Documentary Films and Programs

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      Margot Benacerraf, Award-Winning Venezuelan Documentarian, Dies at 97

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      She made only two films, but her “Araya,” a rumination on the daily rituals of salt-mine laborers, became an enduring work of Latin American cinema.Margot Benacerraf, a critically acclaimed Venezuelan documentary filmmaker whose hypnotic “Araya,” a visual tone poem chronicling the daily lives of salt workers on an austere peninsula on her country’s coast, shared the critics’ prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Caracas. She was 97.Her death was announced by the country’s culture minister.Hailed as a major figure of Latin American cinema, Ms. Benacerraf founded Venezuela’s national cinematheque and in 2018 was given the Order of Francisco de Miranda, honoring outstanding merit in the sciences and humanities, by the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.But although Ms. Benacerraf was celebrated, she was not prolific. She made only two films in her career: “Reverón” (1952), a 23-minute documentary short about the reclusive later years of the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón, and “Araya,” her sole feature-length work.Influenced by the magic realism of novelists like Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier, Ms. Benacerraf captured, in 90 minutes, the sweat and toil of workers amid the towering salt pyramids on the centuries-old mining terrain of the Araya peninsula. “Araya” shared the International Federation of Film Critics award at Cannes in 1959 with Alain Resnais’s landmark New Wave film, “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”A scene from Ms. Benacerraf’s acclaimed 1959 documentary, “Araya,” which the director Steven Soderbergh called “a gift to cineastes.”Milestone FilmsIn 2019, the New Yorker film critic Richard Brody called “Araya” a “majestic documentary portrait” of salt producers and their families. “Benacerraf’s grand style,” he wrote, “captures the drama of subsistence in the face of nature,” adding that “the overwhelming beauty of the wide-open spaces contrasts with the workers’ burdened trudges through them.”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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      A Life, and Death, as a Mexican Journalist Shown in Documentary

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      The documentary “State of Silence,” premiering at the Tribeca Festival, uses personal stories to explain the bleak situation for journalists in Mexico.If you are going to make a documentary about danger, you have to take your camera to daring places. You have to point it at nefarious subjects, doing brazen things, and capture a level of authenticity essential for a credible film.That was the case for the crew on “State of Silence,” which explores the existential threats faced by journalists in Mexico. For the documentary’s tense opening segment, the team accompanied the reporter Jesús Medina on a nighttime search for illegal loggers cutting down trees in a remote forest in the state of Morelos. When Medina, with his camera in hand, encountered one, the unsuspecting transgressor was fully masked — and brandishing a thundering chainsaw.As Medina began his interview with the logger, the film crew was just a few steps behind, recording the scene while both men did their risky jobs, and as the journalist — no stranger to precarious assignments — de-escalated the situation into a businesslike conversation between two professionals.An illegal logger being interviewed for the film. The “State of Silence” crew accompanied the reporter Jesús Medina on a nighttime search for illegal loggers cutting down trees in a remote forest in the state of Morelos. La Corriente del GolfoThe reporter Jesús Medina.La Corriente del Golfo“Sometimes you have no other work option and you have to do this out of necessity,” the logger explained. Medina got the point, and his story gently morphed into a nuanced profile of a worker toiling to support his family, despite the hazards.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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      Tribeca Festival: Liza Minnelli Documentary Includes Lost Footage

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      The director Bruce David Klein’s documentary, premiering at the Tribeca Festival, includes old footage found in Minnelli’s closet.A new documentary celebrates the life of the singer and actress Liza Minnelli. And it kicks off with the death of her mother, Judy Garland.“Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” (which premieres at the Tribeca Festival on June 12) opens with the vision of Garland’s rose-covered coffin being carried past thousands of mourning fans in New York in 1969.With that somber start, the director Bruce David Klein is making a point. Rather than dwell on Minnelli’s childhood years in the orbit of her prodigiously gifted mother, he sets out to show that Minnelli, 78, shot to fame almost immediately after her mother’s passing — as if it were a catalyst of her success.Klein includes interviews with Minnelli’s artistic mentors, stage partners and close friends, including the actress Mia Farrow, who speaks of her with affection and insight.There are also glimpses of the media nastiness she faced throughout her career, such as the male journalist who asked, “They write about you that you are ugly?” Her reply: “I don’t really care. When I’m onstage, I just do my job.”Bruce David Klein, the director of the Liza Minnelli documentary. “Liza deserves it, because she has a level of artistry that many people have forgotten and need to be reminded of, that is really mind-blowing,” he said.Arin Sang-urai/Atlas Media CorpWe 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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      ‘Jim Henson Idea Man’ on Disney+ Offers Lessons for Young Artists

