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      ‘Albert Brooks: Defending My Life’ Review: Revisiting Past Hilarity

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      This actor, comic, writer and director is seen in a cinematic retrospective that celebrates his talent, but not always in a critically discerning way.“Albert Brooks: Defending My Life,” a documentary about the venerable comedian, filmmaker, actor and writer, directed by his lifelong friend Rob Reiner, has the easy, amiable air of a career retrospective — wistful and hagiographic, it’s the kind of thing that usually accompanies a lifetime achievement award.Now 76, Brooks certainly deserves the recognition: the first four of the films he wrote and directed between 1979 and 2005, “Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” “Lost in America” and “Defending Your Life,” are among the finest American comedies ever made, and his trailblazing work on the late-night talk show circuit during the 1960s and 1970s had a seismic impact on the landscape of contemporary comedy. (To say nothing of his Academy Award-nominated turn in “Broadcast News,” a near-peerless masterpiece.)But there’s a reason we have comedy roasts, not toasts, as the rhapsodic tone of this film makes clear — breathless flattery just isn’t that interesting, no matter how funny the person receiving it. While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.Brooks and Reiner, lounging in a booth at Matteo’s Restaurant in Los Angeles, reminisce chummily about Brooks’s life and work, while an ensemble of comedy A-listers including Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill and Larry David gush over his influence in a series of standard-issue talking head interviews. There are also clips from Brooks’s films and standup routines, which render much of the praise from the interviewees redundant. We don’t need to be told that Brooks is a genius. Even a brief glimpse of his work makes the case.Albert Brooks: Defending My LifeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Youth (Spring)’ Review: Garment Rending

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      The documentarian Wang Bing examines the cloistered world of young textile workers in China.Despite running three and a half hours, the documentary “Youth (Spring)” withholds a great deal. That isn’t necessarily a criticism. The film is the latest documentary from Wang Bing, a persistent and widely admired chronicler of China’s downtrodden — its migrants, its outsiders, its mental patients and its survivors of forced-labor camps.“Youth (Spring)” is partly a follow-up to his “Bitter Money,” which opened in New York in 2018 and concerned the textile boom in Huzhou, China; the city had become a destination for migrants eager for work. While “Bitter Money” devoted some time to the journey itself, “Youth (Spring)” takes more of an inside-out approach, looking specifically at young textile workers — most of the identified subjects are in their late teens or early 20s — from a radically cloistered perspective.The overwhelming majority of the movie is set in Zhili, a district of Huzhou that holds more than 18,000 workshops that make children’s clothes, according to the closing credits, where Wang typically places his documentaries’ only contextual information. “Youth (Spring)” zeros in on what must be a small fraction of those workshops. Several are on a thoroughfare incongruously named Happiness Road.The trash on the streets (“Heard of public hygiene?” one man shouts) makes the exteriors look even grimmer than the interiors. Visually, the shops are practically interchangeable. Over the long running time, the drilling noise of the sewing machines begins to prompt a Pavlovian flinch. The windows, which generally seem to have bars, barely let in any light, and at times the shops’ dull tube-bulb illumination makes it hard to concentrate on the image without vigorous blinking.But Wang’s implicit thesis, emphasized through duration and repetition, is that these shops have become the complete universe for the men and women who work there, and who live there in cramped, dormitory-style housing. (From what we hear, the managers use their provision of board and food as an excuse for paying low rates.)These settings are where they will find their first girlfriend or boyfriend or prepare for parenthood. Wang appears to prioritize the quantity of subjects rather than characterization, but one of the most vivid sections occurs early, as a young couple, Hu Zuguo and Li Shengnan, make a decision on how to handle a pregnancy. The conversation involves not only them and both sets of their parents but also the shop’s boss, hardly a model of tact. (“Cheer up!” he says. “An abortion is like you got bitten by a dog, and you bite back.”)Near the midpoint, workers at another shop stage what their manager sneers at as a “mass protest,” descending on him as a group to demand better pay, only to get brushed off because he’s supposedly busy with a rush job. Again and again, we see workers and managers arguing over the rates that each item should fetch. “Rate bargaining is hard,” says one of the few subjects to acknowledge Wang’s camera, which mostly observes invisibly. “It can take days.”There is more to come. Wang shot in Zhili from 2014 to 2019, and “Youth (Spring)” is said to be the first in a three-part series. Even for fans of Wang and mammoth docs, “Youth (Spring)” can be an arduous film to sit through. But while the running time may be indulgent, the experience of feeling trapped in this world is difficult to shake. Like Wang’s “’Til Madness Do Us Part,” set in a mental hospital, the movie is an exhortation not to forget the unseen.Youth (Spring)Not rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Still Small Voice’ Review: Grant Them the Serenity

