Documentary Films and Programs

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    ‘Deaf President Now!’ and the Biases of a Hearing World

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    The documentary recalls the 1988 protests that erupted at Gallaudet University when trustees rejected deaf candidates to lead it.In 1988, the board of trustees of Gallaudet University was preparing to announce its pick for the institution’s next president. That’s not an unusual task for a board. What’s unusual is what happened next, as told in “Deaf President Now!” (streaming on Apple TV+).Directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, the documentary plays like a high-stakes political thriller, but in an unconventional venue. The film chronicles the week of turmoil and transformation that followed the announcement of Elisabeth Zinser as president. (DiMarco is a Gallaudet alum.)Gallaudet University — founded in 1864 as a school for deaf and blind children, through a law signed by Abraham Lincoln — is the nation’s only liberal arts university designed specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and it’s officially bilingual, with instruction in both English and American Sign Language. In 1988, however, Gallaudet had never had a deaf president. And Zinser, a hearing person with a background in nursing, had been chosen over two deaf, arguably more qualified candidates.To tell the story, “Deaf President Now!” weaves together archival footage and contemporary interviews with a number of the students and faculty, now middle-aged and older, who led or were involved in the protests. All of the interviewees, filmed against a simple black background, give their answers in ASL, with an off-camera voice (rather than subtitles) providing the translation for hearing audiences.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘My Robot Sophia’: An Unsettling Look Into the Soul of a Machine

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      This film by Jon Kasbe and Crystal Moselle skirts gimmicks to examine a creator’s drive to build a humanoid device powered by artificial intelligence.In 2017, a robot named Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, a dubious move on many fronts. Real human women had only earned the right to drive a car in the country a month earlier, and robot citizenship was also, somewhat transparently, a publicity stunt. Sophia, which is humanoid and powered by a proprietary artificial intelligence engine created by Hanson Robotics, has participated in a number of stunts since then, including appearances on “The Tonight Show” and at a lucrative sale of its art during the 2021 NFT boom.All of these events and more appear in the new documentary “My Robot Sophia” (on digital platforms), but the film skirts gimmicks to go in a more tricky and unsettling direction. It’s an almost soulful portrait of the artist under capitalism, rather than another exposé on robotics and artificial intelligence. It’s a bit parallel to Alex Garland’s fictional film “Ex Machina.” And in the Frankensteinian tradition, the robot’s creator is not uncomplicated.The title of the film implies that Sophia belongs to someone. That someone is David Hanson, the chief executive of Hanson Robotics. A loner and an artist from a young age, he became fascinated with creating lifelike masks. His lab is crowded with them, rubber faces on little pedestals that seem, in the background of many shots, to be staring upward in open-mouthed wonder, or terror.That kind of image adds subtext, and it’s all the more astounding because it’s nonfiction. “My Robot Sophia” is littered with visual tells, and if you’re not actually watching with your eyes, you might miss what they’re saying. The two directors have experience telling these sorts of sprawling stories that require a lot of patience, time and observation — Jon Kasbe with “When Lambs Become Lions” and Crystal Moselle with “Skate Kitchen” and “The Wolfpack.” You see what they see.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted’ Review: In the Deep End

