The Hamptons Doc Fest announced the full film slate for its 13th year, expanded from 5 days to 10 days and running online December 4-13. Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI kicks off this year’s virtual festival boasting a lineup of 35 films that cover a range of topics including, politics, public health, environment, American history, and the arts.
“We had hoped this year to welcome you in person to an expanded Hamptons Doc Fest program at multiple cinemas in December, but, as with everything in 2020, we are innovating,” said Jacqui Lofaro, Executive Director of the festival. “Therefore, we are pleased to have you join us for our first ever online festival, with 35 films to be watched at home, with family and friends, at your convenience, over an expanded 10-day festival. Our lineup is vibrant and diverse, and we hope you will find it as entertaining and enlightening as we do.”
Each year, the festival gives special recognition to participating filmmakers. Frederick Wiseman, director of CITY HALL, will receive this year’s Pennebaker Career Achievement Award; and UNITED WE SING will receive the Art & Inspiration Award sponsored by The Tee & Charles Addams Foundation.
THROUGH THE NIGHT will receive the Robin L. Long Human Rights Award and will be accompanied by a Q&A with director Loira Limbal, hosted by HDF Advisory Board member Susan Margolin. FISH AND MEN, will receive The Andrew Sabin Family Foundation Environmental Award.
Douglas Elliman will sponsor two films for free online screenings to the community. The films selected for the Douglas Elliman Free Community Screenings have a close connection to the Hamptons, profiling resident artists and their work: BARNEY’S WALL: PORTRAIT OF A GAME CHANGER, directed by Sandy Gotham Meehan and Williams Cole and UNSTOPPABLE: SEAN SCULLY AND THE ART OF EVERYTHING directed by Nick Willing.
2020 Hamptons Doc Fest Lineup
A CRIME ON THE BAYOU
USA, 2020, 72 min
Director: Nancy Buirski
Producers: Nancy Buirski, Claire L. Chandler, Susan Margolin
Editor: Anthony Ripoli
Cinematographer: Rex Miller
Gary Duncan, a young Black teenager bravely challenges Leander Perez, the cigar puffing D.A. in Plaquemines Parish, the most powerful white supremacist in 1960s Louisiana. With the help of Richard Sobol, a young Jewish attorney, systemic racism meets its match in courtroom battles that go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nancy Buirski founded the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 1998 and directed it for 10 years. She made her first documentary in 2011, The Loving Story, which won an Emmy. She went on to produce the feature version of the documentary, Loving, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2017. She also made Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq, By Sidney Lumet and The Rape of Recy Taylor, which was awarded the Human Rights prize at the Venice International Film Festival.
ACASA MY HOME
USA, 2020, 86 min
Director: Radu Ciorniciuc
Producers: Radu Ciorniciuc, Alina David, Erkko Lyytinen, Monica Lazurean-Gorgan
Editor: Andrei Gorgan
Cinematographers: Radu Ciorniciuc, Mircea Topoleanu
Acasa My Home tells the story of a family that lived for 20 years in the wilderness of Vacaresti Delta, until the place gained the status of a protected area – Vacaresti Natural Park – the first urban, natural park in Romania. For four years, director Radu Ciorniciuc followed the Enache family through their great adventure: from a life in complete harmony with nature to a life full of challenges in the great urban jungle of the capital. The film won seven film festival awards in 2020, including for Cinematography at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It is the director’s feature debut.
Radu Ciorniciuc is a producer and director who co-founded the first independent media organization in Romania in 2012, Casa Jurnalistului, a community of reporters specialized in in-depth, long-form and multimedia reporting. His research interests have focused on human rights, animal welfare and environmental issues across the globe. His previous film is the short Sick Chicken: What You Need to Know made in 2014.
