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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Doc Corner: S&M Lesbians, Oscar Winners and Queer Theater — classic restorations of 2020

By Glenn Dunks

We tend to focus on new release documentaries around here, covering the gamut of titles premiering in cinemas, on streaming and VOD, and occasionally—as you’ll see over the next few week—festivals. What I rarely have the pleasure of doing is review classic docs, which is probably rather silly since the boom in popularity for the form has meant distributors and exhibitors are getting more confident in not just re-releasing classics documentaries, but restoring them, too.

As I found when researching my top 100 docs of the decade list, even titles from as few as four or five years ago become increasingly hard to find. And if they never received a US release? Even harder. Hopefully that starts to change and all the more reason to celebrate when older works do appear. So, to celebrate the Film Society at Lincoln Centre’s season of films by gay icons Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (until November 5, so get on it!) I wanted to highlight some of the absolute rippers that have come along lately.

There’s everything from S&M lesbians, American cross-country road trips, nuclear bombs, and one Chantal Akerman masterpiece...

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Interview: Garrett Bradley, Fox and Rob Rich on their award-winning documentary "Time"

by Murtada Elfadl 

Fox and Rob Rich in a shot from the film

This year’s documentary sensation is Time, now streaming on Amazon Prime, a film that announces the arrival of Garrett Bradley as an accomplished filmmaker. Telling the decades spanning story of Fox Rich, an entrepreneur and abolitionist who spent almost 20 years fighting for the release of her husband Rob Rich out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola. He has been given a 60 year sentence for a robbery they both committed in a moment of desperation. Talk about punishment that doesn’t fit the crime.

The film’s 2020 journey of accolades started at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where Bradley won the Best Director award in the Documentary feature competition. Since then it has played the Toronto and New York film festivals and is now available to screen on Amazon. And it is absolutely my favorite film of 2020.

The film is a mix of Fox’s video diaries that she recorded over the years with insight into the last couple of years of her family’s story shot by Bradley. That was not the original concept. After ending the shoot Fox gave Bradley a treasure of archival footage that she had shot through the years. Bradley changed direction and incorporated Fox’s footage. Recently I had the chance to speak to the Riches and Bradley over zoom and I started the conversation at this juncture asking Fox why she gave Bradley her video diaries.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity... 

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AFI Fest: Notturno

By Abe Friedtanzer

Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s last film, Fire at Sea, was released right around the time of the 2016 election. The Oscar-nominated film was a poignant and timely look at the implications of severely restricted immigration worldwide. Unlike popular recent documentaries like American Factory and Free Solo, Rosi’s work didn’t feature much dialogue or even a formed argument of any kind. Instead, plainly documenting what was happening was powerful enough to speak on its own. Rosi’s follow-up, Notturno, has a different focus but is much the same… 

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Monty @ 100: The recent documentary "Making Montgomery Clift"

by Sean Donovan

As a kind of epilogue to our Montgomery Clift Centennial series, in which we revisited every film of his, let's discuss a curio that made the festival rounds in 2018 and 2019. The documentary Making Montgomery Clift was co-directed by Hillary Demmon and Monty’s nephew Robert Clift. Robert is very much foregrounded as a protagonist of the film as he attempts to do much of what the Film Experience team has been attempting over the past two and half weeks: to grapple with the legacy of Montgomery Clift and bask in the immortal work he has left behind. Making Montgomery Clift is an imperfect project, and those imperfections arise out of an enormous emotional attachment to the subject that can’t hep but obscure our view of the man and his work.

Making Montgomery Clift provides an overview of the star’s life and career trajectory, the highlights and lowlights that have been gestured to in posts throughout this series: Clift’s struggles with alcohol and pills, his queer sexuality, the traumatic car accident that transformed his career, his reputation as a difficult diva of a movie star, etc. But the film also does the invaluable work of tracing the discourse of our pop culture knowledge of Clift himself: when and how the legend of Monty Clift was written...

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