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      ‘The Last Waltz’ With Robbie Robertson Is One of Rock’s Great Docs

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      The film capturing the Band’s final performance in 1976 is a showcase for the group’s main songwriter and guitarist, Robbie Robertson. And for some, that was a problem.By the mid-1970s, the Band was well known as the group that had backed Bob Dylan on his first electric tour and released a series of its own reverentially reviewed albums that returned music to a pre-psychedelic era and augured a return-to-basics movement in rock. But in 1976, with the quality and sales of its albums both declining, the Band announced a farewell show, full of illustrious guest stars, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day. The gala concert would be filmed by Martin Scorsese, who in the last few years had directed the provocative and acclaimed films “Mean Streets,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “Taxi Driver.”The music documentaries of the late ’60s and early ’70s — “Don’t Look Back,” starring a scabrous Dylan, in 1967, then the concert films “Monterey Pop” in 1968 and “Woodstock” in 1970, as well as the Rolling Stones debacle “Gimme Shelter” the same year — were low-budget affairs, underground in their lighting, camerawork and sound. D.A. Pennebaker shot “Don’t Look Back” by himself, using a hand-held camera and 16-millimeter film.“The Last Waltz” — which put a spotlight on the Band’s guitarist and principal songwriter, Robbie Robertson, who died this week at 80 — was a confident, dramatic upgrade with an atypical structure. It begins with the concert’s final song, and incorporates band interviews and B-roll shots to give personality to each member. The 1978 film employs highly stylized backlighting and footlights, avoids audience shots and uses nearly every camera angle except low angle front, which is how bands are traditionally seen by members of an audience. The musicians dressed like western gunslingers ready to face their end, and to counteract all the mythic imagery, the interviews are full of the kind of artifice other films edit out, including awkward exchanges between the band members and Scorsese, their stumbling inquisitor. The movie dwells in shades of purple, the color of bruises and cabernet sauvignon.It didn’t take long for critics to laud “The Last Waltz.” In the British music weekly Record Mirror, Mike Gardner called it “the first rock movie to eschew the shambling amateurism that passes for rock cinema and replace it with the most illustrious professionals within Hollywood.” More resoundingly, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker (no big fan of cinéma vérité) wrote that it was “the most beautiful rock movie ever.”These days, “The Last Waltz” is by consensus one of the best music films in the canon, neck and neck with “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert film by Jonathan Demme. Many deconstructions of the Scorsese film describe it as a crucial and irreversible departure in rock filmmaking, a move away from naïve image-capturing and the “shaky camera” of Jonas Mekas, and toward canny image-making.The star power in front of the camera — guests included Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr and Muddy Waters — was matched by the filmmaking expertise behind it. The crew included the director of photography Michael Chapman, plus seven camera operators, including the renowned Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, all shooting with 35-millimeter film, as well as the recording engineer and Neil Young collaborator Elliot Mazer. The production designer Boris Leven dressed the Winterland stage with columns, chandeliers and wall hangings from the San Francisco Opera’s staging of “La Traviata,” bringing some 19th-century Italian brio to the farewell concert.How did it all come together? Once the Band decided to disband, Robertson wanted to find “someone special to capture this event on film,” he wrote in “Testimony,” his 2016 memoir. He considered most of the emerging young directors of the mid-70s — Hal Ashby, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Milos Forman — but picked Scorsese, who had been an assistant director and editor on “Woodstock” and was already considered gifted at using music cues onscreen, most notably Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky” in “Taxi Driver,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” by the Rolling Stones, in “Mean Streets.”Robertson, the most sophisticated, charming and socially fluent member of the Band, met Scorsese through Jon Taplin, a Princeton graduate who had been a road manager for the Band, and later produced “Mean Streets.” Once Scorsese signed on, he asked for lyrics to each song in the concert, so he could plan camera movements and lighting changes. He eventually wrote a 200-page shooting script, according to Robertson. Other sources say it was 300 pages.The director and the guitarist grew close, especially during postproduction, and pretty soon they were living together and jetting off to parties in Paris or Rome. That closeness caused friction: Despite the acclaim for “The Last Waltz,” some members of the Band felt that Robertson had made the film about him, rather than about them.The drummer Levon Helm, whose superlatively soulful voice electrifies “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” made these criticisms public with the 1993 publication of his memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire.” He called the movie “a disaster” and accused Scorsese of making Robertson look great while ignoring other band members.By then, Robertson and Helm had arrived at very different levels of success and financial comfort. “Robbie won. Levon lost,” Ken Gordon wrote in a 2015 essay in The Bitter Southerner. Some people reflexively side with winners, others with losers, and after Helm’s book came out, Robertson’s reputation suffered in some circles, and possibly influenced subsequent evaluations of “The Last Waltz,” especially after it was rereleased in theaters and on DVD in 2002.“The movie’s real subject is not the Band as a whole, but Robbie Robertson,” Stephen E. Severn wrote in Film Quarterly, adding that “virtually every visual and thematic aspect of ‘The Last Waltz’ is designed to showcase his talents at the expense of the other members of the group.” Nonetheless, Severn affirms that it “may be the best film ever made about the music scene,” one that, unwittingly or not, reveals the cutthroat nature of the business.Nearly 25 years after the release of “The Last Waltz,” its placement on lists of the best music documentaries was so common that the consensus around the film was ripe for a challenge. “‘The Last Waltz’ has inexplicably been called the greatest rock documentary of all time,” Roger Ebert wrote in 2002. In a re-evaluation of the movie that same year, Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times that “part of the pleasure is in watching Robbie Robertson, the group’s leader, seduce Mr. Scorsese.”The movie is more skeptically understood now, but its stature has never waned. Even its stoutest opponents recognize its quality. “Critics called the movie the best and most sumptuous film ever made about a rock concert,” Levon Helm wrote grumpily in his book, “and I suppose that’s true.” More

