Curio: Nomi & Cristal 4ever

Curio is our fan art series, curated by Nathaniel R

I found myself seething with jealousy yesterday when Joey from Awards Daily received a Nomi Malone pin (left) in celebration of the release of the documentary You Don't Nomi (now available on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play and we'll have an interview about that movie soon.)

Today on the inimitable Gina Gershon's birthday,  I am more zen about the injustices of being denied Showgirls swag. Life is not fair. And I'm getting too old for that whorey look, anyway.

Nevertheless I was one of the original champions* of the movie's trash brilliance, and I am programmed to celebrate it every time it comes back around to public attention. After the jump some tees, crafts, and artwork honoring the iconic characters from that classic film...

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OUTStream Film Festival - It's Happening Right Now

by Nathaniel R

Last night we told you about the Cannes selection. While that's glitzy information it's not particularly useful since none of the films are available and Cannes isn't actually happening. But there is a festival happening right now. It's called OUTStream and 2020 is its inaugural outing. The queer festival runs through this weekend (Sunday, June 7th) if you wanna have a mini queer film adventure over the next few days. You purchase virtual "tickets" to the movies and watch (if you want to see the Q&As though you have to watch at the alotted times, otherwise it functions like a normal rental). 

HERE ARE SOME OF THE HOT TICKETS

Song Lang is a Vietnamese drama from debut filmmaker Leon Le. It's about the romance between an opera performer and a debt collector in 1980s Saigon. We've heard nothing but good things about this one on the festival circuit but we haven't seen it yet. Leon Le won Best New Director at the Beijing Film Festival for this. There's a livestream Q&A on Friday June 5th...

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Doc Corner: 'Rewind' and 'On the Record'

by Glenn Dunks

To put one’s own story to film often takes some form of personal courage. To not allow any sort of emotional distance between the traumas and the pains of life and the audience will always be a tough line for many to cross. It is why documentaries are so often labelled as merely grim or depressing and placed in a metaphorical too-hard basket. It’s true that many are indeed an emotional trial of sorts, but to watch survivors speak directly to us is one of the things I most cherish about non-fiction filmmaking.

As I watched and listened to the stories of Sasha Joseph Neulinger, Drew Dixon and others unfold in two new documentaries, Rewind and On the Record, I found myself captivated and angry. Angry that this happened in the first place and angry that these films aren’t being spoken about as important works of film...

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Doc Corner: 'Asian Americans' and 'First Vote'

By Glenn Dunks

Some facts will be long remembered.

Others won't be much remembered.

And then will be forgotten.

These are words spoken at the end of Rithy Panh’s stark 2011 documentary Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell. Not a happy film by any stretch, but these words at least partially explain why we need documentaries about the traumas of the past and why we should watch them.

I thought of this quote when I sat down to write about the new five-part PBS documentary series Asian Americans. Every five-minute stretch of this remarkable series comes with a story or anecdote or remembrance that could be lost to the greater history. It all but stunned me. Every episode ought to be a veritable blueprint to smart Hollywood producers and entrepreneurial independent film financiers.

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Doc Corner: The retro hippy futurism of 'Spaceship Earth'

By Glenn Dunks

Would you believe that I also dream about documentaries? You probably would. We surely all dream about movies in some form. Well, just a few weeks ago I found myself awakening after a dream about a (non-existent) documentary that went back to the first ever series of Big Brother and interviewed the participants—none of whom I would know or have any sort of facial recognition of as I surprisingly did not watch turn-of-the-century Dutch TV—about living in isolation and what we could all learn while in our own contemporary COVID-19 isolation.

At the time it struck me as actually quite an interesting concept, a rare occurrence of wishing I had any inclination towards actually making documentaries instead of simply watching them. I needn’t have spent the mental energy. While crass reality television isn’t the theme of Matt Wolf’s Spaceship Earth, what it is about is the futuristic science experiment of the early 1990s known as Biosphere 2, a trial in inter-planetary life preservation that began rather improbably with a San Franciscan experimental avant-garde art troupe and ended, somehow just as improbably, with Steve Bannon.

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