Tag: Documentary Films and Programs

Ketamine Therapy Offers Hope for This Emergency Worker

Emergency workers and researchers use the term “critical incident” to describe a traumatic event. It’s estimated that people, on average, will experience two to three critical incidents in their lifetimes. My first came at 8 years old, when my father made his first suicide attempt. Five years and five attempts later, he was dead. I’ve […]

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‘Stormy’ Reveals the Flawed Feminist Icon Looming Over Trump’s Trial

In an impressive bit of narrative synergy last week, significant judicial decisions in the Manhattan district attorney’s hush-money case against Donald J. Trump coincided with the premiere of a documentary, “Stormy,” about the woman at the center of it all. Hours before the film was screened at 3 Dollar Bill, a Brooklyn nightclub, a state […]

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Freaknik Documentary: Atlanta’s Rowdy Spring Festival Revisited

Back then, hundreds of thousands of young people, mostly Black college students, descended on Atlanta every spring for the rowdy and raunchy event called Freaknik. Performers like Notorious B.I.G., OutKast and Uncle Luke put on shows all over the city. The traffic hardly budged, and why should it? The party was right there in the […]

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David Breashears, 68, Who Braved Everest to Capture It on Film, Dies

David Breashears, a mountain climber and cinematographer who reached the 29,032-foot summit of Mount Everest five times, including for a 1998 film that became the highest-grossing IMAX documentary ever, died on March 14 at his home in Marblehead, Mass. He was 68. A representative of his family confirmed the death but said the cause had […]

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Dan Schneider Apologizes for Behavior After ‘Quiet on Set’ Documentary

Dan Schneider, the children’s television producer and writer behind many of Nickelodeon’s biggest hits, released a video on Tuesday in which he apologized for some of his behavior on the job, including soliciting massages on set. The video comes after the release of a documentary series in which former employees denounced him as a boss […]

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Behind the Exoneration of Two Men Wrongfully Convicted in an L.A. Shooting Case

Four years ago, as a deadly virus began to upend the world, Jessica Jacobs was at home in Los Angeles, in a wooded canyon that has long attracted bohemian types, and like many Americans was binge-watching true crime documentaries on Netflix. One of them would change her life. Watching an episode of “The Innocence Files,” […]

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Director of ’20 Days in Mariupol’ Says He’d Rather Have No Oscar and No War

The Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov used his acceptance speech for “20 Days in Mariupol,” which won the Oscar for best documentary feature on Sunday, to give an emotional denunciation of the continued invasion of his country by Russian forces. “I’ll be the first director on this stage who will say, ‘I wish I never made […]

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When Oscar Winners Have a Bigger Point to Make

March 5, 2024, 1:29 p.m. ET March 5, 2024, 1:29 p.m. ET “I was a little disappointed that Katie Porter chose to run,” Karl Rubin, an emeritus professor of math, told me on the patio of a community center on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, on Monday morning. He said that Porter, […]

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Cramming for the Oscars

I’m in competition with no one but myself in trying to view all the major-category nominees for the Oscars before the ceremony tomorrow night. I’m doing well this year, probably because the slate is fairly small: Most of the films with acting and screenplay nominations are also contenders for best picture. If I can get […]

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The Oscar Contender That Won’t Let Us Look Away

Any filmmaker trying to draw meaning from the Holocaust onscreen faces potential pitfalls. If you showcase individual human perseverance, as in Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film “Europa Europa,” you risk trivialization; if you attempt to dramatize the inside of a concentration camp, as in Roberto Benigni’s 1997 film “Life Is Beautiful,” you risk exploitation; if you’re […]

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‘Dahomey’ Wins Top Prize at Berlin International Film Festival

The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was given to “Dahomey,” a documentary by the French filmmaker Mati Diop about 26 looted artworks that were returned to Benin from France in 2021. The unconventional feature, narrated in part by the gravelly, imagined voice of one of the artworks, is a playful exploration […]

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The Documentary Aleksei Navalny Knew We’d Watch After His Death

In the opening moments of “Navalny,” the Oscar-winning 2022 documentary about the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, the director Daniel Roher asks his subject a dark question. “If you are killed — if this does happen — what message do you leave behind to the Russian people?” the voice asks from behind the camera. […]

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From Ballet to Blackjack, a Dance Pioneer’s Amazing Odyssey

Among the blaring lights and all-hours amusements of downtown Las Vegas, in a sea of slot machines at the Four Queens Hotel and Casino, George Lee sits quietly at a blackjack table, dealing cards eight hours a day, five days a week, a job he’s been doing for more than 40 years. Lee, 88, was […]

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When Soccer’s Content Mine Loses Sight of Reality

Being early, Marc Andreessen once ruefully said, is the same as being wrong. Admittedly, Andreesen, the software engineer, angel investor and all-purpose Silicon Valley maven, deployed the maxim in the context of his own somewhat bitter experiences in the world of cloud computing, but it works surprisingly well as an analysis of “Being: Liverpool.” If […]

