Laura Poitras: Last News

Kicking off the nomination season, ‘Fire Of Love’ with seven and ‘Good Night Oppy’ with six lead all comers in nominations for the 7th Annual Critics Choice Documentary Awards.

Clayton Davis The Critics Choice Documentary Awards announced its nominees where Sara Dosa’s lava-fueled love story “Fire of Love” led the field with seven nominations including best documentary feature and director. Co-distributed by National Geographic and Neon, the film’s Ryan White’s “Good Night Oppy,” the moving reflection on the Mars rovers, received a hearty six-nom tally including editing and score. “This year’s nominees prove that documentaries of all lengths and formats are advancing nonfiction media like never before,” said Christopher Campbell, Co-President of the Critics Choice Association Documentary Branch.

Neon has closed a revolving credit facility with Comerica Bank and said it will use the capital to build on its core film business and “aggressively” expand its production slate.

Naman Ramachandran Oscar and Venice-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”) and fellow filmmakers Georgia Oakley (“Blue Jean”), Roberto Minervini (“What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?”) and Ondi Timoner (“Last Flight Home”) were among those who protested against the imprisonment of Iranian filmmakers and other incarcerated artists around the world, and to demonstrate support for the tenacious women of Iran who are challenging for their freedom at the BFI London Film Festival on Monday. They joined festival director Tricia Tuttle, producer Madeleine Molyneaux (“Gospel Hill”); actors Aurélia Petit (“Saint Omer”) and Taki Mumladze (“A Room of My Own”); actor and writer Mariam Khundadze (“To Batumi and every single memory”); writer Morgan M. Page (“Framing Agnes”); industry leaders Tabitha Jackson, Clare Binns and Jason Wood; and other festival delegates in a moment of solidarity and reflection.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Don’t expect any drive-inscreenings, virtual screenings, mask mandates or reduced capacity theaters at the 30th annual Hamptons Intl. Film Festival. This year’s edition will look and feel as it did way back in 2019. The Long Island-based fest, which runs Oct. 7-16, will screen 69 feature films and 51 shorts that are 54% female-directed and represent 34 countries from around the world. Also back at HIFF are a bevy of fancy cocktail hours and the fest’s Rowdy Talks series, which will include a conversation with director, screenwriter and producer Chris Columbus.

When September rolls around, it means one thing for many of the top filmmakers in the world – time to hit the road. Venice, Telluride and Toronto come in rapid succession, to the point of overlapping. But for documentary filmmakers eager to showcase their work, there’s another important stop to make in September: the Camden International Film Festival in mid-coast Maine.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor U.S. director-producer Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar and an Emmy with Edward Snowden film “Citizenfour,” and recently took the Golden Lion at Venice with opioid epidemic pic “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” will be the Guest of Honor at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The 35th edition of the festival takes place from Nov. 9 to 20. Poitras will be honored at IDFA with the Retrospective and Top 10 programs, in which she curates 10 films. The Top 10 program includes reflections on political imprisonment (“Hunger” by Steve McQueen; “This Is Not a Film” by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), incarceration and psychiatry (Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”), and genocide (Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”). As part of the Top 10, Poitras will be in conversation with several of her selected filmmakers during the festival’s public talks program.

Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras will be guest of honor at the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), running from November 9 to 20.

The People’s Choice Award from the just wrapped 2022 Toronto International Film Festival has gone to Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.  First Runner Up is Canada’s own Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. And Second Runner Up was Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The Documentary Award went to Black Ice, and the Midnight Madness winner was Weird: The Al Yankovich Story             .

The Oscar race came into sharper focus at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with actors like Brendan Fraser and Michelle Yeoh cementing their lead contender status, and big-budget studio efforts like The Fablemans and Glass Onion premiering to raves.

Diane Weyermann’s impact continues to be felt throughout the documentary field, with her presence evident on some of the fall’s most talked about nonfiction films, including Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Steve James’s A Compassionate Spy.

Diane Garrett On Friday, during the 18th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, organizers unveiled a Diane Weyermann Fellowship at Points North Institute.Weyermann, the former chief content officer at Participant and former director of the Sundance Institute’s documentary film program, died last October of cancer.

NewFest said Thursday that HBO’s upcoming Mama’s Boy, the documentary about the life of Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, will be the opening-night film for the New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival. The fest, which also announced its full lineup, kicks off its 34th edition October 13.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras sharply criticized the Toronto and Venice film festivals today for programming documentaries connected with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggesting the decision bordered on a “whitewashing” of history.

HBO Documentary Films has acquired U.S. television and streaming rights to Oscar winner Laura Poitras’s film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, fresh from its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and sneak preview at Telluride.

Neon has acquired North American and UK rights to the horror-drama Handling the Undead, marking the narrative feature debut of Thea Hvistendahl, who previously directed the documentary Adjø Montebello and several short films, including the SXSW Grand Jury Award-nominated Virgins4lyfe. The project reteams the distributor with Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, who starred in its Oscar-nominated romantic drama The Worst Person in the World, directed by Joachim Trier.

“Photography was always a way to walk through fear,” says Nan Goldin in her raspy voice as photos fill the screen. Nuzzled within the textures of the snapshots live friends, lovers, and drifters, all eternally preserved through the eyes of the consecrated artist who rose to prominence in the 80s thanks to her visual chronicling of queer life and culture in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

The scourge of the opioid crisis has been documented in the press and in government reports; the culpability of the Sacklers, the multi-billionaire pharmaceutical family whose former company Purdue made the painkiller Oxycontin, has been successfully dramatized. The Sacklers are everywhere in Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but they are supporting players.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the photographer Nan Goldin tells a woeful, revealing, and in its way rather funny anecdote about how in the 1980s, when she first gathered up her photographs — casually transgressive images of her and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, along with shots of the assorted other people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village New York subculture — and tried to shop them around to galleries and museums, they were roundly rejected, because the arbiters of taste, who were inevitably men, favored photographs that were black-and-white and composed in elegant meticulous ways. Goldin’s photographs were in garish verité color, set in environments that were so scruffy (messy bohemian apartments, ordinary people just lolling around) that it looked, to the gallery mavens, like there was no visual organization to them, no art.

Neon in association with National Geographic Documentary Films said director Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love will cross $1 million at the box office this weekend, becoming the biggest documentary release of the year for combined domestic and international gross. The film opened this summer and is entering its ninth week in theaters nationally. It will stream on Disney+ later this year.

Gregg Goldstein Since 2007, Venice’s Queer Lion Award has reflected and elevated the best in LGBTQ cinema. Fifteen years later, founder Daniel N. Casagrande said this year’s Venice Film Festival will be “the most queer edition ever.” Among the fest’s 30 LGBTQ-themed titles, 19 are competing for the Queer Lion, including a record six films from the main competition. They include Todd Field’s orchestra conductor drama “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett; Darren Aronofsky’s estranged gay father study “The Whale,” featuring Brendan Fraser; Laura Poitras’ doc “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” chronicling bisexual artist Nan Goldin’s life and anti-opioid crusade; Andrea Pallaoro’s trans woman family drama “Monica”; Emanuele Crialese’s “L’immensità,” starring Penélope Cruz as the mother of a transgender child; and Gianni Amelio’s “Il signore delle formiche,” the true story of an Italian artist jailed under an infamous anti-gay law.