrack, Gleyzer’s aggressive shots make everything increasingly strange. Hirsch adds surrealism as we witness a grotesque, Buñuelian scene on a regular Tuesday in Buenos Aires.
In Manzanas (1969), filmed by another great documentary filmmaker, Gerardo Vallejo, the three collaborators take to the streets again, distributing apples to streetwalkers. This time we have a sound recording, so the documentation becomes a small installment of cinema vérité. Conflicts emerge. A man confronts the artists by saying he needs to know why they are handing out apples. Another one says it’s the first time someone gives him something for free in Argentina. The artistic action installs surreality in the everyday life of the city, but it also works as a detonator for dialogue, creating a small glimpse into the political climate on the streets of Buenos Aires.
Another chapter of Narcisa Hirsch’s approach to documentary is apparent in her portraits of artists and loved ones. For each person portrayed, the film takes a different shape. In Aída (1976), a Super 8 camera captures ballerina Aída Laib dancing vigorously in Hirsch’s atelier to the sounds of Nina Simone. The dancing movements intersperse with a visual exploration of the artist’s naked body, where Hirsch’s sensual gaze grasps textures and reaches abstraction. For screendance expert Silvina Szperling, Aída “plunges into a frenzied dance that transports her body into an ecstasy of movement.”4 The film is so hot it literally catches fire toward the end, with Aída’s image being burned in front of the camera.
The approach is radically different in Retrato de Marta Minujín (1974). The famous conceptual artist engages in a conversation with Hirsch about her ideas and methods, telling us about past happenings in Montevideo and New York. The framing is much wider than in Aída as the camera explores the space populated with Minujín’s objects. True to Hirsch’s experimentation, however, the interview is far from regular. There is a constant interaction between the two women, with the filmmaker playfully dialoguing with Minujín’s visual world. For example, in an interview when Minujín imagines a future project on failure, a jump cut delights us with the artist wearing a strange mask she calls “the mask of failure.” Later on, while Minujín talks about a happening at the Sandridge Hotel in New York, which involved a feast with local beggars, we see a table set for a banquet. The artist sits at the head and all the guests, including the filmmaker, have their faces covered
Top: Still from Aída.
Bottom: Still from Warnes.
with politically provocative masks (one is Henry Kissinger, another is the devil). The film reaches the humorous, provocative world of Marta Minujín with an equally playful formal approach.
if wRitinG letteRs is, by definition, a way to feel closer to someone, filming them can be a way to discover a layer of intimacy that is more about the journey than the destination. In Hirsch’s film letters, an element provides closeness with the addressee along with the act of seeing: the voice of the filmmaker. Since it is not recorded at the same time as the images, the voice-over creates a mismatch with them and persists as a testimony of the director’s own gaze during the revisions and projections of the material. This makes Hirsch, before anything else, a spectator of her own films.
In Andrea (1973), she tells her daughter, the addressee of the letter, “I felt like being with you alone through this.” Here, uniting images that were born separate through editing is a form of intimacy similar to telling a bedtime story, using the voice mainly to describe the images and to accompany the viewer through Andrea’s life.
But in Para Virginia (1984), the voice adds more layers to the story being told, acting as a way to travel in time. “I would have liked to see you live,” Hirsch says. The gesture changes, as we are told that the addressee, Virginia, is not able to experience it. As well as in the voice, the phrase replicates through images, as if duplication was a way of creating a symbiosis between image and text, between light and voice. The camera slowly follows the words graffitied on urban walls, discovering them one by one. To produce an impact, one must slow down, but to remember,
one needs to be rushed. Narcisa’s camera remembers Virginia’s dancing, moving along the beach. Meanwhile, the background music is an electronic song, where the “loop” prevails over any other aspect. That same loop accompanies the memory of that tortured body, dancing on its axis, which is no longer there. Sometimes, expectations and real life collide, and there’s no correlation between memories and self.