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      ‘Sound of the Police’ Review: The Silence and the Fury

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      This documentary dives into the nation’s outrageous history of the policing of Black citizens by touching on the 2022 killing of Amir Locke.It is not the first image in “Sound of the Police,” a documentary about the chronically vexed relationship between Black people and police officers, but it is its most chilling: the ominous hush of the police at a front door, signaling the horror to come.In February 2022, a SWAT team entered an apartment in Minneapolis. Body camera footage, released by the city’s police, shows a key being quietly inserted into a lock during a no-knock search warrant operation. Seconds later, Amir Locke, 22, who had been asleep on the living-room couch when roused by the officers, was mortally wounded. Footage shows him, groggy and confused, under a blanket holding his legally owned handgun.The director Stanley Nelson’s freighted film opens with family and friends gathering for Locke’s funeral, a celebration of his life, followed by interviews with his parents. The movie also concludes with them. In between those sad but cleareyed bookends, the filmmakers have packed a necessary history of policing. That Locke’s death came after the killings of Breonna Taylor (also a no-knock warrant) and George Floyd, underscores the movie’s argument: Reforming policing remains a life-or-death matter.For viewers who’ve digested the bitter lessons of the documentaries “13th” and “MLK/FBI,” as well as more recent social-justice portraits of the activist Rev. Al Sharpton (“Loudmouth”) and the civil rights attorney Ben Crump (“Civil”), many of the images of brutality and insights about the abuses of institutional power will be familiar, though no less outrageous. Some early police forces in America were formed from slave patrols, and their violent tactics descend from post-Civil War attempts to control and contain Black people, engendering a justified mistrust.The film boasts a formidable collection of interviewees — among them the legal scholar James Forman Jr., the historian Elizabeth Hinton as well as David Simon, the creator of the police procedural “The Wire.” Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, dissects the social conditions that have enabled police departments to rebuff oversight and have emboldened white citizens to imagine a personal relationship to the police. (The montage of white women making 911 calls to report Black citizens — bird watching, lemonade selling, just tending to life — might be amusing, were it not so pathological.) If you need a refresher on what “systemic” looks like, these thinkers offer it.Sound of the PoliceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and on Hulu. More

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      ‘Aurora’s Sunrise’ Review: A Patchwork Record of the Armenian Genocide