DOUGLAS ELLIMAN FREE COMMUNITY SCREENING
BARNEY’S WALL: PORTRAIT OF A GAME CHANGER
USA, 2019, 78 min
Directors: Sandy Gotham Meehan, Williams Cole
Producers: Sandy Gotham Meehan, Williams Cole
Editors: Kasia Plazinska, Williams Cole
Cinematographer: David Leitner
Fiery cultural/political activist, filmmaker, and bad-ass Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset battled 1950’s literary censorship, sexual taboos, and the era’s racial bigotry. Barney had, in effect, inspired the Sixties counterculture rebellion, defying censors and publishing and promoting the most radical writers of the day–among them Beckett, Burroughs, the Beats, Malcolm X, Che Guevara–along with the cream of Europe’s avant-garde, blowing the minds of mainstream middle America and fundamentally changing the culture.
The film probes the lasting political and cultural impact of Barney Rosset by focusing on Barney’s final act of creative expression, a sculptural wall mural he painted obsessively as a visual memoir of his life, through the memories of Barney’s friends, family and the artists who considered Barney a formative influence on their work.
Sandy Gotham Meehan works with independent filmmakers on narrative refinement and project development through her New York City film production company FoxHog Productions.
BEETHOVEN IN BEIJING
USA, 2019, 87 min
Directors: Jennifer Lin, Sharon Mullally
Producers: Sam Katz, Jennifer Lin
Editor: Rachel Sophia Stewart
Cinematographer: Paul Van Haute
Beethoven in Beijing is more than just an eye- (and ear-) opening look into a forgotten chapter in history when President Richard Nixon recruited the Philadelphia Orchestra to visit communist China in hopes of reopening the closed-off nation to the West. The film uses classical music and the legacy of this iconic American orchestra to reframe the narrative on U.S.-China relations. Director Jennifer Lin is a former China correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer; the idea for this film grew out of an assignment for the newspaper. Lin uses the historic 1973 tour as the starting point for her narrative, and ends it in the present, showing through musicians like composer Tan Dun and pianist Lang Lang how China is energizing the world of music.
Jennifer Lin is an author and former journalist with The Philadelphia Inquirer, including postings as a correspondent in Beijing, New York and Washington, D.C. Sharon Mullally is an Emmy Award-winning producer, director and editor whose work has appeared in more than 20 feature-length documentaries.
BEHIND THE STRINGS
USA, 2020, 59 min
Director: Hal Rifken
Producer: Michael Peroff
Editor: Tracy Cring
Cinematographer: Hal Rifken
When Mao’s Cultural Revolution ended, China’s door cracked open. Four young, classically trained musicians seized the opportunity to flee to the West. Their string quartet performed for 36 years in the U.S. and around the world. Behind the Strings tells how they got there, the price they paid to stay on top, and why China is now inviting them back to perform the chamber music that was previously banned.
Hal Rifken has worked as a cinematographer and documentary film producer/director for over 30 years. Prior to making Behind the Strings, Rifken had no experience with classical music. But after spending five years shooting this ambitious string quartet project, he says he now “knows a bit” about chamber music and why Mao’s Cultural Revolution banned it.
BLOODLESS: THE PATH TO DEMOCRACY
USA, 2020, 89 min
Directors: Bared Maronian
Producers: Silva Basmajian, Bared Maronian, Seda Grigoryan
Editor: Bared Maronian
Cinematographer: Bardig Kouyoumdjian
One beautiful spring morning, while resting in his hotel room in Yerevan, Armenia, Bared Maronian heard a commotion coming from outside. He opened the window and saw thousands of young men and women chanting while marching. He immediately grabbed his camera, ran down to the street and followed the march. He was documenting the blueprint of a non-violent, peaceful revolution that brought down a thirty-year-old established oligarchic regime. The revolution lasted one month, one week and one day. Not a single bullet was fired. Deemed short of a miracle, Bloodless is a riveting political thriller, capturing the story as events unfolded in the spring of 2018 in Armenia.
Bared Maronian is a four time Regional Emmy Award winning Lebanese-born American Armenian documentary filmmaker. Maronian has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the Haigazian University and is a graduate of the Broadcast Career Institute of Palm Beach, Florida.