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      This absorbing documentary follows a chaplain at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.Mati, the employee at the center of the hushed and absorbing documentary “A Still Small Voice,” reports for duty at an ordinary-looking office. There are cubicles, roller chairs, a water cooler and flat lighting that the director, Luke Lorentzen, would never dishonor by gussying up with a lamp. These are the chaplains’ quarters at The Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, and Mati and her colleagues are here to comfort the dying and the families of the dead — to transform this 1,134-bed institution into a sacred space. They are Olympian empaths and they are exhausted.Unexpectedly — and astutely — Lorentzen emphasizes not the emotional support these workers give, but the support they need to soldier on. Mati leans on her fellow residents and their supervisor, David; he, in turn, allows the camera into his counseling sessions with his own adviser, the Rev. A. Meigs Ross, where he admits that he no longer has “the gas in the tank.” Lorentzen keeps the image respectfully still while the chaplains vent their grievances in sensitive, measured language. When the pressure drives two to snap and interrupt each other, their moderately raised voices are as shocking as a slap.Here, comfort isn’t found in any particular religion. The one unifying belief is in a centering breath. Mati, raised Hasidic, questions whether she believes in God at all. Yet, in a powerful scene, she baptizes an infant who died at birth. Her persuasive words of comfort seem improvised. The holy water is in a Styrofoam cup. Somewhere, a door slams. It’s human and messy — and it’s divine.A Still Small VoiceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Orlando, My Political Biography’ Takes a Collective Approach to Joy

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      The filmmaker Paul B. Preciado shares the title role with 20 trans and nonbinary performers to make a point about the cage of identity.Few movies this year have lived in my head as long and as happily as “Orlando: My Political Biography,” which I’ve been thinking about since I first saw it in September. Written and directed by the Spanish-born philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado — a trans man making his feature directing debut — the movie is, at its simplest, an essayistic documentary about transgender and nonbinary identity that draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography.” Yet trying to squeeze “My Political Biography” into a tidy categorical box is fundamentally at odds with Preciado’s expansive project, which is at once an argument, a confession, a celebration and a road map.It’s also a sharp, witty low-budget experimental work of great political and personal conviction, one that breathes life into Woolf’s novel about a 16-year-old boy in Elizabethan England who, after centuries of trippy adventures, enigmatically ends up as a 36-year-old woman in 1928, the year the novel was published. Woolf dedicated the book to her lover Vita Sackville-West, whose son Nigel Nicolson described it as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” one in which Woolf weaves Vita “in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds.”Don’t expect luxurious trappings here; this isn’t the usual screen waxworks with meticulous details but few ideas. It is instead a pointed, spirited, up-to-the-minute exploration of sex, gender and sexual difference through the character of Orlando, who serves as Preciado’s mirror and avatar. In the novel, Orlando (long story short!) awakes one day to trumpets blaring “Truth!” and finds that he’s become a woman — a development that is, well, complicated.“The change of sex,” the book’s narrator asserts, “did nothing whatever to alter their identity.” As Preciado explains, his own transformation was more complex. “You didn’t know, perhaps,” he says, gently addressing Woolf, “this was not how one became trans.”From the very start Preciado expresses love and admiration for Woolf and her novel, but he also critiques some of her choices; he’s enraged, for one, that Orlando is an aristocratic colonialist. Even so, for the most part he expresses palpable tenderness toward Woolf, a quality that suffuses “My Political Biography” as he loosely re-creates Orlando’s narrative trajectory and plucks characters, episodes and sentences from the book. Along the way, Preciado draws attention to the construction of identity and that of the movie itself, fusing form and subject. While he’s peering behind the scenes (and as crew members drop in and out), he also introduces a chorus of other voices, including that of trans pioneers like the American actress-singer