A Conversation With Nicole Bazuin And Andrea Werhun (MODERN WHORE)

Modern Whore, which world-premiered at TIFF, is the latest sex-work-destigmatizing project in an unusual multiyear collaboration between director Nicole Bazuin and the hybrid doc’s co-writer and star Andrea Werhun (who also served as a consultant on EP Sean Baker’s Anora). It’s based on Werhun’s book Modern Whore: A Memoir, which features Bazuin’s photos, and comes on the heels of Bazuin’s 2020 shorts Modern Whore and Last Night at the Strip Club, which likewise center on Werhun. In other words, this prolific pair have long been on a fierce artistic mission to bring the oldest and perhaps most misunderstood profession in the world out of the closet, and simultaneously slay some tired tropes in an inventively stylish and often cheeky manner along the way. A few days after the film’s May 1st VOD release (via Quiver Distribution), Hammer to Nail caught up with the Canadian duo to learn all about the productive partnership, along with what they’ve dubbed the “Modern Whore Cinematic Universe.”

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

"Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever

"It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor — who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke for her acclaimed 2022 short Love, Barbara — in her Sundance-debuting feature Barbara Forever. Fusing Hammer’s poetic words and striking images with her own experimental editing approach, O’Connor takes us on a riveting ride through one woman’s boldly adventurous life and the larger frame of queer history, from the lesbian and gay rights movement of the ’70s through to today’s more inclusive and expanded awakening. Ultimately, Barbara Forever is a heartfelt portrait of an individual who wasn’t afraid to embrace life on her own terms, holding lessons for humans of every profession and persuasion. A few days before the film’s January 24th Park City premiere, Filmmaker caught up with O’Connor, an award-winning artist in her own right whose “work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

STRAY BODIES

Though Elina Psykou’s Son of Sofia took top honors in the International Narrative section back at Tribeca 2017, the acclaimed Greek director’s first documentary, last year’s unconventionally cinematic Stray Bodies, has yet to find distribution on these shores. Which is an inexplicable shame. Debuting at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2024 – where riot police were dispatched in response to far-right threats – the film next played CPH:DOX (where I saw it), before hopping the pond over to Hot Docs in Toronto. It was a notable festival journey for a doc about “involuntary body-related traveling” (as the CPH:DOX synopsis so spot-on stated) – specifically throughout Europe, but in the wake of a global crackdown on reproductive rights, a topic not far from anyone’s shores.

To read the rest of my review visit Hammer to Nail.

“Seduction: the Cruel Woman Was Banned for 18 Years”: Monika Treut on her Queer Trailblazing Career

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since I last interviewed queer film pioneer Monika Treut. At the time trans identity was just starting to become tentatively accepted. Fifty Shades of Grey (a story centered around two straight, white, privileged cisgender protagonists into BDSM) had been released earlier that year, and was well on its way to becoming a glitzy Hollywood franchise. In other words, marginalized subjects the German filmmaker had been deeply and cinematically exploring for over three decades — Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Verführung: Die grausame Frau) hit screens in 1985! — were just beginning to enter the mainstream consciousness. Which inevitably proved to be both a blessing and a curse. And that’s why it’s an honor to catch up once again with Treut, whose eclectic oeuvre also includes docs like 2001’s Warrior of Light, a portrait of the human rights activist Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, and 2012’s The Raw and the Cooked, a dive into Taiwan’s culinary traditions, just prior to the Anthology Film Archives run of “Female Misbehavior: The Films of Monika Treut” (October 11-19), a seven-film retrospective of the icon’s recently restored early works.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“We Created the Film to Address How Journalism Was Perpetuating Anti-Trans Bias”: Sam Feder on Heightened Scrutiny