PENNEBAKER CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD to FREDERICK WISEMANCITY HALL
USA, 2020, 272 min
Director: Frederick Wiseman
Producer: Frederick Wiseman
Editor: Frederick Wiseman
City Hall is Frederick Wiseman’s 43rd film. At 90 years old, Wiseman has a rich portfolio of some of the greatest nonfiction films ever made, films that are intimate, deeply researched portraits of people and places that shed light on American life. In addition to examining social and ethical questions, he also confronts the big metaphysical questions faced in life, such as illness and mortality. His films can also be a reflection on democracy. Wiseman said about this latest film, “I made City Hall to illustrate why government is necessary for people to successfully live together.”
City government touches almost every aspect of our lives. When it works well, life is good. When it doesn’t, trouble ensues. But most of us take for granted necessary civil services, such as police, fire, sanitation, veterans affairs, elder support, parks, professional licensing, record keeping of birth, marriage and death, as well as hundreds of other activities that support residents. City Hall shows the efforts by Boston’s government to provide these services to its citizens. The film also illustrates the variety of ways the city administration enters into civil discourse with the citizens of Boston. The film’s deep dive into its subject shows a city government successfully offering a wide variety of services to a diverse population.
The subjects of Wiseman’s films have spanned a wide range of topics, including a state hospital for the criminally insane, a high school, welfare center, juvenile court, boxing gym, ballet companies in New York and Paris, Central Park, a racetrack, and a Parisian cabaret theater. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote: “Taken together, this is work that presents a sweeping, continuing portrait of modern America, its institutions, social relations, administrative and bureaucratic controls and of course—right at the center of this filmmaker’s unyielding frame—its people.”
Wiseman received his BA from Williams College in 1951 and his LLB from Yale Law School in 1954. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won numerous awards, including four Emmys. He is also the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Society (2013), the George Polk Career Award (2006), and the American Society of Cinematographers Distinguished Achievement Award (2006), among many others.Josh Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, MoMA will present a short career overview of Wiseman’s work prior to the screening.
THE ANDREW SABIN FAMILY FOUNDATION ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD
FISH & MEN
USA, 2019, 85 min
Directors: Darby Duffin, Adam Jones
Producers: Darby Duffin, Adam Jones, Heidi Zimmerman
Editor: Heidi Zimmerman
Cinematographers: Derek McKane, Jonathan Millman
Do you relish every morsel of your exquisitely prepared, succulent seafood dinner? Of course you do. But did you know that 91% of our fish is imported and the U.S. is flooded with six billion tons of imported seafood. Consumers across America eat blissfully, unaware of where their seafood is from or knowing the dire consequences that a demand for five species of fish sourced from distant oceans brings to our shores. Fish & Men exposes the high cost of cheap fish in the modern seafood economy and the forces threatening local fishing communities and public health by revealing how our choices as consumers drive the global seafood trade.
Darby Duffin’s company On a Mission Media produces original short and long-form digital content. He is currently working on multiple projects, including producing a feature narrative and directing his second feature documentary. Adam Jones’s first job out of college was as a production assistant on a TV commercial campaign directed by Albert Maysles. He later began directing commercials. Fish & Men is his first feature.
There will be a Q&A following the film with co-directors Darby Duffin and Adam Jones moderated by Bonnie Brady, Executive Director, Long Island Commercial Fishing Association.
DOC FEST SHORTS, 7 shorts, 86 min
ALL THE POSSIBILITIES, 16 min
Directors: Marsha Gordon, Louis Cherry
Producers: Marsha Gordon, Louis Cherry
Editor: Kevin Wells
Cinematographers: Louis Cherry, Kevin Wells, Bruce DeBoer
A documentary about one of the most important American paintings that nobody has ever heard of: Artist Vernon Pratt’s 1,450 square foot systematic abstraction painting, “All the Possibilities of Filling Sixteenths (65,536)”, which was completed in 1982 but only recently exhibited posthumously.
A LONG WALK TO THE MOON, 14 min
Director: Connie Tais
Former Grumman engineers narrate the challenges and successes of being part of the historic construction of the Lunar Module for the Apollo program.
