News

There are not many initial viewings I remember so vividly as I do watching Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies.” I was a junior in college taking a course on the history of documentary and when the professor chose to show us this film, I was immaturely prepared for the kind of slog the class experienced a few weeks before with Robert J. Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North.” What I got instead was both an intricately dynamic portrayal of an institution none hope to step inside and one of the most compassionate pleas for human understanding and empathy ever put to screen.

This is the power of Wiseman’s lens. For over 50 years, the Boston-based filmmaker has stationed himself and his camera within settings many of us take for granted or would prefer to avoid entirely. Places like hospitals, welfare offices, schools for the deaf and blind, meatpacking plants, and battered-women’s shelters.

It’s been 10 months since “Sugarcane” first premiered at Sundance, where it picked up the Directing Award: U.S. for documentary. Since then, directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat have landed a worldwide distribution deal with National Geographic Documentary Films and have traveled across the world with their film, now stopping at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam as part of the Best of Fests strand.

“Sugarcane” follows a long-coming reckoning at the titular reserve, sparked by the discovery of unmarked graves on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada in 2021. The documentary explores how Indigenous communities were forced to suppress years of separation, assimilation and abuse committed against their children by a system designed to “solve the Indian problem.”

Speaking about the first drive for the film, Kassie, a journalist with years of experience in portraying stories of persecuted peoples and human rights violations,...

Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival announced Tuesday lineup for its 46th edition, with “Danish Girl” star Alicia Vikander and double Palme d’Or winning director Ruben Östlund among attendees.

The biggest festival in Scandinavia, Göteborg opens with the world premiere of Abbe Hassan’s “Exodus” on Jan. 27. Its closing film is “Camino” by Birgitte Stærmose.

The festival will screen 250 films during 10 days. “Exodus” will compete for the title of Best Nordic Film – and a prize sum of Sek 400 000 – alongside “Godland,” IFFR opener “Munch,” “Ellos eatnu – Let the River Flow,” “Unruly,” “Four Little Adults,” “Copenhagen Does Not Exist” and “Dogborn,” already shown in Venice.

In the Nordic Documentary Competition, the audience will get to see “Hypernoon,” “The King,” IDFA winner “Apolonia, Apolonia,” “Bong Thom” (“The Brother”), “Labor” and “Monica in the South Seas.”

“Nordic countries are opening up for discussion about their role in colonial history. It’s something that’s...

Don Palathara’s Indian drama ‘Family’ will have its world premiere at the festival.

Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s Pamfir and Andrew Legge’s Lola have been added to the Harbour strand for the 52nd edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Ukrainian drama Pamfir was supported by the festival’s Hubert Bals fund in 2020 and recently nominated for a European Film Academy award in European discovery.

Lola is the feature debut from UK director Legge and is set during the Second World War. It premiered at Locarno in August and was recently acquired by Signature Entertainment for the UK and Ireland.

Don Palathara’s Indian drama ‘Family’ will have its world premiere at the festival.

Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s Pamfir and Andrew Legge’s Lola have been added to the Harbour strand for the 52nd edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Ukrainian drama Pamfir was supported by the festival’s Hubert Bals Fund in 2020 and recently nominated for a European Film Academy award in European discovery.

Lola is the feature debut from UK director Legge and is set during the Second World War. It premiered at Locarno in August and was recently acquired by Signature Entertainment for the UK and Ireland.

Vladimir Putin may prefer that people forget about imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but the Cinema Eye Honors isn’t.

The awards show dedicated to the art and craft of documentary film today announced its 2023 Unforgettables list of the most memorable subjects of nonfiction films this year, and Navalny’s name was front and center. The story of the lawyer and anti-corruption crusader, who was almost killed in a Kremlin poisoning plot in 2020, is told in the award-winning film Navalny, directed by Daniel Roher.

Joining Navalny on the Unforgettables list is another political leader — Gabby Giffords, the former Congresswoman from Arizona who was severely injured in an assassination attempt in 2011. Her difficult road to recovery and return to activism is told in Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen.

Artist Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin, the artist at the center of the Laura Poitras...

Do you know when the first movie premiere in Hollywood history was held?

On Oct. 18. 1922 Sid Grauman opened his movie palace the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Blvd. with superstar Douglas Fairbank’s latest swashbuckler “Robin Hood.” The red carpet was rolled out for Fairbanks, his wife Mary Pickford and their good friend (and partner in United Artists) Charlie Chaplin. It cost 5 to attend the premiere. And the movie, which was the top box office draw, played there exclusively for several months. The Egyptian cost 800,000 to build and took 18 months to complete for Grauman and real estate developer Charles E. Toberman. It is currently being renovated by Netflix in cooperation with the American Cinematheque.

“Robin Hood,” directed by Allan Dwan, was one of the most expensive movies of the silent era, costing just under 1 million. The castle was the biggest set ever made for a silent movie. Some scenes feature over 1,200 extras.

Four documentary filmmakers were invited to participate in the Sundance Institute’s newly created Indigenous non-fiction intensive program that concludes July 29.