As someone who started calling myself “bigendered” decades ago, trans visibility has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s a relief to no longer have to explain being nonbinary to puzzled and often dubious cisgender folks (gay and straight alike). On the other hand, it’s infuriating to watch as one’s existence is then abruptly erased and turned into an “ideology” by right-wing transphobes. And it’s downright demeaning to have one’s identity suddenly hijacked and transformed into a hip “cause” by cisgender liberals. (The dehumanization inevitably leading to dangers like the NYTimes breathless bothsidesism reporting on trans issues by cis reporters — though no doubt the equivalent would have occurred had the BLM movement been covered exclusively by white folks.) Everyone from haters to allies are so obsessed with pronouns and bathrooms (prurient clickbait) that the crucial bigger picture of bodily autonomy gets swept aside in the larger cis discourse. Which is why it’s so refreshing and empowering to sit through Sam Feder’s Sundance-debuting Heightened Scrutiny, an up-close look at levelheaded ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as he embarks on a high-stakes journey preparing to become the first known transgender person to make oral arguments before the most consequential platform of all: the Supreme Court of the United States. And while the recent outcome of U.S. v. Skrmetti, in which SCOTUS upheld a Tennessee state law banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors (though treatment for other medical reasons is still permitted), is disappointing, Feder is smartly less concerned with keeping score on the trans rights battlefield than with who is representing the team. Finally we, through Strangio, are the dignified adults in charge, taking the narrative back into our own hands and acting as the spokespeople for our own bodies, ourselves. (Here’s to the tattooed advocate following in ACLU board member Thurgood Marshall’s shoes.) Just prior to the doc’s July 18th opening at DCTV, Filmmaker reached out to Feder, who we last caught up with to discuss Disclosure, the director’s 2020 deep dive into how trans individuals have historically been depicted onscreen.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Tip Jar

All tips appreciated!

“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 first 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. 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.

“… 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.

“Maybe an Individual is Only as Interesting as the Energy Surrounding Them”: Angelo Madsen on His True/False-debuting A Body to Live In

Angelo Madsen’s A Body to Live In is a doc as unconventional in form as its leading man. Comprised of various formats (16mm, VHS, archival, 2K) overlaid with underground voices (Annie Sprinkle and Ron Athey are probably the best known), the film takes us on a winding journey through the life and philosophy of photographer-performance artist-ritualist Fakir Musafar, one of the founders of the modern primitive movement. With the archival Musafar (born Roland Loomis in 1930) as our guide we’re introduced to an unheralded slice of LGBTQ+ history that includes gay BDSM parties, the first piercing shop, body modification as a balm during the AIDS epidemic, and of course body-based performance art. And this is all while never really getting to know the queer Korean War vet, whose anthropological fascinations led to dabbling in flesh hook suspension by the mid-’60s. (Musafar eventually married BDSM educator and ritualist Cléo Dubois, who remained by his side till his death in 2018.) But this elusive quality is as it should be when it comes to celebrating a mysterious artist for whom seeking, not answers, was the point. A week prior to the doc’s February 27th True/False debut, Filmmaker caught up with the director and interdisciplinary artist to learn all about A Body to Live In and making art from life.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

‘Cutting Through Rocks’ Review: A Sharp Documentary Profiles a Motorcycle-Loving Woman Who Takes on the Patriarchy in Rural Iran

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s precisely lensed “Cutting Through Rocks“ is a deftly shaped work of cinematic nonfiction that opens with a literal bang, as we cut from a black screen to a middle-aged, headscarf-clad woman wrestling with a metal door that’s become unhinged; eventually she decides to buzzsaw through the surrounding stone enclosure to make it fit back in. It’s an apt metaphor for the formidable Sara Shahverdi, a longtime divorcee in a deeply religious region of northwest Iran — a woman who’s spent most of her life flouting gender norms and giving the finger to convention. The former midwife is also a vocal advocate for the empowerment of women and girls, which includes access to education and an end to child marriage. And, of course, she’s also an advocate for the right to ride a motorcycle, her greatest passion of all.

To read the rest of my review visit IndieWire.