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      The movie offers full-on immersion, or perhaps submersion, in the singer-songwriter’s musical world.Premises for documentaries don’t come much more casual than in “Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted,” a profile organized around exactly what the title says. As the singer-songwriter Swamp Dogg, born Jerry Williams Jr., awaits the completion of a custom paint job on his pool in Los Angeles, he hangs out on the patio with various friends (including, at one point, Johnny Knoxville of “Jackass”) who drop by to reminisce. The directors — Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson — observe.The movie offers full-on immersion, or perhaps submersion, in Swamp Dogg’s world. His daughter Dr. Jeri Williams, a neurologist (“I’ve got five daughters, but this is the main one,” Swamp Dogg says), likens his home in Northridge to a bachelor pad for “aging musicians.” For years, Swamp Dogg let some of his musical collaborators, like David Kearney, who performed as Guitar Shorty and died in 2022, and Larry Clemon, known as Moogstar, live there too.With Swamp Dogg as MC, the film dutifully checks off biographical highlights: how Little Jerry Williams came up through R&B beginning in the 1950s; how he changed his name to Swamp Dogg in 1970 (“Jerry Williams just seemed too soft”); how the politics of his music (he played in Jane Fonda’s touring anti-war show in 1971) led, he says, to questions from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.In addition, you’ll hear about how Swamp Dogg arranges the TVs in his home, about his recipe book (“If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It”) and about that time he put out an album of pets singing Beatles songs. At one point, the musician’s phone rings. He answers, “I’m in the middle of an interview. Call me later.” Somehow, an editor thought that was worth keeping — which should indicate how much this fans-only documentary gets bogged down with dull asides.Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool PaintedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Milestone Films Will Be Given Away to Maya Cade of the Black Film Archive

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      The distributor’s owners, Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, made the unusual choice to give it away. Their successor is Maya Cade of the Black Film Archive.Milestone Films is a small but mighty distribution company dedicated to discovering works that have been lost to history, restoring them and reintroducing them to anyone willing to watch. It has been run out of the New Jersey home of Amy Heller and Dennis Doros for the last 25 years, but now both are preparing to retire.“One of the things we’ve come to realize is that we are not immortal,” Heller said. As the company’s sole workers, “we are it. It’s the two of us and we want it to continue.”How to keep it going after they step down is something they’ve been discussing for a decade, and now they’ve hit on a novel solution. They’re giving the company away, to Maya Cade, the noted programmer behind the Black Film Archive.Heller and Doros said that last summer they had discussed with Cade, who volunteered herself, the idea of simply handing over their company.“When we met Maya, we just thought, ‘Oh, well, we found her,’” Heller said. “We found the person who we really love and trust and can enthusiastically make this move.”Heller and Doros started Milestone Films in 1990 in their one-bedroom New York apartment shortly after marrying. Since then, it has grown into an internationally recognized distributor that helps bring lost or little-seen films back to prominence. For the last 18 years, the company has been focused on work by and about directors who are Black, Native Americans, L.G.B.T.Q. or women — artists from segments of the population that are underrepresented in the canon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Pavements’: A Sly Ode to the Last Band You’d Give the Biopic Treatment

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      Part spoof and part serious, the film is about mythmaking as much as it is about music. The result is delightfully destabilizing.Everybody thinks they know their favorite musicians or bands inside and out: what the lyrics mean, when their style changed, which fabled event made or broke their careers. Filmmakers have always been willing participants in the process, from concert movies to intimate documentaries to glossy biopics. We crave the results, because the myth-weaving is collaborative. And sometimes it involves bending reality a bit to get a better story.Nominally, the subject of the eccentric new documentary “Pavements” (in theaters) is, well, Pavement — but in truth, it’s about the whole ecosystem that creates the legend. The 1990s indie-rock band reached moderate fame in its prime, broke up in 1999, and reunited for tours in 2010 and 2022, which is where “Pavements” begins. The band has a lot of lasting fans, mostly people old enough to have gone to shows or listened on their local college station during Pavement’s original run. There are also a lot of people who’ve never heard of it.That makes the band an unlikely subject for a documentary, which is kind of the joke — and which lends “Pavements” its bigger theme, too. Directed by Alex Ross Perry and edited by the documentarian Robert Greene, it’s a hard film to describe. Part spoof and part serious, its vibe is very much in keeping with its subjects. There’s the documentary part, about the band’s formation and various albums, with archival footage and interviews, a format familiar to anyone who watches documentaries these days.But there are at least three other things going on inside this movie, shot by the cinematographer Robert Kolodny in a variety of visual styles designed to recall genres we’ve seen before. We watch the creation and rehearsal process for “Slanted! Enchanted!,” a Pavement jukebox musical that culminated in two workshop performances in New York in 2022 (one of which I attended). We see the opening of a museum-style show with memorabilia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Martin Scorsese Interviews Pope Francis in Upcoming Documentary ‘Aldeas’