Christine Jorgensen and those of his trans performers.Preciado’s most provocative conceit is that he shares the role of Orlando with 20 other trans and nonbinary individuals of different ages, hues and shapes. While Preciado largely remains offscreen, other Orlandos enter and exit, introducing themselves to the camera, talking about their lives and — with both naturalism and charming, at times goofy, theatrical flourishes — playing out scenes from the novel, their words mingling with Woolf’s. Like her Orlando, his travels widely (if on a shoestring budget), undergoes metamorphoses and weaves through the centuries. One Orlando (Amir Baylly) wears a magnificent headpiece and shows off his legs; another (Naëlle Dariya) preens in a billowy wig festooned with tiny ships.By sharing the role of Orlando, Preciado shifts the story from the individual to the collective, taking it out of the private realm and into the public sphere. This communitarian shift from me to we also allows Preciado to attenuate the familiar documentary binarism (and power dynamic) in which there is one person who films and another who is filmed. Everyone is invited to this party. As Woolf writes, Orlando had “a great variety of selves to call upon”; Preciado similarly calls on a multiplicity of selves, at one point introducing a sweet-faced, pink-haired Orlando (Liz Christin) who visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Queen (Frédéric Pierrot), as other Orlandos chat in the waiting room sharing stories, hormones and laughter.Liz-Orlando’s mother has sent her to Dr. Queen for dressing like a girl and speaking about herself in the feminine. When the doctor asks Orlando how she believed herself “authorized to wear a skirt as a young man,” she answers that she’s not a man. “So you’re a woman?” the visibly confused shrink asks, brow furrowing. “I wouldn’t exactly say that either,” Orlando says with a Mona Lisa smile. The visit to the psychiatrist’s office takes place fairly early on and while the doctor’s bafflement is played for obvious, somewhat uneasy laughs, his inability (or refusal) to truly see Liz-Orlando has a sharp sting that lingers for the rest of the movie.The office face-off comically distills the rigid medical orthodoxies that Preciado challenges in greater detail in his electrifying short book “Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts,” a published version of a speech that he delivered in Paris in 2019 at a conference of 3,500 psychoanalysts. Having been invited to talk about “women in psychoanalysis,” Preciado instead spoke about, as he put it in his speech, “finding a way out of the regime of sexual difference.” For him, that meant a world beyond the cages of masculinity and femininity, an idea that inspired this audience of putative professionals to heckle Preciado, who writes that he was only able to deliver a quarter of his talk.“My Political Biography” is lighter and certainly funnier than “Can the Monster Speak?,” though the two work as companion pieces. The movie is serious, which you would expect given the political and personal stakes that one after another Orlando — with open faces and feeling — express. This is, on the one hand, a movie made by a philosopher who studied with Michel Foucault. At the same time, Preciado’s lightness of touch and intellectual nimbleness buoys the movie, lifting both it and you. There is nothing tragic other than the world that insists on policing bodies. Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.Orlando, My Political BiographyNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘You Were My First Boyfriend’ Review:

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      In this documentary, Cecilia Aldarondo relives her high school trauma by directing cinematic re-enactments of her adolescent years.Cecilia Aldarondo takes the process of reliving adolescent trauma to a literal degree in “You Were My First Boyfriend,” her feature that falls somewhere between documentary and diaristic re-enactment. Spurred by her 20-year high school reunion in Winter Park, Fla., Aldarondo pulls back layers of memories and old home-movie footage to investigate the significant relationships of her formative years: her first intense crush, her bullies, and her childhood best friend and fellow outsider, Caroline.To face down her demons, Aldarondo enlists a cadre of child actors to recreate scenes from her time in high school — both memories of real events and fantasy sequences — in which Aldarondo portrays her own teenage self. The film documents the making of these scenes as much as the final product, a process that can be equal parts touching and awkward. When Aldarondo gets in touch with the now grown-up Joel, the boy she had a crush on for six years, she chooses to read a poem she wrote about him during the peak of her obsession — a decision that makes even her current partner, Gabe, cringe with embarrassment.However, despite its title, “You Were My First Boyfriend” is at its most effective when Aldarondo moves beyond teen lust and into the more complicated aspects of her upbringing. Her Puerto Rican heritage made her an easy target for bullying at her predominantly white high school, but Aldarondo was not exempt from acting cruel to those around her to fit in. She rehashes those nuances through, among other things, creating a shot-for-shot remake of Tori Amos’s “Crucify” music video with her sister Laura. It’s just zany enough to work.You Were My First BoyfriendNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      ‘How to Have Sex’ Considers Assault Survivors