In the group of letters dedicated to Rafael Maino, a painter who was Narcisa’s former lover, Rafael (1975), Rafael in Rio (1977), and Rafael, August 1984 (1984), the relationship between the voice-over and the images changes as their relationship does, making palpable their intimacy. In the earliest film, “It looks like a letter but it’s different,” Hirsch says, over a close-up of Maino’s face. We can hear the smile in her voice, and it looks like he can too. The curiosity lies in the fact that the image seems to be reacting to her words, not the other way around, becoming glad or taciturn, depending on the confession. But in Rafael in Rio (1977), the stability between the voice
Top: Still from Para Virginia.
Bottom: Still from Rafael, August 1984.
and the images drifts, as well as their relationship. “You are very far away, and there is a very big haze; you can hardly see anything,” Hirsch’s voiceover says, as the image depicts Maino diving into the ocean until he becomes just a point on the horizon, and neither Hirsch nor we can reach him. But she maintains her hold over his image, even if we can’t see him, by whispering, “I still love you very much.”
John GRieRson once said that the first chapter of the history of documentary should be the travelogue. The early travel film has inspired many documentarians. Film historian Jeffrey Ruoff also made the connection that “the episodic, descriptive, non-narrative form of the travelogue appeals to many experimental filmmakers” as well.5 In this particular intersection between documentary and the avant-garde, Hirsch has worked again and again with the travelogue form, both in films that were more constructed and staged, such as the two versions of Patagonia (1973 and 1976), and in those that were for many decades considered mere domestic movies.
Diarios Patagónicos 1 (1970) could be described as a documentary account of a family vacation in Argentine Patagonia. Although there is a resemblance to Jonas Mekas’s diaries, with the joy of filming loved ones taking over the film, Hirsch’s gaze has a very particular way of mingling place and body. Filmed closely, a breast becomes a mountain, and a belly button filled with water turns into a Patagonian lake. Filmed sensually, a landscape becomes a turgid body. There are echoes of Ana Mendieta’s body art— the Silueta series—and of Barbara Hammer’s exploration of the arousing qualities of nature, especially Multiple Orgasm (1976). But Hirsch does it in an unpretentious family movie. And when she walks in water, holding the Super 8 camera from the height of her chest, we see the artist’s genitalia floating over the lake, embracing an unparalleled point of view that is visceral, lyric, and revolutionary.
In Diarios Patagónicos 2 (1972), an account of a trip from Bariloche to the Atlantic coast with her friends and collaborators Horacio Maira and Marie Louise Alemann, Hirsch’s sensual gaze continues to grasp landscapes and bodies, but in this film, as in the core of the Latin American documentary tradition, racial and class relations come to the foreground. The camera opens up to the presence of the Patagonian workers— most with Indigenous features—around the white group of friends. They come as glimpses of otherness, disturbing the homogeneity of
Stills from Diarios Patagónicos 2.
the group, gazing defiantly into the axis of the camera. A stark contrast between leisure (the artist swimming with sea lions) and hard work (fishermen unloading their boats) imposes itself. A rapid-fire montage interrupts the tender pace, as if otherness required a change in form.
we pRefeR to think of Hirsch’s body of work as a pendulum between spontaneity and structure. Her extreme concentration in the film form and radical openness to the world can coexist in the same film. That is, Hirsch’s “structural rationalism” is constantly tempered by her poetic meditations, her autobiographical drive, and her avidness to plunge into the outside world.6
At first sight, Potrero (1973) could be paired with Andy Warhol’s experiments with repetition or James Benning’s structural landscape films. To document the changing of the Patagonian scenery over a year, Hirsch sets an exquisite, stratified frame, encompassing a nearby tree, a grassy field with a walking path, and snowy mountains on the horizon, and leaves the camera on a tripod to be activated by a local farmer. The unchanging frame and the rigid set of rules certainly situate Potrero in P. Adams Sitney’s classic definition of the structural film, where “the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film.” 7 In that sense, we don’t believe that Come Out and Taller represent a “radical paradigm shift, a sort of evolutionary leap” in Hirsch’s filmography because Potrero, made in between those two masterpieces, also sits within that tradition. 8 For Paulo Pécora, Hirsch experiments both “in a poetic and intuitive line of work as well as in a structural and minimalist one.”9
Thus, what makes Potrero special is not just its inventive, predetermined shape but also its unexpected documentary qualities. Snow comes and goes and comes again. Lighting, wind, the aspect of trees, everything changes radically from one shot to the other. A red flower is born and dies within the film. After a while, the invariable framing begins to welcome multiple presences, from the artist herself to human passersby and defiant farm animals. In between shots of the landscape, the frame is suddenly occupied by a restless child, the drifting figure of a dog, or a cow looking straight into the camera. The notion of participatory documentary can certainly be invoked here since the farmer turns the camera on from time to time and becomes a coauthor of the film. Still, it can also be expanded in scale: the final shape of Potreros only exists because of the unpredictable participation of multiple entities, human and nonhuman. By withdrawing from the scene and restricting her authorship to the gesture of setting a static framing, Hirsch opens up the film to the participation of the cosmos.