A SYRIAN WOMAN, 11 min
Directors: Khawla Al Hammouri, Louis Karim Sayad DeCaprio
Producers: Khawla Al Hammouri, Liz Charky, Nagham Osman
Six Syrian refugee women, living in Jordan, recount their stories of survival – from displacement, child-marriage, and trauma, to their resilience and hope to rebuild a better future for their children.
MAKING THE CASE, 10 min
Director: Jennifer Callahan
Producer: Jennifer Callahan
Editor: Hélène Attali
Cinematographer: Gordon Chou
Legal arguments were Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s daily currency, for which she is renowned, but what about her everyday life? In this short film she examines her handbags, revealing a corner of the mind that argued and won way-paving, historic cases. Jennifer Callahan is a filmmaker chronicling stories which go against the grain; her first feature, The Bungalows of Rockaway, illustrates 100 years of the comedies and dramas of New York City’s largest beach community and foregrounds urbanism, architectural history, and race/ethnicity.
NINE, 8 min
Director: Jane Musky
Producers: Jane Musky, Robert Morrison
Editor: Robert Morrison
Cinematographer: Joshua Echevarria
Nine is the story of a brave group of powerful young women who came together to petition for the inclusion of Woman’s Crew as a varsity sport at Boston University in the mid-1970’s. They went on to become national champions.
NINETY-TWO AND A QUARTER, 11 min
Director, Producer, Editor, Cinematographer: Helen Herbert
Sarah Hackett is a feisty nonagenarian who moves through the world with spirit, determination, and a strong desire to help others, despite devastating personal loss. This film celebrates growing old while still looking toward the future.
THE LITTLE TEA SHOP, 16 min
Directors: Matteo Servente, Molly J. Wexler
Producers: Joseph Carr, Asima Farooq, Molly J. Wexler
Editor: Laura Jean Hocking
Cinematographer: Ryan Earl Parker
The Little Tea Shop restaurant, founded by two women in 1918, encourages relationships that in turn create connections and opportunities. The atmosphere there created a perfect place for Suhair Lauck, a Palestinian immigrant, to take over in 1982.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
USA, 80 min, 2020
Director: Carolyn Jones
Producer: Lisa Frank
Editors: Laura Israel, Chelsea Smith
Cinematographer: Jaka Vinsek
In Case of Emergency paints a startling picture of our ERs stretched to the breaking point and exposes the extent of our nation’s broken safety net. All of our country’s biggest public health challenges—from COVID-19 to the opioid crisis to gun violence to lack of insurance—collide in emergency departments. Nearly half of all medical care in the U.S. is delivered in ERs, and nurses are on the frontlines, addressing our physical and emotional needs before sending us back out into the world. In Case of Emergency follows emergency nurses across the U.S, shedding light on their efforts to help break a sometimes-vicious cycle for patients under their care.
Carolyn Jones is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker who specializes in telling stories that shed light on issues of global concern. From people “living positively” with AIDS to women artists supporting entire communities and nurses on the front lines of our healthcare system, Jones has devoted her career to celebrating invisible populations and breaking down barriers.
KUBRICK BY KUBRICK
USA, 2020, 73 min
Director: Gregory Monro
Producers: Martin Laurent, Jeremy Zelnik
Editor: Philippe Baillon
Cinematographer: Radek Ladczuk
In the pantheon of all-time greatest filmmakers stands Stanley Kubrick. During the course of his long career he directed 13 feature films and three documentaries. Kubrick by Kubrick offers a rare journey into the life and films of the legendary Kubrick, featuring a treasure trove of unearthed interview recordings from the master himself who did not like to talk about his films. The film is built around a series of tape-recorded interviews that Michel Ciment, the French film critic and editor of Positif, conducted with Kubrick over a period of 20 years.
The film also features some of our most famous actors talking about their experiences with Kubrick: Jack Nicholson, Marisa Berenson, Peter Sellers, Tom Cruise, Shelley Duvall and Malcolm McDowell, to name just a few. Kubrick was known as a demanding perfectionist, which could bring him into conflict with his casts, but he often broke new ground in cinematography, creating innovative special effects that earned him acclaim.