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      In new films, including “How to Have Sex,” female British directors emphasize the impact of sexual trauma, rather than portraying the act itself.When Molly Manning-Walker was a teenager, her favorite film was Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible.” In a recent interview, she remembered being impressed by the film’s infamously brutal, nine-minute rape scene, and how “immersive” it was.But now 30, and a director herself, she questions Noé’s approach to that scene. With such graphic — and prolonged — violence onscreen, she said, “you’re almost abusing the audience.” When it came to depicting sexual assault in her debut feature, “How to Have Sex,” which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Manning-Walker resolved to do things differently.“How to Have Sex,” which opens in theaters in Britain and Ireland on Nov. 3 and in the United States in February, follows three British teenagers on a party vacation in Greece. Manning-Walker said that, like Tara, the film’s protagonist, she was sexually assaulted when she was 16 (though in a different scenario), and that she wanted the audience to understand what was happening “through Tara’s face and her reaction,” rather than putting the act onscreen.Manning-Walker’s debut is one of several new films directed by British women that offer fresh perspectives on sexual assault by focusing on its varied impacts. Adura Onashile’s “Girl,” which opens in theaters in Britain later this month, asks what happens when women don’t talk about their experiences. And in the documentary “The Taste of Mango,” which recently played at the London Film Festival, Chloe Abrahams discovers her family’s buried history of sexual abuse and domestic violence, which triggers a revelation about herself.These movies arrive as violence toward women and girls continues making headlines in Britain. Recently, the comedian Russell Brand denied accusations of sexual assault from four women. In January, a London police officer admitted to 49 charges of sexual abuse. Around a quarter of women in England and Wales have experienced sexual assault since the age of 16, according to the Office for National Statistics.Déborah Lukumuena as Grace, and Le’Shantey Bonsu as her daughter, Ama, in “Girl.”via Studio SohoIn an interview, Onashile described this climate of violence against women as “an epidemic.” Her film, “Girl,” centers on a young immigrant mother, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena), and her 11 year-old daughter, who live in a Glasgow tower block. Grace’s erratic behavior implies a traumatic past, but Onashile doesn’t make this explicit. As part of her research for the film, Onashile said she learned from social workers that you can spot sexual assault survivors by their body language, which gives the “sense that something is held, and tight, and wound up.” In the film, Lukumuena plays Grace with stooped shoulders and a downcast gaze.Abrahams said that the act of recording her family members gave her the courage to ask difficult questions about long-hidden abuse. With “The Taste of Mango,” she was seeking to heal divisions between her mother, Rozana, in England, and her maternal grandmother, Jean, in Sri Lanka, but along the way she learned that Rozana is suspected to have suffered at the hands of her stepfather.The movie pairs audio of her mother’s testimony with poetic images, including the moon and a road rushing by, glimpsed from a car window. Its meditative pacing was designed to allow the audience “to breathe, and not get sucked down by the heaviness of it,” Abrahams said.But equally, she added, she wanted to show how her mother “finds joy in life” — including in country music and manicures — so Rozana isn’t defined by the things that were done to her.In the documentary “The Taste of Mango,” Chloe Abrahams, right, discovers her own family’s history of sexual abuse and domestic violence.Chloe AbrahamsAll three filmmakers considered the impact of the subject matter on the people making their movies and had support on hand from therapists during production. Manning-Walker, who also works as a cinematographer, recalled filming an assault scene for someone else’s film, in which there was no acknowledgment of the toll it might take on the person behind the camera. On her film, she said, her team could stop filming if they felt uncomfortable, which they did several times.Manning-Walker said she didn’t want the character of Tara, who goes on vacation intending to lose her virginity and flirts her way into an unwanted scenario, to be a helpless victim. At the end of “How to Have Sex,” she picks herself up and carries on. But that doesn’t mean she’s not affected by what happened, Manning-Walker added.Sexual assault “happens everywhere, and in all situations,” she said. By making a film that confronted it, she said she hoped to challenge a culture of shame and silence around a common experience. All three filmmakers described tearful, post-screening encounters with male and female audience members who saw elements of their lives reflected onscreen.After one screening, Manning-Walker recalled, a woman in her 70s had told her that watching “How to Have Sex” had made her reconsider a teenage sexual encounter: “‘I just realized that I’ve been assaulted, from watching your film,’” Manning-Walker remembered the woman saying.There was “a lack of conversation around female pleasure and what sex is for women,” Manning-Walker said, which also meant a lack of education about consent. If people aren’t taught that sex is an act of negotiation, she said, “of course it’s going to go horribly wrong.” More