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      The project will highlight scripted short films from international communities along with snippets of a conversation between the director and the pontiff, who died last month.Martin Scorsese will produce a new documentary featuring an on-camera interview with Pope Francis that was recorded at Vatican City in December, a few months before the pope died at the age of 88.The film, “Aldeas — A New Story,” is about the worldwide cultural project developed by Scholas Occurrentes, a global educational movement founded by Francis in 2013, the same year he was elected pope. Communities around the world will create scripts for short films that highlight their identities, histories and values.Snippets of the conversation between the pope and Scorsese will be interwoven into the film, which does not have a release date.In a statement on Wednesday, Scorsese said it was important to Francis for “people across the globe to exchange ideas with respect while also preserving their cultural identity, and cinema is the best medium to do that.” Before the pope’s death, Francis called “Aldeas” a poetic project because it “goes to the roots of what human life is.”The project punctuates a long relationship between the pope and Scorsese, whose work has sometimes been religious in nature. When “The Last Temptation of Christ” was released in 1988, it drew protests and outrage from religious groups.In 2016, Scorsese met with Francis to discuss his movie “Silence,” a drama about a Portuguese Jesuit priest who heads to 17th-century Japan, where Christians are persecuted. They met again in 2023, when Scorsese announced he would make another film about Jesus. The director’s most recent project, “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” dramatizes the lives of eight Catholic saints.Before his death, Francis called “Aldeas” a poetic project because it “goes to the roots of what human life is.”Aldeas Scholas Films, via Associated PressWhen Francis died, Scorsese said in a statement to Variety that he was lucky to have known him and that his loss for the world was immense.“He had an ironclad commitment to the good,” Scorsese said. “He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening.” More

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      ‘Pavements’ Blurs Fact and Fiction to Reimagine a Band’s Legacy

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      The director Alex Ross Perry said Stephen Malkmus of Pavement told him to “avoid the legacy trap.” The result is a music documentary with made-up elements that really existed. What?The Bob Dylan Center gathered some 6,000 items from the musician’s archive in an Oklahoma museum. Green Day’s “American Idiot” album was adapted into a Broadway show. The Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” won four Oscars and was nominated for best picture.If these artists could burnish their legacies and become part of a wider cultural conversation outside of music, then why not Pavement, the beloved ’90s indie-rock band that was about to reunite for its first concerts since 2010?That’s the animating spirit behind “Pavements,” the director Alex Ross Perry’s audacious documentary about the band, which opens Friday. Perry did, in fact, write and direct a stage show called “Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical” that played for two nights in Manhattan in 2022. A museum touting “rumored relics of the band’s real and imagined history” popped up in TriBeCa that fall, coinciding with the initial Brooklyn run of the group’s (very real, and very successful) reunion tour. And Perry filmed portions of a fictionalized Pavement biopic — starring Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”), Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker, among others — then staged a “premiere” for it in Brooklyn.“Pavements” covers, clockwise from top left, the band’s reunion tour, a museum of its memorabilia, a made-up Hollywood biopic and a jukebox musical, sometimes presented in split screen.UtopiaIn “Pavements,” all of this is intercut with archival imagery from the band’s history and footage from the reunion tour’s rehearsals and performances, sometimes presented in two-, three- or even four-way split screen. (The plural title is quite literal.) Overall, the effect is about as far from the typical rock documentary as you could get.“I was told, ‘They want nothing traditional,’” Perry said in a video interview last month, adding that the group’s frontman, Stephen Malkmus, texted him, “‘Avoid the legacy trap.’ Possibly in all capitals.” At this point in the life cycle of Pavement or any other band, Perry said, the question becomes: What else do we do with our story? A documentary, a series, an exhibition, what? “So that, for me, became the actual text of the movie,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Drop Dead City’: When New York Was on the Financial Brink