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      This standout documentary combines archival footage and animated re-enactments to share one survivor’s memories.The documentary “Aurora’s Sunrise” shares the great and terrible story of Aurora Mardiganian, an Armenian survivor of the genocide that began in 1915. Aurora was 14 years old and living in a small town in the Ottoman Empire when the violence started. Her peaceful life was obliterated when her father and brother were rounded up and murdered by Ottoman Turk soldiers. Aurora was then forced into a death march across the desert of what is now Syria. She survived weeks of the march and two years of subsequent violence. Aurora witnessed unimaginable atrocities: rivers teeming with corpses, children begging for their lives, bandits pillaging the caravans of survivors.Aurora escaped these horrors through the aid of Armenian resistance groups. Her survival already made her a rarity, but Aurora’s most improbable achievement was that she was able to create a contemporary record of her own memories. This film follows Aurora’s story after she resettled in America and starred in the 1919 silent film, “Auction of Souls,” which dramatized the events of her own life. She never stopped sharing her memories, including in interviews that were filmed decades later.Using many of the materials Aurora left behind, the documentary’s director, Inna Sahakyan, crafts a cohesive narrative of the woman’s life. Clips from “Auction of Souls” and footage from Aurora’s later interviews support animated re-enactments of her recorded memories. Despite the presence of material that is more than 100 years old, the parts using cutouts and rotoscoping (redolent of the 2008 war docudrama “Waltz With Bashir) are what feel the most dated. But even with that herky-jerky animation, the effect of Sahakyan’s compilation is still admirably seamless, and she creates a reconstructed, yet still personal record of a long-unrecognized genocide. The film’s coherence is a reflection of both the skill of the filmmaker, and the heroic efforts of Aurora herself to ensure that her view of history would not be forgotten.Aurora’s SunriseNot rated. In Armenian, Turkish, English, German and Kurdish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘King Coal’ Review: A View From Appalachia

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      A coal miner’s daughter turned filmmaker profiles a region’s relationship with fossil fuel and presents a eulogy for a way of life.In her personal documentary “King Coal,” the director Elaine McMillion Sheldon records the modern traditions — beauty pageants, local football games and modest festivals — that commemorate the once dominant natural resource that powered central Appalachia. Through archival footage and vivid narration, Sheldon notes how the discovery of the precious black rock led to an economic boom that inspired a vibrant middle class in the 20th century, born from labor struggle. She also observes how the poisonous fossil fuel destroys the environment. The film is both a cumulative eulogy for a way of life and an examination of the climate crisis through witnessing the charred remains of these rural landscapes.“King Coal,” however, isn’t merely a remembrance. By following two girls, Lanie Marsh and Gabrielle Wilson, Sheldon also considers the future of this region, which, like many industrial corners of the United States, is still struggling to imagine its own economic possibilities.Sheldon’s film doesn’t answer what lies ahead. Rather the poignantly poetic rhythms and wistful insights of “King Coal” are meant to provide closure. Healing in her documentary can take form in on-the-nose metaphors, such as the film staging a literal funeral for the anthropomorphized King Coal, or move through subtler means, like the sharing of oral history by locals in several Appalachian states.Sheldon also locates the beauty, potentiality and sorrow of the region to its surrounding mountain ranges, from forested rolling hills to the mounds of coal on river barges. But in this melancholic, thoughtfully attuned cinematic essay, no mountain is more important than the people who are still confined to the claustrophobic tunnels of the past.King CoalNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘All Up in the Biz’ Review: Showtime’s Biz Markie Documentary

