“Mierle Does Not Fit Neatly Into Any Box”: Toby Perl Freilich Discusses Her Tribeca-Premiering ‘Maintenance Artist’ Starring Mierle Laderman Ukeles

It’s fitting that Mierle Laderman Ukeles is not a household name. The pioneering activist-artist has devoted her entire life and career to showcasing the behind-the-scenes labor—and laborers—crucial to any art project. By her way of thinking, manual labor in all its forms should be celebrated as an artistic endeavor. Toward the end of Toby Perl Freilich’s Maintenance Artist, its title a reference to Ukeles’s own as the one, and only, artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, Ukeles says: “art can manifest the agency of individual citizens.” Rich with archival imagery, Freilich’s Tribeca-debuting doc is comprised of interviews with the now octogenarian (and not-so-retired) Ukeles, alongside various academics and fans (including David Byrne). It’s a fascinating look at an undeterred feminist and advocate for the working class who constantly defied such easy labels. A conceptualist inspired by Marcel Duchamp, Ukeles is also a happily married Orthodox Jewish mother who declared in her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art that the cleaning and caregiving that went into housekeeping and childrearing was itself a museum-worthy performance. As is the maintaining of communities as a whole, which led her to form what would become a decades-long artistic alliance with NYC’s often ignored and even derided sanitation workers in the 1970s. (Which in turn led to a backlash among certain feminist artists who wanted to keep that label male-free.) Just prior to the film’s documentary competition debut, Documentary caught up with Freilich (2010’s Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment and 2018’s Moynihan, co-directed with Joseph Dorman) to learn how she ended up collaborating with this unconventional and unusually empathetic character, who urges us all to “cherish the work of taking care.” For ultimately, “We are all maintenance workers.”

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“So Many Sequins!”: Penny Lane on Her Tribeca-Debuting Docuseries Mrs. America

Kudos to Anonymous Content and Fremantle for putting together a project focused on the most wholesome of beauty pageants and thinking, “We need the director of Hail, Satan? for this!” Indeed, while the idea might seem absurd on its surface, it’s no more so than the notion of married women from 18 to 80 (and up) going toe to toe (or heel to heel) in evening gowns and swimsuits, sacrificing precious time and exorbitant amounts of money for the chance to wear the Mrs. America crown. And veteran filmmaker Penny Lane, whose 2023 doc Confessions of a Good Samaritan followed her own quest to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger, if nothing else has a knack for always deploying patience and compassion in the face of the seemingly absurd. A few days before the June 8th world premiere of market title Mrs. America (parts one and two of a four-episode series, screening as a work in progress) Filmmaker caught up with the busy director who’s currently in production on her HBO doc Flaco, starring the titular Eurasian eagle-owl that broke free from the Central Park Zoo.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Artists are complicated”: S/He is Still Her/e – The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary review

Even if you’re not familiar with the experimental art/music groups Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV, the synopsis for David Charles Rodrigues’s S/He is Still Her/e – The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary makes a one of a kind case for viewing: “Featuring William Burroughs, Brion Gyson, Timothy Leary, Alice Genese (Psychic TV), David J (Bauhaus/Love and Rockets), Nepalese monks, African witch doctors, and a special cameo by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.”

To read all about it visit Global Comment.

“Artistically Reflecting on Women’s Rights Within Religion is an Act of Resistance Itself”: Arash T. Riahi and Verena Soltiz on Their CPH:DOX-Premiering Girls & Gods

Arash T. Riahi and Verena Soltiz’s Girls & Gods is a stylishly crafted philosophical investigation that addresses an intriguing question both timely and timeless: Can feminism and religion coexist? The brainchild of Inna Shevchenko of the Ukrainian collective FEMEN, also credited as writer, the doc takes us on a whirlwind tour throughout Europe (and NYC) with Shevchenko serving as our inquisitive guide, allowing us to listen in as she deeply converses, debates, and gathers wisdom from other women. And not just atheist activists like herself, fighting religion as a vestige of patriarchal oppression, but true believers: theologians, priests, imams and rabbis, all of whom are also activists, either defending religion as a feminist act or reforming it to better align with its original intent. In other words, Girls & Gods is an arthouse “debate film” in which the questioning, not any hard answers, is the point, as it should be with art and religion both. To learn all about the globetrotting, eye-catching (and ear-catching, with Pussy Riot and Baby Volcano featured on the soundtrack) doc, Filmmaker reached out to the Austrian co-directors a few days before the film’s March 23rd premiere.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

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“… The Visual Approach of the Documentary is Deeply Influenced by Amish and Mennonite Norms”: Elaine Epstein on her SXSW-Premiering Arrest the Midwife

As its nonsensical title might imply, Elaine Epstein’s Arrest the Midwife centers on the plight of three certified professional midwives who, after the death of a newborn (ironically, at a hospital one of the midwives rushed her client to the minute she noticed complications), find themselves in the crosshairs of their local authorities in upstate New York, one of only 11 states where midwifery is either illegal or highly restricted. (NYC midwives might consider moving to progressive Alabama.) And while the tale is quite harrowing, it’s also unexpectedly empowering. For what the (male) police and prosecutors didn’t quite bargain for was a “radical uprising” from the rural community the trio of conservative birthing providers serve – Amish and Mennonite women willing to fight for their right not to engage with the medical industrial complex of the outside world. (Onward, Christian soldiers!) To learn all about the film – including how a Brooklyn-based, gay, Jewish, South African documentarian even got access to this cloistered community – Filmmaker caught up with the award-winning director (State of Denial, Nothing Without Us: The Women Who Will End Aids) the day before the doc’s March 9th SXSW debut.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Women Like Gail are Often Vilified in the Media as Cold-Blooded Killers and Even Monsters”: Jessica Earnshaw on her SXSW-Debuting Baby Doe

Baby Doe is the latest from Jessica Earnshaw, whose Jacinta won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at Tribeca 2020. While that film followed a mother-daughter relationship bound up in drugs, incarceration and generational trauma, Baby Doe stars a happily married mother and grandmother who likely never even smoked a cigarette or garnered a speeding ticket. Indeed, Gail Ritchey was an unassuming conservative Christian living in rural Ohio until the magic of DNA matched the fifty-something to “Geauga’s Child,” a newborn left abandoned in the woods three decades ago. Which soon led to an arrest for murder (though Ritchey claims the baby was stillborn), a close-knit family’s unimaginable anguish, and one overriding question: How can a young woman be so traumatized by an unwanted pregnancy that she refuses to believe she’s even carrying? Until nine months later denial clashes with inescapable reality. The day of the film’s SXSW premiere (March 7th) Filmmaker caught up with Earnshaw to learn all about what psychologists term “pregnancy denial,” and embedding with a traumatized family still living its consequences.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.