The three-day program was created to identify Indigenous artists creating formally bold and personal work and to uplift them with a small grant and mentorship on a current edit of their short-form documentary films.

The four filmmakers selected to partake in the new initiative are: Sarah Liese (“Coming In”), Sean Connelly (“A Justice Advancing Architecture Tour”), Olivia Camfield and Woodrow Hunt (“If You Look Under There You’ll Find It”). The advisors for the inaugural program include Emmy award-winning filmmaker Colleen Thurston, filmmaker-editor Maya Daisy Hawke (“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”), and filmmaker Darol Olu Kae (“I Ran From It and Was Still in It”).

Each participant will receive year-round creative support from Sundance’s Indigenous program staffers as they work to complete their films.

Indigenous program director Adam Piron...

The relationship between documentary subject and documentarian has been fraught with conflict since the genre’s evolution beyond “actualities” and into a narrative format pioneered by Robert Flaherty. Interrogating what it means to become a “subject” in a documentary film that ultimately takes on a life and a folklore of its own, Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall have created an essential exploration of ethics with Subject.

It’s a code of ethics that some of the film’s scholars, critics, and festival programmers argue is needed more than ever in an era when nonfiction content is more in demand from all major streamers. For some, their story grows over time—like Margaret Ratliff, who as a teen agreed to participate in a documentary about the death of her mother and the murder conviction of her father, novelist Michael Peterson. She originally agreed to participate in the series to support her...

After a century marked by breakneck change and nonstop innovation, there’s something coldly comforting about the fact that the broad contours of the “ethics in nonfiction filmmaking” conversation haven’t moved all that far since Robert J. Flaherty stuck a Nanook in the north and called it documentary way back in 1922, and whatever similar debate raged in online film circles way back in the heady days of… last month.

It feels noteworthy to bring this up in reference to Michelangelo Frammartino’s “Il Buco” because such are the thoughts you might find yourself dwelling upon throughout this alternately challenging and absorbing sit. Of course, the fact that the film both welcomes and nourishes such mental digressions is neither a feature nor a bug but a direct and inevitable outcome of an uncompromised and uncompromising deep dive into the nature of screen representation that is — very much by design — painstakingly dry.

Andrei Konchalovsky's Sin is showing on Mubi starting June 18, 2021 in the United States.Not once does Michelangelo pick up a brush—or a chisel—in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Sin. Like the Russian icon painter in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, which Konchalovsky co-wrote over five decades ago, the artist is never captured at work and is instead plunged into a war-stricken wasteland, a 16th century Italy that feels, looks, and probably smells like a pestilential nightmare straight out of Dante’s Inferno. There are wars, murders, plots, crooked aristocrats and ungrateful relatives; early on, Alberto Testone’s Michelangelo staggers into Florence’s Piazza della Signoria to see his monumental David preside over a swamp of corpses and severed heads. Time and again, the genius casts his eyes skyward, searching for someone who’ll only show up in the film’s closing shot. There’s a biblical quality to his helplessness, a...

The show must go on. At least the Venice Film Festival must go on. Even a pandemic can’t stop the oldest international film festival from taking place Sept. 2 through Sept. 12 in the picturesque of grand canals. Of course, safety is first with masks, social distancing etc. are all in place as critics get a first glance at possible award-winners.

Over the past seven years, the festival has held world premieres of such Oscar-winners as 2013’s “Gravity”; 2014’s “Birdman”; 2015’s “Spotlight”; 2016’s “La La Land”; 2017’s “The Shape of Water”; 2018’s “Roma”; and 2019’s “Joker.” Only two films that won the festival’s top prize have gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars: 1948’s “Hamlet” and 2017’s “The Shape of Water.”

The festival began in 1932 as part of the Venice Biennale, the city’s legendary exhibition of the arts under the guidance of President of the Biennale, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata,...

Above: German poster for The Strike of the Thieves. Art by Walter Riemer.In 1944, as Allied air raids intensified towards the end of World War II, Germany’s centralized state film archive, the National Socialists’ Reichsfilmarchiv, decided to protect their vast collection of film and film publicity materials by hiding them in a salt mine in Grasleben, 125 miles west of Berlin. After the Allied victory, American units entered the mine and recovered the film reels. But much of the paper material was left behind.In 1986 a treasure trove of German film posters from the first four decades of film history were found, profoundly damaged by a fire, in the mine where they had remained for forty years. Starting in 2017, the posters were recovered, restored, and digitized.Many of those posters are currently on view at the exhibition Burn Marks – Film Posters from a Salt Mine, which opened in June at...

After highlighting the most overlooked films of 2019 with our 50 favorite movies that made less than $100K at the U.S. box office, today we’re putting a spotlight on the truly overlooked: the 30 films (and honorable mentions) that we loved on the festival circuit that are still seeking U.S. distribution.

Acting also as a 2020 preview, we hope that highlighting these titles spurs some distributor interests and a release in the next twelve months. Featuring favorites from Berlinale, Cannes, Locarno, Tiff, Nyff, and beyond, make sure to follow us on Twitter to get the latest distribution updates. As we move into a new decade, one can also track all of our festival coverage here.