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      This surprisingly entertaining film examines the 1975 fiscal crisis that nearly led the city to bankruptcy. The movie’s conclusions remain relevant today.There’s a bit of a puzzle at the center of “Drop Dead City” (in theaters), the new documentary about that time New York City barely escaped bankruptcy. Michael Rohatyn, who directed the film with Peter Yost, is the son of Felix Rohatyn, the banker and diplomat who led the Municipal Assistance Corporation. That’s the entity, established at the height of the crisis in 1975, that negotiated the solution with the city, the banks and the unions that ultimately pulled New York back from the brink of financial ruin. But while the elder Rohatyn is praised by many participants in the film, his connection to one of its directors isn’t mentioned at all.I admit I raised an eyebrow when I realized the link, and it’s true that at times “Drop Dead City” seems like a tribute to Felix Rohatyn’s acumen and ability. That might color the film’s credibility a bit. But on the whole, the movie probably benefits more from the younger Rohatyn’s involvement, not least because an incredible array of people who worked for the city and state at the time appear as participants, whether they are former aides and comptrollers or mayors, union leaders and members of Congress.That chorus of voices tells the story, helped by a lot of archival video that vividly illustrates how heated the protests and garbage-laden the sidewalks became while the municipal government tried to figure out the resolution. It’s an evenhanded and surprisingly entertaining account of how things got so bad, who was to blame, the way it was fixed (to some degree) and what New York inevitably lost in the process.The story, as a lot of New Yorkers know, is complicated, and “Drop Dead City” sets out to tell it as simply as possible, from the city’s progressive roots to its years of chaotic bookkeeping and sometimes profligate spending to its contentious relationship with both the state government in Albany and the federal government. The participants in the film don’t all agree with one another, which makes for a richer tale. No story about money is straightforward, but this version is about as fun and vivid as it could be without skimping on the details.Viewed through a wider lens, it’s also a parable, and it should be watched through that lens. When you think about it, it’s a bit of a miracle that the American system — involving many interlocking governments and interests, led by colorful personalities that often clash — ever works at all. But while the sheer size of the nation sometimes tempts us to think of faraway people as “them,” with problems that are only “theirs,” our fates are tied together. As people note repeatedly in “Drop Dead City,” it was in everyone’s interest to keep New York afloat, because what happened in the city had broad repercussions for the whole country. The crisis may have unfolded 50 years ago, but our interdependence is as important to remember now as it was then. More

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      Andrea Nevins, Who Made Touching Films on Quirky Topics, Dies at 63

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      Her documentaries, one of which received an Oscar nomination, explored subjects like punk-rock dads and Barbie dolls.Andrea Nevins, a documentary filmmaker who brought sensitivity and depth to seemingly lighthearted stories about underdogs and unlikely heroes, including punk-rock dads and Barbie dolls, died on April 12 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 63.Her daughter, Clara, said the cause was breast cancer.Ms. Nevins received an Academy Award nomination in 1998 for her first independent project as a producer, the short film “Still Kicking: The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies,” about a cabaret group made up of retirees in the Southern California desert city.The film bears all the hallmarks of her later work: offbeat characters in unconventional circumstances who, through their struggles, say something meaningful about life and how to live it.Her first full-length project, “The Other F Word” (2011), was based on the 2007 memoir “Punk Rock Dad: No Rules, Just Real Life,” by Jim Lindberg, the lead singer of the band Pennywise.In some ways the opposite of the performers in Palm Springs, Mr. Lindberg was known for his aggressive stage presence and profane lyrics, even as he navigated the everyday challenges of raising three daughters.In a clip from the documentary “The Other F Word,” Fat Mike, the lead singer of NOFX, tends to his second job, parenting his daughter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More