Nancy Buirski: Last News

Though you might think Midnight Cowboy’s main claim to fame is one of the most famous improvised lines in screen history (“I’m walkin’ here!”), Nancy Buirski’s fascinating and really quite hypnotic documentary will introduce more thoughts and perspectives on a truly underrated Hollywood milestone. Directed by John Schlesinger in 1969, Buirski’s subject film has the rare distinction of being the only X-rated movie to win the Best Picture Oscar, although that claim is put to the test here, opening up a whole other can of worms in the process.

Addie Morfoot Contributor This year’s Oscar feature documentary shortlist is made up of a group of 15 films that, by and large, big streamers aren’t interested in sharing with subscribers. Six films that made it to the shortlist — Lea Glob’s “Apolonia, Apolonia,” Nancy Buirski’s “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Kaouther Ben Hania’s “Four Daughters,” Maciek Hamela’s “In the Rearview,” Luke Lorentzen’s “A Still Small Voice” and Sam Green’s “32 Sounds” — have theatrical distribution, but were not picked up by a major streaming company such as Netflix, Amazon or Apple TV+.

Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman and late filmmaker Nancy Buirski will be honored at the Hamptons Doc Fest in New York next month.

Nancy Buirski, a PGA Award winner who produced the 2016 film Loving that was inspired by her documentary, directed several films including last year’s Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy and founded the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, died August 29. Her company Augusta Films announced the news but did not provide details.

Michaela Zee Nancy Buirski, the award-winning documentary filmmaker known for “The Loving Story” and “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” has died. Augusta Films shared the news of her death on Wednesday in a statement, writing, “Nancy’s extensive and rich body of work delved into a wide range of social, cultural and historical issues with keen insight, humanity and above all, artistry.” Buirski directed 2011’s “The Loving Story,” a documentary about the Supreme Court case of Loving v.

When Midnight Cowboy came out in 1969, Miami Herald critic John Huddy heralded its arrival with a string of superlatives: “Staggering, shattering, heartbreaking, hilarious, tragic, raw and absurd.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A movie, good, bad or indifferent, is always “about” something. But some movies are about more things than others, and as you watch “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Nancy Buirski’s rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary, what comes into focus is that “Midnight Cowboy” was about so many things that audiences could sink into the film as if it were a piece of their own lives. The movie was about loneliness. It was about dreams, sunny yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and the shock of really seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland, which had never been captured onscreen with the telephoto authenticity it had here. The movie was also about the larger sexual revolution — what the scuzziness of “free love” really looked like, and the overlap between the homoerotic and hetero gaze. It was about money and poverty and class and how they could tear your soul apart. It was about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. It was about a new kind of acting, built on the realism of Brando, that also went beyond it.

EXCLUSIVE: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is developing a docuseries about pioneering Black basketball players including Chuck Cooper, Earl Lloyd and Nat Clifton.

EXCLUSIVE: Kino Lorber and Zeitgeist Films have picked up North American rights to Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy — a new documentary on the making of the iconic John Schlesinger film, from acclaimed documentarian Nancy Buirski (The Loving Story).

EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Rapp, the Star Trek: Discovery actor who accused Kevin Spacey of making unwanted sexual advances, is prepping a docuseries about abuse in Hollywood.

EXCLUSIVE: Gladys Knight, the Empress of Soul who recorded hits such as Midnight Train to Georgia and I Heard It Through The Grapevine, is gearing up for a scripted mini-series about her life.

EXCLUSIVE: Nancy Buirski, director of feature doc Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, has signed a development deal with Cineflix Productions.

The Hamptons International Film Festival will screen Cannes Jury Prize Winner EO by Jerzy Skolimowski, Phyllis Nagy’s Call Jane, and Decision to Leave by Cannes Best Director winner Park Chan-wook among others when the 30th edition unspools October 7-16.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThe recent centenary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which was marked by a number of new documentary features among other tributes, struck many in large part because such a major event had been so successfully erased from U.S. history.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaMore than 50 years after it hit theaters and ushered in a new and more sexually daring style of on-screen entertainment, “Midnight Cowboy” continues to rank among the greatest American films ever made. It’s still the first and only best picture winner at the Oscars to be rated X, an indication of just how barrier-breaking the movie was when it debuted.Now, a new documentary from Nancy Buirski will explore the behind-the-scenes odyssey to get the story of two small-time grifters produced, as well as the tumultuous era in which the movie was released and embraced.

EXCLUSIVE: Shout! Studios has acquired worldwide rights to Emmy-winning director Nancy Buirski’s documentary A Crime on the Bayou, the third in her trilogy of films that explore vital stories from the Civil Rights era.

When Gary Duncan was arrested on trumped-up charges, essentially for being Black, his situation was hardly unique. But his readiness to fight the bogus case was nothing short of heroic, especially in 1966 Plaquemines Parish, near New Orleans, part of a region that one of the interviewees in Nancy Buirski's film calls a "totalitarian nation." The word "totalitarian" is uttered several times in A Crime on the Bayou, and on the evidence of this real-life drama, it isn't hyperbole.