Many of Kubrick’s films were nominated for Academy Awards or Golden Globes, but his only personal win of an Academy Award was for his work as director of special effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he also wrote, produced and directed. Steven Spielberg referred to 2001 as his generation’s “big bang”. The Shining starring Jack Nicholson is widely regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made. Kubrick was also the Director, Writer and Producer of A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket. His last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was completed shortly before his death in 1999 at the age of 70.
LOVE & STUFF
USA, 2020, 80 min
Director: Judith Helfand
Producers: Judith Helfand, Hilla Medalia, Julie Parker Benello
Editors: David Cohen, Marina Katz
Cinematographer: Daniel B. Gold
Seven months after helping her terminally ill mother during the end of her life in home-hospice, filmmaker Judith Helfand becomes a “new old” single mother at 50. Overnight, she’s pushed to deal with her stuff: 63 boxes of her parent’s heirlooms overwhelming her office-turned-future-baby’s room, the weight her mother had begged her to lose, and the reality of being a half century older than her daughter.
Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark worlds of chemical exposure, heedless corporate behavior and environmental injustice and make them personal, highly-charged and entertaining. Among her many films are the Sundance award-winning and two times Emmy nominated film Blue Vinyl and its Peabody Award-winning prequel A Healthy Baby Girl, as well as her global warming documentary Everything’s Cool. In 2009 she co-founded Working Films, one of the nation’s first non-profit dedicated to engagement, and in 2005, Chicken & Egg Pictures, a non-profit film fund dedicated to supporting women documentary directors with strategic grants and creative mentorship.
MEAT THE FUTURE
Canada, 2020, 88 min
Director: Liz Marshall
Producer: Liz Marshall
Editors: Carolyn Christie, Roland Schlimme
Cinematographer: John Price
Is it real meat or Frankenmeat? Some call it “cultivated meat”, a food science that grows real meat from animal cells in a controlled environment, free from disease and infection. Some see this as a revolution in food production, a sustainable way to feed the world in the future without the need to breed, raise and slaughter animals. At the forefront of this urgent new frontier is cardiologist Dr. Uma Valeti, the co-founder and CEO of Memphis Meats, one of the leading start-ups in the field. From a meatball which cost $18,000 per pound in 2016 to the world’s first “clean” chicken fillet in 2017 for a significantly lower cost, the film follows Valeti over three years as the cost of production continues to plummet, and consumers eye the birth of this industry.
Liz Marshall is an award-winning Canadian filmmaker. Her feature-length films, such as The Ghosts in Our Machine, explore social justice and environmental themes through strong characters.
OPENING NIGHT FILM
MLK/FBI
USA, 2020, 104 min
Director: Sam Pollard
Producer: Benjamin Hedin
Editor: Laura Tomaselli
Cinematographer: Robert Chappell
One of the darkest chapters in the history of the FBI is how Director J. Edgar Hoover used every dirty trick in his arsenal to discredit and disempower Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on newly discovered and declassified files, MLK/FBI explores the government’s stained history of targeting MLK and other Black activists. This is the first film to uncover the extent of the FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Dr. King during the height of the Civil Rights movement. Among the voices heard in this powerful film are Andrew Young, James Comey and Clarence Jones. According to former FBI Director James Comey, a fabricated letter sent to Dr. King and his wife, written to sound like a disgruntled King supporter imploring King to kill himself, represents “the darkest part of the FBI’s history.” Director Sam Pollard contrasts Hoover and Dr. King, going back and forth exploring the actions and motivations of both in the process of telling this tragic story.
Pollard is an accomplished feature film and television video editor and documentary producer/director whose work spans almost 30 years. His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside production Eyes on The Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads. He received an Emmy for one of his episodes in this series.
Between 1990 and 2000, Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee’s films: Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers and Bamboozled. Pollard and Lee also co-produced some documentary productions for the small and big screens: One, Four Little Girls, a feature-length documentary about the 1963 Birmingham church bombings, was nominated for an Academy Award. Pollard has been nominated for nine Emmys and won three, the most recent one in 2010 for Best Editing for Nonfiction Programming on the HBO documentary By the People: The Election of Barack Obama. He was the recipient of Hamptons Doc Fest Filmmakers’ Choice Award in 2018 for Sammy Davis Jr.: I Gotta Be Me.
