film

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.

New Zealand's early film industry was small and mostly focused on documentaries. The government made films featuring the country’s stunning landscapes to promote tourism.

Team House Studios is not your typical production company. Founded in 2020 by filmmaker Steven Grayhm with former NFL'er and Green Beret Nate Boyer, its aim was to become the foremost film and TV production company in the industry that was committed to empowering military veterans both in front of and behind the camera through real, hands-on training.

Many Americans, especially younger ones, may not know who Arthur Ashe was and how significant his achievements were in and out of the realm of sports. For starters, Ashe was the first Black tennis player selected to the US Davis Cup team and the only Black man ever to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open.

Once upon a time … Americans sipped coffee and ate pie around communal tables at the Horn & Hardart’s iconic Automat, where they could share their struggles and dreams with strangers they had never met before (and would never see again). Lifetimes ago, these largely working-class palaces nourished a sense of unity and community that bridged diverse social classes, languages, genders and races in the increasingly rising urban melting pots of the East Coast.

In 1956, when the French diving pioneer Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997) made his documentary, The Silent World, in 1956, it was a novelty in many ways that he himself could not have anticipated. The feature was co-directed by Cousteau, who was then 46, and a young director, Louis Malle, 24, who would go on to become a major voice in French and world cinema (Lacombe Lucien, Atlantic City, Au Revoir les Enfants) in the next three decades.

The 1923 establishment of Turkey as a Republic delivered the coup de gråce to the Ottoman Empire, and the country’s president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, encouraged culture and art. The first free elections were held in 1950.

“Unlike other kids my age,” recalls Bretten Hannam, “I didn’t play with many toys. I would rather draw, paint and tell stories.

What a film is about is not the same thing as the story it tells. This is useful to remember when watching the new Netflix documentary Britney vs Spears, released in advance of an important legal hearing on her case in Los Angeles the following day.

Wars, upheavals, changing politics, all have shaped filmmaking in Iraq. In 1909 the country’s first film project took place, but it was not seemingly in the Iraqi’s DNA to indulge in cinema.