Rachel Lears: Last News

Roadside Attractions has taken domestic rights for To The End, the follow-up film from Rachel Lears (Knock Down The House), and set a Dec. 9 theatrical-only release date.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Documentary filmmaking has never been a profession one enters into to get rich — though for a brief period it seemed possible. Cable expanded documentary’s reach to wider audiences in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and films like “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “March of the Penguins,” and “An Inconvenient Truth” became legitimate box-office breakthroughs, but nonfiction features on the whole remained something of a stepchild within the larger Hollywood ecosystem until 2017, when Netflix acquired Brian Fogel’s “Icarus” for $5 million.

EXCLUSIVE: The trailer to Rachel Lears’ new documentary To the End debuts on over one thousand screens in theaters today, but we’ve got your first look at it here.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is engaged to longtime partner Riley Roberts! The U.S. congresswoman confirmed the happy news on Twitter Thursday. «It’s true! Thank you all for the well wishes,» Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response to a piece by  about the news.«We got engaged last month in my family's hometown in Puerto Rico,» the Democrat told the outlet via Twitter.

Bob Iger is barely out the door at the Walt Disney Company and a film from a scion of the founding family has already come along to give the well compensated ex-CEO a kick in the ass. However, besides attracting a lot of attention, the Abigail Disney co-directed The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales documentary doesn’t have much to add to the discussions of income inequity, ice cold hearted corporations and the legacy of the Reagan Revolution, except a high profile and well-heeled surname.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaIn 2019, Rachel Lears electrified Sundance with “Knock Down the House,” a fly-on-the-wall look at a group of progressive candidates hoping to ride grassroots campaigns to Washington. That film, which played like cri de coeur while the Trump administration was at the height of its power, also benefitted from capturing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while she was still a bartender turned upstart congressional hopeful, a bit of kismet that resulted in a $10 million sale to Netflix.Three years later, Lears returns to Sundance in a different key with “To the End.” It’s a more somber look at a group of activists who are trying to do everything possible to pressure the U.S.

Returning to similar thematic territory as her previous 2019 documentary feature, “Knock Down the House,” director Rachel Lears turns to the climate crises in her follow-up, “To the End.” Much like that previous film, Lears follows four female climate activists — Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Sunrise Movement Executive Director Varshini Prakesh, Justice Democrats Executive Director Alexandra Rojas, and Roosevelt Institute Policy Director Rhiana Gunn-Wright — as they work to write and institute the Green New Deal.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticUnstoppable force meets immovable object in “To the End.” Rachel Lears’ documentary inspires in its portrait of youthful activists organizing to push impactful climate-change policies into American political reality — and exasperates in the resistance with which that urgent quest is greeted on both sides of the entrenched-power aisle. Covering several years of fast-moving events, this Sundance premiere is too exclusively U.S.-focused to be particularly viable for offshore programmers, but its topicality should stir sales interest on home turf.Like the director’s last feature “Knock Down the House,” about the 2018 Congressional election, this one also throws a spotlight on New York state candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Janet W. Lee Tribeca Film Institute and Gucci have announced the grantees of this year’s Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund.The grant, funded by Gucci, provides production finances for feature-length documentary films examining domestic and international social justice issues.Eleven projects — Jon Sesrie-Goff’s “After Sherman,” Shaunak Sen’s “Airborne,” Sabaah Folayan’s “Ain’t I A Woman,” Débora Souza Silva’s “Black Mothers,” Nesa Azimi’s “Driver,” Jasiri, Moyo and Duke’s “Jasiri,” Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s “King Coal,” Zaynê Akyol’s “Rojek One Day,” Rachel Lears’ “To The End,” Sura Mallouh’s “Untitled” and Kate Stonehill’s “Untitled Privacy Project” — have been selected this year to receive a total of $140,000 in funding.