Participation is what makes possible one of Hirsch’s most ambitious cinematographic exercises, which took place in 1974, 1979, and 2005, called “Women who speak with their own image.” The series recalls some self-reflexive documentary experiments, from Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961) to Sara Gómez’s Mi Aporte (1969), where the filmmakers invite participants to reflect on their own image. In the final version of 1979, Seguro que Bach cerraba la puerta cuando quería trabajar, eight women, including the director herself, are confronted twice: once with the camera and once with themselves. While the
Stills from Potreros.
image is being projected in front of them, they search for words to battle against that image. The history of cinema speaks for itself: those encounters can’t be anything but confrontations. Each woman reacts differently. The majority criticize their physical defects. Others affirm what they can recognize about their faces. One thanks herself for being alive; another is unable to be with herself and laugh.
Hirsch adds more complexity by including herself as a participant, placing herself in the middle of all the other women. One would expect her, as a filmmaker, to be able to better articulate notions of representation and the gaze. But Hirsch doesn’t have better tools to understand her own image, instead affirming that “behind that face is oneself.” It’s necessary to explain to viewers, whose experience collapses all the participants’ two reactions into a single one, why this exercise is unique and strange, even if it consists of nothing other than looking at oneself in the mirror.
Hirsch repeats her self-portrait in El Mito de Narciso (2005), where the filmmaker revisits the series by leaving behind the rest of the women who had been offscreen and putting herself inside the frame. She is present in three ways: her past projected self, in the voice-over, and seated in the filmed present, watching the projection. Thirty-one years after making the source material, she says, there’s nothing left to ask but “Who is the self that asks who? [...] Who am I, the beholder or the gaze?” Hirsch closes the process with nothing more than questions. As Narcissus knew, it’s not about falling in love with yourself through the mirror. It’s the audacity of wanting to get close to the reflection, even though you can never accomplish the task of knowing yourself. Some images will always remain unknown. .
Notes
1. Narcisa Hirsch, “El cine experimental,” El amante 2, no. 19 (1993): 49.
2. Federico Windhausen, “Narcisa Hirsch en cuatro lugares,” laFuga 26 (2022): 4. Available in: http://2016.lafuga.cl/narcisa-hirsch-en-cuatrolugares/1101.
3. Pablo Marín, Una luz revelada: El cine experimental argentino (Córdoba: La Vida Útil, 2022), 192.
4. Silvina Szperling, “Ritual in Transfigured Time: Narcisa Hirsch, Sufi Poetry, Ecstatic Dances, and the Female Gaze,” The International Journal of Screendance 3 (2013): 82.
5. Jeffrey Ruoff, in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).
6. Marín, 202.
7. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avantgarde, 1943–2000, 3rd ed. (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2002), 348.
8. Marín, 193.
9. Paulo Pécora, Super 8 argentino contemporáneo (Buenos Aires: Universidad del Cine/Editorial Biblos, 2022), 45.
Top: Narcisa Hirsch.
Below: Still from Seguro que Bach.