Bait (Mark Jenkin)

For his debut feature, writer-director-cinematographer Mark Jenkin takes a parable about a contemporary fishing community under threat from wealthy outsiders and presents it in a style reminiscent of documentaries of the early 20th century,...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’re highlighting the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Arabian Nights (Miguel Gomes)

In lauding Miguel Gomes’ three-part, six-and-a-half hour behemoth, it’s perhaps important to consider his background as a critic. Not just in terms of the trilogy’s cinephilic engagement with Rossellini, Alonso, Oliveira, etc.; also in its defiant nature. While it’s easy to assign the trilogy certain humanist and satirical labels from the get-go and just praise these films for following through on them, Gomes continually seeks to mutate and complicate his of age-of-austerity saga. Far from perfect, and so much more exciting for that very reason. – Ethan V.

Where to Stream: Mubi (free for 30 days)

Bait (Mark Jenkin)

For his debut feature,...

Spike Lee, Bi Gan, Steven Spielberg, Kelly Reichardt, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Mia Hansen-Løve, Terence Davies, Jia Zhangke, Pedro Almodóvar, Lynne Ramsay, Tsai Ming-liang, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Guillermo del Toro, Lee Chang-dong, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Christopher Nolan. Those are just a few of the filmmakers who brought their early work to New Directors/New Films. Now in its 48th edition, the New York City-based film festival continues to spotlight emerging directors representing the future of filmmaking and this year’s edition is particularly eclectic.

We’ve covered all twenty-four of the features playing at the festival, taking place March 27 through April 7 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. Along with gems hailing from Berlinale, Cannes, Locarno, Rotterdam, Tiff, Sundance, and beyond, the festival also features one world premiere (End of the Century) as well as two shorts programs.

Check out our comprehensive coverage below along with links to full reviews.

For his debut feature, writer-director-cinematographer Mark Jenkin takes a parable about a contemporary fishing community under threat from wealthy outsiders and presents it in a style reminiscent of documentaries of the early 20th century, namely Robert J. Flaherty’s 1934 film Man of Aran. The result is titled Bait, a punky, pastoral little movie that draws from the mysticism and iconography of documentaries like Flaherty’s but with a narrative and ironic wit that is inescapably of the here and now. Put it this way: the director may have had those films in mind when he chose to shoot Bait on 16mm and have it processed by hand–for purposes of wear and tear–but perhaps less so when he wrote the scene in which a man on a stag party boards a boat dressed in a large penis costume.

It is that kind of anachronistic counterpoint that makes so much of Bait such a blast.

“Spring is coming earlier and earlier each year.”

A vast icy field somewhere in Siberia reveals itself to the viewers’ eyes, with only the faint line of the horizon marking a border, a change somehow in this landscape before the white is disturbed by a small figure and a sleigh. Making his way towards a yet unknown destination somewhere ahead of him is Nanook (Mikhail Aprosimov), a man who lives in this region with his wife Sedna (Feodosia Ivanova). He is looking for food, for some prey caught up in the traps he has laid the day before, and finally to dig a hole in the ground to catch some fish.

Even though “Ága” is supposed to be set in our time and age, the way of life Sedna and Nanook live is archaic, to the point you might think you have entered a time machine. Only a few interventions...

Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville's Liberté et Patrie (2002) is free to watch below. Mubi's retrospective For Ever Godard is showing from November 12, 2017 - January 16, 2018 in the United States.I. One of the most beautiful essay films ever made, Liberté et Patrie (2002) turns out to also be one of the most accessible collaborations of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The deeply moving lyricism of this short may astonish even those spectators who arrive to it casually, without any prior knowledge of the filmmakers’s oeuvre. Contrary to other works by the couple, Liberté et Patrie is built on a recognizable narrative strong enough to easily accommodate all the unconventionalities of the piece: a digressive structure full of bursts of undefined emotion; an unpredictable rhythm punctuated by sudden pauses, swift accelerations, intermittent blackouts and staccatos; a mélange of materials where...

By Jacob Oller

Truth needs a little creativity sometimes. n the early 1920s, director Robert Flaherty decided to film the incredible and different society of Inuits that he’d stumbled upon. He ruined the first draft, then went back and reshot what later became 1922’s Nanook of the North, a feature-length docudrama that became the controversial catalyst for a […]

The article Birth, Death, and Dramatization: The Invention of the Modern Documentary appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Ben Rivers' The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015) is showing on Mubi from September 6 - October 6 and Oliver Laxe's Mimosas (2016) from September 7 - October 7, 2017 in the United Kingdom as part of the series Close-Up on Oliver Laxe.MimosasBoth Mimosas and The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers mirror each other in many different ways: they both take place in the same geographical space, the south of Morocco, they were filmed at the same time, have some of the same people in them, and are filmed in 16mm. But these are only apparent similarities that veil deeper discussions between both films. Director Oliver Laxe stands behind the camera in Mimosas, he is observed from the distance in the first part of The Sky Trembles, and finally ends up crossing the invisible wall...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Robert Flaherty's Moana with Sound (1926 / 1980) is playing August 30 - September 29, 2017 on Mubi in most countries around the world.Slowly, slowly, the tufunga taps his comb of bone needles into the young man’s lower back. His movements are practiced and precise, each tap marking the young man for the rest of his days. The young man winces in agony, sweat pouring down his face as his relatives wipe away the blood and excess ink with tapa cloth. A witch-woman stokes a fire and burns candlenut stalks to make more soot for the tufunga’s ink. The infernal tapping continues, now on his upper back, now on his flanks, now on his knees—the most painful part of the ceremony. Outside the hut, a crowd of men dance and sing. “Courage to Moana,” they cry, “Courage to Moana!

