What’s Up Doc?: Wiseman Rises to New “Heights” & Rivers Shooting “The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers” in Morocco

It’s been a surprisingly interesting month of moving and shaking in terms of doc development. Just a month after making his first public funding pitch at Toronto’s Hot Docs Forum, legendary doc filmmaker Frederick Wiseman took to Kickstarter to help cover the remaining expenses for his 40th feature film In Jackson Heights (see the film’s first trailer below). Unrelentingly rigorous in his determination to capture the American institutional landscape on film, his latest continues down this thematic rabbit hole, taking on the immensely diverse New York City neighborhood of Jackson Heights as his latest subject. According to the Kickstarter page, Wiseman is currently editing the 120 hours of rushes he shot with hopes of having the film ready for a fall festival premiere (my guess would be TIFF, where both National Gallery and At Berkeley made their North American debut), though he’s currently quite a ways away from his $75,000 goal.

https://vimeo.com/126135695

Just a couple weeks prior, director John Walter launched his own Kickstarter campaign in hopes of raising funds for his new film The Earth Moves, which looks to tell the story of “Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach, and the connection between physics, opera, and human imagination”. Seemingly as dense and mysterious as his heady subjects, Walter was still able to raise over a hundred grand, surpassing his funding goals. Like Wiseman, he hopes to have the film ready for a fall festival premiere later this year. An Indiegogo campaign was also launched around the same time by Jacqueline Olive in hopes of garnering cash to finish her film Always in Season. The film “explores the impact of the racial terrorism of more than a century of lynching African Americans”. Originally backed by the Southern Documentary Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures and the Catapult Film Fund, Olive needs additional funding to cover the expenses of additional shoots with with activist and scholar Angela Davis and Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative.

Two years ago, Ted Griswold and Chris Valdes raised $40,000 for a project titled The Sound of Sangre about a young accordionist who makes a living performing for drug cartels in Honduras via their own Kickstarter. Since then, they’ve renamed the film Olancho, released a pair of trailers (one of which can be seen below), and taken part in various funding forums like the Big Sky Pitch, the Hot Docs Forum (their pitch can be seen here) and most recently the National Association of Latino Independent Producers Media Market 2015 where they were given an award for 2015 NALIP Official Selection after the film’s trailer as shown. From the sound of their increasingly frequent updates, the film is nearing completion and could make for an interesting pairing with Shaul Schwarz‘s Narco Cultura.

https://vimeo.com/104630488

More mysteriously, a pair of Lithuanian multimedia artists by the name of Berta Tilmantaitė (whose Mermology project was recently part of the Sheffield Doc/Fest Crossover Market) and Artūras Morozovas (whose photographic work has been featured in The Guardian, News Week and more) released a teaser trailer for Monotone Days (see below), their first documentary project under the banner of their new production venture, Nanook Multimedia. Through intimate interviews and intricate observation the film looks at the lives of various women currently living in a correctional facility in Lithuania. No word yet on further details.

One of the most intriguing developments of the last month was Sight & Sound’s photographic report on Ben Rivers’ latest film, The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (see still of Rivers shooting at top). While his other mysteriously titled in-the-making project Rose floats up and down this list, he’s apparently been hard at work in Morocco on another non-fiction/fiction blending film that “encompasses an adaptation of Paul Bowles’s 1947 brutal short story A Distant Episode, about the atrocities befalling a Western linguist wandering North Africa, along with elements from the life and stories of Moroccan writer and artist Mohammed Mrabet and visits to the sets of Moroccan-based films by Spanish director Oliver Laxe and British artist Shezad Dawood”. The project sounds more ambitious than anything he’s attempted thus far and from the production photos shot by Yuki Yamamoto, it is shaping up to be quite a beautifully enigmatic project. It may be too early in the production, but fingers crossed for its inclusion in TIFF’s Wavelength’s program, like his miraculous collaboration with fellow filmmaker Ben Russell on A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness which played the festival a couple years back.

As mentioned previously, for those attached to any of the docs mentioned below — please feel free to share any updates on the status of your projects. I can be reached at jordan [at] ioncinema dot com. Here is my most anticipated Top 100 docs in the pipeline.

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