“A Deep Dive Into My Trauma”: Shiori Ito on Black Box Diaries

Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries is a film the Japanese journalist should never have had to make. Based on her international bestseller, the Sundance-premiering doc is a dogged investigation into a rape perpetrated by another Japanese journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a longtime friend of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose biography the offender penned as well. It’s also a somewhat surreal journey, given that the brave survivor in the purposely stalled case is Ito herself. Through an engaging mix of secret recordings, vérité shooting and confessional video, we’re invited along on an increasingly maddening odyssey through the shockingly antiquated Japanese judicial system; exposing a hidden world where, prior to production, rape laws hadn’t been changed for 110 years. As a result the minimum sentence for rape was shorter than for theft, and was provable not by a lack of consent but only by physical violence or threats. Add to this the chances of a female officer taking on your case being next to nil (since women make up less than 8% of the force), and the fact that you’ll likely have to re-traumatize yourself by reenacting the incident with a life-sized doll for the assigned policeman, and it’s easy to see why only four percent of violated women even bother to report the crime. That is, until an undaunted reporter suddenly decided to seek justice for herself and others by documenting everything, and calling BS on it all. Just prior to the October 25th theatrical release of Black Box Diaries, Filmmaker reached out to the gender-based human rights-focused writer and filmmaker, who in 2020 also made Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

'A Sisters’ Tale’ Review: An Iranian Woman Pursues the Musical Dreams Her Country Is Determined to Stifle in an Affecting Doc

Leila Amini’s “A Sisters’ Tale” centers on the filmmaker’s sister Nasreen, a Tehran housewife with a traditional husband, two young kids, and one big unrealized dream to sing. It’s an unfulfilled desire she shares with many a fellow “sister” in Iran, all of whom have been banned from expressing themselves through public singing since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. And it’s a story Amini followed closely with her camera as a not neutral observer for seven years, forever rooting for Nasreen to pursue her passion while simultaneously fearing the consequences if she in fact succeeds.

To read the rest of my Toronto Film Festival review visit IndieWire.

The Feedback: Emily Packer’s Many Forms of Hybridity in ‘Holding Back the Tide’

In Holding Back the Tide, Emily Packer’s “docu-poetic meditation on New York’s oysters,” the humble bivalve becomes much more than the sum of its pearls. Indeed, the experimental filmmaker has inventively chosen to reimagine the once ubiquitous mollusk as a queer icon, and cast the gender-fluid creature alongside a host of other thought-provoking characters, both real and fictional. We’re introduced to folks like Moody “The Mothershucker” Harney (real), who’s bringing oysters back to the average diner through his cart, taking inspiration from Thomas Downing, the 19th-century Black Oyster King of New York. And Pippa Brashear of SCAPE Landscape Architecture, which is harnessing the oyster to protect Staten Island’s Tottenville neighborhood through its Living Breakwaters project. Even former WNBA star Sue Wicks has gotten in on the mollusk action, having retired to her Violet Cove Oyster Co. farm (where she knows each of her bivalves by name). Between scenes with these colorful individuals in their natural environment are staged encounters with Packer’s gender-unbounded collaborators, who pass along the cinematic baton through striking visuals and lyrical words. A woman emerges from a shell on a beach. Diners feasting on oysters discover a new identity. Social constructs like race and binary categorizations fall by the wayside, ultimately swept out to sea by the power of “we.” Or as the director themself optimistically puts it, “We took inspiration from the oyster, which thrives when connected and fails when isolated.” Before its theatrical debut, Documentary recently caught up with Packer to learn all about Holding Back the Tide, from its Hurricane Sandy origins to the intersectional queer production process.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

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“My Hope Is That the Film Itself Is An Impact Campaign”: Alex Hedison on Her Sundance Short Alok