Mubi's retrospective on filmmaker Peter Nestler, A Vision of Resistance, presented as part of a collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is showing in from July 18 - September 1, 2017 in most countries around the world.By the Dike SluiceWhen German documentarian Peter Nestler sees a glass, he doesn't just see a glass. He sees factories, he sees furnaces that melt the glass and he sees hands that toil and mold it. When he sees a city, he sees the hills, the roads and the sluice, and then looks more intently at the children running on the road, the women carrying their babies to work and the men playing cards in a bar. He sees layers within the unidimensional cinema space and reads the politics, the geography and the history through the people he sees, especially the children. His Marxist lens sifts through footage as his eyes try to represent...

Here's a brief look – to be expanded – at Turner Classic Movies' June 2017 European Vacation Movie Series this evening, June 23. Tonight's destination of choice is Italy. Starring Suzanne Pleshette and Troy Donahue as the opposite of Ugly Americans who find romance and heartbreak in the Italian capital, Delmer Daves' Rome Adventure (1962) was one of the key romantic movies of the 1960s. Angie Dickinson and Rossano Brazzi co-star. In all, Rome Adventure is the sort of movie that should please fans of Daves' Technicolor melodramas like A Summer Place, Parrish, and Susan Slade. Fans of his poetic Westerns – e.g., 3:10 to Yuma, The Hanging Tree – may (or may not) be disappointed with this particular Daves effort. As an aside, Rome Adventure was, for whatever reason, a sizable hit in … Brazil. Who knows, maybe that's why Rome Adventure co-star Brazzi would find himself playing a Brazilian – a macho, traditionalist coffee plantation owner,...

IFC’s “Documentary Now!” has always gone for more than the cheap laugh. While it’s a mockumentary of public-tv programming and the documentaries they feature, the real pleasure lies in watching how it will create homages to great nonfiction filmmaking.

“We really wanted you to be clicking through the channels, landing on our show and thinking that it is a real documentary, and then suddenly say, ‘Hey, hold on for a minute — that’s Fred Armisen, what’s he doing in this documentary?'” said Alexander Buono, the executive producer who has co-directed and served as cinematographer on every episode of the show’s two seasons.

Buono and his fellow co-director, executive producer Rhys Thomas, started their collaboration on “Saturday Night Live” where every week they were charged with creating send-ups of everything from a suspense drama to a pharmaceutical commercial to a music video.

Read More: How ‘The...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950) is playing June 2 - July 2, 2017 on Mubi in the United Kingdom as part of the series The American Noir.Although mostly remembered now by the public for his 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray left behind him a legacy of over twenty feature films. A veritable cinematic explorer, Ray traversed genres ranging from noir, western (most notably his 1954 gender-bending cult Trucolor extravaganza Johnny Guitar), melodrama, epic and experimental film. He dared as few would to shoot in remote and forbidding locations such as the Arctic and Everglades National Park. What are Ray’s films about? As in his signature piece Rebel, despite Ray’s wide-ranging endeavors in genre and subject matter we are often met with anti-hero protagonists who struggle and rail against authority while lamenting their meaningless and circumscribed existences.

Over the last decade or so, non-fiction and documentary cinema has been the breeding ground for some of cinema’s most interesting films and film-makers. However, for many cinephiles the history of this world of cinema has been vastly undervalued and works vastly underseen. Be it the earliest days of silent cinema to the importance of documentary films in global conflicts, non-fiction directors have crafted some of the greatest and most influential works in all of the art form.

And thankfully two great, if light, histories of some of the great films are finally available on DVD.

From Icarus Films comes the release of three films, across two DVDs, that take a direct look at the early days of documentary cinema, ostensibly from the beginning with films like Nanook Of The North to the work of German propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl and Us news reels which would see names like...

A tender love story, Dina is a documentary that could easily be mistaken for a fiction film. Framed in long takes, often on a tripod, several choices other than its style call the film’s legitimacy into question, including a key moment which occurs in the film’s third act that leaves one wondering if directors Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini are playing fair. The film, up until that moment, is so engrossing that as manipulative as it may appear, I’m willing to forgive the choice of pulling back the curtain a bit on a moment that’s offered up with little context.

The story of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize winner follows Dina Buno, a 49-year-old living on disability, suffering from a neurological disorder, and her courtship with Scott Levin, a Walmart greeter with Asperger syndrome. The filmmakers arrive after Scott proposes to Dina at a Red Robin,...

