Kirsten Johnson: Last News

seven Ukranian filmmakers urged for a cultural boycott of Russia, claiming that it would be “an attempt to cleanse the world of the propaganda of a terrorist state”.Statements were released by several filmmakers including Volcano director Roman Bondarchuk, Valentyn Vasyanovych (Atlantis) and Nariman Aliev (Homeward) explaining their reasoning.At Visions du Réel, producer Illia Gladshtein and director Nadia Parfan, whose film Heat Singers screened at the festival in 2019, sat on the panel. They were joined by Maksim Nakonechnyi, whose debut film Butterfly Vision will show at Cannes next month, and photographer-director Artem Iurchenko (Cursed Days, 2018).Nakonechnyi has been shooting in Ukraine since the first days of the war in February.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Fusion Entertainment has signed veteran documentary filmmaker Katy Chevigny for management on the heels of the world premiere of her first narrative feature, “The Easy Kind,” at the Telluride Film Festival. Chevigny has produced or directed over a dozen documentary features and series over the course of her career, and she’s the co-founder of the long-running independent production company Big Mouth Productions. She won an Emmy in 2023 for directing two episodes of “Home” for A24 / AppleTV+.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “The Easy Kind” isn’t the easiest kind of film to describe for someone who is getting a first look, as audiences did in its premiere screenings at the Telluride Film Festival this past weekend. On first blush, it might appear to be a documentary of the esteemed country singer Elizabeth Cook, who enjoys a sizable following for an independent artist, between her nearly 25-year discography and her SiriusXM radio show.

We are becoming part machine.

Naman Ramachandran Jon Hamm, Ryan Coogler and Molly Shannon are among the luminaries headlining a new podcast that reunites former Sundance Film Festival directors John Cooper and Tabitha Jackson. Titled “The Film That Blew My Mind,” the first season of the podcast will have 20 episodes and will be co-hosted by Cooper and Jackson.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Documentary veterans Natalie Bullock Brown, Kirsten Johnson, Mary Lampson and Jacqueline Olive are the inaugural documentary film fellows for the documentary film in the public interest research initiative by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.As the first cohort of doc film fellows, the foursome will join the center for the fall 2023 semester. There, each fellow will conduct research and do public education activities about questions facing the documentary film field and civic information.Led by Shorenstein Center’s director Nancy Gibbs and doc filmmaker Sara Archambault, the initiative, which was established in March, will work to examine the challenges facing the documentary field and their impacts on civic life and information.“In this challenging moment for media and our information ecosystem, we are excited that the Shorenstein Center can provide the support and infrastructure to drive renewed and creative thinking about complex issues in the documentary film space,” says Gibbs.Archambault adds: “As the initiative considers the vital role of documentary film in our civic life, this group of fellows will advance research in documentary ethics, practices, pathways to audiences, and new directions for the field.

Charna Flam The Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences has launched an Academy Originals podcast, “The Art of the Documentary.” The new podcast is hosted by Oscar-nominee and “Crip Camp” documentarian Jim LeBrecht. The six-episode season will include LeBrecht sitting down with documentary filmmakers, as they reveal to the host and the audience their filmmaking processes. “The Art of the Documentary,” will chronicle “how a filmmaker approaches their subject and how they engage with it,” according to the press release. The podcast will highlight how the various documentarians work to find new filmmaking approaches, all in an effort to tell their stories in innovative ways. LeBrecht and guests will discuss how they achieve special access and how far they’ll go to get their story — even if that means taking dangerous risks.

Lise Pedersen Cannes Docs, the Marché du Film sidebar dedicated to documentary film, has unveiled the line-up of its Doc Day, which unspools on May 23, as the final event in at Cannes Docs. Veteran U.S. cinematographer and documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, president of Cannes Festival’s Œil d’or Jury which hands out an award to the best doc in Cannes’ Official Selection, will open the morning session in a conversation with writer, director and producer Guetty Felin (“Ayiti Mon Amour,” “Closer to the Dream”). Entitled “Cinema and the Pleasures of the Impossible,” it will explore the many ways filmmaking creates possibilities to search for the invisible, to bring life to the dead and to time travel in their lives.

Kristen Stewart is no stranger to biopics, with “Seberg” in 2019 and “Spencer” in 2021. Now she has another to add to her upcoming projects, but this one has a meta twist.

Nick Schager Film CriticA nonfiction collage that plumbs the complicated relationship between filmmaker and subject, “Cameraperson” finds cinematographer Kirsten Johnson assembling snippets from her past works in order to evoke an assortment of intricate, uneasily resolved questions. The person behind the camera for “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Darfur Now” and “Citizenfour” (among many others), Johnson has made a decades-long career out of traveling the globe for stories that uncover hidden truths — a modus operandi reflected in her backward gaze, seeking the larger threads uniting the images and moments that continue to affect her. Without narration or a conventional storyline, it’s a uniquely insightful memoir-cum-critical-treatise that, after its Sundance premiere, should garner substantial attention from the documentary crowd.Aside from opening text that explains the diary-like nature of the project, “Cameraperson” offers little overt context regarding its intentions, instead diving headfirst into snapshot after snapshot from Johnson’s earlier films.

Lise Pedersen Ukrainian filmmakers and producers discussed the act of resisting war through images during an online talk Thursday at international documentary film festival Visions du Réel.The panel was made up of producer Illia Gladshtein and director Nadia Parfan, whose film “Heat Singers” screened at the festival in 2019, Maksim Nakonechnyi, whose debut film “Butterfly Vision” will be in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes next month, and photographer and director Artem Iurchenko (“Cursed Days,” 2018).Nakonechnyi has been shooting in Ukraine since the first days of the war and Parfan returned from an artist’s residence in Egypt in the wake of the Russian invasion to document what was happening in her country. Iurchenko, who is based in Paris, has been traveling across Europe in his car since the start of the war, transporting refugees, equipment, medical and humanitarian aid to and from Ukraine.

Lise Pedersen Opening her masterclass at doc film festival Visions du Réel in Switzerland, cinematographer and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson – an Emmy and Sundance award winner for “Dick Johnson Is Dead” – started by naming each and every member of the technical crew on set. “What I often find upsetting with cinema is that we forget to acknowledge all the people it takes to make these moments together.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorSwiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel has opened in Nyon with a homage to Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravicius, who was killed while filming in Ukraine last week. The 45 year old, best known for his conflict-zone documentary “Mariupolis,” which was screened at the 2016 edition of the fest and has been added to this year’s lineup, was a festival regular.

Emmy nominations in the doc categories are giving films passed over by the Oscars a shot at some trophies of their own.

Today, the 2020 Critics Choice Documentary Awards were handed out. The fifth annual non-fiction offshoot of the Critics Choice Awards, it’s obviously given out by the Critics Choice Association, of which I’m a member. As such, I did vote on these awards (including for some of the winners), but regardless of that, the crop of honorees is really top-notch. Sure, there were some snubs, like Miss Americana and Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You, but largely, this is a terrific batch of nominees, which in turn became a great group of winners. The biggest award went to Dick Johnson is Dead, which took home Best Documentary Feature, as well as Best Director for Kirsten Johnson. All of the winners can be found below…

A documentary maker who repeatedly staged her father’s death to help her deal with his descent into dementia has said the film is “an act of defiance”.