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      What Fuels the ‘Manic Creativity’ of Joan Baez

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      The 82-year-old singer and subject of a new documentary sleeps in a tree, has come to terms with not being a reader and is more interested in upside down than right side up.About seven years ago, Joan Baez — singer, activist, icon — decided she was ready.“I wanted to do what I called an honest legacy,” she said. “Then I realized that to do that, I had to really give up a lot of control over my personal stuff.”That meant opening up the meticulously sorted archive of family movies, recordings, photos and journal entries that her mother maintained. In the documentary “Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” which was released in October, Baez lays eyes on the trove at the same moment as viewers.“I just kind of gawked at it in astonishment,” Baez, 82, said. Each time she watches the documentary, “there’s something revelatory,” she added. “It’s been a major learning experience for me.” Baez told us about some of the people, places, activities and music that have fueled the “manic creativity” she’s now experiencing.1DancingI dance in the morning when I get up, on and off through the day, and have a Zoom dance with friends one night a week. We can start at 6 p.m. and quit at 7, instead of starting at 10 and dancing until I drop, which I realize was not that much fun after all, as I am no longer 30 and everything began hurting.2Drawing Upside DownUpside down is far more interesting to me than right side up. Things otherwise not available to my conscious mind become obvious when I turn the drawing right side up and see what it’s telling me. It can take the place of doodling, though not necessarily. Doodling has its place.3A Certain TreeI sleep in my big oak tree most nights in the summer. I have a platform 20 feet up, held in place by ropes and bamboo. There’s a ladderlike stair which is way too steep. Having fallen from it once, I now use a climbing harness to get up and down — so my friends won’t live in a constant state of panic and have to try and hide the panic from me. So I won’t worry that they are worried, and we don’t have to talk about it, and I can just get on with my life. The tree is named Frank. He named himself.4Writing PoetrySince I quit touring four years ago, I have been in a state of manic creativity: portrait painting, drawing, making prayer sticks, making a documentary and last but not least, finishing up a book of poetry which will be released in the spring. It’s called “When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance.” The title poem is a fantasy story of my mother falling in love with a Swedish opera singer, Jussi Bjorling, and him falling for her.5Music I Have Listened to ForeverJussi Bjorling, the sopranos Joan Sutherland and Kathleen Ferrier, the pianists Glenn Gould and Maurizio Pollini, and the violinist Jascha Heifetz are among the classical favorites I listen to. For nonclassical music I depend on the Gipsy Kings; selected country and western music like Lauren Duski and Sturgill Simpson for the voice; Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash for the soul. I like to put Leonard Cohen on Spotify and see which of my friends and colleagues show up in Spotify’s interpretations. And I’ll listen to anything at all by Andrea Bocelli.6Collecting Eggs From My Beloved ChickensA fresh egg is a gift from God. Did you know that when it comes out it’s wet? Like a newborn elephant, or sparrow. Or you, or me.7AudiobooksI am a nonreader and now can depend on audiobooks to both entertain and educate me. My favorite book of the last 10 years is “A Gentleman in Moscow,” with “Bel Canto” running a close second. People give me books to read and I just smile blankly and say thank you, and wish I were a reader. I know I’m missing a world of treasures.8Making Good TroubleI know about the pendulum theory — politics swing left to right, imperfect democracy to fascism — but no one could have predicted the current wrecking ball. What to do about it? Keep your head up, or down if you are passing the Proud Boys on the street, and make good trouble wherever and whenever you can.9BirdsongOf all the animals and birds which are now disappearing by the billions, I feel closest to the songbirds. They are, after all, my family. My advice is to listen to one bird sing its glorious song — listen hard and treasure it, and no longer expect a chorus.And then go help someone clean up a river.10My SonHe is uniquely funny and can make me laugh as few people can. I’ve given him permission to leave the room when I’m on my deathbed and say, “[Expletive], I wish she’d just get on with it, because she’s driving everybody nuts!” Gabe doesn’t read much either, so he probably won’t see this. More

