Category Archives: In the Works

The award-winning cinematographer and director of TRINIDAD, a film profiling a quiet Colorado town that has become a center for sex reassignment surgery, turns his camera on the lives of LGBT seniors.

Noting the specific challenges faced by LGBT seniors, including reduced access to healthcare, increased solitude, and, for some, either late-in-life coming out, or, for others, a forced return to the closet, director PJ Raval has set out to document their lives around America. Interweaving interviews with archival footage, the film explores their past and present, and the way that age is addressed within the gay community. Continue reading →

The director of I WAS A TEENAGE FEMINIST turns her attention to America’s obsession with virginity.

Recognizing the contradictory messages constantly presented to girls and women about sex – told to “protect” their virginity, but at the same time barraged by popular culture and advertising that glamorizes and celebrates women as sexual objects, director Therese Shechter’s film hopes to provide a candid exploration of female sexuality and the ways society have tried to control it. Focusing on virginity, ever synonymous with a woman’s virtue, Shechter explores her own sexual history and that of other women to debunk the myths around the concept of chasteness and to shed light on how and why it has attained and maintained such significance in a culture that otherwise seems sex-mad. Continue reading →

A multiple Emmy Award-winning filmmaking team reveals the story of what really happened during the 1971 Attica prison riot.

More than forty years ago, inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York state took control of the prison in protest over inhumane living conditions and in response to the recent killing of a black radical activist prisoner in California’s San Quentin Prison. After tense negotiations faltered, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the state police to reclaim the prison, resulting in what has been called the bloodiest single-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War. While official records place the blame on the deaths of prisoners and hostages at the hands of the rioters, director David Marshall and producer Chris Christopher reveal four decades of a politically motivated cover up through eyewitness testimony and newly unearthed documentation. Continue reading →

A celebrated documentary series about gay men and intimacy crosses the Pond.

Filmmaker Travis Mathews has spent the last several years filming gay men in various cities in self-reflection, all from the privacy of their bedrooms. Attaining a remarkable closeness with his subjects, Mathews encourages them to open up about things they might never articulate publicly, from erotic fantasies to confessions of deep-seated fears. The result is an unusually revelatory peek into the private thoughts and lives of gay men. After successful episodes filmed in San Francisco and Berlin, the next stop is London, for an hour-long piece. Continue reading →

Did a soldier from 2036 interact online with the people of 2000 during a time-traveling mission, or was it an elaborate hoax?

Jay Cheel, the director of BEAUTY DAY and founder/editor of The Documentary Blog, explores his interest in time travel through the stranger than fiction episode in 2000 involving a man who claimed to be a time traveller. In the post-apocalyptic America of 2036, soldier John Titor is sent back to 1975 in search of an IBM computer. The world would know nothing of this clandestine, physics-defying journey, except that Titor decided to make a stopover in 2000 to meet with his family, and even himself as a toddler. During this unexpected excursion, he inexplicably shared details online of his mission and his mode of chronal displacement. While skeptics immediately doubted the veracity of Titor’s claims, still others have maintained their belief of a crosstime correspondence. Continue reading →

Recognizing the role modern technology had in the conception of his triplets, a filmmaker contemplates its impact and interrelationship with our sense of being.

Having turned to in vitro fertilization after difficulty getting pregnant, filmmaker Avi Zev Weider and his wife became the parents of triplets. From their conception to their neo-natal care, their children owed their existence to technology, leading the filmmaker to huge questions around our increasingly complex interdependence with machines. In exploring these questions, Weider seeks the input of thinkers with wildly divergent perspectives, while also exploring his own story and those of others dramatically changed by technology. Continue reading →

Parents follow their son and his friend for twelve years to create an in-depth portrait of the experiences of young black males in the education system.

Cognizant of the horrific statistics showing that young black males are more likely to end up in prison than in college, and generally are at a major disadvantage within the educational system, parents Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster decided to begin a documentary in 1999 detailing their family’s experience in the NYC school system. Shooting over the course of a dozen years, they have followed their son Idris and his best friend Seun, as well as themselves, from primary through high school, capturing the specific challenges the now young men have faced in the pursuit of learning. Continue reading →

The stranger-than-fiction story of a scandal-ridden film festival organizer is at the heart of a filmmaking duo’s investigative quest.

After Dan Nuxoll, the Program Director of NYC’s Rooftop Films, had some less-than-satisfying business dealings with the Queens International Film Festival, he partnered with documentary filmmaker Martha Shane (BI THE WAY) to find out what was going on. The result of their multi-year investigation: a portrait of that festival’s director, Marie Castaldo, a charismatic figure who somehow has managed to work within the film industry for more than twenty years despite numerous allegations of fraud and failed festival after failed festival plagued by unpaid bills and other woes. Constructed as an investigative thriller, Shane and Nuxoll’s film aims to peel back the layers of the enigma that is Marie Jocelyne Castaldo and uncover (if possible) the real person behind the cons. Continue reading →

The members of an atypical Mississippi family each seek love despite odds seemingly being stacked against them.

Director and cinematographer Moby Longinotto originally began his project as a short documentary. After it screened at notable fests including Hot Docs and Sheffield, he teamed with producer Aviva Wishnow (BLANK CITY) to expand it to feature-length. Joining the pair as associate producer is Jordan Mattos, who served in the same role for the SXSW and Cinema Eye Honor award-winning BILLY THE KID. The film follows the three-member Jones family, who live together in a Mississippi trailer park: Matriarch Jheri Rae, elder son Brad, and junior son Trevor. Complicating things a bit, 70-year-old Jheri Rae started life as the male Jerry, and is the boys’ biological father; 40-year-old Brad suffered brain damage at birth and has been dependent on his parents his whole life; and 34-year old Trevor is a virgin, racked with insecurity. Their small town might not know what to make of them, but they’re not letting that stop their search for partners who can accept them as they are. Continue reading →

A provocative look at the turbulent life and loves of an amateur porn producer/performer.

Although Dan Leal is not particularly attractive, in shape, or possessed of a Michael Fassbender-sized endowment, he finds himself enjoying popularity and financial success as “Porno Dan,” the head of Immoral Productions, his one-man amateur porn production company. Living out some people’s idea of a dream job, Dan performs in many of his low-budget productions. Having received peer recognition by being nominated for an AVN Award (the adult video Oscars), he’s ready to grow his business and stop appearing in his own films, hoping this can help him settle down in a stable relationship. Director Alexandra Berger, making her documentary feature debut, follows him through more than three years of challenges, both professional and personal, on his quest to reconcile his unconventional career with his more conventional aspirations for true love. Continue reading →