April 19, 2018
Laura Dunn Draws From Wendell Berry for Look at Rural America
Craig Phillips in Interviews
Laura Dunn's first feature documentary, The Unforeseen, executive produced by Robert Redford and Terrence Malick, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, aired on the Sundance Channel, and was called "a…...
April 10, 2018
Filmmaker Cullen Hoback Digs Into Political Cover-Ups and Chemical Spills in Americans Water
Craig Phillips in Interviews
Filmmaker Cullen Hoback's previous film Terms and Conditions May Apply (2013), a humorous but chilling documentary about the erosion of online privacy and what info governments and corporations are legally…...
April 04, 2018
Shoes Wisely: Stacey Tenenbaum Shines a Light on an Age-Old Profession
Craig Phillips in Interviews
Award-winning filmmaker Stacey Tenenbaum co-created a critically acclaimed series in Canada, The Beat, which followed a team of beat police officers patrolling the streets of Downtown Vancouver. Exchanging the police beat…...
March 28, 2018
Filmmaker Till Schauder Had Many Sleepless Nights Telling Shahin Najafi’s Story
Craig Phillips in Interviews
The German-born, New York-based filmmaker Till Schauder's previous film The Iran Job was about an American basketball player who went with great trepidation to play professionally in Iran, a winning…...
March 13, 2018
Peter Bratt Feels the Calling to Tell Dolores Huerta’s Story
Craig Phillips in Interviews
Filmmaker Peter Bratt's first feature Follow Me Home, a San Francisco International Film Festival Audience Award winner, was produced with his brother Benjamin Bratt, which they followed with the heartfelt indie film La…...
February 21, 2018
Filmmaker Theo Anthony’s Ratty Exploration of Urban Segregation
Craig Phillips in Interviews
[pullquote]"It’s cool to watch younger audiences watch the film, because they just get the filmic language right away. It’s a film that feels more like an Instagram story than a…...
February 16, 2018
10 Questions with “Rat Film” Composer Dan Deacon: On Baltimore, Rats, Player Pianos and Theremins
Craig Phillips in Beyond the Films
Baltimore-based composer/musician Dan Deacon did the music for Theo Anthony's Rat Film. The film, which uses the urban rat as a way to explore a deeper story of urbanization and…...
January 29, 2018
“Winnie” Filmmaker Gives a New Perspective on Anti-Apartheid Activist Winnie Mandela
Craig Phillips in Interviews
Filmmaker Pascale Lamche took on the enormous but important challenge of documenting Winnie Mandela's story, a narrative, as she discovered, that was slightly skewed in the mind of many across…...
January 26, 2018
Filmmakers Marco Williams and Stanley Nelson Tell an Essential Chapter of American History in Story of HBCUs
Craig Phillips in Interviews
Tell Them We Are Rising, which premieres on Independent Lens on PBS Monday, February 19 at 9 pm [check local listings], covers the rich history of America’s Historically Black Colleges and…...
January 24, 2018
How a Chinese Filmmaker Ended up in Florida with a Drifter from Utah
Craig Phillips in Interviews
Nanfu Wang was a student at NYU when she went exploring America, which found her in Florida staying at a hostel. There she encountered a young drifter named Dylan, whom…...
January 17, 2018
Balancing Along the Thin Blue Line, Filmmaker Captures Police Force at an Explosive Time
Craig Phillips in Interviews
A follow-up to his acclaimed, Independent Spirit Truer than Fiction Award-winning film The Waiting Room (Independent Lens, 2013), Pete Nicks' The Force is part of a trilogy of films he's making which…...
January 10, 2018
How “I Am Not Your Negro” Filmmaker Reopened James Baldwin’s “House”
Craig Phillips in Interviews
The worldly Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck and his family fled the Duvalier dictatorship in 1961 and found asylum in the Democratic Republic of Congo, before Peck finished his schooling in…...