The Honoraries: Danny Glover as Producer

by Cláudio Alves

Danny Glover's cameo in BAMAKO

Despite his fantastic career as an actor, Danny Glover isn't receiving an Honorary Oscar to recognize that work. Instead, AMPAS is honoring him with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award as a way of celebrating his lifelong actions as a community activist, fighting for worldwide justice, and other such efforts. If anything, those values are more imminently evident in Glover's filmography as a producer rather than as an actor. Since the early 90s, after becoming a box-office star, the American thespian started leveraging his success to try and make specific projects happen. Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger marked Glover's first experience as a producer, and the funding was mainly secured through his participation in Lethal Weapon 2. From then on, Danny Glover has been a strong supporter of underrepresented filmmakers, helping them make their cinematic dreams come true… 

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Doc Corner: (Belated) Shark Week — 'Playing with Sharks' and 'Fin'

By Glenn Dunks

Sally Aitken’s Playing with Sharks and Eli Roth’s Fin are two very different documentaries but share common ground. Not just in that they are both about sharks, but because they each want to use their platforms to advocate for the preservation of the ocean’s perfect predators. Neither film reaches the heights of other better, similarly themed films (in recent years, I stump heavily for Karina Holden’s Blue), but it’s something of a sad indictment that their very existence is important as the environmental crises happening in our oceans appear so far from being solved.

Aitken’s film chooses to focus its lens on Valerie Taylor, a famed Australian diver whose role in some prominent Hollywood productions (you may know of one called Jaws, but also Blue Water, White Death in 1967) led to being a conservationist. Fin on the other hand is a most unexpected non-fiction diversion for Roth; a film more akin to The Cove than the gory horror features that he is better known for.

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Doc Corner: 'No Ordinary Man'

By Glenn Dunks

In No Ordinary Man, a groundbreaking biography emerges out of the tragic throes of history. Populated almost exclusively by the voices and experiences of transgender individuals, this riveting and decidedly trans-positive documentary from co-directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt has the power and the depth to deserve a place in the queer canon (if such a thing exists). It dismantles the very politics of disclosure, and tells its story of self-discovery with empathy and tenderness while utilising film craft in a way that offers genuine inclusive insight.

It tells the story of Billy Tipton, an acclaimed jazz musician, husband and father who, upon his death, was discovered to have been assigned female at birth. At first mocked on the daytime talk show and tabloid entertainment circuit as a ‘unimaginable’ fraud who deceived his family and society for personal gain (women had little access to the jazz scene), No Ordinary Man charts how Tipton’s story was just one of many in a society that was woefully ill-prepared for the complexities of human behaviour. And how Tipton inspired a generation to live authentically.

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Cannes Diary #3: From Haynes to Trier, a binge-watch kind of day

TFE is thrilled to have a correspondent on the ground in Cannes this year. Thank you to Elisa Giudici.

The Velvet Underground

by Elisa Guidici

It was a really intense day. I was greedy, I could not say no to the majority of the movies screened today so I basically spent the third day inside Palais, running from one screening to another. Six in all (!) With some positive surprises.

The Velvet Underground  (Todd Haynes)
OUT OF COMPETITION

It is perhaps predictable that Todd Haynes would do a fine job in telling the story of Velvet Underground in his newest documentary. He is the man behind Velvet Goldmine and I'm Not There so he has already shown an understanding of the sensibility and the struggle of rock music genre and inner restlessness...

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Doc Corner: 'End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock'

By Glenn Dunks

The politics of protest are always going to provide filmmakers with the sort of loaded emotions that make for good movies. Even when peaceful, the fractured dynamics of a society that continuously pits side against side in the fight for progressive ideas have long produced the sorts of anger and fierce determination that explode on camera. Racial equality (and more recently, Black Lives Matter), queer rights and women’s liberation have all been seen in compelling documentaries for decades.

But as environmental issues become more engrained as a fixture in the political and societal landscape, the street-battles to protect the only Earth we have are just as pertinent even if they perhaps lack the more personal connections that so many of us find in narratives of struggle and protest. In fact, Shannon Kring’s End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock finds much of its power in the way race, gender and the environment overlap in the fight for our planet's future.

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