Vladan Petković is a film journalist, critic, and festival programmer. He is a correspondent for Screen International, senior writer for Cineuropa, contributing editor for IDFA’s website, and head of studies of the GoCritic! training program for emerging film critics. He is a program advisor at IDFA, program director at Rab Film Festival, and a programmer at ZagrebDox, and regularly curates for other festivals and events around Europe.
CPH:DOX 2024 Reviews Phantoms of the Sierra Madre, The Flats, and Black Snow
By Vladan Petković
Phantoms of the Sierra Madre
Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes made his name with confrontational documentaries in which he explores the motivations of questionable characters, such as in Golden Dawn Girls (2017), which enters the dark and confused world of women from the far-right Greek nationalist party. At one point, he leaves the camera running when the protagonists think it’s off, which results in the most revealing segments of the film. In The Name of the Game (2021), he follows a popular Norwegian politician whose rise is halted by accusations of sexual harassment. Bustnes uses the unexpected access he has been granted to directly confront his protagonist. The ethically dubious but undeniably exciting way he inserts himself into his films is not only a matter of style but the very form of his storytelling.
This approach is particularly pronounced in his latest documentary, Phantoms of the Sierra Madre, which world-premiered at CPH:DOX. This time around, the hero is less obviously negative but similarly misguided. Bustnes attempts to distinguish between the story he is telling versus the one his protagonist wants, disguising his complicity with criticism. But they eventually turn out to be one and the same.
Tellingly, almost every point made by the flawed protagonist, Danish author Lars K. Andersen, is either accompanied by a self-doubting ethical dilemma or challenged by other characters and the director himself. Indeed, Bustnes leaves the voice-over narration to Andersen, whose words “It was not my story to tell” bookend the picture, working as a protective cocoon. But it additionally begs the question for both the protagonist and the director: Why, then, did you decide to tell it?
At the beginning of the film, Andersen tells us how he has been fascinated with Native Americans since his childhood. This interest first sprouted from watching old Westerns and deepened when he discovered the work of Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad, who in 1937 went to search for a “lost Apache tribe” that fled to the Sierra Madre mountains after Geronimo’s defeat. Ingstad never found them, and almost 100 years later, Andersen is compelled to do what his role model didn’t manage to do.
Next up, we see Andersen and Bustnes head to New Mexico to meet the Mescalero Apache community. Andersen goes around asking about Ingstad and the lost tribe and keeps running into obstacles; the manager of the local museum has never heard of the Norwegian explorer
Still from Phantoms of the Sierra Madre. Courtesy of UpNorth Film
and actively dislikes Western novels and movies. But soon Andersen gets lucky, and the great-great-grandson of Geronimo, Pius Garcia, answers his call. Garcia, along with Bird Runningwater, former director of the Sundance Indigenous Program, is credited as executive producer, lending Indigenous authorization to the film project. Pius is extremely proud of his origins and invested in his community and heritage, so one motivation for him to accompany Andersen might be to make sure someone less competent doesn’t do it instead.
As they arrive in Mexico, they keep encountering silence and misdirection. The most aggressive example is a Mexican-Apache anthropologist and intelligence officer who verbally attacks Andersen and Pius for trying in the first place; if this tribe doesn’t want to be found, their wishes should be respected, especially if it’s another white man who wants to tell their story.
In addition to some people claiming Ingstad was actually after looted gold reportedly stashed away by Geronimo, a scene that questions the filmmaker’s intentions involves two women who also claim to be the iconic chief’s descendants. When Andersen arranges a meet-up with the women and Pius, it plays out like an ugly confrontation straight out of a reality show: Pius blows off the women’s scarce genealogical evidence. This sequence is then followed by another element that is unorthodox for documentary filmmaking: a meta-textual interview in which Andersen speaks to an Indigenous expert whom Bustnes has asked to take a look at the film—but how much of it or which cut is not specified.
With its lack of temporal clarity within the perceived process of filmmaking, this scene foreshadows the ethical concerns the viewers will inevitably have when the third act comes around. The expert is not named, and only identifies herself by tribal affiliation (Cree-Métis-Saulteaux). When Andersen contends that the confrontation segment is interesting, she responds that it is sad that it is used for
entertainment, and that it is finally time for Native Americans to tell their own stories. Andersen counters with the claim that he is telling his own story—that of a Scandinavian explorer. This line of reasoning is legitimate, but it still leaves the white man in the dominant position in a foreign territory.