There will be a Q&A following the film with director Sam Pollard and Variety’s Clayton Davis.
OPEKA
USA, 2019, 90 min
Director: Cam Cowan
Producers: Cam Cowan, Tiffany Peckosh-Soffrin
Editors: Tiffany Peckosh-Soffrin, Cam Cowan
Cinematographer: Cam Cowan
Pedro Opeka declined a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play professional soccer in his native Buenos Aires. He chose instead to become a missionary and live in one of the poorest countries in the world. The son of a bricklayer, he convinced destitute families living in Madagascar’s largest landfill that he could teach them how to build their own houses and, in the process, build their dignity. His mission is to prepare the children he saves to one day save their own country.
Believing that powerful movies can move the justice dial in ways conventional law and politics cannot, Cam stopped practicing law to study filmmaking and later created Sohei Productions to make documentaries focused on social justice issues. His first feature film about survival, Madagasikara, won over 20 awards at film festivals in 2018-19. Opeka, his second feature film, is about hope. Opeka received the Golden Palm Award at the Beverly Hills Film Festival 2020.Cam has a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
OVERLAND
USA, 2020, 105 min
Directors: Revere La Noue, Elisabeth Haviland James
Producers: Elisabeth Haviland James, Revere La NoueEditors: Elisabeth Haviland James, Revere La Noue
Cinematographer: Benjamin Pritchard
Husband and wife team Revere La Noue and Elisabeth Haviland James set off to make Overland as a response to an ever-modernizing world that leaves little room for the wild. While spending hundreds of hours in the field with three falconcers–American Lauren McGough, Emirati racer Khalifa bin Mejren and Italy’s Giovanni Granati–they discovered a shared humanity across cultures, borders and religions. The filmmakers were determined to film in pristine locations avoiding the imagery of our overly industrialized landscape. Through the use of a drone and with thoughtfully planned falcon flight routes they revealed stunning, dynamic compositions of open, borderless realms that had never been seen before. Amazingly, the falcons of Overland never seemed to mind the drone–maybe they thought it was too slow to be a threat or not tasty enough to eat.
Elisabeth Haviland James is a Peabody and Emmy winning filmmaker whose work has screened theatrically, on television and in museums. Revere La Noue is an artist and filmmaker working on a wide array of projects all over the world.
SO LATE SO SOON
USA, 2020, 70 min
Director: Daniel Hymanson
Producers: Kellen Quinn, Josh Penn, Trace Henderson, Noah Stahl
Editor: Isidore Bethel
Cinematographer: Daniel Hymanson
Chicago-based artists Jackie and Don Seiden have lived an idiosyncratic life following their muse. Surrounded by carefully found and placed objects in each room of their home, the aging pair, married for half a century, struggle to maintain the eccentric life they have known for decades.
Daniel Hymanson, a former child art student of Jackie’s, embedded himself with the Seidens on and off for close to five years to make So Late So Soon. His previous films are Slothman, The Weekend and Inequality for All.
SOME KIND OF HEAVEN
USA, 2020, 81 min
Co-presented with Sag Harbor Cinema
Director: Lance Oppenheim
Producers: Darren Aronofsky, Simon Horsman, Kathleen Lingo, Lance Oppenheim, Melissa Oppenheim, Jeffrey Soros, Pacho VelezEditors: Daniel Garber, Lance Oppenheim
Cinematographer: David Bolen
At The Villages in Central Florida, often called the “Disneyland for Retirees,” we meet four residents living on the margins, striving to find happiness. While most residents have bought into the community’s packaged positivity, married couple Anne and Reggie, widow Barbara, and 82-year-old bachelor Dennis all struggle to find their footing in this fantasy oasis as they seek to survive and possibly thrive in their golden years.
Lance Oppenheim is a filmmaker from South Florida. His films explore the lives of people who create homes in unconventional places and circumstances. He was a 2019 Sundance Ignite fellow, was one of Filmmaker magazine’s 2019 “25 new faces of independent film,” and is the youngest contributor to the New York Times: Op-Docs TV series.
