Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
“Living is an adventure and a challenge…If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.” Opening with the words of the great jazz musician himself, the tone is set for Stanley...
Author: Lauren Wissot
Cold Case Hammarskjöld is a gonzo journey you don’t want to miss
Mads Brügger’s Cold Case Hammarskjöld, which debuted at Park City back in January, is a cinematic reinvestigation of the mysterious 1961 plane crash that took the life of United Nations...
A 5-Step Guide to a Nonbinary Life in the Post-Stonewall, Pre-Caitlyn Era
Long before there was wifi and smartphones, let alone language to define my identity, I’d envisioned a world in which a boy could feel comfortable living his true self in a girl’s body, and...
Greta Schiller, “Before Stonewall”
“I made a whole film, Paris Was a Woman, about lesbians in Paris between the wars. Now we have the internet, and the communication on the web, and people can fly places, and you can live...
Blowin’ Up chronicles harm reduction at the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court
“I hate court. I didn’t want to be at court. No one likes court. It’s boring. It’s terrible. It’s chaotic. And having to tell someone they have to do five sessions with me to get an...
The Notorious BHL: Bernard-Henri Lévy on Peshmerga and the Fate of the World
Long hailed as France’s most famous – and controversial – public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy has been making waves through his writing and speaking (and outsized personality) since his...
The Poverty Porn of Roma
With its current 96% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing (the overwhelming majority of critics weighing in being from the white male demographic unsurprisingly), many anointing it the...
Divide and Conquer: The Corporate Coup d’Etat
Thanks to Canadian filmmakers Mark Archbarand and Jennifer Abbott’s 2003 doc The Corporation (which was subsequently turned into the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and...
The Blessing brings a bright moral compass to a dark world
Watching The Blessing, Hunter Robert Baker and Jordan Fein’s exquisite portrait of one family on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, during the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival this month marked...
Call Her Ganda is an indictment of Western imperialism, transphobia, and injustice
PJ Raval’s Call Her Ganda is a film I’ve been raving about since catching it at Hot Docs last spring. It’s the story of Jennifer Laude – Filipina, trans and a sometime sex worker – whose...