Is Bustnes’s decision to keep the scene in the film meant to show that he is just telling the story of his protagonist, thus cleansing his own culpability? In order to fully convey how the structure of the film transgresses ethical boundaries, we here have to resort to spoilers (skip to the last paragraph to avoid them). In a confrontation late in the documentary, Andersen and Bustnes wrangle about concerns of ownership of the story, with the director coming across as the more ethical one, saying that the writer maybe shouldn’t be the main character and that “maybe the Apache should tell their own story.” In an argumentative mood, Andersen claims he has the right to tell this story just because he can, just as a person from the Congo or China would, without ever considering the issue of who has the voice and the tools to tell it. While Bustnes goes out of his way to make sure that he is perceived as an objective storyteller who is just following his protagonist’s misguided ideas and actions, the very ending of the film destroys any such illusion for anyone with basic awareness of the nature of documentary filmmaking.
In the final stretch of the film, Andersen visits the house of Helge Ingstad in Oslo. There, the explorer’s grandson shows him the attic, where trophies and artifacts he had brought from Mexico are stored. Among them is the skull of an Apache woman who is mentioned earlier in the film. Andersen decides to take it to New Mexico so that it can be properly buried after Pius tells him her spirit would otherwise not find peace. So, the documentary ends with this European writer triumphantly righting a wrong of another European from a century ago. But when you think in terms of research for a documentary film, wouldn’t the
Still from Phantoms of the Sierra Madre. Courtesy of UpNorth Film
filmmaker and protagonist start closer to home, that is, in Ingstad’s house, before traveling all the way to the other side of the world? This wouldn’t be the first time that the timeline of an explosive late revelation was manipulated by filmmakers, such as in Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx (2015). It is quite plausible that Bustnes and Andersen knew where they were going with the story, and that everything that preceded it in the film was, in fact, reverse engineered. With all this in mind, it is impossible to escape the feeling of European arrogance inflected with a detached Scandinavian exceptionalism. This is also evident in the cinematic language. Andersen is initially presented as an earnest and somewhat naïve and quirky character. Wide shots of him trudging between rocks and bushes of the Sierra Madre in his European clothes imply he is lost and doesn’t belong there, but with the awareness of the skull scene, it too comes across as faked. In an early scene, in which the museum manager laments everything the Apache have lost, the camera films him in profile, as if he is wistfully looking into the distance, to a soundtrack that grows epic and tragic with distorted guitars and choir, which is hard to perceive as not at least slightly ironic. Furthermore, when we consider the rest of the admittedly elegant score that nevertheless clearly harks back to spaghetti Westerns with a dollop of generic Native drumming and singing, it reinforces the impression that Bustnes actually did what Andersen said about that confrontational scene: He made the film because he was able to, and consciously gave it this ironic European flavor. Whomever they really belong to, stories end up being told by those who have the tools and the voice.
The Flats
The Troubles is the name of the conflict in Northern Ireland between Loyalists and Republicans from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which took more than 3,500 lives. Loyalists, mostly Protestants, wanted to stay in the UK while Republicans, mostly Catholics, wanted to join the Republic of Ireland. Online research reveals that this sectarian conflict is rooted in deep cultural and political differences rather than based on religion, but Joe, the hero of Alessandra Celesia’s CPH:DOX-winning documentary The Flats, would probably beg to differ. “I will proudly die a bigot,” he says about the event that scarred him for life when he was nine years old.
The structure of the film is simultaneously very complex and freewheeling, with timelines that intermix and protagonists who sometimes play other characters in reenactments, and sometimes are just being themselves, which can be confusing for the viewer. But this reflects that Joe and other protagonists are frozen in a liminal space between the past and the present, just like Northern Ireland itself. Even if not every scene or point the film makes is clear, it successfully paints the big and painful picture of unresolved conflict that resonates to this day and continues to affect its population.
