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.
Documentary
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?
Resilience reveals a new public health crisis
Redford has crafted a densely packed film intended to educate the public about Adverse Childhood Effects, or the very real existence of Toxic Stress.
NUTS! and foreveryone.net: The visionary and the charlatan
The Sundance documentaries foreveryone.net and NUTS! each chronicle the scientific achievements and self-mythologizing of two very different men.