Doc Corner: Kimberly Reed Returns with 'Dark Money'

by Glenn Dunks

Talk about a sharp turn. Director Kimberly Reed is best known for her 2008 feature Prodigal Sons, an autobiographical documentary about Reed’s journey as a transgender woman returning home to her small town high school reunion where she not only must confront the people who knew her as a football quarterback when living as a male, but also the strange story of her adopted brother’s newly discovered heritage to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth and his declining mental health. It was an astonishing film and one that The Film Experience loved and covered at the time.

In the time since, Reed brought her story to audiences once more in the opera As One (which I also covered in 2014) as well as produced Paul Goodman Changed My Life and last year’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson for Netflix. It was a great surprise to me then to discover Reed’s latest film – her first as director for a decade – was a swerve away from themes of identity, gender, sexuality and family, but was instead a piece of investigative political journalism imbued with the narrative thrust of a court-room thriller.

Dark Money examines the various threads that make up the confusing and alarming world of American election campaign financing...

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Stage Door: 'As One' by Kimberly Reed

Glenn here to discuss the latest excursion to the live stage.

It can be easy to bemoan the fate that befalls many female filmmakers. Lord knows I have often found myself lamenting the post breakthrough careers of the likes of Patty Jenkins, Courtney Hunt and others. Those filmmakers for whom a great early work somehow doesn’t permit them the same carte blanche movie projects as male directors like, for example, Marc Webb who got The Amazing Spider-Man off the back of a slight, but popular romantic comedy whereas Kimberly Peirce won her star an Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry and yet it took nine years for a follow-up. Still, as frustrating as it must be to them and to moviegoers when (I assume) financing doesn’t come to them quite as quickly or as robustly as it might another, we thankfully live in a society that doesn’t mean they have to sit around idly letting their creative juices stop flowing. One of the benefits of the expanding TV universe, for instance, is a greater opportunity for female directors like Jodie Foster, an Emmy nominee for directing an episode of Orange is the New Black, and Jennifer Lynch, for whom Teen Wolf and Psych have allowed more opportunities than film ever has.

This is basically a far too long roundabout way of getting to Kimberly Reed, the director of the fantastic 2008 documentary Prodigal Sons. That film’s autobiographical nature wherein Reed documented her small town high school reunion having since transitioned only to then be simultaneously confronted by the realization that her adopted brother is the biological grandson of Hollywood royalty was perhaps suggesting that film wasn’t always the direction she wanted to take her career. Yet it was an exceptionally good movie, and one that deserved to breed a wider voice for Reed and issues of transgender (six years later and it has finally reached the mainstream). For what it’s worth, I only cottoned on to to Prodigal Sons after having read about on The Film Experience.

While I am unaware of what Reed has been doing in the intervening years, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that she was one of the names behind As One, an intimate chamber opera that played this past weekend at BAM in Brooklyn. Many artists will find any means necessary to tell the stories that are inside them and whether Reed had a hard go of it getting a second film off the ground or not, the emergence of her point of view in any creative outlet is something to cherish.

More after the jump...

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Nashville Awards: Andrew Haigh's "Weekend" and More...

Jury Deliberations. Most festivals have separate jurors for each of the major sections. Cannes is the one people are most familiar with it being the festival of festivals. The competition slate is the main focus but they don't actually decide each of the awards you hear about. There are other juries gathered to decide things like the Camera D'Or (best first film) and the short film prizes. Nashville has five juries and they're also an AMPAS qualifying festival so if, for instance, a short film wins "best" in category here it becomes eligible for Oscar consideration. I was on the Narrative Competition jury this year. The running joke at the table became "this doesn't leave the table..." so...end of story!

Let it suffice to say that it's always usually enjoyable to discuss movies with other creative types and in this case it was extra enjoyable as my fellow jurors Dan Butler (previous discussed) and Joe Leydon (a Texas based film critic who also writes for Variety) were both fun passionate movie-loving guys.

After we decided our prizes, I scampered over to the Music Film jury when I saw them wrapping up to thank the gorgeous Kimberly Reed for her Prodigal Sons film the one I kept raving about to y'all a couple of years back. She told me about a new percolating project of hers but she's actually still trekking around the country with her breakthrough film years later. Oprah's interest in her story really made a huge impact -- Oprah really does control the world, doesn't she? -- but that kind of sustained interest couldn't have happened to a better documentary or to a more articulate champion for the transgendered community.

BEST OF THE 2011 NASHVILLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Read on to find out which films each jury loved as well as a few notes on the films.

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