In one of the film’s first scenes, Joe is filmed in a session with therapist Rita, who works with a suicide prevention organization. The middle-aged bachelor, who lives with his little dog, Freedom, in the titular towers of North Belfast, speaks about the murder of his 17-year-old Uncle Cocke by the infamous Loyalist Shankill Butchers gang. The youngest brother of his mother was shot through the back of the head and the bullet went out through his nose. The way we are affected by traumatic events in childhood is perfectly encapsulated by this detail, and Joe
Still from The Flats. Courtesy of The Party Film Sales
has in many ways remained stuck in this tragic past. He felt responsible for it, as children tend to do, and it haunts him to this day. Even his facial expressions when he remembers it give him a child-like appearance, wide-eyed, full of tears and despair but also pride. “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” he keeps quoting Bobby Sands, an iconic IRA figure who died after 66 days of hunger strike in prison.
Celesia re-creates the wake for Cocke with Joe and other protagonists. As Joe helps a young man who plays his uncle step into the coffin in his apartment, the scene has a chilling resonance, which turns into a more mournful key when he gently applies a plaster over his nose. French cinematographer François Chambe’s camera peeks between the bodies of mourners to reveal a young gingerhaired boy standing in the doorway. This is Sean, Joe’s neighbor, who plays Joe’s younger self in several of these re-creations. Celesia goes beyond the traditional method of dramatizations: In a scene which is by virtue of editing and coloring implied to be happening in present day, Sean approaches two soldiers in 1970s uniforms on the roof of one of the towers and pretend-shoots them with his finger. This is what Joe used to do, before he threw his first petrol bomb and later became one of the organizers of frequent riots in Belfast. The soldiers were obviously put there by the filmmakers, but they fit in perfectly—the neighborhood is full of murals defiantly celebrating the IRA.
Another neighbor and protagonist is Jolene, a talented 30-something singer, who plays Joe’s mum in several scenes. She is instructed on how to defend herself by Angie, who shot her husband in the hip with a gun she hid in her oven for the IRA. Rampant domestic violence and substance abuse are the consequences of the Troubles. We see Joe shouting at drug dealers—his biggest concern that will lead him to a potentially fatal decision—from his balcony adorned with the Irish tricolor, as he smokes a joint and shows us his moonshine: “The rest is for my wake,” he says, with a childish flair for the tragic.
The documentary was filmed over a period of seven years and covers the contemporary events of Brexit and the death of the Queen. Through the present-day scenes, the film gives us a clear picture that the conflict, if not directly violent anymore, is still very much present. Celesia further underlines this connection by visually connecting archival material with her own footage. The TV archival are heavily tinged in blue, while Chambe’s footage is washed out, so the grays also appear bluish. As Joe watches an old broadcast report of a clash of Republicans with the British Army and the police, identifying the rubber bullets and petrol bombs by sound, his reminiscence is either reflected on the TV screen or superimposed over the archival footage. Outside of such experimental methods and reenactments, the camera often shows the characters in skewed angles that reflect their confused and traumatized state of mind. This makes it quite easy to sink into the bleakness and dark poetry of the film, which at almost two hours of running time becomes heavily immersive.
Black Snow
Stories of industrial conglomerates causing environmental damage in poorly regulated countries are as much a staple of documentary cinema as they are of investigative journalism—and the overlaps between the two. For instance, in Nanna Frank Møller and Zlatko Pranjic’s The Sky Above Zenica (2024), activists are fighting the global steel giant ArcelorMittal, which has made the titular Bosnian city one of the three most polluted ones in Europe, with at least one cancer patient in each household. In other countries, multinational companies don’t poison their citizens; the local mining industries do it instead. Such is the story that Ukrainian-born, U.S.-based journalist and filmmaker Alina Simone’s first feature-length documentary, Black Snow, tells. An unlikely hero uncovers the story of pollution in her hometown and gets targeted by Putin’s Russia. Black Snow (an IDA Enterprise Fund recipient) won the F:ACT Award at CPH:DOX.