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      In ‘Subject,’ Documentary Stars Look Back

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      A talk with the directors Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall about their film that checks in on the subjects of high-profile documentaries.Being a documentary subject can be a thankless kind of stardom, without much control over how your life story is told. In “Subject,” Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall went back to five famous documentaries and asked their stars about their experiences: “Hoop Dreams,” “The Staircase,” “Capturing the Friedmans,” “The Square” and “The Wolfpack.”Rather than a “where are they now” update, Tiexiera and Hall investigate the unexpected personal ramifications and ethical quandaries that arise. Arthur Agee of “Hoop Dreams,” for example, speaks of earning around $500,000 through profit-sharing.I spoke with the filmmakers about what they learned, and their dauntingly extensive efforts at making “Subject” a full collaboration with their subjects. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.Whose documentary experience surprised you most?JENNIFER TIEXIERA: I would say Margie’s [as the daughter of a man tried for murder, Michael Peterson]. When you watch “The Staircase,” you’re caught up in the story and you’re not thinking about this young girl whose face is now everywhere. She’s truly been defined by that series for the last 20-some years now. Her story has been told and sold over and over and over again.CAMILLA HALL: I think Margie got a comment saying the acting was better on the HBO show [the true-crime mini-series starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette] than the Netflix show [the documentary series]. I think Ahmed’s journey in “The Square” is also so dramatic. Where Ahmed [Hassan] comes from in Cairo is a very underprivileged neighborhood. And he became the face of the Egyptian revolution!Jennifer TiexieraNoam GalaiCamilla HallRita BaghdadiWere there positive effects to participating in a documentary?HALL: Susanne [Reisenbichler, the mother of the nearly housebound family in “The Wolfpack”] talks of how letting somebody in from the outside was the first time she fully understood her level of despair. I think she had just been living in this bubble for so long. That intervention had an enormously positive impact on her life and has led to her total independence. Now she’s a domestic abuse support adviser.Arthur was able to use the “Hoop Dreams” brand and has his own line of merchandise. Ahmed is an Emmy-winning cinematographer as a result of “The Square,” and we were able to get him a visa to move to America because of that award.How did you get people to open up?HALL: I think we created a platform where their voice was the most important at the end of the day. They had final say over how they would be presented in “Subject.” They were able to watch the rough cut of the film and give feedback. And there wasn’t much coaxing. They knew exactly what they were doing — it was almost like Margie directed her own scenes.TIEXIERA: And they’re co-producers, by D.P.A. [Documentary Producers Alliance] standards. When it came to what was very important to them, we adjusted their agreements to reflect that. Jesse [the son in “Capturing the Friedmans” who served 13 years in prison on child sexual abuse charges] wanted to be aware of the distribution: where this is going to go and who’s going to see it.We did reach out to a few people for “Subject” who weren’t ready to go back into that place but still loved the idea. For example, Carole and Howard from “Tiger King” became supporters of “Subject.” And Mark Borchardt [of “American Movie”] was a great sounding board.Did you cut anything from “Subject” based on feedback from participants?TIEXIERA: The biggest hurdle was when Susanne and [one of her sons] Mukunda agreed to be part of “Subject,” and Mukunda’s brothers did not want to be. They had had a different relationship and experience and didn’t want to be on camera. I want to say it was a couple of weeks before our premiere, it came back that they did not want to be part of the archival [material]. So we had to re-cut the entire “Wolfpack” section and keep them out, except for one of the brothers who was OK with it. Legally, sure, we could have kept that. But it’s just not what we were doing.We also feature 112 films and series [in montages], and people have been able to see it and say, I don’t like where my film is placed. We’ve been able to go back and take it out or move it to a different location.Would you ever participate in a documentary about your life?HALL: So, we are considering that in the series that we’re developing at the moment.TIEXIERA: If you would ask me this last year, I would say absolutely not. But as we develop the series with Time Studios, it’s come up a few times. In the spirit of “Subject,” the series would be a collaboration between the participants [in documentaries], and we would have the time to bring the directors’ voices into it, and then we also reflect on the process while we’re making it. It’s very meta! More