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      This Ron Howard documentary doesn’t ignore the Muppet mastermind’s faults, but the tribute has a lot to teach creators everywhere.I don’t need to tell you that Jim Henson’s work is ubiquitous and beloved, foundational to childhood across several generations of “Sesame Street” watchers and stretching far beyond. It’s so important to us that when one of his creations, Elmo, “asked” an innocuous question about people’s mental state on social media this winter, the responses seemed … well, it was a lot.Clearly, his puppets and Muppets and stories and sense of humor do not lose their power with time. But to everyone other than Muppet obsessives, Henson the artist is still a bit shadowy. Good news: Now we have “Jim Henson Idea Man” (on Disney+), a tribute to the artist and a treasure trove of archival footage and interviews about his work and life. Though it borders on hagiography, it’s not blind to Henson’s faults, and it boasts a flair for the unexpected. The film, directed by Ron Howard, starts with Henson and two of his Muppet friends, Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog — Henson’s alter ego — being interviewed on TV by none other than Orson Welles. In his sonorous baritone, Welles calls Henson “Rasputin, as an Eagle Scout.” The movie sets out to show what he meant.A few years ago, Marilyn Agrelo’s documentary “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street” (for rent on major platforms) — also very much worth watching — filled in some of the story, with digressions to illustrate the zany, hilariously violent sense of absurdist humor that Henson brought to his early commercial work. “Jim Henson Idea Man” spends longer in the same territory, while focusing on Henson’s life (he died in 1990 at 53), his creative collaborations (including those with his wife, Jane, and with Frank Oz) and his insatiable need to keep pushing his boundaries.There’s so much to love here: old, gut-splitting commercials; behind-the-scenes footage and stories from “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show”; and explorations of “The Dark Crystal,” “Labyrinth” and “The Muppet Movie.” But what struck me especially was that Howard has made a movie that every young artist should watch (and older ones, too), whether they’re making puppets, paintings, music, movies or anything that requires creative labor.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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      ‘Ren Faire’ Is ‘Succession’ With Turkey Legs

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      An engrossing documentary debuting Sunday on HBO, it chronicles a Renaissance festival impresario’s effort to find a worthy heir.George Coulam, known as King George to his acolytes, in a scene from “Ren Faire.”HBO“Ren Faire,” an engrossing and inventive three-part documentary that debuts on HBO Sunday at 9 p.m., centers on George Coulam, founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival. King George, as everyone calls him, claims he wants to retire; he believes he’ll live for another nine years, and he has a vision for how he wants to spend this remaining time.“I wanna do art and chase ladies,” he says. If only he could find a worthy heir.Coulam comes across as part Logan Roy, part Joe Exotic — cruel, charismatic, driven and able to inspire fealty even as he dispenses bitter nastiness. (He has an assistant maintain his profiles on sugar-daddy websites and asks all dates, within moments of meeting them, if they have breast implants.)People on the show compare him to Willy Wonka and King Lear, and he says he followed Walt Disney’s playbook for land acquisition and political strategy. One employee weeps with glee upon meeting him, and others curtsy when he walks into their office. He’s not a king! you want to shout. He’s just some guy! But I guess someone wants to shout that about every king.George’s ambitious underlings strive for his intermittent approval and prostrate themselves, enduring petty humiliations only to crawl back and beg for more. The most debased and tragic is Jeff, who, with his wife, has worked at the fair for decades. He gets frustrated with her comparative lack of loyalty to the king, even as George pushes them both aside. “Just say that you serve George,” he insists, past the point of banter.Later, as Jeff schemes and stresses, she asks him earnestly, “Is it folly?”“Of course it’s folly!” he bellows, his voice shaking. Usually these kinds of lines are heard only in particularly farcical episodes of “Frasier,” but here they are both laughable and heartbreaking.There’s something ridiculous about renaissance fairs, and so there’s something ridiculous about “Ren Faire,” which blends hallucinatory nightmare sequences and fiery cinematic moments into its nonfiction. Those clever additions echo the agreed-upon dumb fantasy of renaissance fairs: Nay, my lord, this meager pub be all out of Red Bull.Directed by Lance Oppenheim and produced by Benny and Josh Safdie among others, “Ren Faire” depicts and embodies a Möbius strip of truth and grandiosity. The fair really is Jeff’s life’s work, as he says multiple times; it really is George’s gilded isolation chamber; it really is a business and a dream. Things can be silly and true and meaningful at the same time. Huzzah. More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: ‘Dirty John,’ ‘The Puppet Master’ and More