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      Biz Markie created hits like “Just a Friend” and influenced a wide range of rappers, many of whom remember him fondly in this Showtime documentary.Biz Markie’s death in 2021, at the way-too-young age of 57, robbed hip-hop — hell, robbed American music, period — of one of its most idiosyncratic and singular talents.“All Up in the Biz,” a new documentary directed by Sacha Jenkins, is a cogent, affectionate and largely apt tribute to Markie, the D.J. and rapper who was known as a gifted beatboxer.The documentary uses animation along with comedic and dramatic sketches to underscore Markie’s irresistibly antic nature. For instance, while there are no documentary scenes of his extended hospitalization before his death, the artist’s wife, Tara Hall, re-enacts the loving care she gave to her husband, who’s played in the dramatization by a bemused-looking puppet.Even as the movie portrays Markie — whose birth name was Marcel Theo Hall and who is frequently referred to by friends as “Mark” — as a clown prince whose humor was a way of deflecting and transcending a tough childhood, it charts the near-parallel development of Bronx-bred hip-hop and its Long Island brand, with Markie a stellar representative of the latter. In his early days, the rapper worked on his lyrics and delivery with the Juice Crew, a collective in Queens, before he released his first EP.With respect to commercial development, Markie was, as the cliché goes, crazy like a fox, even if his charms weren’t immediately appreciated. The entertainment veteran Bernard Alexander recalls hearing the eccentrically drippy “Just a Friend” in demo form and throwing the cassette off a hotel balcony. Months later it was Markie’s breakthrough single, and the burly, goofy guy behind it was a pop star.“You get a little jealous when someone loves hip-hop more than you do,” the rapper and record producer Rakim, a close friend, says here. “Biz made me jealous.”All Up in the BizNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      ‘The Eternal Memory’ Review: A Love That Lasts When Recollections Fade

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      This documentary from Maite Alberdi looks at how a couple faces one partner’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.The word “Alzheimer’s” isn’t spoken until well into “The Eternal Memory.” While that may be because this documentary’s subjects rarely mention it themselves, withholding the diagnosis also seems like a deliberate choice by the director, Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent”).An uncannily intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease that affects the mind, “The Eternal Memory” doesn’t aim to hold spectators’ hands. Like Paulina Urrutia, whose husband, Augusto Góngora, is the one with Alzheimer’s, the viewer must continually reassess Góngora’s lucidity, which for long stretches is hardly in doubt. Part of Urrutia’s strategy is to gently quiz him about their lives. Does he remember their first date? Was it at one of their homes? (The correct answer is no: Neither can cook.)Góngora — who died in May, after the film was completed and first shown — was a TV journalist in Chile who participated in underground newscasts during the Pinochet dictatorship. Urrutia is an actress who served as culture minister during the Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s first term. Their occupations add another layer of reflexivity: In different ways, both were involved in telling other people’s stories and preserving the national memory.Urrutia, who is shown taking over the shooting of the documentary once the pandemic necessitated isolation, is almost surreally unflappable; she is rarely seen losing patience with Góngora, although there is a heart-rending scene in which she informs him that he has gone a whole morning without recognizing her. Could any film completely capture such a private dynamic? Surely not, but at moments, “The Eternal Memory” appears to come close.The Eternal MemoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Rodriguez, Singer Whose Career Was Resurrected, Dies at 81