“What lives outside of the frames of this camera and your own eyes?” is the question the poet/comedian/actor/public speaker Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the viewer to ponder at the very start of Alex Hedison’s Sundance-premiering short Alok. Currently on the Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour, and premiering at IFC Center on June 14th (with both the nonbinary star and Hedison, who also happens to be married to her EP Jodie Foster, in attendance), the doc is based on footage Hedison shot during the performer’s recent international tour and is supplemented with highly stylized interviews with the spiritually enlightened artist and their equally deep-thinking friends (including Dylan Mulvaney, who poignantly self reflects that “replacing fear with fascination” is what has made her life worth living). Indeed, for Alok, eliminating the binary between “us” and “them” is more important than the blurring of he and she. (Alok likewise stresses that the most controversial pronoun they have is “we,” which requires acknowledging our interconnectedness.) Transphobia is just another form of pain, they firmly believe. And by the end, as in the beginning, we’re faced with another potentially revolutionary question: “What would it look like if our weapon was love?” To learn more about Alok and Alok, Filmmaker reached out to Hedison, likewise an internationally-acclaimed artist and actor (and fine art photographer whose work has graced galleries throughout Europe); along with producers Natalie Shirinian and her wife Elizabeth Baudouin (also credited as music supervisor), who together founded indie production company Not All Films.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“A Shapeshifter in Constant Motion”: Sandi DuBowski Spent 21 Years Filming ‘Sabbath Queen’

It’s been 23 years since Sandi DuBowski’s groundbreaking Trembling Before G-d, which uncloaked the lives of Hasidic and Orthodox gays and lesbians, made its Sundance debut. Since that time DuBowski has built a career at the intersection of religion and queerness, social activism and filmmaking, always avoiding the binary choice in favor of the “and.” This insistence is a bond shared by the director-producer and the riveting Israeli-American star of his latest feature Sabbath Queen—a doc over 21 years in the making focused squarely on Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, a descendant of 38 generations of Orthodox rabbis. This member of rabbi royalty is also the creator of drag persona Rebbetzin Hadassah, the founder of Jewish congregation Lab/Shul, and a queer dad to three young kids. And also a Jewish Theological Seminary-trained Conservative rabbi with a loving family entangled in a heartbreaking war back home. In other words, it’s complicated. Which is why Documentary decided to reach out to the veteran activist-filmmaker to learn all about his Tribeca-premiering Sabbath Queen, the film’s unconventional lead, and embracing the messy nonbinary nature of humankind itself.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“Production Was a Kind of Durational Epic”: Nesa Azimi Reflects on ‘Driver’

“No one enters trucking from charm school,” notes Desiree Wood, star of Nesa Azimi’s long-haul road trip film Driver, which follows the founder of REAL Women in Trucking as she works her minimum wage on (18) wheels job from coast to coast. Indeed, Wood, a forty-something who retired from stripping and now finds herself in a financially precarious gig (that puts her at far greater risk of sexual assault to boot), serves as our no-nonsense guide to a sightseeing-cinematic world hidden in plain sight. As another seasoned trucker attests, it’s a beautiful country and she gets paid to see it—though another veteran later caveats, “Seeing the United States is awesome—but it’s not a vacation.” Which makes sense if, like Desiree, you can’t afford to ever leave your home on the road. The day before the Tribeca premiere of Driver, Documentary caught up with Azimi, a TV producer who abandoned her own secure job to pursue her first independent feature from the cab of a truck.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

“In Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, the Women are Voicing Out Their Deepest Feelings and Thoughts, But Here in Sauna Day the Focus is On the Unsaid”: Anna Hints and Tushar Prakash on their Cannes-Debuting short Sauna Day

When I last interviewed Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints it was to discuss her Sundance 2023-premiering Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, which would go on to win the World Cinema Documentary Competition Directing Award. (It also nabbed Best Documentary at the 36th European Film Awards on its way to becoming Estonia’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.) The film offers quite a unique peek into a UNESCO-designated tradition that for centuries has allowed women like those the director (and contemporary artist and experimental folk musician) respectfully lenses to bond, heal and reveal in a safe space of smoke and sweat. And now Hints’s painstakingly crafted short Sauna Day, co-directed with her “partner in life and art,” Indian filmmaker Tushar Prakash (who also served as an editor on Smoke Sauna Sisterhood), transports us to “the world of Southern Estonian men who go to the dark-intimate space of a smoke sauna after a hard day’s work” (per the mysterious synopsis). But if you’re expecting a sort of “brotherhood” followup, think again. Not only is Sauna Day not a look at a group of guys experiencing emotional release as they free themselves from society’s gender-specific constraints, it’s not even purely nonfiction with two very intense actors woven into the otherwise vérité proceedings. Which admittedly made a certain sense to me since Sauna Day happens to include what could be viewed as some hot and sweaty catharsis of the homoerotic sort. Just after the 13-minute film’s Cannes (Critics’ Week Special Screening) debut, Filmmaker reached out to the unconventional duo to learn all about collaborating on such an unusual and rather provocative project.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Shame and punishment: Stormy Daniels takes the stand

While Israel’s war against Palestine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine still make above-the-fold news here in the US – mostly in the hyperbolic navel-gazing form of whether or not the former will tank Biden’s chances in this year’s election and thus end democracy as we know it, the latter whether the far-right wing of Congress will eventually withhold arms sales to Ukraine and thus tank its existence – it’s not the news. No, far more riveting than body counts a world away seems to be the real-life soap opera unfolding in a Manhattan courtroom, the recent star of which has been not the corrupt businessman and reality tv star on trial, but the savvy businesswoman and porn star at the center of the former president’s twisty election interference scheming. And to read the rest of my not-so-hot take visit Global Comment.

