Documentaries

“American Pie" by Don McLean was first released in 1971 and was an instant hit. One of the most successful and debated songs of all time, it is now the subject of an intriguing new documentary The Day the Music Died which delves into the origins of the song, why it remains so popular and what exactly do some of those cryptic lyrics mean.

Actress, producer, activist and living film legend Jane Fonda was a panelist at our first Summit in 2019. That’s where the idea was born to restore FTA, the documentary on the anti-war movement in the US military, with and produced by Fonda and Donald Sutherland in 1971.

The Glass Castle is the most recent entry in a subgenre of sorts detailing the coming of age of children in non-conformist families. Last year Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic explored the effects of an eccentric patriarch (Viggo Mortensen) on his brood of children while Doug Pray’s 2007 Surfwise was the documentary account of one actual such family and their peripatetic raising of nine children in a wandering surf commune.

Eleanor Coppola famously directed Hearts of Darkness, behind-the–scenes documentary and companion piece to husband Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the groundbreaking rethinking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the ultimate Vietnam-era existential war movie.  At the age of 80 she has now directed her feature film debut, Paris Can Wait starring Diane Lane as a woman of a certain age who takes a wide detour through the French countryside – and the midlife rethinking of her marriage on the way to Paris and perhaps beyond.

You never know who might stop by the HFPA lounge in Cannes. Today it was none other than ex-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It’s been a busy festival for Sundance regular – and lifetime honorary Hobbit – Elijah Wood. The actor/producer was at Eccles for the premiere of Macon Blair’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, a quirky millennial noir, which takes an unexpected turn into gore territory (think Coen Bros).

The remarkable and tragic story of Christine Chubbuck was center stage at the last Sundance Film Festival with both a documentary and a feature devoted to the 1970s Florida newscaster who took her own life on live television. The latter, directed by Antonio Campos, features Rebecca Hall in the title role and is an examination of Chubbuck’s depression on the backdrop of the societal and professional pressures faced by women both then and, as current events so clearly show, in today’s world.

This month marks 35 years since the passing of Steve McQueen – an actor whose light burned bright during a career cut short by cancer in 1980. Until then the “king of cool” as he came to be known, embodied the rebel, nonconformist, maverick leading man like no one perhaps before or since.