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      Two albums in the early 1970s went largely unnoticed in the United States, but not overseas. Then came the 2012 documentary “Searching for Sugar Man.”Rodriguez, a Detroit musician whose songs, full of protest and stark imagery from the urban streets, failed to find an American audience in the early 1970s but resonated in Australia and especially South Africa, leading to a late-career resurgence captured in the Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” in 2012, died on Tuesday. He was 81.A posting on his official website announced his death but did not say where he died or provide a cause.Rodriguez’s story was, as The New York Times put it in 2012, “a real-life tale of talent disregarded, bad luck and missed opportunities, with an improbable stop in the Hamptons and a Hollywood conclusion.”Rodriguez — who performed under just his surname but whose full name was Sixto Diaz Rodriguez — was playing bars in Detroit in the late 1960s, his folk-rock reminding those who heard it of Bob Dylan, when the producer Harry Balk signed him. In the documentary, Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, who would go on to produce his first album, “Cold Fact” (1970), told of hearing Rodriguez at a particularly smoky establishment called the Sewer on the Detroit River, where he was playing, as he often did, with his back to the audience.“Maybe it forced you to listen to the lyrics, because you couldn’t see the guy’s face,” Mr. Coffey said.A single released under the name “Rod Riguez” went nowhere. “Cold Fact,” released on the Sussex label, drew a smattering of favorable notices; its first track, “Sugar Man,” gave the documentary its title.“Rodriguez is a singing poet/journalist, telling stories of today,” Jim Knippenberg wrote in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “He does it with a voice much like Dylan’s, very Dylanesque imagery and a musical backing dominated almost entirely by a guitar. But he’s not a Dylan carbon. Rodriguez is much more explicit.”Mostly, though, the album went unnoticed in America, as did its follow-up a year later, “Coming From Reality.”“Getting the records cut was easy,” Rodriguez told The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia in 1979. “Getting them played was a lot harder.”Rodriguez performing in Paris in 2013. He found a fan base overseas and went on tour after the documentary was released to rave reviews.Pierre Andrieu/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe was being interviewed by an Australian newspaper that year because, while he had settled into a life as a laborer and office worker in Detroit (though still playing bars and even running unsuccessfully for various political offices), he had — unknown to him — been developing fans overseas. Australia was one place where his music had found an audience, and in 1979 he was invited to tour there. He returned in 1981 for a few shows with the band Midnight Oil and released a live album in Australia.Rodriguez’s music had found an even bigger following in South Africa, which was still under apartheid and cut off from the rest of the world in many respects. He seemed to have no idea how popular he was there, especially among white South Africans uncomfortable with apartheid and the country’s rigidly conservative culture.“To many of us South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives,” Stephen Segerman, owner of a Cape Town record store, said in the documentary. “In the mid-’70s, if you walked into a random white, liberal, middle-class household that had a turntable and a pile of pop records, and if you flipped through the records, you would always see ‘Abbey Road’ by the Beatles, you’d always see ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by Simon and Garfunkel, and you would always see ‘Cold Fact’ by Rodriguez. To us, it was one of the most famous records of all time. The message it had was ‘Be anti-establishment.’”In the mid-1990s Mr. Segerman began trying to find out more about the mysterious artist known as Rodriguez and how he had died; rumors were rampant that he had killed himself onstage, died of an overdose, and so on. He joined forces with Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a journalist who was also searching for Rodriguez, and eventually they found the singer, still living in Detroit. A 1998 tour of South Africa followed, with Rodriguez playing six sold-out shows at 5,000-seat arenas.“It was strange seeing all those bright white faces, all of them knowing every word to every one of my songs,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 2009.After the South Africa tour he played shows in England, Sweden and other countries. In the United States, the label Light in the Attic rereleased “Cold Fact” in 2008 and “Coming From Reality” in 2009.“Searching for Sugar Man,” which focused on two men and their search for Rodriguez, won the Oscar for best documentary feature.Sony Pictures Classics/courtesy Everett Collection
      And there was another round of rediscovery ahead. In 2012 Malik Bendjelloul released “Searching for Sugar Man,” his first and only documentary (he died in 2014), to rave reviews. The film, which won the Oscar for best documentary feature, concentrated on the search by Mr. Segerman and Mr. Bartholomew-Strydom and included an interview with Rodriguez, who in the aftermath found himself at the Hamptons International Film Festival and embarking on a fresh round of touring.Matt Sullivan founded Light in the Attic Records, which reissued Rodriguez’s albums.“His words and music were brutally honest and raw to the core,” he said by email. “It instantly struck a chord the second we heard it, and still does, nearly 20 years later.”Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was born on July 10, 1942, in Detroit. His mother, Maria, died when he was a boy. His father, Ramon, was a laborer who became a foreman at a steel plant.He said that he started playing the guitar at 16.“Of course I’ve been into Dylan forever,” he told The Times in 2012, “and also Barry McGuire, the whole ‘Eve of Destruction’ thing.”During his period of relative anonymity after the release of his albums, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.The “Coming From Reality” album includes a song called “Cause,” a lament about hard times and life’s disappointments.“They told me everybody’s got to pay their dues,” Rodriguez sings. “And I explained that I had overpaid them.”But in the 2009 interview with The Sunday Telegraph, he was more serene about his unusual career path.“My story isn’t a rags to riches story,” he said. “It’s rags to rags, and I’m glad about that. Where other people live in an artificial world, I feel I live in the real world. And nothing beats reality.” More

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      Jess Search, a Force in the Documentary Genre, Dies at 54