Otto Bell’s documentary mixes the traditional and modern to thrilling effect

Related: The Eagle Huntress review – Kazakh falconry was never so family-friendly

At first glance, Otto Bell’s The Eagle Huntress looks like one of those archetypal ethnographic documentaries with which Robert Flaherty kicked off the whole history of documentary film-making a century ago. Just like in 1922’s Nanook Of The North, Bell tackles a vanishing way of life – an ancient people in a harsh, unforgiving climate – and one might be forgiven for thinking it celebrates a wilful anachronism as it slides over history’s horizon. But you’d be wrong: there is enough of the new and the now to make this enthralling viewing.

Continue reading...

Lupita Tovar, the 1930s film actress who starred in the acclaimed Spanish-language version of Dracula and the first Mexican talkie, Santa, has died. She was 106.

Born the oldest of nine in a poor and very religious household in a small town in the southernmost part of Mexico, Tovar moved with her family to Mexico City in the later years of the Mexican Revolution. It was there, as a teenager studying dance and gymnastics, that she was discovered by Robert Flaherty, the docu-fiction film pioneer who directed Nanook Of The North and Man Of Aran. At the time, Flaherty was preparing his collaboration with F.W. Murnau, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, and he wanted Tovar for the lead role. However, after coming to Hollywood, she ended up signing a contract with Fox; Tovar would later claim that this was an attempt by the studio to get back ...

Disney’s animation roster has a history of playing with culturally insensitive fire, from the “siamese” cats in “Lady and the Tramp” to the savage Middle Eastern stereotypes in “Aladdin.” The same directors of that movie, Ron Clements and John Musker, reteam for “Moana,” the tale of a young Polynesian woman who commands the high seas to save the world. But the movie has two other co-directors, Don Hall and Chris Williams, whose credits include more recent Disney efforts such as “Big Hero 6.” While the quartet of credits may contribute to the movie’s uneven tone, it also suggests a merging of Disney’s past and present.

Visually dazzling and loaded with charm, the movie is also blatant in its quest for cultural sensitivity: It has memorable songs by “Hamilton” phenom Lin-Manuel Miranda and a first-rate mystical soundtrack by Samoan composer Opetaia Tavia Foa’i, in addition to a...

Though Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers are no longer on “Saturday Night Live” together, they still work closely together on the IFC mockumentary series “Documentary Now!” Hosted by Helen Mirren, the series parodies celebrated documentary films by adopting its style and focusing on a fictitious subject. In the first season, the team parodied the Maysles brothers’ “Grey Gardens,” Robert J. Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North,” Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line,” and the recent rock doc “The History of the Eagles.”

Read More: IFC’s ‘Documentary Now!’: Bill Hader and Fred Armisen Break Down the Docs Spoofed in Season 2

The series will return this fall, but before then, they have released a teaser of their first episode back which parodies Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s 1993 political documentary “The War Room,” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for President. “The War Room” mainly follows lead strategist...

The Great FortuneNot many festivals grant you the privilege of being personally welcomed by its director with a bottle of home-brewed liquor, not very many set that as their standard of hospitality: Beldocs, the Belgrade International Documentary Film Festival, is one of them. The composite beauty and disinterested generosity of the city and its people are the ideal environment for a festival genuinely close to its etymological roots, that of festivity, of an uplifting moment of reciprocal discovery and exchange. Big enough to explore, small enough to elaborate, Beldocs is what a festival is meant to be: a place where films are not only consumed but also convivially dissected. The size and schedule of the festival, but most crucially its comradery dimension, allow for the kind of space cinema needs in order to be cultivated, not only watched. The constitutive elements of the seventh art in Beldocs coexist organically side by side,...

Spliced together from interviews, establishing shots, and dramatic reenactments, its subjects’ homegrown aphorisms set against the forceful tinkling of the score, “The Eye Doesn’t Lie” might’ve been made by Errol Morris himself.

Inspired by “The Thin Blue Line,” the fourth episode of IFC’s inventive, erudite “Documentary Now!” — from the frenzied imaginations of director Rhys Thomas and “Saturday Night Live” alumni Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers — mimics the filmmaker’s work so precisely that it comes to resemble an X-ray, showing the bone structure of his distinctive style while (gently) poking fun at it. In this sense, to describe “Documentary Now!” as a parody is to undersell: It’s a wildly funny act of criticism, deconstructing the mechanics of nonfiction in an age defined by the slippage between “reality” and the real.

Starring Armisen and Hader in an ever-changing series of roles—in a pungent send-up of Vice Media, they even play three indistinguishable pairs of plaid-clad, ne’er-do-well correspondents on the trail of a Mexican drug kingpin — “Documentary Now!” is designed with an in-depth knowledge of the form, down to the title sequence. A clever nod to public television, replete with evolving logo, synthesized theme music, and Helen Mirren’s refined introductions, the homage to the likes of “Pov,” “Frontline,” and “Independent Lens” is telling. Though tough, at times, on the familiar tropes of Morris and the Maysles, the creators’ treatment of documentaries is affectionate; their approach is closer to Christopher Guest’s warm, playful comedies, from “Waiting for Guffman” to “For Your Consideration,” than to the sharp satire of “Drop Dead Gorgeous” or “Tanner ’88.”

