Blog

The Last Laugh filmmaker Ferne Pearlstein with director/writer/comedian Mel Brooks
Interviews

April 20, 2017

Ferne Pearlstein Asks Comedians and Survivors: What Is Off-Limits in Comedy?

Craig Phillips in Interviews

“Somebody once said, ‘Tragedy plus time equals comedy.’ And I always felt, why wait?” - Comedian Gilbert Gottfried, in The Last Laugh There have been many films about the Holocaust,…...

Women sort seeds from vegetables at a farm, fron SEED
Interviews

April 12, 2017

Filmmakers Share the Roots of their Seed Documentary

Craig Phillips in Interviews

With SEED: The Untold Story, filmmakers Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz complete a trilogy of sorts, after The Real Dirt on Farmer John and The New York Times Critic Pick…...

Mark Barden's son Daniel Barden races the school bus in Newtown
Interviews

April 03, 2017

Kim A. Snyder Tells Newtown Families’ Deeply Intimate Story

Craig Phillips in Interviews

Filmmaker Kim Snyder is no stranger to having to patiently and empathetically ingratiate herself with a community. Her film Welcome to Shelbyville, which was nationally broadcast on Independent Lens, spent time in a…...

Interviews

March 23, 2017

Ovarian Psycos Filmmakers Follow the Ovas Bike Brigade in East L.A.

Craig Phillips in Interviews

Ovarian Psycos brought together filmmakers Joanna Sokolowski, who co-produced the Emmy® Award-winning HBO documentary Very Semi-Serious (2015), about New Yorker cartoonists, and Kate Trumbull-LaValle, an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker who first began…...

Joey McGee walks down a road in the Mojave Desert.
Interviews

March 17, 2017

Filmmakers Lou Pepe and Keith Fulton Tell Story of At-Risk Youth Getting Last Chance

Craig Phillips in Behind the Films

Filmmakers Lou Pepe and Keith Fulton have gone from the deserts of Spain (for their acclaimed film Lost in La Mancha about Terry Gilliam's ill-fated attempt to make a Don Quixote…...

Interviews

February 13, 2017

Keith Maitland Goes Back to 1966 to Tell Story of Victims and Heroes of Texas Shooting

Craig Phillips in Interviews

Keith Maitland's previous film The Eyes of Me, the moving story of a group of blind teenagers making their way in Austin, aired on Independent Lens and was nominated for an…...

Interviews

February 09, 2017

Filmmaker Matt Ornstein Captures Daryl Davis’s Quest to Confront Racism, One Racist at a Time

Craig Phillips in Interviews

Filmmaker Matt Ornstein has a background in music videos and short films (one of which, Atlantis, was about that space shuttle's last launch and starred Jason Ritter), but the story…...

Silhouetted image of William M. Trotter speaking in protest about Birth of a Nation, from Birth of a Movement
Interviews

February 02, 2017

Filmmakers Tell Story of William Trotter’s Fight Against Racist Silent Blockbuster

Craig Phillips in Interviews

Birth of a Movement, based on Dick Lehr's book, captures the backdrop to a prescient clash between human rights, freedom of speech, and a changing media landscape — that happened in 1915.…...

The Witness filmmaker James Solomon in profile
Interviews

January 21, 2017

Filmmaker James Solomon Peels Back the Mythology of the Kitty Genovese Story

Craig Phillips in Interviews

The Witness  may be James Solomon's first film as director, but his vast experience as a storyteller made him the perfect fit for reopening this case. The Witness, which made…...

Wind River Director, Mat Hames, and DP, Wilson Waggoner, film a Northern Arapaho child at the Ethete Powwow.
Interviews

January 11, 2017

Filmmaker Mat Hames Goes to Wind River to Amplify Native Voices

Craig Phillips in Interviews

Award-winning filmmaker Mat Hames’s feature documentary, When I Rise, about African American mezzo-soprano and civil rights icon Barbara Conrad, was featured on Independent Lens and nominated for an IDA Documentary…...

Nicky Nuke graphic by artist Peter Kuper
Interviews

January 06, 2017

Containment Filmmakers Go into the Future to Read the Warning Signs

Craig Phillips in Interviews

Harvard professors and filmmakers Peter Galison and Robb Moss have been collaborating for a decade: first, in co-teaching a course, bringing student filmmakers into scientific laboratories to think about the…...

Filmmaker siblings Ravi and Geeta Patel of Meet the Patels
Interviews

December 23, 2016

For Filmmakers Geeta and Ravi Patel, Love Is a Family Affair

Craig Phillips in Interviews

It was a long and winding road for sibling filmmakers Geeta Patel and her brother Ravi in the making of their film Meet the Patels — including not just the initial…...