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      As one of the leaders of Doc Society, she supported countless filmmakers, with an emphasis on underrepresented groups and unconventional stories.Jess Search, a producer on dozens of important documentaries and a catalyst on many more as one of the directors of Doc Society, a nonprofit organization she helped found in 2005 that supports documentary filmmakers, died on July 31 in London. She was 54.Doc Society said in a statement that the death, in a hospital, was caused by brain cancer. Search had announced last month that she was stepping away from the organization because of her illness.Search had been a central figure in the documentary scene in Britain and beyond for years. She was gender nonconforming (she used the pronouns “she” and “her” but preferred not to use the gendered courtesy title Ms.), and she had a special interest in promoting work by filmmakers from underrepresented populations or that dealt with out-of-the-mainstream subjects.She was a producer or executive producer on some of those films, like Matthew Barbato’s “Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother” (2007), about a sex reassignment surgery, and Agniia Galdanova’s “Queendom,” which was released earlier this year and is about a queer Russian performance artist.Her family and colleagues said she was even more devoted to her work at Doc Society, which she led with several other directors and which describes itself as “committed to enabling great documentary films and connecting them to audiences globally.” Since its founding, it has backed hundreds of documentary projects, supporting emerging filmmakers financially and with expert input.“Jess was a builder,” Laura Poitras, director of the Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” (2014), about Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified information, said by email. “A builder of communities, infrastructures (material and immaterial), and imaginations.”That film had support from Doc Society, which at the time was called the Britdoc Foundation. (The name changed in 2017 to better reflect the organization’s global focus.) So did “While We Watched” (2022), about the travails of independent television journalism in India, on which Search is credited as an executive producer. Vinay Shukla, its director, called Search “ragingly courageous and resolutely funny.”“It was an impossible film,” he said by email, “and I’d wake up to find new holes in our boat everyday. I would spin and spiral. And then I’d get on a call with Jess and everything would be all right. She would read me poems over Zoom while figuring out my legal strategy. She was always 10 steps ahead.”Tabitha Jackson, who was director of the documentary film program at the Sundance Institute for years and was the Sundance Film Festival director from 2020 to 2022, said Search invigorated the entire genre.A poster for “While We Watched,” about the travails of independent television journalism in India. Search was an executive producer.MetFilm Distribution/Courtesy Everett Collection“In her championing of the field of independent film, and the art of impact and the impact of art, Jess often said that ‘If you are going to move people to act, first you have to move them,’” she said by email, “and that was apparent in the many independent films she was deeply involved in.”“But beyond individual films,” she added, “her strategic laser focus and abundant kinetic energy evangelized and galvanized a collective that could turn a moment into a movement and a challenge into an opportunity for transformation.”Jess Search was born on May 15, 1969, in Waterlooville, England, near Portsmouth, to Phil and Henrietta Search. She grew up in Sevenoaks, southeast of London, and attended Tonbridge Grammar School before earning a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. In 2008 she added a master’s degree from Cass (now Bayes) Business School.In an interview at the 2021 BFI London Film Festival, Search said she had no particular career aspirations after earning her undergraduate degree but chose her path for an unusual reason.“I knew I was gender nonconforming,” she said, “and at that time, leaving university at the very beginning of the ’90s, I knew that I couldn’t work anywhere that had any kind of formal or informal dress code.”Being a lawyer or management consultant was out, she said, “because I’ll have to turn up every day wearing clothes I don’t want to wear.”“So,” she added, “I was like, ‘I think I’d better go into the media,’ because that seemed like a space where it was less formal.”An uncle working in television hired her as his assistant. That led to a job as a commissioning editor for independent film and video at Britain’s Channel 4, which at the time was programming a wide variety of documentaries. In the BFI interview, she expressed a particular fondness for “the Box,” a cardboard box where unsolicited films and ideas for films were collected.“This box was full of amazing, crazy stuff that people just sent in to us,” she recalled in the interview. The channel programmed mainstream documentaries as well, she said, but the Box provided “that sense that anything might happen, that anything might be in there, and you might hear from anyone around the world with something to say.”In 1998 Search was one of the founders of Shooting People, a networking organization for people in the documentary world. In late 2004 Channel 4 shut down its independent film and video department, prompting her and others to start what became Doc Society.Search is survived by her wife, the producer and director Beadie Finzi, and their children, Ella Wilson and Ben Wilson.The outpouring of tributes to Search on social media and elsewhere after her death included a statement from Joanna Natasegara, an Oscar-winning producer who had worked with her.“She believed documentaries could change the world,” she said, “and she spent much of her life lifting up others and proving her thesis.” More