Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, December 8:
ARTHUR MILLER: WRITER

Director:
Rebecca Miller

Premiere:
Telluride 2017

Select Festivals:
New York Film Festival, Woodstock

About:
An intimate portrait of the filmmaker’s famed playwright father.

Assembled from interviews shot by the filmmaker over the past 25 years of Arthur Miller’s life, as well as copious archival footage, Rebecca Miller’s film provides an insightful exploration of the playwright’s life and work. Though undeniably a personal project, the doc avoids blatant hagiography to consider not only Miller’s many achievements, such as DEATH OF A SALESMAN and THE CRUCIBLE, but also his later, critically-dismissed work. Filming her father casually, around his woodworking shop, Miller provides the expected biographical background, including his various relationships, with special attention paid to his romance with Marilyn Monroe, as well as his reactions to the Red Scare. At the same time, the filmmaker makes skillful use of her intimate connection with her subject to reflect on larger questions of success and failure, celebrity, and the impact of art on society.

Coming to Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater this weekend, Friday, December 8 through Sunday, December 10:
MANSFIELD 66/67

Directors:
P David Ebersole and Todd Hughes

Premiere:
Rotterdam 2017

Select Festivals:
BAFICI, Docs Against Gravity, Provincetown, Sitges, Gent, Am Docs, Frameline, Inside Out

About:
A campy exploration of the life, death, and legend of Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to HBO this Thursday, December 7:
32 PILLS: MY SISTER’S SUICIDE

Director:
Hope Litoff

Premiere:
Hot Docs 2017

Select Festivals:
AFI Docs, Provincetown, Biografilm, San Francisco Jewish, Woodstock, Denver, Cork, Rocky Mountain Women’s, Boston Jewish

About:
A filmmaker confronts her grief over the loss of her sister.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, December 5:
KARL MARX CITY

Directors:
Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker

Premiere:
Toronto 2016

Select Festivals:
New York, Chicago, Stockholm, Palm Springs, Guadalajara, CPH:DOX, Movies That Matter, Indielisboa, Docaviv, Durban

About:
A personal exploration of the legacy of the East German surveillance state.

The setting of this well-observed essay film is the city of Chemnitz, renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt during the decades of the GDR, and director Epperlein’s hometown. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the filmmaker moved to the states. Ten years later, her father committed suicide, perhaps as a response to threatening anonymous letters he received. Faced with the possibility that her father might have somehow been involved in the deep-rooted web of surveillance and informants controlled by the Stasi, the East German state security system, Epperlein begins an investigation, and, perhaps, a hoped-for exoneration. In addition to interviewing family members about her father, the filmmaker visits the Stasi archive, and, most strikingly, makes extensive use of surveillance footage the Stasi or their informants shot – banal in its content, but panoptic evidence of their oppressive control of society. Adopting the austere look of these quotidian recordings and the paranoid feel of of an espionage thriller, the film proves compellingly disturbing and surprisingly topical, despite its Cold War setting.