Documentaries

Twenty-five years ago, Reed Harkness began making short adventure films with his father’s Super 8 camera starring his 11-year-old younger half-brother, Sam. Eventually, the pair decided to film their 2,000-mile road trip to solve a family mystery: Sam’s missing mother.

Filmmaker Kyra Elise Gardner, daughter of special effects supervisor and puppeteer Tony Gardner, has spent a good deal of her youth with the infamous doll Chucky, star of the Child’s Play franchise. Living with Chucky takes an in-depth look at the groundbreaking Child’s Play films from the perspective of a filmmaker who grew up within it.

Somali-American director Idil Ibrahim is one of the Queen Collective filmmakers. Along with five other women, she has participated in the talent development initiative that was created in partnership with Queen Latifah, Flavor Unit Entertainment, P&G and Tribeca Studios in order to help accelerate gender and racial equality behind the camera.

Originally published: February 16, 2023 The First Step is a powerful documentary following CNN media personality Van Jones as he successfully brought together both major American political parties at a time of extreme polarization to pass The First Step Act – a landmark criminal justice bill promising a path to an early release for eligible incarcerated people who invest their time and energy in programs that reduce recidivism. Brothers Lance (producer) and Brandon (director) Kramer – whose credits include City of Trees and The Messy Truth – spoke to us on Zoom about the journey of documenting Jones’ bridge-building efforts during the Trump administration and the fierce opposition he faced from both sides.

Christina Zorich unveils a powerful new documentary, The New Abolitionist, a movie about the mission to end sex trafficking in Southeast Asia. The feature doc, produced by Olympia Dukakis, trails the journey of abolitionists throughout Southeast Asia, people who have devoted their lives to freeing and rehabilitating those involved in criminal human sex trafficking, and prosecuting the perpetrators.

Directors Din Blankenship and Erin Bernhardt bring a powerful documentary to the screen and allow the viewer to observe an unlikely bond between a former KKK member, Chris Buckley, and a Kurdish refugee, Dr. Heval Kelli.

If one stopped a hundred people on the street in the United States and asked them to name the most popular and successful artist of the past quarter century, it’s unlikely more than a few — if any — would name Thomas Kinkade. And yet sales estimates claim that at his peak, one out of every 20 homes in America owned a copy of one of his paintings.

Director Suzanne Hillinger’s new documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story, available now on Netflix, tells a nuanced story about the fight to destabilize, delegitimize and topple the titular adult video-streaming website — one of the top 15 most visited online destinations in the world. Money Shot: The Story of Pornhub hints at a broader story about the complicated relationship with sexualization in Western culture, and the social expediency of perhaps willfully conflating the distasteful with the criminal in service of a moral-minded mission.

It’s been almost a quarter-century since the death of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. But in the years since, his legendary stature has only grown, with fans and critics alike celebrating his filmography and debating the status of his many discarded or never-realized projects.

How much less might we know about the world without being able to watch films from different eras and different countries that we would or could never travel to? And to what extent should that reality inform a sense of global responsibility that extends beyond national borders when it comes to film preservation? Those questions inform director Inés Toharia’s absorbing documentary Film: The Living Record of Our Memory, now playing in theatrical engagements via Kino Lorber, and give her movie an emotional power that shouldn’t come as a surprise for any true cineaste. In part a celebration of the monastic profession of film archivists, laboring to preserve cinema for humankind’s future, the documentary is also a fascinating historical and sociocultural document on its own, spanning both time and the globe.