"The Arc of Oblivion" explores a quirk of humankind: in a universe that erases its tracks, we humans are hellbent on leaving a trace. Set against the backdrop of the filmmaker's quixotic quest to build an ark in a field in Maine, the film heads far afield - to salt mines in the Alps, fjords in the Arctic, and ancient libraries in the Sahara - to illuminate the strange world of archives, record-keeping, and memory.
In the golden age of documentaries, who benefits? SUBJECT reveals the unintended consequences – good, bad, and complicated – of having your life shared on screen. Featuring the protagonists of acclaimed documentaries The Staircase, Hoop Dreams, The Wolfpack, Capturing the Friedmans, and The Square, as well as the filmmakers of Minding the Gap, Cameraperson, An Inconvenient Truth, and more.
With this inventive portrait, director Kirsten Johnson seeks a way to keep her 86-year-old father alive forever. Utilizing moviemaking magic and her family’s dark humor, she celebrates Dr. Dick Johnson’s last years by staging fantasies of death and beyond. Together, dad and daughter confront the great inevitability awaiting us all.
Made from footage captured at Brooklyn’s BAMcinemafest in June 2016 in which filmmakers were left alone in a hotel with a camera and a question: "Is cinema a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?" An homage to Wim Wenders’s documentary Room 666, in which the same question was posed to directors such as Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ROOM H.264: Brooklyn, NY, June 2016 serves as a revealing document about the current state of American independent film, as well as a provocative rumination about how we see and experience the world.
The following roundtable conversation features director Kirsten Johnson along with documentary filmmaker Gini Reticker and sound recordists Wellington Bowler and Judy Karp, frequent collaborators of Jonhson’s whose work is featured in CAMERAPERSON. It was produced in 2016.
As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.
Kirby Dick's provocative documentary investigates the secretive and inconsistent process by which the Motion Picture Association of America rates films, revealing the organization's underhanded efforts to control culture. Dick questions whether certain studios get preferential treatment and exposes the discrepancies in how the MPAA views sex and violence.
Kirsten Johnson (born 12 October 1965, Seattle) is a cinematographer and documentary filmmaker. She graduated from Brown University in 1987, with a BA in Fine Arts and Literature. After two years in West Africa working on local fiction and documentary film projects, she attended the FEMIS (the French National Film School) in Paris. Her film "Cameraperson" premiered at Sundance 2016 and her short "The Above" premiered at 2015 New York Film Festival. Her work as a cinematographer appears in Oscar-winning "Citizen Four," Academy Award-nominated, "The Invisible War," Tribeca winner, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," "Fahrenheit 9/11", Academy Award-nominated "Asylum," "This Film is Not Yet Rated," and "Derrida."
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