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      Four picks across television, film and podcasting that explore a devastating, yet slippery, type of manipulation.The concept of “coercive control” entered the lexicon about a decade ago and has become an increasingly prevalent theme in the true crime genre. Pioneered by Evan Stark, a researcher and expert on domestic abuse, it refers to a pattern of abusive behavior and manipulation — including isolation, humiliation, financial abuse, stalking and gaslighting — used to dominate a partner. Men are most often, but not always, the abusers.Coercive control “is designed to subjugate and dominate, not merely to hurt,” Stark, who died in April, said in a London court in 2019 while testifying on behalf of a domestic abuse victim who’d murdered her husband. She, appealing her conviction, was subsequently released from prison.Here are four picks across television, film and podcasting that show how this form of psychological abuse, though hard to prove as a crime, ruins lives.Podcast‘Sweet Bobby’Because I’ve watched every episode of the MTV show “Catfish,” I thought that this six-chapter investigative podcast from Tortoise Media, which explores a true story in which coercive control overlaps with catfishing (tricking others, often into a romantic relationship, using fake digital profiles), was unlikely to shock me.But the saga — about Kirat Assi, a woman from London whose life was turned on its head for nearly a decade after she fell for “Bobby” via Facebook — still managed to test my tolerance for how little legal recourse the deceived parties have. The story also speaks to why the damage caused by coercive control and by the proliferation of catfishing should not be minimized.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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      ‘MoviePass, MovieCrash’ Review: When They Take Your Company Away

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      An illuminating documentary about the ill-fated (though now-revived) subscription service finds an unexpected story.As a reporter, I spent the better part of 2018 puzzling over the meteoric rise and sensational nosedive of MoviePass, the brief beautiful dream of a subscription service that’s the subject of Muta’Ali’s new documentary “MoviePass, MovieCrash.” Perhaps you remember those halcyon days. For about $10 a month, you could see any movie in any theater on any day. You received a debit card that you’d use to “purchase” the ticket, and then the company would reimburse the theater for the ticket’s full cost. It worked, for a while, and it was amazing. But it made positively zero sense.Anyone who passed third grade math can see why. If I pay $10 this month, and see only one movie, the company’s probably already in the hole. (A normal, non-matinee ticket in New York City, where there were a whole lot of MoviePass subscribers, hovered around $15.) If I see two, the hole gets deeper. Now consider the people who go to two movies a week, or four, or seven, and you start to see the problem.There was some speculation that MoviePass was working on the gym membership model — lots of people subscribe, but few people actually use it, and they balance each other out. But that also makes very little sense. People, on the whole, tend to enjoy watching movies more than they enjoy slogging away on the StairMaster.The only answer was that MoviePass was either trying to cut deals with studios and theaters, or selling and utilizing user data, or both — especially since Helios and Matheson, MoviePass’s publicly traded owner, was a data analytics firm. The answer is both, and the company’s leadership was convinced that the bigger their user base, the more likely they’d be able to monetize audiences. After all, data showed that MoviePass drastically increased people’s willingness to go to the movies, where they’d presumably spend money on concessions, too — and that might translate to eagerness from theaters to keep the service alive. The company’s chief executive, Mitchell Lowe, who was at Netflix in its early days, was certain that if they could reach five million users, they’d be operating in the black.MoviePass didn’t reach five million users, but for a while it seemed as though there would be no stopping it. Under the leadership of Lowe and Theodore Farnsworth, the chief executive of Helios and Matheson, the new subsidiary MoviePass Ventures produced the abysmal movie “Gotti” and threw a lot of very expensive parties in mid-2018. At the same time, if you were trying to actually use the service, it went from bad to worse to baffling: random blackout periods, strange requirements for purchasing tickets (like uploading photos of stubs) and near-constant changes to the terms and conditions. Eventually the Federal Trade Commission made accusations that MoviePass fraudulently deceived its customers to prevent power users from getting what they’d paid for. That era of MoviePass did not end well.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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      10 Artists on Living and Creating Through Grief

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      Sigrid Nunez, authorConor Oberst, musicianBridget Everett, performerBen Kweller, musicianJesmyn Ward, authorJustin Hardiman, photographerJulie Otsuka, authorLila Avilés, filmmakerRichard E. Grant, actorLuke Lorentzen, filmmakerWhen Jesmyn Ward was writing her 2013 book, “Men We Reaped,” she could feel the presence of her brother, who had been killed years earlier by a drunk driver. She still talks to him, as well as to her partner, who died in 2020.“This may just be wishful thinking, but talking to them and being open to feeling them answer, that enables me to live in spite of their loss,” she told me.While filming the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere,” Bridget Everett, playing a woman mourning the loss of her sister, was grieving the loss of her own. Working on the show was a way to still live with her, in a way, she said: “There’s something that’s less scary about sharing time with my sister when it’s through art or through making the show or through a song.”One of the many things you learn after losing a loved one is that there are a lot of us grieving out there. Some people are not just living with loss but also trying to create or experience something meaningful, to counter the blunt force of the ache.We talked to 10 artists across music, writing, photography, film and comedy about the ways their work, in the wake of personal loss, has deepened their understanding of what it means to grieve and to create.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