Daniel Lombroso: Last News

Naman Ramachandran Luana Bajrami has won best director and the Discovery Award for best debut feature for “The Hill Where Lionesses Roar” at the 29th Raindance Film Festival (Oct. 27 – Nov.

Marta Balaga “White Noise” director Daniel Lombroso’s interest in the alt-right started in 2016, five months before Donald’s Trump’s election. Working as a reporter for The Atlantic magazine, he spent three years in the field, starting his research on Reddit and 4chan before gaining the trust of three of the movement’s brightest stars: Richard Spencer, organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville; social media personality Mike Cernovich; and Canadian activist Lauren Southern.“It was a slow process,” says Lombroso.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn “White Noise,” Daniel Lombroso’s lively and disturbing documentary portrait of three alt-right influencers, there’s a riveting scene in which Richard Spencer, a rock star of white nationalism who talks like a noodgy corporate assistant and has meticulous gelled hair that’s supposed to be his designer version of a Hitler fade (though Hitler didn’t have James Garner’s sideburns), is getting ready to give a speech at Michigan State University. In the white-cinder-block green room, he goes into a panic when he learns that there’s a riot taking place outside, with hundreds of students protesting his appearance.You’d think he might welcome the publicity; Steve Bannon certainly would.

To make his feature documentary about the rise of the alt-right movement, Daniel Lombroso embedded himself and became friendly with three of its leading figures. For that, he deserves our sympathy.

A queasily riveting documentary that puts the audience far closer than comfort to some of the worst people in the world, ‘White Noise’ builds a template for how in the modern media landscape, the need to confront and make noise can overlap with greed and narcissism to create deadly results. Rather than present a sweeping portrait of the alt-right, he shrewdly picks three of its showier spokespeople—Richard Spencer, Lauren Southern, and Mike Cernovic—and follows what happens as infamy, infighting, and the consequences of their hate speech takes its toll on both its progenitors and the world they inflict themselves on.