“Russia is for Russians!” goes the far-right rallying cry. To which Marusya replies, “Bullshit. Russia is for depressed people.” She should know: Moscow-born Marusya Syroechkovskaya spent a dozen years turning her camera (multiple cameras, really) on herself and her co-credited cameraperson and best friend (turned lover, turned husband, turned ex) Kimi Morev. The two met as suicidal teenagers in their nation’s capital in the aughts, both part of the spiraling “silenced generation” under Putin. They shocked one another by deciding to stick around for a spell to see how their—and perhaps their antiauthoritarian compatriots’s—story would end. (That said, the soulmates […]

From robot-inflicted deaths (2018’s The Truth About Killer Robots) to the rise of Donald Trump through Russian state-sponsored media (2018’s Our New President), Maxim Pozdorovkin recently has taken some unconventional routes down the darkest of rabbit holes. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the Russian-American filmmaker’s latest, The Conspiracy, closing this year’s DOC NYC, is both artistically inventive (featuring evocative animation seamlessly wed with archival imagery) and downright chilling. With a powerful score and big names such as Liev Schreiber (Trotsky) and Jason Alexander (Max Warburg) added to the mix, Pozdorovkin weaves together the interwar stories of three prominent Jewish families: […]

One of the more unusual projects to play this year’s DOC NYC (also concurrently screening at IDFA in the Best of Fests section), Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski’s The Hamlet Syndrome follows five young men and women as they develop an experimental stage piece based on Shakespeare’s tragedy—as well as their own. The quintet questioning “to be or not to be” are all Ukrainians who have been engaged, to varying degrees, in the war Russia launched back in 2014. (This theater-as-therapy session even predated Putin’s full-scale invasion by several months.) Soldiers Slavik and Katya, along with paramedic Roman, all saw […]

Forget social and political issues—in documentaries, 2022 is shaping up to be the year of the volcano. There was Sara Dosa’s exquisite Fire of Love (which I fell in love with back at CPH:DOX in March, also screening at DOC NYC), in which a pair of lovestruck vulcanologists are quite literally consumed by their passion. Now we have not one, but two volcano-centric films debuting at this year’s DOC NYC. While I’ve not seen Herzog’s (pre-festival premiering) The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, its title naming Dosa’s aforementioned protagonists, I’m guessing it’s likely the polar opposite of […]

Diana Bustamante’s Our Movie (Nuestra película) feels like both a departure and a homecoming for the Latin American producer credited on numerous Cannes winners, most recently Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Jury Prize-awarded (and Tilda Swinton-starring) Memoria. Comprised entirely of news footage from the Medellín-born Bustamante’s childhood—who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s when kidnappings, political assassinations and blood-soaked streets were as common as choir practice—the “essay documentary” is, as the producer/director puts it, “a collage of images, repetitions and memories, built through the intervention of the Colombian news archive.” And what a visceral collage it is—from closeups of bullet holes to a […]

Moderated by Darrien Gipson, Executive Director of SAGindie, this year’s Wonder Women: Producers discussion at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival was a must-catch, mostly for two glaringly obvious reasons, with the first being the wide diversity of the participants. Alongside white Brits Alison Owen (Elizabeth, Saving Mr. Banks, perennial panelist and SCAD Savannah Film Festival Advisory Board member) and manager/producer Laura Berwick (Belfast, All is True, and Sir Kenneth’s longtime rep), there was the English-Jamaican writer/actress/producer Nicôle Lecky (Mood, The Moor Girl) and American actress/producer Jurnee Smollett (Lovecraft Country, Birds of Prey). Then there was the second reason—the presence of “grande dame” of indie […]

As someone who never understood (okay, downright loathed) the conformist culture of so-called Greek-letter organizations, I didn’t bother to catch Byron Hurt’s (Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Soul Food Junkies) latest doc Hazing when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival back in the spring. But fortunately, the film—which takes a deep historical, as well as personal, dive into what Wikipedia defines as “any activity expected of someone in joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person’s willingness to participate”—will now be launching the new season of PBS’s Independent Lens, which […]

Veteran production designer Sophie Jarvis’s assured feature debut Until Branches Bend is one smartly executed, unexpected gem. Premiering in the Discovery section of this year’s TIFF, the psychological drama (really a contemporary horror film) follows a cannery worker named Robin (2016 TIFF Rising Star Grace Glowicki) whose life is upended after discovering a creepy bug in a peach while (conveniently) alone at break time. Unable to get her boss to take the very real threat of a catastrophic invasion seriously — and perhaps risk a factory shutdown — she decides to go public with her unappetizing finding, which entails sounding […]

Sarah McCarthy is no stranger to navigating the myriad challenges posed by authoritarian states. Indeed, the Australian doc-maker has shot in precarious political places throughout the world, from the Philippines, to Saudi Arabia to Russia—where she’s returned time and time again. Nor is she a stranger to the Toronto International Film Festival, where following on the heels of feature-length works (The Sound of Mumbai, The Dark Matter of Love) she now debuts her latest short Anastasia; and the innocuous title, much like the film’s titular character, belies one powerful punch. Anastasia Shevchenko is a Russian civil rights advocate who’s been arrested […]

Having already made the prestige fest rounds to great acclaim this year—from Tribeca to the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage outdoor film series just this summer—Cinque Northern’s Angola Do You Hear Us? is now a must-catch at Telluride. The documentary short follows the incomparable actor and playwright Liza Jessie Peterson on her artistic and spiritual mission to bring her one-woman show The Peculiar Patriot to none other than the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The film also explores all the baggage, bureaucracy and ultimate blocking that was met with a work centered on racial injustice (that deftly connects the capitalistic dots […]