A place to think deeply about movies
We run two podcasts at Seventh Row:
Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson join us on the podcast to discuss their new film Ghostlight, adapting and working with Shakespeare, and more.
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On the podcast episode, we discuss Luca Guadagnino’s new film Challengers (2024), which stars Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Seventh Row favourite Josh O’Connor as competitive tennis players and romantic rivals.
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On the podcast, Alex Heeney interviews Director Uberto Pasolini and James Norton about avoiding sentimentality and collaborating on their film Nowhere Special (2020).
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In the fifth and final episode of our Creative Nonfiction Film podcast season, Penny Lane discusses her experiments with form in Confessions of a Good Samaritan. This interview was conducted at HotDocs 2023.
Don’t miss a single episode.
On episode 5 of the podcast season, Penny Lane discusses her new documentary film, Confessions of a Good Samaritan, about her journey to becoming an anonymous kidney donor and its emotional repercussions. While educating us on the kidney donation process and why it’s important, the film is, above all, a portrait of the filmmaker in crisis. It is equally a film about making a film about donating a kidney.
Lane uses many different techniques to get us inside her stressed and complicated brain: inviting us onto her desktop, showing us interviews with herself, documenting the donation process with cameras, and even curating archival footage and interviews to reflect the state of mind of the ‘character of Penny Lane’ as she develops through the film.
Penny Lane has been experimenting with film form throughout her career, from the archival footage film Our Nixon, to the animated documentary NUTS!, to the tongue-in-cheek look at the Satanic Temple in Hail Satan? through seemingly conventional talking head interviews, to found footage in The Pain of Others, and beyond. Lane weaves almost all of these techniques (and a few more!) into Confessions of a Good Samaritan, offering a thoughtful, educational, and funny look at the complicated feelings that come with doing good in the world.
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In this 5-episode podcast season, Alex Heeney interviews four creative nonfiction filmmakers about their latest films and how they are pushing the boundaries of what documentary and nonfiction film can be.
Listen to all the episodes to discover how filmmakers are pushing the bounds of documentary cinema in 2023.
Dive deep into the work of Frederick Wiseman and Gianfranco Rosi and read our initial interview with Penny Lane on creative nonfiction by getting Documentary Masters in a bundle with Subjective Realities: The art of creative nonfiction film.
Download a FREE excerpt from Subjective Realities here.
The Seventh Row Podcast spotlights under-the-radar, female-directed, and foreign films. All of our episodes are carefully curated. Indeed, we only discuss films we think are really worth your time and deserve in-depth critical analysis.
Our episodes that are more than six months old are only available to members. In addition, many of our new episodes are for members only.
For exclusive access to all of our episodes, including all of our in-between season episodes, become a member.
All of our episodes that are more than six months old are only available to members. Additionally, we have many bonus episodes and in-between season episodes which are also only available to members.
For exclusive access to all of our episodes:
Host Alex Heeney is the Editor-in-Chief of Seventh Row. Find her on Twitter @bwestcineaste.
This episode was edited, produced, and recorded by Alex Heeney.
The transcript for the free excerpt of this episode was AI-generated by Otter.ai.
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In the fourth episode of our Creative Nonfiction Film podcast season, Sam Green discusses his film 32 Sounds and the live documentary.
Don’t miss a single episode.
On episode 4 of the creative nonfiction podcast season, Alex Heeney talks to Sam Green about 32 Sounds and his work exploring the possibilities of his work that he describes as “live documentaries”. These are part locked footage, part live performance, usually including a live band on stage performing the film’s music.
On this episode, we give some background on Sam Green’s work in live documentary, talk about how A Thousand Thoughts (2018), co-directed with Joe Bini, felt like a turning point for his work in the form, and discuss what makes 32 Sounds such a wonderful and innovative film. Finally, Alex talks to Sam Green about making 32 Sounds, and more broadly about how he thinks about live documentary and why this is a space he likes working in.
The episode features a conversation between Alex Heeney and Orla Smith about 32 Sounds and live documentary, recorded in January 2022 right after the world premiere of 32 Sounds. The interview with Sam Green was conducted via Zoom in January 2022 the day after 32 Sounds had its world (virtual) premiere at Sundance. This is an edited version of the complete conversation; the complete conversation is available on our website here.
Green’s first live documentary was Utopia in Four Movements (2010), which had its world premiere at Sundance 2010. He then did The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (2012), which Alex Heeney saw at its world premiere in San Francisco. Director-editor Joe Bini, whom we interviewed about live documentary in our ebook Subjective realities: The art of creative nonfiction, also saw the film in SF. This led to Bini and Green collaborating on the Kronos Quartet live documentary A Thousand Thoughts (2018). 32 Sounds is Green’s first live documentary which was also designed for a home viewing experience.
