The Washington, DC premiere of Locked Out will open this year’s 2023 Double Exposure (DX), the United States’ only film festival dedicated exclusively to investigative cinema. The film runs November 2nd to November 5th with most screenings taking place at the newly renovated Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library’s 290-seat theater.
The festival will open its ninth season with Locked Out, directed by Academy Award-nominee Kate Davis and Luchina Fisher, a searing documentary investigation of land contracts and rent-to-own schemes targeting Black women in Detroit, the epicenter of the nation’s urban housing crisis.
The U.S. premiere of The Price of Truth, directed by BAFTA Award-winning director Patrick Forbes, is Centerpiece. Forbes’s documentary tracks the secret negotiations by Nobel Prize-winner Dmitry Muratov, founder and editor of Russia’s last independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, to spirit his journalists and news outlet to safety outside Russia. Six of the paper’s investigative journalists were murdered in recent years, yet time and again Muratov returns to Russia after securing the safety of each group of reporters.
In the festival Spotlight title, Another Body, directors Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn follow college student Taylor Klein, who discovers her face was grafted onto pornographic films and images without her knowledge or consent. Klein ventures through the dark web to discover the mysterious source of the fakery, using the tools of deep fakery to tell her story and force her assailant to address his actions.
Closing the festival is the U.S. premiere of The Lost Souls of Syria, from Stéphane Malterre and Garance Le Caisne, which follows a trove of 27,000 photographs documenting atrocities committed by Syrian authorities, smuggled out of the country by a regime photographer intent on accountability.
The 2023 lineup goes deep on timely issues across continents, cultures, and ages, from the rise and fall of cryptocurrency in Chris Temple and Zach Ingrasci’s This is Not Financial Advice, to a 77-year-old bible mistranslation that colored the church’s stance toward homosexuality in 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted a Culture. Caroline Suh and Cara Mones’s Sorry/Not Sorry follows the resurrection of the comedian Louis C.K., as felt by the women he sexually harassed. Academy Award®-winning director Carol Dysinger’s One Bullet traces the consequences over ten years of one gunshot from occupying forces, fired into a young man’s chest on a random night in Afghanistan.
Rounding out the slate is All Static & Noise from David Nowack, with never-before-seen footage inside Uyghur internment camps; Minted, a gripping documentary from Nicholas Bruckman about the $40 billion NFT market, and Phantom Parrot, a deep look at digital surveillance, directed by DX alum Kate Stonehill. Additional titles, including short films, speakers, and venues will be announced in the coming weeks.
As always, this year’s festival is paired with a professional symposium for investigative journalists and filmmakers. This year’s topics include the widening net of government surveillance, intersectionality in storytelling, assaults on voting rights, AI and deep fakes, investigating election-related violence, and more. Confirmed guests include Carla Borrás (Senior Producer, Frontline PBS), Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael Rezendes (Associated Press), Academy Award-winning filmmaker Carol Dysinger, Jesselyn Radack (National Security & Human Rights Director of WHISPeR) whose clients have included Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake, video journalist Alex Clark (co-producer of the PBS NOVA film “Crypto Decoded”) and many more.
“Double Exposure celebrates fearless films and the people behind them, who take big risks to reveal hidden truths,” said Diana Jean Schemo, founder and director of Double Exposure. “In these beleaguered times for democracy, humanity, and our planet, Double Exposure offers a unique home for the kinds of films we need now.”
Lana Garland, Double Exposure’s director of programming, said, “The film selection mirrors the concerns that filmmakers and journalists from across the globe perceive as potential challenges to human rights and freedoms. Their dedicated efforts are driven by the aspiration to shape a brighter future.”
The concurrent Double Exposure symposium, she added, “brings us all together to study the investigative form, ensuring this work continues for generations.”