Despite being a rather niche subject, two films about vogueing competed in the Panorama Documentary section at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Documentary
Joshua Oppenheimer discusses his haunted, ‘magical realist’ doc The Look of Silence
Joshua Oppenheimer discusses his collaboration with Adi Rukun, the importance of empathy, and the magical realist landscape and soundscape of his Oscar-nominated documentary The Look of Silence.
The Lovers and the Despot lacks substance
The Lovers and the Despot tells what should be an interesting story without doing the work to create one. It recounts a bizarre slice of South Korean cinema history: in 1978, director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, were kidnapped, separately, by Kim Jung-II from Hong Kong and held for eight years. Kim Jung-Il wanted swift improvements in the North Korean film industry, and this was his solution.
Notes on Blindness explores the soundscape
Documentarians Peter Middleton and James Spinney use segments of John M. Hull’s actual audio tape recordings to reconstruct his experience of going blind in this experimental non-fiction film.
Penny Lane on NUTS!: a gullible audience
Penny Lane talked to us about the importance of pacing in the film, why they used animated re-enactments, and how to think about documentary film.
Sonita and Sand Storm at Sundance: when the patriarchy looks like your mother
Both films explore how empowered women function within a patriarchal society. They pose the question, can you defeat the patriarchy simply by exercising agency?