Doc Corner: 'Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist'

By Glenn Dunks

We’re back with another film about the making of a classic movie (after last week's Television Event), this time a title that's streaming right now on Shudder. It is Alexandre O. Phillippe doing his thing; a horror behind-the-scenes-doc majestically titled Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist. Artistically speaking, it is probably his best movie yet. (But from me that’s faint praise indeed.)

The problem with a director like Phillippe is that he tends to take incredible works of art and then bleeds them dry. 78/52, his most well-known feature to date, somehow turned the shower sequence of Hitchcock’s Psycho into a routine film school dissertation. He takes iconic horror and performs a very practical (to the point of strict orderliness) dissection. The intellectual passion is there, but that doesn’t necessarily always make for the most scintillating of viewing.

It would have been easy to make a more traditional making-of documentary about The Exorcist. Hell, there’s enough of them out there to prove that. (I would recommend the Exorcist episode of Shudder’s Cursed Films if you want more of the making of style).  What makes Leap of Faith interesting is that Phillippe has done something of the opposite...

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Doc Corner: Crime and (in)Justice in America at DOC NYC

By Glenn Dunks

In our final report from this year’s virtual DOC NYC festival, we’re looking at films about crime and (in)justice. Make sure to check out our reviews of three festival titles that are also competing for Best International Feature as well as The Day After making of doc, Television Event, all of which are highly recommended.

A Cops and Robbers Story

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but themes of crime and (often in)justice have been popular in documentary lately. Maybe we can consider it an artform’s attempt to counteract the many, many years of not just racial discrimination by the police, the law, and American society more broadly, but the silence and misinformation that has come with it...

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'Television Event' about the making of classic 'The Day After' (1983)

By Glenn Dunks

I didn't expect to be throwing in an extra review from DOC NYC but I wanted to bring to your attention a film that is relevant to the interests of many Film Experience readers. The film is Television Event, a wonderful documentary about the making of The Day After (1983).

In a 24-hour news cycle full of of doom and terror, even young audiences are not blind to the world’s ills due to social media and a rapidly politically engaged society. That wasn’t the case in 1983 when Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After aired on ABC to an audience of an estimated 100-million people. The made-for-television movie brought the Cold War into American living rooms in a way that had never quite been done before.

There had not been any prime-time newscast announcing the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course. But for many viewers of The Day After, even though it was fictional, the power of its message and its images made them feel as if they had just borne witness to something of that magnitude...

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Doc Corner: Three International Feature Oscar Contenders

By Glenn Dunks

Documentaries have been popping up more and more in the line-ups for Best International Feature (née Best Foreign Language Film) since Cambodia snagged a remarkably unlikely nomination for The Missing Picture. Last year’s double-whammy nomination for Honeyland in both the international and documentary categories (from an equally unexpected country, North Macedonia) has no doubt emboldened national selectors to choose non-fiction titles, which I am certainly happy about.

Three such selections are playing DOC NYC, the New York documentary festival that opened its virtual doors yesterday. It may be too early to see what the Best International Feature category delivers us this year (as of right now the number of submissions sits at 43), but the three films here representing Kenya, Romania, and Venezuela are all strong and fine contenders. In fact, there is at least one title here that I reckon could deliver for its home country—one that has been routinely ‘snubbed’ by the category, so much so that they changed the rules. Could this be their year for redemption with one of the best movies of 2020?

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Doc Corner: Experiments within reality as Glenn sits on DOKLeipzig's FIPRESCI Jury

By Glenn Dunks

In October, I had the pleasure of being on my first virtual FIPRESCI jury. The International Federation of Film Critics is an organisation that has allowed me to visit and judge both the San Francisco and Stockholm festivals in the past. Since moving back home to Australia it’s has become much harder to do. Still, I wouldn’t have been able to attend DOK Leipzig in Germany for a multitude of reasons this year even without a global pandemic halting international travel. But I was able to attend this doc and animation festival from the relative comfort of my couch! 

My fellow jurors were Yun-hua Chen (critic and film academy member from Germany) and Hrovje Puksek (programmer for the Festival of Tolerance in Zagreb in Croatia). We each watched 12 films from the international competition before landing on our winner: Darío Doria's Vicenta of Argentina.

Our statement...

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