The film opens in a fittingly dramatic manner, with the protagonist, 42-year-old Natalia Zubkova, recording a video in her car, saying, “If you are watching this, it means I had no strength left or I am simply no longer alive.” Living in the city of Kiselyovsk, in the Kuzbass region in southern Siberia, home to one of the world’s largest coal deposits, she is saving one kidney for her daughter, meaning she would never commit suicide. Her elder daughter had already had one replaced, and her son, who was born in another city, is completely healthy.
Historical black-and-white archive footage of coal mining follows, accompanied by Zubkova’s voice-over explaining how mine owners discovered that open pits are much cheaper. This alternates with TV archival of Putin surrounded by his minions, including the Kuzbass governor, saying that Russia has to “occupy this niche or someone else will.”
Black Snow goes beyond the standard investigative documentary format, with its dense dramaturgy involving many complex developments from the angle of the protagonist and the director’s closeness to her. Zubkova isn’t a charismatic personality nor an obvious badass type. Her low profile has the vibe of an ordinary woman, a mother and housewife who disregards her husband’s opinion, making her fight for her children’s and neighbors’ health and social justice relatable. Her headstrong willpower turns against her, but she doesn’t give in even when she is clearly despairing. The way she is targeted is presented in a suspenseful manner, with quick cuts between headlines, social media, and online comments, and crude photomontages from state-aligned tabloid websites creating an almost unbearable tension. The music score switches between dramatic strings with curious acoustic guitar and threatening electronics, building as the film progresses, and slowly decreasing in intensity as the anticlimactic ending approaches.
Faced with the authorities’ complete refusal to recognize environmental issues in general and in her town in particular, and the silence of state-controlled media, Zubkova began her citizen journalism by filming plumes of black smoke from open mining pits and interviewing residents, most of whom have serious health problems. In February 2019, her YouTube channel went viral worldwide with footage of black snow. The mayor covered the spots that were smoking, restoring his reputation but not solving the environmental problem.
Black Snow follows her other reporting of carbon monoxide poisoning from former pits and attempts to appeal to ineffectual regulatory agencies and even Justin Trudeau as an environmental refugee. When Zubkova decides to run for the local council, threats against her intensify, with tabloid websites running horrible, fabricated stories about her mental health, supposed alcoholism, and promiscuity. In a particularly scary scene, the Federal Security Service (FSB) stops her and Simone, wanting to interrogate them. Unsupported even by her husband, who works as a truck driver at the mine and hates being filmed so we never see him except pixelated in a brief scene, Zubkova might have to flee.
If it weren’t for the pit mines, southern Siberia would actually look quite idyllic in the summer, despite “Glory to the Miners” slogans printed and carved everywhere. Although these mottos had a certain purpose during communism, in authoritarian times they have not only turned into a reminder of a bygone era but have also gained a new, sinister meaning.
Miners are no longer considered heroes. In fact, just like other ordinary citizens, they clearly do not matter to mine owners and authorities. This arrogant disregard for their lives is sickening, but in this, the former communist countries are now equal to their counterparts in other parts of the world—international corporations and their government partners are not even trying to sugarcoat how ideologies are no longer relevant. There is only naked power and profit. .
Black Snow goes beyond the standard investigative documentary format, with its dense dramaturgy involving many complex developments from the angle of the protagonist and the director’s closeness to her.
Still from Black Snow. Image credit: Ivan Rechkin. Courtesy of Sheffield DocFest
Screen Time
Daughters
Daughters follows the daughters of imprisoned fathers as codirector Angela Patton’s organization brings daddy-daughter dances to a D.C.-area prison. The measured sorrow of the film is a heartfelt reflection of the tragedy of the impacts of imprisonment. Gorgeous cinematography from Michael “Cambio” Fernandez take us from black and white to vibrant neon passions—buoyed by a watery, atmospheric soundtrack from Kelsey Lu—as we move through meditations on memory, perception, recognition in relationships, and love. How do we love ourselves in a society that continually tells us we are not worthy of it?
