Raoul Peck + Dustin Guy Defa and Laura Dunn
This week's two-pronged episode of the Film Comment podcast digs into a varied slate of contemporary filmmaking. First, from the New York Film Festival, FC columnist and Museum of the Moving Image Associate Curator Eric Hynes speaks to Raoul Peck, whose vital new film I Am Not Your Negro opens this Friday, February 3 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Peck explains his approach to James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript Remember This House, his use of archival footage to create arresting counterpoints, his experience rehearsing Samuel L. Jackson to deliver Baldwin's words, and his personal reflections on the author's work. Our podcast then flashes forward for a final dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival, a live discussion from the Kickstarter House featuring two directors the magazine has supported who have made films with the help of crowdfunding: Laura Dunn, who co-directed Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry (shown in Sundance’s Spotlight section), and Dustin Guy Defa, who directed Person to Person (in the NEXT section). Dunn’s prior feature, The Unforeseen (2007), was deemed “best film of the festival, hands down” in these pages, and so we were eager to see where she took Look & See, a Kickstarter project. Likewise, Defa’s feature Bad Fever, another Kickstarter alum, received the magazine’s high praise (“a small-scale, painfully candid examination of the connection between loneliness and creativity”—which is a good thing), and so expectations were high for his latest, Person to Person.