This is born, it seems, of their interest in the power of nonfiction narratives, and in the process by which such stories take shape. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, “Documentary Now!” is lavish in its praise — Hader’s version of Little Edie Beale, in the series’ tribute to “Grey Gardens,” replicates several memorable moments in the film almost exactly — but it’s when the series turns toward exaggeration and hyperbole that its understanding of the form’s fakery is on fullest display. Against the “direct cinema” aesthetic of the Maysles, “Documentary Now!” depicts the siblings, here known as the Feins, eliciting performances from their subjects, searching the shadows of “Sandy Passage” for the most compelling variant of the truth. (It comes back to bite them, in a way that acknowledges the elements of Gothic horror in “Grey Gardens” by blowing the original to bits.)

Understanding documentaries as a set of narrative techniques, and not simply as a reflection of “the facts,” “Documentary Now!” is at its most astute in the first season’s “Kunuk Uncovered.” Based on 1988’s “Nanook Revisited,” itself an investigation of the stagecraft in Robert Flaherty’s 1922 silent, “Nanook of the North,” “Kunuk” renders explicit the series’ animating principle: “Was the first documentary a documentary at all,” the narrator intones, “or was it something else?” As William H. Sebastian (John Slattery) attempts to mold his subject, Pipilok (Armisen), into the “Eskimo” of his ethnocentric assumptions, mounting dog sledding and spear fishing scenes, he loses control of the project to its central figure. “Kunuk” becomes an artful farce, part Hollywood excess and part careful craft.

Pipilok first demands compensation, securing the managerial services of a local pimp, and then displaces Sebastian altogether, transforming into a tortured auteur. (At one point, he curses out the cast in his native tongue, a true diva of the directing chair.) His aesthetic innovations — recording sound, building sets, developing “point of view” and new forms of movement — are those, roughly speaking, of realism, and “Kunuk” is, in essence, a reminder that the style that doesn’t seem like a style is no less fabricated for convincing us otherwise. In “Documentary Now!” nonfiction is always “something else”: A performance, a manipulation, a construction, adjacent to “the real” but not a mirror image of it.

In fashioning a new short film for each installment—with the exception of the two-part “Gentle and Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee” — the series is an outlier in the Emmys’ nascent Variety Sketch category. Last year’s inaugural field featured five nominees on the traditional “sketch” model, including “Saturday Night Live” and winner “Inside Amy Schumer,” and all, including the final season of the excellent “Key & Peele,” are among this year’s twenty eligible series (up from 17). But given the TV Academy’s tendency to settle into firm patterns, to the point that one might call them ruts, it would behoove voters to honor the heterodox, learned, distinctly non-topical comedy of “Documentary Now!” while the contours of the category are still in flux.

If there’s one aspect of the series we know Academy members can appreciate, it’s the brilliant impression: Schumer and Ryan McFaul were nominated last year for directing the dead solid perfect satire “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” as if inhabited by the spirit of Sidney Lumet, a feat “Documentary Now!” manages many times over, and in myriad registers. Its sketches succeed, in the end, because they’re not sketchy at all, but rather fully realized, remarkably savvy reconsiderations of their subject, which is the creative, sometimes-deceptive act of documentary filmmaking itself.

“The Eye Doesn’t Lie” recalls not only “The Thin Blue Line,” then, but also, by dint of its title, the filmmaker’s examination of visible evidence in “Standard Operating Procedure.” “The pictures spoke a thousand words,” as Army Special Agent Brent Pack says in the latter of photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, launching into the kind of Morris-esque paradox that IFC’s series so beautifully distills. “But unless you know what day and time they were taken, you wouldn’t know what story they were telling.” The eye does lie, of course, and the brilliant “Documentary Now!” is always catching it red-handed.

Related storiesHow 'Mike Tyson Mysteries' Season 2 Pushed Wacky Retro Designs Even Further (Emmy Watch)Taraji P. Henson's 'Empire' Highlight Reel Has to Be Seen to Be Believed'You're the Worst' Star Aya Cash Explains Why You Shouldn't Vote For Her at the Emmys (But You Really, Really Should)...

Employing an outsider to disarm subjects deep in Bubba Texas, Booger Red turns to writer/director/actor/provocateur Onur Tukel as its conduit into this world, asking the absurd questions at the heart of a scandal that involves swingers, foster parents and a “sex kindergarten.” Inspired by Michael Hall’s 2009 Texas Monthly article, director Berndt Mader (Five Time Champion) constructs his own documentary/narrative hybrid with Tukel as a reporter named Onur Tukel (although not as himself) in his most restrained role yet.

Playing an Austin-based investigate reporter, he’s dispatched to the small town of Mineola, Texas where the neighborhood swinger’s club is conveniently located across from the town’s newspaper. It’s here where the mysterious Booger Red apparently brought kids he trained in his “sex kindergarten” to perform — an allegation made by a profiteering set of foster parents.

Rather curiously, Mader has insisted many real players...