On the Seventh Row podcast, Orla Smith described 32 Sounds as the “feel good film of the festival”. It’s an immersive deep-dive into how sound makes us feel and how we process sounds. It asks us to consider the sounds we encounter all the time and don’t notice, the sounds that mark our memories, and how we create sound. Its vignette structure was loosely inspired by 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (François Girard, 1993). 32 Sounds certainly contains more than thirty-two sounds, though the selected ones are occasionally tallied for us. It is alternately lighthearted — explaining sound waves with a whoopie cushion — and deeply contemplative, as when Green dreads listening to the answering machine recordings left by his late brother.
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In this 5-episode podcast season, Alex Heeney interviews four creative nonfiction filmmakers about their latest films and how they are pushing the boundaries of what documentary and nonfiction film can be.
Listen to all the episodes to discover how filmmakers are pushing the bounds of documentary cinema in 2023.
Subjective Realities contains interviews with filmmakers Joe Bini (Little Ethiopia) and Zia Anger (My First Film) on their work on live documentary. Joe Bini also co-directed A Thousand Thoughts with Sam Green, and then continued to make his own live documentaries with his wife, Maya Daisy Hawke.
Dive deep into the work of Frederick Wiseman and Gianfranco Rosi and read our initial interview with Penny Lane on creative nonfiction by getting Documentary Masters in a bundle with Subjective Realities: The art of creative nonfiction film.
Download a FREE excerpt from Subjective Realities here.
The Seventh Row Podcast spotlights under-the-radar, female-directed, and foreign films. All of our episodes are carefully curated. Indeed, we only discuss films we think are really worth your time and deserve in-depth critical analysis.
Our episodes that are more than six months old are only available to members. In addition, many of our new episodes are for members only.
For exclusive access to all of our episodes, including all of our in-between season episodes, become a member.
All of our episodes that are more than six months old are only available to members. Additionally, we have many bonus episodes and in-between season episodes which are also only available to members.
For exclusive access to all of our episodes:
Host Alex Heeney is the Editor-in-Chief of Seventh Row. Find her on Twitter @bwestcineaste.
This episode was edited, produced, and recorded by Alex Heeney.
The transcript for the free excerpt of this episode was AI-generated by Otter.ai.
[fusebox_transcript]
In the third episode of our Creative Nonfiction Film podcast season, we interview Philippe Falardeau about his four-part documentary series, Lac-Mégantic: This is Not An Accident, and reinventing the true crime doc.
Don’t miss a single episode.
On episode 3 of the creative nonfiction podcast season, Philippe Falardeau discusses Lac-Mégantic: This is Not An Accident is a four-part documentary series about the catastrophic 2013 train disaster in Lac-Mégantic, its inevitability, the aftermath, and the government failure to change safety requirements to avoid another “accident” in future. Lac-Mégantic had its world premiere at the HotDocs Film Festival where all four episodes were screened back-to-back.
The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster was the fourth-deadliest rail accident in Canadian history (47 people died) and the deadliest involving a non-passenger train. The documentary Lac-Mégantic not only chronicles the disaster and its devastating effects on the town Lac-Mégantic, but also how blame was handled and how similar disasters continue to happen.
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The series reclaims the history of the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster by showing how systemic problems lead to a disaster that has been blamed on individuals. The series also reveals how appropriate safety measures have not been taken in the intervening years to prevent a similar disaster from happening (and other, smaller disasters have indeed continued to happen).
At the beginning of the episode, Alex Heeney introduces the series Lac-Mégantic, and why she thinks it’s worthy of discussion. Next, we play your Alex’s interview with Falardeau about the film. Finally, we wrap up with how the film fits into the framework for creative nonfiction that we at Seventh Row created in our ebook Subjective realities, and offer some suggestions for what to watch and listen to next.
In this 5-episode podcast season, Alex Heeney interviews four creative nonfiction filmmakers about their latest films and how they are pushing the boundaries of what documentary and nonfiction film can be.
Listen to all the episodes to discover how filmmakers are pushing the bounds of documentary cinema in 2023.
Dive deep into the work of Frederick Wiseman and Gianfranco Rosi and read our initial interview with Penny Lane on creative nonfiction by getting Documentary Masters in a bundle with Subjective Realities: The art of creative nonfiction film.
Download a FREE excerpt from Subjective Realities here.
The Seventh Row Podcast spotlights under-the-radar, female-directed, and foreign films. All of our episodes are carefully curated. Indeed, we only discuss films we think are really worth your time and deserve in-depth critical analysis.
Our episodes that are more than six months old are only available to members. In addition, many of our new episodes are for members only.
For exclusive access to all of our episodes, including all of our in-between season episodes, become a member.
All of our episodes that are more than six months old are only available to members. Additionally, we have many bonus episodes and in-between season episodes which are also only available to members.
For exclusive access to all of our episodes:
Host Alex Heeney is the Editor-in-Chief of Seventh Row. Find her on Twitter @bwestcineaste.
This episode was edited, produced, and recorded by Alex Heeney.
Find out more about the season
Listen to Ep. 1: An introduction to creative nonfiction
Listen to Ep. 2: Sophie Fiennes on Four Quartets and documenting theatre on screen
The transcript for the free excerpt of this episode was AI-generated by Otter.ai.
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