Patton and Natalie Rae adjoin scenes of the prison’s support group for the fathers on the inside with the daughters, mothers, and grandparents on the outside dealing with the emotional and material fallout of the men’s imprisonment—while preparing for the bittersweet, temporary reunion of one special dance together. Depicting the miracle of seeing a loved one for the first time in years and the ecstatic convening of joy, sorrow, and melancholy, Daughters flows through your eyes and heart like water. It doesn’t make direct calls to dismantle the prison industrial complex, but the care and appreciation shown for the girls and their families help us see the love we need to foster in order to survive this world.
—Matazi Weathers
Hollywoodgate
In a short voice-over after the opening scenes of the film, Hollywoodgate’s director, Ibrahim Nash’at, tells us he got permission to film members of the Taliban to “show the world the image of the Taliban that they want you to see.” This image starts after the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, when a group of Taliban fighters took over an American base in Kabul called Hollywood Gate. In total, the Americans left behind US$7 billion worth of military equipment, including weapons, jet fighters, and Black Hawk helicopters. Large supplies of medicine, gym equipment, and alcoholic drinks were also abandoned. Whilst uncovering these findings, we hear one of the Taliban leaders say, “The Americans left us an enormous treasure.”
This treasure leads to new ambitions for the Taliban, to transition from a fundamentalist militia to a military regime. A threatening phone conversation with Tajikistan’s Minister of Defense indicates they have new goals beyond their border. What the Taliban want us to see in this film is not revelatory but a reiteration of the state of tyranny they want to maintain—and a disturbing display of abandonment by the American military.
—Hind Mezaina
Courtesy of Netflix
Courtesy of Acme PR
Look Into My Eyes
Lana Wilson’s Look Into My Eyes, an elegantly crafted portrait of seven NYC psychics, contends with the theme of connection— that of the psychics to their clients and to the loved ones those clients desperately want to reach. Everyone is also connected to the director herself, who has made the inspired choice of casting a very New York–type of cinephile psychic, who has likewise pursued a career as an actor, writer, or artist, and similarly views their clairvoyance as a creative calling. From the sparse sets designed by the filmmaking team, where actual readings with participants chosen through table auditions occur, to the psychics’ real apartments, tiny and cluttered and thus practically an NYC movie cliche, we’re transported to an unexpected world of heartfelt emotion and potential healing. And learn, as the doc-maker behind Miss Americana (2020) and Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields (2023) once put it, “Even if it is make-believe, it is just as meaningful as being ‘real.’”
—Lauren Wissot
War Game
Jesse Moss’s second documentary feature released this year reunites him with Tony Gerber. Like their first collaboration, Full Battle Rattle (2008), which captured the infrastructure and logics of the U.S. military’s Iraq War training facility in California’s Mojave Desert, War Game also records a simulation of a U.S. war. But this simulation isn’t an authorized government one. Instead, it’s organized by a nonprofit. After the film begins with crew setting up the various war rooms for a fictional president’s response to a homegrown insurgency during a presidential election, the war game’s designers give a quick rundown of the stakes: The U.S. military is currently woefully unprepared to prevent homegrown insurgencies. In this war game, the “Blue Team” government officials are tasked with stopping the “Red Cell” takeover of the government and preserving the public’s trust in the presidency. The setup is tense (participants have only six hours to save America), modern (the Red Cell makes many memable social posts), starry (red state Democrats Steve Bullock and Heidi Heitkamp play the president and VP), and urgent (post–January 6).
Despite the filmmakers’ self-professed claim that this doc is a “real-life thriller,” merging the documentary and the game’s arcs creates a shallow simulacrum. Every war game operates differently, under different assumptions—the particulars in this case, however, are withheld from the audience. As a result, War Game struggles to detail both the game’s own logic and the broader mechanics of how the U.S. government could exactly fail, focusing instead on appeals to pathos and personal backstories. What we’re left with is an expensive, baubly fundraising tool for the nonprofit Vet Voice. The film’s precredit text cards inform us that Vet Voice will continue to conduct professional war games as training for real U.S. military and intelligence staffers.
—Abby Sun
Courtesy of A24
Image credit: Thorsten Thielow Courtesy of the filmmakers
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