Oppenheim graduated from Harvard University’s visual and environmental studies program in 2019. Some Kind of Heaven is his first feature film.
There will be a Q&A following the film with director Lance Oppenheim and Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, Artistic Director, Sag Harbor Cinema.
SURVIVING THE SILENCE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF TWO WOMEN IN LOVE WHO HELPED CHANGE MILITARY POLICY
USA, 2020, 73 min
Director: Cindy L. Abel
Producers: Cindy L. Abel, Marc Smolowitz
Editor: Michael Bruno
Cinematographers: Michael Bruno, Jesse Stephen Freeman
Years before the U.S. Military Code of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, Colonel Patsy Thompson presided over the review board that dismissed Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer—a highly-decorated nurse and war hero who was on track to becoming a general—for being a lesbian. Presiding over this case forced Patsy to confront her own moral dilemma and her own secret: she too was a lesbian.
Surviving the Silence tells the story of two women in love who played a part in changing military policy, shining light on the unknown history of how a closeted colonel forced to expel an Army hero for being lesbian did so in a way resulting in re-instatement via federal court. Surviving the Silence is a coming out story like no other, deeply moving, troubling, revealing of unknown, policy-changing history and, powerfully inspirational.
Director and Producer Cindy L. Abel formed Atlantis Moon Productions in 2007 to develop film-related projects that launch conversations and impact popular culture. Her first full-length documentary, the award-winning Breaking Through, was conceived in response to the high number of teens who were taunted because of being gay or perceived to be and committing suicide. Having struggled with coming out, Abel knew the importance of having positive role models and wanted to highlight openly LGBT leaders living authentic and fulfilled lives.
THE DISSIDENT
USA, 2020, 119 min
Director: Bryan Fogel
Producers: Bryan Fogel, Mark Monroe
Editors: Scott D. Hanson, James Leche, Wyatt Rogowski, Avner Shiloah
Cinematographer: Jake Swantko
Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was critical of his beloved Saudi Arabia and of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s policies. On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul and never came out. His fiancee and dissidents around the world are left to piece together clues to his brutal murder–and in their dogged quest for truth, they expose a global cover-up perpetrated by the very country he loved.
Bryan Fogel is a director, producer, author and playwright, best known for the 2017 documentary Icarus, about illegal doping in sports, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2018. He also developed and co-wrote Jewtopia: The Chosen Guide for the Chosen People, an off-Broadway comedy that was one of the longest-running productions in off-Broadway history. Jewtopia was made into a feature film in 2013 and won the audience choice award of the 2012 Malibu International Film Festival.
THE MOLE AGENT
Chile, 2020, 84 min
Director: Maite Alberdi
Producer: Marcela Santibanez
Editor: Carolina Siraqyan
The Mole Agent is a stylish combination of an observational documentary and a spy movie, with sleek camerawork and wonderfully watchable characters. It’s a unique meditation on compassion and loneliness that will infiltrate your heart and never let go. When a family grows concerned for their mother’s well-being in a retirement home, private investigator Romulo hires 83-year-old Sergio to become a new resident and a mole inside the home. The plan goes awry with all kinds of comical, and at times heart-breaking results as Sergio struggles to balance his assignment with his increasing involvement in the lives of other residents.
Maite Alberdi takes interest in the intimate portrayal of the characters in her films, often working with them over multiple years and curating a lasting relationship. Her intimate portraits of small worlds have made her an important voice in Latin American documentary filmmaking. She has directed The Lifeguard, Tea Time, The Grown-Ups and I’m Not From Here. In 2013 she was selected as a Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum.
THE REASON I JUMP
USA, 2020, 82 min
Director: Jerry Rothwell
Producers: Jeremy Dear, Stevie Lee, Al Morrow
Editor: David Charap
Based on the best-selling book by Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump is an immersive film, directed by Jerry Rothwell, which explores the experiences of nonspeaking autistic people around the world. Director Jerry Rothwell talks about the origins and intentions of the film.