Best of 2023: CPH:INTER:ACTIVE: Breaking the Code

For me, one of the hands down highlights of 2023 was the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival’s Inter:Active exhibition, which featured the ballsy theme “Breaking the Code.” Expertly assembled by risk-taking Immersive Curator Mark Atkin, it starred “artists using the 1s and 0s of computer code to explore the messiness of nature and humanity beyond binary definitions...The creators are for the most part neurodiverse, non-binary, queer, marginalised and activists, subverting established visual languages in order to address our existence between the physical and digital realms from an non-heteronormative standpoint.” And that mission statement was certainly accomplished in droves.

To read all about it visit Global Comment.

A Hard Place: Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed

For those looking for some head-spinning holiday viewing, Stephen Kijak’s Tribeca-premiering, HBO-streaming Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is a biopic chockfull of hall of mirrors contradictions: first and foremost it centers on a world-famous, well-adjusted, publicly closeted gay man who proudly (miraculously) lived his truth by hiding in plain sight. Indeed, for over three decades the titular Hollywood heartthrob succeeded in simultaneously abiding by the (straights and closeted folks-only) facade of the studio system that micromanaged his career and media persona – the omertà code unbroken until minutes after Hudson died of AIDS-related complications in 1985 – while unabashedly embracing all the perks naturally afforded an Adonis-hot friend of Dorothy. (You go girl!)

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

The Sisterhood: Kaouther Ben Hania’s Cannes-winning “Four Daughters”

Co-winner of the Cannes ’23 Golden Eye, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters is a “fictional documentary” as compelling as it is troubling. The film stars a pious Tunisian mother named Olfa and her two (secular-leaning) youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir. And also their two elder (religiously zealous) siblings Ghofrane and Rahma; though they are played by a pair of professional actors, Ichraq Matar and Nour Karoui, since the sisters are unable to speak for themselves onscreen, having “disappeared” as teenagers nearly a decade ago. As the film attempts to piece together the events – sometimes traumatic, which is when acclaimed actor Hend Sabri (Noura’s Dream) steps in to serve as Olfa’s double – leading up to the heartbreaking loss, painful secrets emerge. Along with the often-at-odds stories they tell us, the public at large, and of course themselves.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.

“We Cannot Underestimate the Collective Power of Those Who Have No Access to Power”: Tana Gilbert Discusses Malqueridas

A heartfelt departure from the prison life documentaries that have become so ubiquitous in recent years, Tana Gilbert’s Malqueridas takes a novel approach to this thorny topic through a most unusual lens. Comprised solely of clandestinely shot cellphone footage — in its original vertical format — from inside a Santiago women’s prison by incarcerated mothers, the film is narrated by “Karina,” a mom who spent six years behind bars. In the film, she voices the experience of and for the collective whole, specifically the 20 or so women who participated in “extensive conversations” during the film’s research phase. This makes Malqueridas not just a fascinating glimpse into a little-seen world, but also a rare testament to directorial empathy — with the Chilean filmmaker staying as far from the frame and hands off the story, which does not belong to her, as she possibly can. Shortly after Malqueridas premiered at Venice, Documentary reached out to the debut feature filmmaker, whose shorts have screened internationally, including at Hot Docs and Chicago IFF, to learn all about bringing this “illegal” film (phones are banned in Chile’s prisons) to the big screen. Malqueridas is playing next at IDFA.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“A Journey That Allowed Us to Harness the Power of Storytelling”: Kaouther Ben Hania on her Cannes-winning Four Daughters

Co-winner of the Cannes 2023 Golden Eye, Kaouther Ben Hania’s (Zaineb Hates the Snow, Beauty and the Dogs) Four Daughters is both compellingly crafted and deeply disturbing. The “fictional documentary” looks back on an infamous, winding and tumultuous Tunisian saga involving five women: the titular quartet of older siblings Ghofrane and Rahma and youngest Eya and Tayssir, along with their mother Olfa Hamrouni. The younger daughters appear as themselves, and the film features two actors taking on the roles of the oldest, a necessity since Ghofrane and Rahma can’t “play” themselves, having “disappeared” back in 2015 at the tender ages of 16 and 15, respectively. Then there is veteran Tunisian-Egyptian actor Hend Sabri (Noura’s Dream), who plays Olfa when events get too traumatic to recount, a circumstance that happens often when such strong-willed real-life protagonists — especially the domineering Olfa — are as messy and complicated as the stories they tell to us, as well as themselves. Soon after the film’s TIFF premiere (and just prior to its debut at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, where I saw it as part of my Critics Jury duty), Filmmaker reached out to the Tunisian writer-director to learn all about this most unexpected followup to her Oscar-nominated, Monica Bellucci-starring The Man Who Sold His Skin. Four Daughters is released today by Kino Lorber.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Geographies of Survival”: Kumjana Novakova Discusses Her Sarajevo Film Festival Human Rights Award-Winning Silence of Reason

