Current events overtook documentary filmmaker Mark Landsman even as he was working hard on his film about the National Enquirer and its controversial parent company, AMI. “We had already gotten our seed money together and were out filming when the Ronan Farrow stories broke in the New Yorker” about President Trump’s alleged connections to Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s attempts to “kill” ... more >
INTERVIEWS
Mark Landsman: “We have a tabloid president. That’s a very disturbing thing”
"Scandalous: the untold story of the National Inquirer"
Distributed by Magnolia Pictures
Directed by Mark Landsman
Former Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, at the center for “The Report,” tells us about the torture report the CIA didn’t want you to see (INTERVIEW)
"I [...] get emotional about it because it just is so upsetting that we tortured people"
Adam Driver and Annette Bening
Directed by Scott Z. Burns
Daniel J. Jones worked tirelessly in a nondescript Washington, D.C., room for the better part of a decade, trying to connect the dots between the CIA’s detention and torture of terrorist suspects at black sites and the Bush White House. The Senate staffer, whose work was passionately backed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), not only had to contend with members of the Senate who would rather ... more >
INTERVIEW: Mati Diop, director of “Atlantics”
Distributed by Netflix and Ad Vitam
Mame Bineta Sane, Ibrahima Mbaye Sope and Traore
The Arab Spring events of 2011 got filmmaker Mati Diop thinking: What if that search for a better life were told from the viewpoint of a teenage girl in Senegal who stayed behind as her sweetheart crossed the seas in search of new opportunity? “We could say the film is following the ‘spring’ of a young woman in terms of the season from… dark to light, and it’s like an openness blooming,” said ... more >
TALKING WITH Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble, co-filmmakers of “The Elephant Queen”
Film will play in select theaters on October 18th and begin streaming on November 1st
When making a documentary out in nature, sometimes the story will find the filmmakers along the way. Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble spent four years solidly with a small team on the African savanna following an elephant pack led by a female named Athena for their new documentary, “The Elephant Queen,” but they always wanted to do it their own way, and not have financiers dictating the direction of ... more >
IN CONVERSATION with THE LAUNDROMAT’S Scott Z. Burns and Jake Bernstein
The Panama Papers investigation revisited for the screen
The scandal surrounding the revelations contained in the Panama Papers is labyrinthine. So complex, in fact, that Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Jake Bernstein spent years unearthing the intricacies of the enmeshment of the financial system and Russian interests for his book, “Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite,” ... more >
TALKING with Lisa Cholodenko and Susannah Grant of “Unbelievable,” which premieres tomorrow on Netflix
Making sense of the trauma of rape in a post-truth world
Marie Adler’s story about an intruder raping her in the middle of the night seemed incredible. So impossible, in fact, that she later retracted her story, earning her the enmity of police, her friends and the entire community. The thing was, Marie wasn’t lying. The teen had, in fact, been violated in her own home by a man who bound her and took photos of her body amidst hours of torture. But so ... more >
INTERVIEW with “American Factory” (premieres on Netflix today) filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar
Will America become more like China or the other way around?
Distributed by Netflix
Filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar have watched as the industrial Midwest has cratered around them. High-paying factory jobs once stretched from western Pennsylvania to Michigan, providing a comfortable working-class living enabling workers to buy a home, two cars and send their children off to college. All of that changed as plants closed and jobs outsourced to Mexico and China. Those ... more >