21 min read
by Rebecca Martin
November 6, 2026
In August 2020, a night of dry lightning sparked the CZU Lightning Complex fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The flames came within a block of the Boulder Creek home
10 min read
by Rebecca Martin
October 26, 2026
When I covered the New Orleans Film Festival in 2023, I discovered that creative non-fiction is a documentary genre of its own: films made in unconventional ways, rather than the
6 min read
by Rebecca Martin Fagerholm and Matt Fagerholm
October 16, 2026
All That Seeing Allows by Matt Fagerholm Aside from Alex Gibney’s “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” which is slowly making its way around the country in far too
5 min read
by Rebecca Martin
September 25, 2026
This is a preview piece ahead of the Music Box Theatre screening of “Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency” on Tuesday, September 29; the full feature interview will follow closer
12 min read
by Megan Henderson
September 24, 2026
Barbara Hammer made over 80 films in her life time, and yet many don’t know her name. She helped shape experimental and queer cinema, and yet most audience members haven’t
16 min read
by Rebecca Martin
June 16, 2026
Years ago, while working at Chicago Filmmakers, I came across a large pile of magazines from the organization’s archive that were destined for the trash. To some, they may have
12 min read
by Rebecca Martin
May 5, 2026
This month’s lineup leans heavily into documentaries, with “The Invite” as the lone outlier. Watching these films, I kept circling back to my own life—each one opening up a different
14 min read
by Matt Fagerholm
March 9, 2026
As someone who was born four decades ago, any fragments of home movie footage that exist from my childhood—most of which was recorded on a cumbersome camcorder borrowed from my
7 min read
by Rebecca Martin
February 5, 2026
Gara, the guiding force at the center of “To Hold a Mountain,” is living proof that not all heroes wear capes. Her days begin before sunrise — herding sheep across
8 min read
by Rebecca Martin
February 3, 2026
“Birds of War” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it received the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact. At its core, the film is a
8 min read
by Dawn Borchardt
January 29, 2026
“Joybubbles” is filmmaker Rachael J. Morrison’s debut feature documentary, which just premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition. Built almost entirely from archival film footage
16 min read
by Matt Fagerholm
January 28, 2026
Sundance has always been a festival I had admired at a distance. How Robert Redford had gone about using his platform to launch the careers of countless filmmakers for over