“I Operate From a Trans Lens, or Frame, as Though It Is the Only Choice Available”: Jules Rosskam on Desire Lines

For me, watching Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines, which won this year’s Sundance Special Jury Award in the NEXT competition, was a cinematic breath of fresh air. The experimental feature combines no holds barred interviews with transmen (of all shapes and colors) who are attracted to men, with a fictional storyline involving a real archive (one that includes shamefully buried history, like the story of author/ activist Lou Sullivan, probably the first transgender man to publicly identify as gay). The result is a riveting look back in time, and to the present and possible future, to reveal how, in the words of the director, “gender and sexuality animate each other.” Post-Sundance Filmmaker reached out to Rosskam, who is also a longtime artist and educator, to learn all about reframing queer history through a trans lens. After playing the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival and BFI Flare, Desire Lines will screen at the upcoming Wicked Queer, Cleveland International and Milwaukee film festivals.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Ways of (nonbinary) thinking: on desire and Desire Lines

“Past and present collide when an Iranian American trans man time-travels through an LGBTQ+ archive on a dizzying and erotic quest to unravel his own sexual desires” reads the synopsis for Jules Rosskam’s Sundance-premiering (and Special Jury Award in the NEXT competition-winning) Desire Lines. It’s a hybrid doc that uses a fictional narrative to unbury inconvenient history. (How many of us know the name of the trailblazing author and activist Lou Sullivan, probably the first trans man to publicly identify as gay? Where’s Lou’s biopic?) And an experimental film that features shockingly frank contemporary interviews with trans men – which opens up a Pandora’s Box of questions and conundrums strictly for, and about, queers. (In other words, straight cis folks are welcome to look but don’t touch. Refreshingly, this conversation, for once, isn’t about you.)

To read the rest of my nonconforming essay visit Global Comment.

“It was sort of like that scene in Coming to America, where Eddie Murphy and Semmi are in the bar interviewing all the different women”: D. Smith on her Sundance-winning Kokomo City

At its heart, D. Smith’s 2023 Sundance-winning (NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award) Kokomo City is a music-laden, kaleidoscopically-edited series of raw monologues from four defiantly survivalist women whose voices are too often eclipsed by what the debut feature director terms the “red carpet narrative”: “When a fierce PR team puts a trans woman in a fabulous gown and has her speak like a pageant finalist.” (Aka the RuPaul’s Drag Race effect.) Indeed, while Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll (who, tragically and outrageously, was fatally shot by a teenager last spring), Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver are all Black, beautiful and trans, they are certainly not interested in making straight cis white Americans feel all kumbaya comfortable – nor straight cis African Americans for that matter. All are urban (NYC and Atlanta) sex workers with strong and deep opinions on a wide variety of topics – from the vulnerability of macho Black men to the fear of Black mothers for their sons (especially when those sons become daughters. Which according to Carter adds a whole other level of psychological complication for single moms, often forced to grapple with male abandonment for a second time). Not to mention the day-to-day reality of working in the oldest profession in the world, from facing life-threatening dangers to encountering unexpected hilarities (sometimes simultaneously). Just after the film was awarded Outstanding Debut at the Cinema Eye Honors (where the aforementioned four characters likewise received The Unforgettables non-competitive honor), and prior to its nomination for Best Documentary at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, I caught up with Smith, who’s also a twice Grammy-nominated producer-singer-songwriter, to learn all about this unusual passion project; one forged during three years of couch surfing after being shown the door by the music industry for walking “in her truth,” as the red carpet was rolled up back in 2014.