“Making Films in Iran Is Not an Easy Task at All”: Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni on their Sundance-debuting Cutting Through Rocks

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks follows Sara Shahverdi, a middle-aged divorcee in a remote and extremely conservative region of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What makes the scenario rather remarkable that Shahverdi is neither pariah nor wallflower in her tiny town. On the contrary, the onetime midwife, who quite literally brought an entire generation of her village into the world, is also a loud motorcycle-riding rebel who ran for a seat at the government table and won. And now, as the first elected councilwoman, a woman who finds herself at the center of an incompetent bureaucracy, one in which the proverbial glass ceiling just might be made of stone. A few days prior to the film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition debut on January 27th, Filmmaker caught up with the married co-directors to learn all about their seven-year journey with Shahverdi, including staying safe through the “rare knowledge” of their formidable star.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“You’d Be Surprised How Happy People Are to Talk About the Best Times in Their Lives”: Elegance Bratton on His Sundance-Debuting Doc, Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

"A good party knows no fucking sexual orientation, no race, no socioeconomic background,” notes Vince Lawrence, the very first person to record a house song and the main protagonist in Elegance Bratton’s Sundance-debuting Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. That a global movement could be traced back to a rather nerdy Black youngster raised in the segregated world of Mayor Daley’s Chicago is just one surprising element in this lovingly crafted music history lesson. (Less surprising is the number of white folks who would also like to take credit.) But perhaps most remarkable is that through a combination of eye-catching archival imagery, dance floor beats, a wealth of interviews with the sound’s pioneering artists and DJs – and even reenactments – Bratton has managed to create a time capsule of an all-inclusive community, while keeping the party going loud and proud onscreen. The week before the doc’s January 26th (Premieres section) Sundance debut, Filmmaker caught up with the director-writer-producer-photographer, who was last on the festival circuit with his TIFF-premiering 2022 narrative feature The Inspection.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

“Playing Three-Dimensional Chess”: Balancing Personal Lives and the Status Quo in Violet Du Feng’s ‘The Dating Game’

At the start of Violet Du Feng’s Sundance-debuting The Dating Game we learn that, due to the former one-child policy, China now has 30 million more men than women, an eye-catching number that presents dire implications for the country. But behind the cold facts are flesh and blood human beings — and potential clients for a dating coach named Hao. Hao trains lovelorn males in the techniques of “strategic deception”, such as makeovers, enhanced social media profiles, and cagey communication skills. It’s into this faux glamorous world that three rural wife-seekers step. Zhou, Li, and Wu are all shy but willing to try as they take part in Hao’s fast-paced, week-long dating boot camp. They begin to question what to wear, who to pursue — and most importantly, how far on the spectrum between truth and lies they’re willing to go to meet their match. While the doc is specific to China, it’s also universal in its critique of how capitalism, consumerism, and social media collide to create a generation that assumes everyone is faking who they are and therefore concludes that they too must “fake it to make it.” As the film progresses, we learn that Hao’s just a village boy who made it in the big city, and even managed to land the stylish Wen (herself a dating coach for women whose advice couldn’t be more at odds with that of her husband’s). In other words, what Hao is really selling is the eternal rags to riches story, the forever elusive Chinese dream. A week before the film’s World Cinema Documentary Competition premiered today, Documentary reached out to Feng, whose Peabody and Emmy-nominated Hidden Letters (2022) tackled gender stereotypes from the female side.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.

A Conversation With Poulomi Basu (Maya: The Birth of a Superhero)

Who knew knocking down taboos could be so much fun? With Maya: The Birth of a Superhero, a VR piece that exhibited in the Immersive Competition, first edition at Cannes, and is currently available on Meta Quest, the UK-based Indian neurodiverse artist Poulomi Basu, along with her collaborator CJ Clarke, have crafted a coming of age tale that playfully tackles a topic usually discussed behind closed doors (if at all): menstruation. Indeed, with the titular, South Asian teen as our guide, we’re taken to a threatening land (contemporary London) filled with emotional minefields, forced to navigate everything from bullying classmates to a conservative mom for whom shaming comes easier than any expressions of love. Fortunately, Maya’s got some kickass girl moves – able to hurl tampons with Herculean strength! – which allow her (and us) to ultimately overcome insidious patriarchal stigma, the greatest hurdle of all.

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

“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.