Described as “performative research into the court archive of the Kunarac et al. case known as the ‘Foca Rape Camp Trial’” before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Kumjana Novakova’s Silence of Reason took this critic’s prize for the most powerful nonfiction film at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival (August 11–18). Silence of Reason, which runs a swift 63 minutes, follows Novakova’s prior feature, the Oscar-shortlisted Disturbed Earth (2021), co-directed with Guillermo Carreras-Candi. Along with eerie images of rural stillness and an ambient sound design, in which nature is heard loud and clear, the breathtakingly cinematic, archive-based essay pairs a poetic voiceover with the scrolling testimonies of anonymized women, whose voices are necessarily distorted. These are the survivors of rape and sexual enslavement during the war that shattered the Balkans — and birthed the Sarajevo Film Festival — and for whom these pastoral locations can only evoke memories of unbearable unseen pain. Just prior to the closing night ceremony, where Silence of Reason walked away with the Human Rights Award, Documentary reached out to the Macedonia-born Novakova, a busy multihyphenate who is also an international teacher and curator, and even a co-founder of her own Sarajevo-based fest. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

No justice, no peace: A Day, 365 Hours and The Silence of Reason

TRAUMA / Two Sarajevo Film Festival-premiered films take a justice-seeking women's journey, revealing the resilience of rape survivors. Eylem Kaftan’s A Day, 365 Hours follows Reyhan, Asya and Leyla, a trio of young (pseudonymous) women in Turkey attempting to come to terms with – and to seek justice for – the horrific abuse they suffered growing up, a victimisation made all the more monstrous by the fact that each knew her perpetrator not only intimately but genetically. As Reyhan so eloquently puts it in the third «chapter» of the film (titled «Can You Change Your DNA?»), «You want to tear yourself apart and recreate yourself.» Not an overblown sentiment coming from a brave survivor who’d experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her own father – and thus will never escape the traits of her perpetrator no matter how far she flees. Even a glance in the mirror might read as a threat to this band of sisters.

To read the rest of my paired-film essay visit Modern Times Review.

Subverting the Algorithms

"Returning from CPH:DOX’s INTER:ACTIVE program, Lauren Wissot speaks with four innovators working at the frontiers of gaming and immersive work. This year’s 20th anniversary edition of CPH:DOX (March 15–26) was packed with celebratory gems, especially when it came to the radically assembled INTER:ACTIVE exhibition, curated by Mark Atkin. Here are talks with four of the exhibition’s artists, all workng in XR and games, about the boundary-pushing work they presented."

To read my article subscribe to Filmmaker magazine.

“A Call to Action for Everybody To Preserve Their History Before It’s Gone”: Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker on The Stroll

Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s Sundance-premiering The Stroll is a beautifully and lovingly crafted time capsule of NYC’s Meatpacking District that mostly spans from Giuliani’s infamous “broken windows” reign of terror through Bloomberg’s post-9/11 “gentrification on steroids,” as one knowledgeable interviewee ruefully reflects (seconds after I coincidentally yelled those same words at my screener). Unsurprisingly, our billionaire mayor did indeed view unrestrained capitalism as the solution to every problem, including that of the “undesirable” communities — starving artists and sex workers — that called the neighborhood home. For me, the most revelatory aspect of this heartfelt walk down memory lane isn’t that it’s offered from the POV of the mostly Black trans sex workers (including director Lovell) who made their money working the area nicknamed “The Stroll,” but that the filmmakers were able to track down so many that both survived and thrived (at least a dozen, with some whose time went all the way back to the early ’80s, remarkably enough). Clear-eyed and unapologetic, this band of sisters somehow managed to avoid the fate of famous activist contemporaries like Marsha P. Johnson (whose body was found floating in the Hudson River in ‘92) and Sylvia Rivera (who died of complications from liver cancer in 2002 at age 51). Just prior to the film’s June 21 release on HBO, Filmmaker reached out to the co-directors to learn all about the process of using cinema to set the record on queer sex work history straight.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“I Realized That a Sauna Is Not Just for Cleaning the Body, but Also the Soul”: Anna Hints on Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Debuting January 22 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is an intimate look at a tradition that UNESCO has added to its “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” This might appear to be a heavy designation for a way to sweat out stress. Unless, of course, one happens to be South Estonian like director Anna Hints, who grew up with the knowledge that for centuries smoke saunas have also been a place of life (birth) and death. For the small group of women that have generously allowed Hints to serve as a cinematic fly-on-the-wall witness to a sacred space of power, smoke saunas also offer freedom and healing where one can bond through joyous laughter and traumatic confessions — with both one another and themselves. To learn more about this unusual project, Filmmaker reached out to Hints, the film’s equally unique director — also “scriptwriter and composer with a background in contemporary art, photography and experimental folk music” — whose bio additionally notes that they are an “active dumpster diver” that currently calls India their second home.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.