Category: Artist Spotlight

Don’t look now, but it’s been two decades since filmmakers Steve James, Peter Gilbert, and Frederick Marx premiered their rapturously received basketball documentary, Hoop Dreams, at the Sundance Film Festival. As part of the 2014 Festival, a digitally remastered high definition version of the film will screen for the first time ever in this year’s From the Collection program.Hoop Dreams charts the five-year journey of Chicago basketball prodigies Arthur Agee and William Gates as they vigorously chase their on-the-court endeavors while confronting burdensome issues off the hardwood.

It’s hard to recall a documentary film with a more audacious blueprint than the one Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster outlined some 14 years ago. At that time, their 5-year-old son, Idris, and his best friend, Seun, were beginning kindergarten at the prestigious Dalton School, a private institution in New York City. Over the next 12 years, Stephenson and Brewster would candidly document the boys’ conflicting experiences as one opted to pursue an education in the public schooling system.

In making his alarming, often outraging documentary God Loves Uganda, director Roger Ross Williams embedded himself in the eye of a cultural thunderstorm—one marked by stanch moral and religious adherence and a shocking code of ethics surrounding homosexuality. 
God Loves Uganda plays like nothing less than an investigative thriller, penetrating a potent American evangelical movement taking place in a vulnerable East African country. Perhaps the only thing more rousing than the mission itself, is the man crusading it.

Matthew Porterfield’s third feature, I Used to Be Darker, is a delicate exercise in restraint. His fingerprints appear everywhere and nowhere in this strained family drama as he infuses naturalism by seemingly relinquishing control. More than ever before, Darker showcases Porterfield’s undervalued acumen for developing characters by simply allowing them to develop.

Jacob Kornbluth would like you to know that he is not an economist. He didn’t matriculate at a revered School of Economics, nor is he especially well-versed in financial markets or models. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For outliers, New York can often appear to wear clashing visages. After all, it is more frequently depicted in art and media than any other city in the world, and often erroneously. Enter: Shaka King’s Newlyweeds, an incisive new film set in a pre-gentrification Bed-Stuy that captures not just the distinct aesthetic, but the entire disposition of an irregular Brooklyn neighborhood.

If it weren’t for her categorical agility as a writer, Jill Soloway might appear capricious. The comedian’s career has seen her journey from writing/producing on the hugely successful television series Six Feet Under to publishing a novel to, most recently, writing and directing a feature film. That film, Afternoon Delight, played in the U.

“The before and after are almost always more interesting to me than any actual event,” notes David Lowery, the boundlessly pensive director behind the 2013 Sundance Film Festival selection Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. “The empty space after a person has left a room is something that always speaks to me.” That personal notion of Lowery’s presents itself early in his directorial debut, as his two leads—played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara—are apprehended by officers after a shootout in Texas.

Andrew Bujalski concedes that his best chess-playing days are behind him. He’ll offer even less about his dexterity as a computer programmer. But the director’s latest feature film effort, Computer Chess, operates with such careful and nuanced dedication to both fields that nary a technical flaw presents itself.

Filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite knows firsthand how appallingly easy it can be to put on moral blinders when it comes to entertainment. She concedes that she was one of millions of annual SeaWorld visitors who opted, perhaps subconsciously, for obliviousness in the face of alarming animal cruelty. That all changed with the undertaking of her new documentary Blackfish, an official selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, which depicts the sobering reality that exists for killer whales held in captivity and exposes the well-concealed truth about the dangers that their trainers face.

There is a theme that dominates the longstanding trend of actors opting for a stint behind the camera. More often than not, these are stories fueled by personal experience that no other filmmaker could, or even should attempt to tell. Most recently, Jim Rash and Nat Faxon, the co-directing team behind this year’s nostalgic summer comedy The Way, Way Back, reiterate that refrain.

ESCAPE FIRE premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and made its official theatrical release this past October. Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke’s new documentary couldn’t have come soon enough. As millions of Americans descended into a media fray wrought with glaring sensationalism and compulsive hyperbole surrounding last fall’s presidential election, the directing duo offered an unparalleled, unflinching, and—quite frankly—unflattering look at one of the most pressing contemporary American issues: our broken healthcare system.