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

“We Always Sought Out Photos with Movement”: Klára Tasovská on Her “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” Doc I’m Not Everything I Want to Be

"The only way to survive is to take photos,” declares Libuše Jarcovjáková, the iconoclastic star/narrator/guide of Klára Tasovská’s visually arresting (and eye-catching titled) I’m Not Everything I Want to Be. Nominated for the Teddy Documentary Award at this year’s Berlinale, the all-archival film is a globetrotting, black and white trip back in time (primarily to the 80s and 90s) viewed entirely through the rebelliously inquisitive eyes of this “Nan Goldin of Soviet Prague” (in the words of curator Sam Stourdzé). And words. For not only did Jarcovjáková obsessively collect images of both her defiantly unglamorous self and her decidedly adventurous life, she kept copious diaries of that wild inner-outer journey as well. Indeed, throwing caution to the wind, the outlaw shutterbug goes from hanging out at an underground gay club in Czechoslovakia (a country where she found herself “zigzagging through totalitarian reality”) to escaping, via fake marriage, to West Berlin. (Which “might be a step into the void but it’s a step forward,” she notes in her journal with hope. Alas, capitalism also left Jarcovjáková depressingly disoriented, unsure as to whether she was “outside or inside the cage.”) And on to Tokyo as an unlikely commercial photographer, an unsurprisingly awkward fit for a creative who’s always used her art to discover her “true self.” (In fact, Jarcovjáková much preferred returning to an unpretentious janitorial job in Berlin — camera in tow of course.) Just after the film’s Berlin premiere, and prior to its CPH:DOX debut, Filmmaker reached out to the veteran Czech director (2012’s Fortress and 2017’s Nothing Like Before, both co-directed with Lukáš Kokeš) to learn all about cinematically capturing a larger-than-life lenser.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

'Will & Harper’ Review: Will Ferrell Gets a Crash Course on Trans People During a Cross-Country Road Trip with One of His Oldest Friends

Director Josh Greenbaum was known as a documentary filmmaker before he shifted gears for “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” and with “Will & Harper” — a nonfiction buddy comedy in which Will Ferrell drives across the country with a beloved colleague — he returns to his nonfiction roots in order to confront a series of questions that seem as far from his comfort zone as they are from Ferrell’s. Questions like: How does a straight cis male of a certain age come to terms with the fact that one of his oldest friends has just come out as trans? And what will happen to their friendship when said trans woman refuses to stop for donuts? (Spoiler alert: Ferrell has a comic meltdown, declaring the whole trip “stupid” if he doesn’t get his Dunkin’).

To read the rest of my genderqueer critique visit IndieWire.

“Being a Latina Immigrant Offered Me Personal Insight Into the Culture That Influenced and Inspired This Great Artist”: Carla Gutiérrez on Her Sundance-Premiering Frida

Though 2024 marks seven decades since the passing of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, it often feels as if the ubiquitous artist never actually died (or lived) at all. A feminist/Chicana/indigenous/disabled/nonbinary icon ahead of her (if not outside the concept of) time, Frida Kahlo has long been celebrated as more phantasmagoric myth than flesh-and-blood painter (as opposed to her corporeal hubby Diego Rivera). So how does a filmmaker go about capturing and confining such an ethereal figure to the screen? If you’re the multi-award-winning editor Carla Gutiérrez (Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s RBG and Julia) you compile and compose as much Frida-generated material as seemingly possible: letters, essays, her personal diary (and sketches and paintings from that diary); and also nearly 50 original paintings and sketches (and around half a dozen Rivera murals). Then you add in first-person accounts from Kahlo’s colleagues and intimates (and very intimate intimates) and arresting archival photos. Finally, you complete your topnotch, mostly Latinx team with Mexican animators and a lyrical narrator to guide us through this wonderland that was the fiery legend’s real magical world.

Just prior to the Sundance premiere of Frida (January 18th in the US Documentary Competition) Filmmaker reached out to the veteran editor to learn all about her own artistic journey to this auspicious, all-archival directorial debut. (Produced by Imagine Documentaries and TIME Studios, in association with Storyville Films, Frida also hits Prime Video on March 15th.) To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Personal truth and consequences: Transition

Perhaps the most unnervingly unexpected film I stumbled upon in 2023, Monica Villamizar and Jordan Bryon’s Transition follows co-director Bryon, a veteran Australian journo granted exclusive access to a group of Talib fighters just as Afghanistan is collapsing back into their human rights-abusing hands. Which is a complicated situation for any Western reporter to be in, but especially for Bryon, who happens to be a trans man passing as a cis man in this lethally patriarchal world.

To read the rest of my review visit Global Comment.