Documentaries

The answer is a resounding yes. Even if we get uncomfortable.

Writing With Fire, Rintu Thomas and Shushmit Ghosh’s feature documentary debut tells the story of Khabar Lahariya, a female-run newspaper in northern India whose journalists are all Dalit, the lowest group in the Hindu caste system. Highly acclaimed, the film has won an audience award and special jury award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and is nominated for best feature honors by the International Documentary Association (IDA).

In October 2018, actress Selma Blair revealed that she had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS).  In Introducing, Selma Blair, a raw, unpolished, if ultra-honest documentary, Rachel Fleit, making her feature directorial debut, provides an inmate look at Blair's new life chapter of living with Multiple Sclerosis.

A good film festival is defined by its programming: diversity and inclusion play as much a role as does variety in all genres of filmmaking. The New Orleans fest distinguishes itself by also paying attention not only to local filmmakers but to local stories: topics that resonate with or were born from the city, the state, or the region.

After directing and producing documentaries for the German TV channel ZDF on the refugee casualties of Middle Eastern wars that were dismissed as simply statistics, or producing images in news bulletins, Egyptian journalist Ali El Arabi decided to quit his job and live with the Syrian refugees in the Za’atari camp in order to get to know them closely and understand their needs. "I felt guilty, so I wanted to shed light on their plight from their point of view and not from an external point of view,” El Arabi said at the last El Gouna Film Festival.

“You could summarize Spin Time as a documentary about the poor as you've never seen them before,” says Italian author, stand-up comedian and satirist Sabina Guzzanti, known internationally for her 2005 documentary Viva Zapatero! Her new film, Spin Time, subtitled How Tiring Democracy Is!, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September and will be screened in New York in early December. “The film portrays the world of the invisible poor, who refuse to play the victims here,” says Guzzanti, who is famous in Italy for her parodies and hilarious impressions of Italian politicians (her Berlusconi is a classic).

Women made up 39% of directors in 2020. While that number reflects gender gains in the field when placed in the perspective of the fact that women make up 51% of the general population – not so much.

One of the more difficult aspects of adolescence to capture on film is the overwhelming ambivalence that is often a staple of teenage life — the grappling with general uncertainty as well as contradictory feelings, frequently quite intense, as one prepares to leave whatever nest their family of origin provides, and more proactively chart their own path forward. Both through its subject matter and framing, the documentary At the Ready, a world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival now enjoying a theatrical and VOD release, captures this mood with considerable sensitivity and insight, providing a fascinating look at the nexus of education, law enforcement, politics, and young adulthood.

The HFPA met Oliver Stone in Nursultan, Kazakhstan, and later at the Rome Film Fest in October to talk about his involvement in the new documentary Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, which is now showing at the Asian World Film Festival in Los Angeles. The film, available both as a feature-length version and as a six-hour series, is written, directed and produced by Igor Lopatonok, and Stone figures as the interviewer of Kazakhstan's former President, considered the founder of the country, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the larger-than-life and controversial subject of this intriguing project with the music score composed by Golden Globe nominee Carlo Siliotto.

Found is an involving documentary that taps into a thick vein of universal feeling while also never running or trying to squirm free from the potential ambiguity inherent in its story. After DNA tests reveal that they are blood-related cousins, three American teenage girls, all adopted as babies from China, develop an online friendship built around the understandably complicated feelings they each have about their respective lost personal histories.