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A whopping 166 documentary features have been submitted to the academy for consideration at the 2019 Oscars. That is down by four from last year’s record 170 submissions. Among these contenders are all of the highest grossing documentaries of the year including “Free Solo,” “Rbg” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

To winnow the entries down to the 15 semi-finalists that will be announced on December 17, the academy is sending monthly packages of the newly eligible documentary feature screeners to all 400 or so members of the documentary branch. While all members are encouraged to watch as many of these as they can, one-fifth of the voters are assigned each title. In late November, each branch member will submit a preferential ballot listing their top 15 choices.

See 2019 Oscars: Foreign-language film entries from A (Afghanistan) to Y (Yemen)

All of these ballots will be collated to determine the 15 semi-finalists. Branch members will then be...

In the age of wokeness and empathic inclusivity, Rachel Dolezal might be one of the most tone deaf people in America. In 2015, she became infamous when it was revealed that Dolezal—the then-President of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington—was not African American and had lied about being Black. Dolezal had appropriated Blackness, and lied about hate crimes perpetrated against her. Afterward, she doubled down on the idea that she was Black and misguidedly leaned into the idea that she was “transracial.” So when it was announced the controversial figure would be the subject a new Netflix documentary— “The Rachel Divide,” directed by Laura Brownson— the idea was met with outrage fierce backlash.

Rachel Dolezal doesn’t get it. In Laura Brownson’s intimate documentary, “The Rachel Divide,” the controversial figure gets another platform to tell her life story as a “transracial” civil rights activist unable to come to terms with the impact of her lies. While the film inspires the kind of empathy that’s so often missing in works that chronicle people ravaged by social media mobs and a vicious news cycle, “The Rachel Divide” lets Dolezal continue to dictate the experience through her own perspective, and even hard-hitting words from a handful of sharp critics are drowned out by Dolezal’s unflagging resistance to facing up to her misdeeds.

At one point in the film, a talking head muses about the various open questions still remaining about Dolezal, coming to the conclusion that two disparate facts about her can both be true at the same time, which eventually emerges as...

It's perhaps not surprising that a documentary about controversial figure Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP head revealed in 2015 to be a white woman pretending to be a black woman, would generate a lively debate full of provocative questions.

And that's exactly what happened when the Netflix film about Dolezal, titled The Rachel Divide, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. Laura Brownson directed and co-wrote the doc about Dolezal (now named Nkechi Amare Diallo). 

The film explores Dolezal's past and shows what happened after she made headlines and how she's rebuilt her life. In doing so,...

Documentary filmmaker Laura Brownson has chosen to make a film about Rachel Dolezal, the former president of an NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, who was outed as white and formerly blonde-haired by a news reporter in 2015. The vague title that Brownson has chosen is “The Rachel Divide,” which would suggest that there might be something to debate in Dolezal’s story. This most certainly is not the case.

Dolezal wears her hair in elaborate dreadlocks most of the time in this film (which premieres April 27 on Netflix) and sometimes sports a curly wig. Her hairdos are so over-the-top that they look like they were meant to attract attention, and attention is clearly something that Dolezal craves, whatever she might say to the contrary. She refuses to give up her hairdos, which have become her trademark. What we are dealing with here seems to be a pathology where Dolezal is seeking negative attention and abuse. If she doesn’t get that negative attention or abuse, Dolezal is not above fabricating it.

“Who’s the gatekeeper for blackness?” Dolezal asks at one point, in her thin, nagging, disembodied voice. We see her raising her two teenaged male sons, who have to deal with the trouble she brings wherever they go. And when the expected sob story of her past finally emerges, it proves to be just as thin as her speaking voice.

Watch Video: Rachel Dolezal Ripped by Son in Trailer for New Netflix Doc: 'I Resent Some of Her Choices'

Dolezal was raised by white parents who were very religious and who favored her older brother. Dolezal’s parents adopted four other children, all of whom were African-American, and they lived in a very white area of Montana. Dolezal’s adopted sister Esther is the only family member we see much of in the film. (Her parents are only seen via interviews from television news sources.) Esther shows us scars from beatings she claims to have gotten from her adoptive parents, and she says that she was sexually abused by Dolezal’s older brother. Esther brought a court case against this brother that Dolezal herself was participating in, but this fell apart after Dolezal was exposed in 2015.

If Brownson was so set upon making a film about Dolezal, surely she should have pressed more into this family history and pressed Dolezal herself about it. We do see Dolezal attacked and pressed throughout this movie, but by journalists, college students, and former colleagues at the NAACP, and their verbal attacks are increasingly scathing and un-answerable.

Also Read: Rachel Dolezal Slammed for 'Coolest Prince on the Planet' Sweatshirt After H&M Gaffe

Dolezal desperately tries to align herself with absurd terms like “trans racial” in order to try to find some way of making her way of life acceptable, but she always comes up short, and it is impossible to have any sympathy for her because she is so transparently a manipulator and a guilt-tripper. Dolezal gives herself away particularly here in the moment when she says that the negative response she got in the wake of her public outing made her think of her abusive parents.