Don't let your boss see this movie, it'll give them ideas. Writer-director Kaneto Shindo reduces the human drama to its basics, as an isolated family endures a backbreaking existence of dawn 'til dusk toil to eke out a living. It's a beautiful but humbling ode to adaptability and human resolve. And the show has no conventional dialogue. The Naked Island Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 811 1960 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 94 min. / Hadaka no shima / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date May 17, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama, Shinji Tanaka, Masanori Horimoto. Cinematography Kiyomi Kuroda Film Editor Toshio Enoki Original Music Hikaru Hayashi Produced by Eisaku Matsuura, Kaneto Shindo Written and Directed by Kaneto Shindo

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Writer-director Kaneto Shindo started his own production company in the 1950s earning critical attention but not great success with pictures on topical themes -- the legacy of Hiroshima, the story of the fishing trawler irradiated by a hydrogen blast.

As a supplement to our Recommended Discs weekly feature, Peter Labuza regularly highlights notable recent home-video releases with expanded reviews. See this week’s selections below.

After a decade of the Dust Bowl destroying crops while rich land owners exploited every little farmer there was, making a film that naively bought into the American dream would seem foolish for any filmmaker. But Jean Renoir could only see hope in the plains, having fled his home to exchange the dreams of Fascism for the dreams of celluloid. While Renoir struggled in Hollywood during the war period, his break came as he went north to Millerton Lake to make The Southerner in 1945. The resulting film follows doe-eyed Zachary Scott, exuding his common-day presence, as Sam Tucker. Tucker, gullible for the promises that hard work means a better life, moves his family from a proto-Days of Heaven cotton-picking existence to a farm of one’s own,...

Icarus Films

While many still view the documentary as the ugly stepsister of the glamorous feature picture, the truth is that non-fiction has played an important part in the development of film, being just about as old as the art itself. The term itself was coined some 90 years ago by young Scottish academic John Grierson during his review of Robert Flaherty’s 1926 ethnographic piece Moana, a film funded by Paramount Pictures that aimed to document the traditional lives of the Polynesians.

Pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov developed the genre further with his experimental work in the late 20s and beyond, though the documentary would be taken in a different direction entirely during the 1930s and 40s, used as a war-time tool rather than a means of education or entertainment. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a new generation of young filmmakers in the Us and Europe took steps to...

The major retrospective of the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam is dedicated to the Barcelona school of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s, with Catalonian master Pere Portabella’s body of work—and his new film—serving as a figurehead. Nearly completely unknown in the United States—where critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has been a beacon of support and revelation—insomuch as Portabella is known in the film community it is for his film Vampir-Cuadecuc, which hijacks the production of Christopher Lee and Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970) for its own ends and exhilaratingly exposes this documentarian’s acute analysis of and play with the subject of his films. (I will note here that Mubi has shown a great deal of Portabella’s work in the past, including this 1970 horror film.) This is hardly a lone accomplishment; in 1961 he helped produce Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Viridiana, and the director has been a strident voice in documentary,...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

Koyaanisqatsi kicks off “See It Big! Documentary” on Friday. Saturday brings the follow-up, Powaqqatsi, as well as Robert Flaherty‘s Louisiana Story. Close out Reggio’s trilogy with a Sunday screening of Naqoyatsi.

Labyrinth screens on Sunday, but is currently listed as being sold-out.

Spectacle

You’ve probably heard about The...

FrancofoniaIt seems slightly off-kilter to term a film by Alexander Sokurov, everyone’s favorite Slavophile modernist, a “mash-up.” Yet Francofonia, which opened the Museum of the Moving Image’s fifth annual First Look festival, brings to mind an idiosyncratic synthesis of motifs derived from Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomacy. With more than a passing resemblance to the ever-popular fiction/non-fiction hybrid film, Sokurov’s rambling meditation on the aesthetic imperatives of authoritarianism was an appropriate choice to open a festival that specializes in experimental hybridism. New work by such disparate filmmakers as Dominic Gagnon, Léa Rinaldi, and Louis Skorecki traverses generic boundaries—even though, for seasoned festival audiences, this sort of genre-bending is now more of a routine occurrence than a transgressive event. First Look’s desire to showcase subversive hybridity was evident in Quebecois filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s double bill—Pieces and Love...

By 1931, nearly the entirety of the film industry had not only gained the capabilities to make sound pictures, but appeared to leave silent cinema completely behind. Save for a few iconic artists like Charlie Chaplin, who stuck with silent cinema aesthetics for quite some time after the growth of sound in cinema, the medium had all but shifted into both sound storytelling, and the stationary camera that it would need.

And then there is Tabu. From not only one, but two of those iconic artists mentioned in the paragraph above, this brisk and powerful journey into the South Seas was created by the pair of F.W. Murnau and Nanook of the North director Robert J. Flaherty, and tells a story only these two legendary filmmakers could. Blending both Murnau’s beautiful, expressionistic filmmaking with the cultural focus that made the heart of Flaherty’s work beat, Tabu became a film...

