Thom Powers: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: Rise and Shine World Sales has acquired sales rights to the documentary A Sisters’ Tale ahead of its international premiere Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Gregg Goldstein Documentaries have flooded streaming services and arthouse theaters for years, with good reason: They’re usually the most inexpensive indie films to produce and can spark cultural conversations that attract big audiences. But with so many to choose from, how can filmmakers set theirs apart from the pack? In Toronto, directors are taking some unconventional approaches: inserting new theatrical scenes to present unfilmable histories, capturing mind-bending aerial stunts that go far beyond typical doc photography, using aural techniques that duplicate protagonists’ experiences and even bringing doc elements into other genres.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the topic of a new feature documentary, “The Bibi Files” produced by Oscar winner Alex Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom. The two-hour docu, which will screen as work-in-progress at the Toronto Film Intl. Festival, features never-before-seen police interrogation footage of Netanyahu.

Take one conservative anti-Trumper, add a liberal Hollywood filmmaker, toss them in a Hot Tub Time Machine, and what comes out? One of the most talked-about documentaries set to premiere at next month’s Toronto Film Festival.

Ex-GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a prominent critic of Donald Trump, will get a major platform at the Toronto International Film Festival just weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Documentaries about the rise and fall of media company Vice, former Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger and disability rights activist Patrice Jetter are heading to the Toronto Film Festival.

Annika Pham In a keynote conversation Tuesday at Copenhagen’s leading international documentary festival CPH:DOX, Academy Award winning filmmaker and producer Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”) talked honestly about the winding road of making it in the documentary world, the creative process, and the lessons of life, partly learned from singer-songwriter Paul Simon. The inspirational talk at the baroque Kunsthal Charlottenborg exhibition space, with moderator Thom Powers, Toronto Film Festival programmer, was a prelude to the festival’s screening of Gibney’s two-part doc “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” which debuted on MGM+ March 17.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Filmmakers Alex Gibney, Johan Grimonprez and Laura Huertas Millan, along with industry figures Jessica Harrop from Sandbox and Marie Nelson from Hot Docs will be among the speakers at CPH:CONFERENCE, the discussion program at documentary festival CPH:DOX. The program, which is curated in partnership with the training initiative Documentary Campus, has the theme “rebuilding narratives.” The conference will kick off on March 18 with a collaboration with the DISCO Network – made up of Ambulante, AFLAMUNA, DocsMX, Doc Society, DocSP, Docubox, In-Docs and India Docs – who will present and workshop “Our Declaration of Independence.” This session, led by Jad Abi-Khalil (AFLAMUNA) and Beadie Finzi (Doc Society), is a result of an initiative aiming to “articulate the importance of independent documentaries to culture, society and democracy, and to advocate for the resources and platforms they deserve.” In the mornings of March 19-21, there will be thought-provoking conversations with filmmakers featured in this year’s CPH:DOX program.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…,” Charles Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities. The same phrase could describe the state of the documentary industry. 

The Toronto International Film Festival announced its lineup of documentaries this morning, a slate that includes the world premiere of a film on uncancelled comedian Louis C.K., as well as fresh work from nonfiction greats Raoul Peck, Frederick Wiseman, Errol Morris, Lucy Walker and Roger Ross Williams.

World class climber Jimmy Chin met his future wife, filmmaker Chai Vasarhelyi, over a mountain – of footage.

Addie Morfoot Contributor During a talk at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX on Wednesday, Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams spoke about a wide variety of topics, including his latest documentary, “Love to Love You, Donna Summer,” how insanely expensive it is to garner a doc Oscar nomination, and why the racial reckoning that occurred in the nonfiction community after George Floyd’s murder is over. Despite celebrity-driven docs being all the rage, Williams admitted that he usually rejects them. “I have so many celebrities who come to me about making a documentary (about their life),” the helmer told moderator Thom Powers. “It’s never worked out because if they are a living celebrity, who is very popular, they are all about control. It’s a piece of propaganda about their image and their career. It’s not a documentary.”

Addie Morfoot Contributor On Monday, Oscar-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia told a roomful of CPH:DOX Conference attendees that he might have never directed a nonfiction film had it not been for Harvey Weinstein “killing” his first narrative feature film, “The Warrior.” “The Warrior,” starring the late Irrfan Khan (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “The Lunchbox”), is about a mercenary directed by an evil warlord to wreak havoc on a rural village in Rajasthan by forcing the poor inhabitants to pay taxes. In 2003, the film won two BAFTAs for outstanding debut and outstanding British Film. But according to Kapadia, the film garnered no attention outside of England due to Weinstein, who bought worldwide rights – excluding the U.K. – in 2001.

Addie Morfoot Contributor When CPH:DOX shifted from a fall festival to a spring-based fest in 2017, it got out of IDFA’s shadow and grew into one of the most influential documentary events of the year. “It made a big jump in prominence when it moved to March because it fit into the calendar in a more exciting way for a lot of documentary stakeholders,” Thom Powers, lead documentary programmer for Toronto Film Festival, says. “It became a great place for films coming out of Sundance to have a European launch. It’s also become a very significant place for films to make world premieres near the beginning of the year, which can then send them on a circuit, traveling to other festivals like Hot Docs or DOC NYC.”

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.

TIFF just announced a whole lot more movies for this year’s festival.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and daughter Chelsea Clinton now have double the reason to head to the Toronto International Film Festival next month. TIFF unveiled its documentary lineup today, which includes the world premiere of In Her Hands, a film executive produced by the Clintons through their banner Hidden Light.