It seems clear that Dolezal is seeking condemnation, and that she likely wanted to be exposed because only that would give her the twisted form of attention she is seeking. But all of this is a subject only for a psychologist, and it’s not even a particularly interesting subject. Dolezal’s story has nothing to do with race or racial perceptions beyond the racial performance element in her self-presentation that calls up all kinds of ugly memories of white entertainers performing in blackface.

The mark of a successful documentary, and a worthy subject for a documentary, is how much it can make us think about and consider various issues and various complications. There is nothing complicated about Rachel Dolezal’s story. It turns out to be small and far too specific to have any bearing on anything beyond the sickness of one highly unpleasant and repellent individual.

Watch Video: Rachel Dolezal Blames 'White Media' for Her Troubles

So why did Brownson choose to extend Dolezal’s 15 minutes of fame with this movie rather than celebrate or tell the story of an actual living African-American woman? The answer is that Dolezal is basically outrage clickbait in human form, and so Brownson is using Dolezal’s negative attention seeking to get attention for herself as a filmmaker. Nothing beyond that has been accomplished here.

Brownson winds things up with a montage of photos from Dolezal’s youth where we can see that as a teenager she dressed up several times in Asian garb, and so she seems to have had an Asian period as well. Whatever other racial identities Dolezal decides to try out in the future will hopefully be performed in obscurity.



Read original story ‘The Rachel Divide’ Film Review: Rachel Dolezal Doc Is Non-Illuminating Clickbait At TheWrap...

After working for years as president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the NAACP, Rachel Dolezal made national headlines in 2015 when it was revealed that she was a white woman — a designation she staunchly rejected, saying she identified as black. Laura Brownson’s intimate and canny “The Rachel Divide” picks up with Dolezal shortly after that tumultuous moment and charts her uneasy process of self-definition in the searing media spotlight. The portrait it paints is sure to confound and infuriate in equal measure. Far from simply a snapshot of a discussion about race, Brownson’s documentary is a riveting account of self-sabotage, misplaced priorities, and obstinacy run amok. Following its premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, it should be a big draw on Netflix.

The film’s title refers far more to Dolezal’s internal struggle than to the debate surrounding her, since virtually everyone featured in Brownson’s doc,...

A controversial figure is the subject of a thought-provoking yet problematic film that prioritizes a white woman’s feelings over the damage she has caused

Rarely has a film been so uneagerly anticipated. When word got out that Netflix was releasing a documentary about Rachel Dolezal, the controversial white woman who identifies as black, many people were furious. Understandably so. Getting a movie made about your life because you appropriated blackness and then lied about it seems like peak white privilege. What, large swaths of social media wanted to know, was Netflix thinking?

A cynic might say they were thinking that controversy equals free publicity. Netflix’s own defence of The Rachel Divide was far more high-minded, of course. Last month Netflix responded to the backlash about the documentary on Twitter, stressing that the film isn’t just about Dolezal but explores her “life as a microcosm for a larger...

Frank Wuterich, Sandra Bland and Rachel Dolezal captured the attention of the country for weeks, sometimes months, only to eventually be eclipsed by fresher faces in the news.

But documentary filmmakers couldn’t forget their stories – or those of other news makers. So they decided to investigate further, peeling back the proverbial onion on stories that had once been under a short-term microscope. The result is seven documentaries at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival that explore the truths, the lies and the aftermath of stories we thought that we knew.

Michael Epstein got the idea to make “House Two” 12 years ago when he read about the 2005 Haditha, Iraq, massacre, where U.S. Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children — some of them at close range inside a small bedroom.

“I began working on this film when the massacre was a part of media diet,” Epstein says. “I thought I...

Documentaries are hotter than ever, but their production and distribution is in constant flux. In 2017, major companies were shelling out huge dollars to acquire documentaries, dramatically shifting the scales for the budgets and value of nonfiction. Then everything changed at Sundance 2018, when contrary to expectations, Netflix and Amazon deescalated the marketplace they had super-sized a year before.

At the Park City festival, Netflix acquired a single doc, “Shirkers”; Amazon hasn’t acquired a completed documentary since Matthew Heineman’s “City of Ghosts” from 2017. “It’s like night and day,” said one documentary producer. While Amazon’s strategy remains unclear, Netflix has refocused its resources on producing documentaries in-house.

Both companies declined to comment for this article. But it’s clear that their recent absence from the market has had impact — deals have taken longer to close and the price-tags have been reduced.

“We’re having to educate producers and financiers...

Now in its seventeenth year, New York City’s own Tribeca Film Festival kicks off every spring with a wide variety of programming, from an ever-expanding Vr installation to an enviable television lineup, but the bulk of the annual festival’s programming is movies. This year’s festival offers up plenty of familiar faces with new projects alongside newcomers. While Tribeca’s documentaries tend to be its high point, there are plenty of narratives features worth checking out this year as well. We’ve culled this list from a program that consists of 96 titles.

This year’s Tribeca Film Festival takes place April 18 – 29. Check out some of our must-see picks below.

“Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda”

One of the most influential, prolific, and flat-out enjoyable composers of the last 30 years, Ryuichi Sakamoto exploded onto the scene by writing unforgettable scores for films like “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and “The Last Emperor,...