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‘In the Summers’ and ’Didi’ Among 2024 Sundance Film Festival Winners

“In the Summers,” an independent film about two sisters navigating fraught summer visits with their father, won the top prize in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. dramatic competition on Friday. The movie also won the competition’s directing award for its first-time filmmaker, Alessandra Lacorazza. “This film snuck up on us,” read a citation delivered by […]

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Coming Soon: A George Santos Documentary Focusing on His ‘Human Side’

George Santos, the disgraced former congressman trying to parlay his notoriety into a cottage industry, is now participating in a documentary film project on his colorful lies, life and times. The film is being led by Jenner Furst, a successful documentarian whose projects include a Peabody-award winning documentary about Kalief Browder, a young Bronx man […]

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‘Home Alone,’ ‘Fame,’ and Apollo 13’ Join National Film Registry

It was a year for the underdogs. Two films that initially received mixed receptions but that later came to be considered groundbreaking in their own way — Spike Lee’s satire of blackface in cinema, “Bamboozled” (2000), and Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated Disney musical “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) — are among the motion pictures that […]

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Podcasters Took Up Her Sister’s Murder Investigation. Then They Turned on Her.

A journey implies leaving your home, traveling somewhere new and a change in the landscape, but often also a change in the traveler herself. When Flatt started on her journey in 2016, she was 49 and living with her husband and her mother, Joyce Lemons, in a large suburban house in Fort Worth. She had […]

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In Taiwan, I See a Geopolitical Dance Up Close

I was born in Taiwan, grew up in the United States, worked extensively in China and now live in Taipei. This mix of experiences has given me a front-row seat to the complex, decades-long dance between these nations. Lately, the world is paying considerably more attention to my homeland, especially after the former U.S. House […]

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Best Movies of 2023

Alissa Wilkinson Where Evil Lies This was the year of evil at the movies: gut-wrenching, bone-chilling, ordinary evil. It didn’t wear villainous capes, nor did it often arrive in the expected horror movie package. That’s why it was so terrifying. The movies this year posited that evil’s opposite isn’t goodness; it’s reality. Evil was something […]

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Ramboy: A Family Farm in Ireland Prevails

Ever since we were children, we’ve been fascinated by pastoralism. We both come from families with farming roots but grew up in the city. This enthusiasm brought us to Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland, where sheep graze over the grassland. In a vast peat bog in this corner of the world, the […]

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Wife of Gilgo Beach Suspect Gets a Documentary Deal

After Rex Heuermann was arrested in July and accused of slaughtering women found bound in burlap and buried along a desolate stretch of Gilgo Beach, his family was left reeling and destitute. With their dilapidated Massapequa Park ranch house turned inside out by investigators, Mr. Heuermann’s wife, Asa Ellerup, and their two grown children were […]

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Hunter College Pulls Screening of Film Critical of Israel

The screening of “Israelism” at Hunter had been planned since June, according to Tami Gold, a professor in the film and media department who organized the screening. The movie, made by a nearly all-Jewish team, follows two young Jews, Simone Zimmerman and Eitan (who withholds his last name). In the West Bank, where Eitan served […]

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The N.F.L. Looks Beyond Game Day to Try to Create a Streaming Universe

As Americans gather this Thanksgiving, tens of millions will sink into their couches for one of the country’s enduring rituals: watching football games showcasing the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys while turkeys are being dressed, carved and gobbled. The National Football League has long been a broadcast juggernaut, with its games accounting for 83 […]

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Madeleine: The Joy of Intergenerational Friendship

Growing up, I was very close to my grandmother. I’ve always admired the wisdom and humor of my elders, and she instilled in me a profound appreciation for their company. Unlike the prevalent notion that aging is negative, my perspective on growing old — very old — was different. When I emigrated to Canada from […]

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What I Read and Watch to Decompress

It has been an intense couple of weeks here at Interpreter HQ. “India’s Daughters,” the special newsletter series that I created with my colleagues Emily Schmall and Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, premiered last week. There will be a new chapter on Friday, and you can catch up with the first installment here if you missed it. […]

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How Tupac Shakur Remained a Defining Rap Figure After His Death

Tupac Shakur has been dead for longer than the 25 years he lived. During his lifetime, he rose to levels of stardom matched by few other rappers, rocketing quickly from a Digital Underground backup dancer to a chart-topper and movie star, all while courting controversy with law enforcement and presidential administrations. In the decades since […]

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Talking Heads on the Return of ‘Stop Making Sense’

Four decades after it was filmed, “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert documentary, is still ecstatic and strange. “It stays kind of relevant, even though it doesn’t make literal sense,” David Byrne, the band’s leader and singer, said in a recent interview. The film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme, has been restored from […]

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