Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter are the adult children of high-ranking Nazi officers. As we learn in My Nazi Legacy, their fathers sent tens of thousands of people to…...
The "making of" documentary has become a lively subgenre of nonfiction filmmaking, thanks in large part to the explosion of home video and the proliferation of cable channels in the…...
Once you've watched a beloved movie two or three times, you start to crave a little more information about the film's conception, production, and cultural impact, among other things. So…...
For a long time, the Oscar-winning 1988 drama Rain Man wasn’t just the best-known representation of autism on film, it was a lot of people’s only frame of reference for…...
In memory of Vilmos Zsigmond, the legendary cinematographer who died New Years Day, we reached into the Independent Lens archive for an interview Mr. Zsigmond gave us in June 2010…...
Chuck Norris vs Communism may not literally be the retro action film the title implies, it's a shorthand way of reflecting how this new documentary captures the giddy way Romanians in…...
In Ilinca Calugareanu’s documentary Chuck Norris vs. Communism, a handful of Romanians who endured the Cold War reminisce about congregating surreptitiously in cramped apartments to watch American action films on…...
This piece is part of an ongoing Independent Lens series exploring documentary film history. Check out the previous entry, Silent Real-Life Adventure Films, and stay tuned for more installments. The birth…...
It's often said that truth is stranger than fiction, and while that may be accurate in some cases, it's also true that truth can be a lot scarier than fiction. As…...
This piece is part of an ongoing Independent Lens series exploring documentary film history. Stay tuned for more installments. Since the dawn of cinema, cameras have been taken around the world to…...
In communist Romania, thousands of Western films on bootleg VHS tapes — mostly Hollywood action movies — were smuggled behind the Iron Curtain, opening a window into the free world. Under President Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania was culturally isolated and ideologically censored. Images of life outside its… Read More
By Noel Murray When Lacey Schwartz applied to Georgetown at age 18, she left the “racial identity” box unchecked, but did submit a photograph, and not long after she was…...