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas

Written by (Told by): F.W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty

Directed by F.W. Murnau

USA, 1931

Compared to John Ford’s studio-bound—though still highly appealing—South Seas adventure The Hurricane, recently reviewed here, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, directed by the great German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, is a patently more realistic and wholly distinctive production. Aside from its genuine French Polynesian locations (Bora Bora and Tahiti), Murnau’s silent 1931 film features a cast consisting almost entirely of actual island inhabitants, rather than Hollywood stars, thus resulting in a generally less strained authenticity. Not necessarily a better film for this reason alone, Tabu, even with its fictional plot, is nevertheless a purer and more revealing historical and scenic document.

Directed by Murnau and “told by” he and renowned documentarian Robert J. Flaherty (of Nanook of the North [1922] fame), Tabu is divided into two chapters.

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

BAMcinématek

This is the final weekend for marathon screenings of Out 1. We highly recommend taking the plunge.

Museum of the Moving Image

“Lonely Places: Film Noir and the American Landscape” highlights a different atmosphere of the noir picture, and it makes its case with some great films. Out of the Past shows on Friday; Saturday...

Chis Marker's Chat écoutant la musiqueThere are dog people and there are cat people, this we know, and there are even people who claim to be of both—though latent sympathies remain unspoken, like with a parent and which child is their favorite. With the Vienna Film Festival welcoming me with a tumbling collection of dog and cat short films spanning cinema's history—the Austrian Film Museum, an essential destination each year collaborating with the Viennale, is hosting a “a brief zoology of cinema” throughout the festivities—it is clear that filmmakers, too, have their preference. Silent cinema decidedly prefers the more easily trained and exhibited canine, with 1907’s surreal favorite Les chiens savants as a certain kind of cruel pinnacle. For the cats, Chris Marker, already the presiding figure over so much in 20th century art, I think we can easily claim is the cine-laureate. One need not know...

Film Forum will premiere a new restoration of 1926's "Moana with Sound," filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty's follow-up to his widely praised "Nanook of the North." Made alongside his brilliant wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, the two journeyed with their children to the south seas in 1923 to capture the exotic lives of the unsung Samoan people. Originally filmed without any sound (as it was nearly impossible in the early 1920's), their daughter Monica Flaherty ventured back after nearly 50 years with vérité auteur Ricky Leacock to record location sound, dialogue and folk songs to accompany her parents' moving portraiture of vanished customs destroyed by industrial modernization. "Moana with Sound," a Kino Lorber release, will play for one week only at Film Forum from November 13th-19th. Bruce Posner, who restored the film, will introduce the opening night screening (Friday, November 13) at 6 Pm. For more info, click...

Kino Lorber is proud to announce the acquisition of all North American rights to Les Blank & Gina Leibrecht‘s How To Smell A Rose: A Visit With Ricky Leacock In Normandy, a moving tribute by one cinema verité master to another.

Opening at New York’s Film Forum on Wednesday, August 12, 2015, How To Smell Of Rose: A Visit With Ricky Leacock In Normandy was co-directed by Les Blank and his longtime creative partner, Gina Leibrecht. How To Smell A Rose: A Visit With Ricky Leacock is the penultimate film directed by Les Blank, before he passed away on April 7, 2013.

During its theatrical run at Film Forum, How To Smell A Rose will be screened with the Leacock-Joyce Chopra classic, Happy Mother’S Day, on the 1963 birth of the Fischer quintuplets in Aberdeen, South Dakota. In further national theatrical engagements “Rose” will be presented with Les Blank’s now classic...

As AFI Docs opens in Washington, DC, the Post's Ann Hornaday sketches a brief history of the American documentary, from the cinéma vérité of the 60s (Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles) through the personal essays of the 80s (Ross McElwee and Michael Moore) to the day "Errol Morris revolutionized the industry by introducing reenactments and stylized cinematic flourishes in the true-crime thriller The Thin Blue Line. (Actually, he reintroduced reenactment, if you consider the work of Robert Flaherty in 1922’s Nanook of the North.)" We're gathering previews of this year's 13th edition. » - David Hudson...

As AFI Docs opens in Washington, DC, the Post's Ann Hornaday sketches a brief history of the American documentary, from the cinéma vérité of the 60s (Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles) through the personal essays of the 80s (Ross McElwee and Michael Moore) to the day "Errol Morris revolutionized the industry by introducing reenactments and stylized cinematic flourishes in the true-crime thriller The Thin Blue Line. (Actually, he reintroduced reenactment, if you consider the work of Robert Flaherty in 1922’s Nanook of the North.)" We're gathering previews of this year's 13th edition. » - David Hudson...

Orson Welles indisputably made a huge impact on the film industry, both in terms of technical proficiency and storytelling sophistication. However, Welles was never the biggest fan of films themselves. He just saw it as a way to tell stories he wanted to. That makes sense to me of how he approached filmmaking. Had he been a movie fan, I don't know if he would have thought so much outside of the box about to make them than he did. That isn't to say he didn't like all movies. In the early 1950s, Welles managed to cobble together a list of his ten favorite films for Sound on Sight (via Open Culture). As he had only been exposed to a couple of decades of cinema, I think this is a very interesting list, and one that makes a lot of sense for someone like Welles. City Lights (dir. Charles Chaplin) Greed (dir.