vHopeful Conversations Podcast

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Yoruba Richen about her powerful documentary short, Free Joan Little, and the extraordinary movement that rallied around a young Black woman’s right to defend herself against sexual violence. We explore how Yoruba’s work on Rosa Parks led her to Joan’s story, the archival discoveries that helped her center Joan’s voice whi...

In this vHopeful conversation, I talk with Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, directors of the extraordinary documentary One in a Million, about their decade of filming Israa and her family as they fled Syria and built a new life in Germany, and about the trust, commitment, and emotional honesty that allowed them to capture the deeply personal experience of displacement and migration. We discuss how sh...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with Academy Award-winning filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras and filmmaker and investigative journalist Rachel Lauren Mueller about their extraordinary short documentary, They’re Here, which I first saw at its world premiere in Venice. We explore how they drew on the language of horror and dystopian cinema to convey the terror of immigration raids in Min...

I was honored to speak with the extraordinary filmmaker Ross McElwee about Remake, his profoundly moving new documentary built from a lifetime of footage—including material filmed by and with his late son, Adrian. In this intimate vHopeful Conversation, Ross reflects on returning to the archive after devastating loss; discovering Adrian’s own voice, humor, and unflinching filmmaking; the evolving...

I was so moved by The Cycle of Love, the luminous new documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel, director of the Oscar-winning The White Helmets, the Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated Virunga, and the BIFA-winning Evelyn. In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with Orlando about his extraordinary new film, which follows P. K. Mahanandia, a young Dalit street artist who, in 19...

In this vHopeful conversation, I speak with Chilean-Belgian filmmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra about his exhilarating Sundance-winning documentary, Everybody to Kenmure Street, which brings us inside the extraordinary eight-hour 2021 uprising in Glasgow’s Pollokshields neighborhood, when hundreds of neighbors gathered on the first day of Eid to stop a Home Office van from deporting two local men. Feli...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with Emmy-nominated Iranian American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian about her searing new documentary, An Eye for an Eye, co-directed with Farzad Jafari. This gripping, real-life courtroom thriller follows Tahereh, an Iranian woman who has served fourteen years in prison for killing her abusive husband and now faces execution unless she can negotiate forgiveness—o...

In this vHopeful Conversation , I was delighted to speak with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Green about his tender, funny, and profoundly moving new documentary, The Oldest Person in the World. Over the course of a decade, Sam traveled from Brooklyn to Italy, Jamaica, Japan, France, and beyond in pursuit of the ever-changing title, only to discover that the film was less about a secret to longevit...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Alysa Nahmias about Cookie Queens, her joyful, incisive documentary following four Girl Scouts through the high-stakes world of cookie-selling season. What begins as a lively look at an $800 million enterprise becomes a rich coming-of-age portrait of ambition, friendship, family, class, confidence, performance, and the early...

In this vHopeful Conversation , I was honored to speak with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth about her moving new documentary short, The Righteous Road Trip. The film follows British Jewish humanitarian Jonny Daniels and his dog Tyson as they travel through Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary to visit some of the last surviving Righteous Among the Nations—non-Jews recognized by Yad Vashem fo...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with writer-director-editor Rafael Manuel about Filipiñana, his haunting and visually exquisite debut feature, winner of Sundance’s Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. Set at an exclusive golf club outside Manila, the film follows Isabel, a 17-year-old tee girl whose movement through its manicured grounds reveals a world structured by class, gender, colon...

In this vHopeful conversation, I speak with the extraordinary filmmaker Rory Kennedy about Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, her urgent new documentary examining how a company once synonymous with engineering excellence and public trust came to place profit, production speed, and shareholder value ahead of safety. Returning to the Boeing story after her 2022 film Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with the incomparable film critic and historian David Thomson about his revelatory new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies . We trace his earliest experiences of cinema—from the terror and beauty of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V to watching Brief Encounter through his mother’s emotional response—and consider why films can both enchan...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I talk with Oscar‑, Grammy‑, and Emmy‑winning filmmaker Morgan Neville about his new documentary Man on the Run, a wildly engaging portrait of Paul McCartney’s post‑Beatles reinvention. We trace Morgan’s lifelong relationship to the Beatles and Wings (via his dad’s jukebox and my own ’70s childhood soundtrack), then dive into the Scottish farm years when a 27‑year‑ol...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I sit down with filmmaker Poh Si Teng—Oscar‑nominated producer of St. Louis Superman, Emmy‑winning executive producer of Patrice: The Movie, and now first‑time feature director of American Doctor—to talk about why she stepped out from behind the scenes after two decades as a producer, commissioner, and executive to make an urgent, deeply personal film about three Ame...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I sit down with Academy Award–nominated, Primetime Emmy–winning director Rory Kennedy to discuss her new Netflix documentary, Queen of Chess, about Hungarian prodigy Judit Polgár and her battle against a male‑dominated elite chess world. We explore Polgár’s radical upbringing in communist Hungary under her father’s “genius is made, not born” experiment, the structura...

In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker and birder Penny Lane joins me to talk about Wild Inside, her HBO documentary about Flaco the Eurasian eagle‑owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in New York City and became a worldwide symbol of freedom and urban wonder. Penny shares the origin story of that first surreal night outside Bergdorf Goodman, how she tried to imagine “what it is like to be...

In this episode of vHopeful Conversations, I sit down with writer-director Peter Glanz to talk about his bold new period satire Savage House, a 1715-set black comedy that uses wigs, corsets, and a pox-ridden elite household to mirror the madness of our own political moment. We dig into how January 6th and QAnon-era unrest pushed Peter toward a story of social climbers trapped at an opulent dinner,...

In this vHopeful Conversations episode, I sit down with legendary San Francisco–based documentary duo Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine to talk about their new film, PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN. They trace the project’s unlikely origin—from a Linda Ronstadt–invited cabaret night at Bimbo’s to deciding to build their own documentary loosely around Peter Asher’s memoir show. The conversation explores ho...

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with filmmaker Valerie Veatch about her Sundance 2026 documentary Ghost in the Machine. We dive into the dirty wiring behind today’s AI boom—its roots in eugenics and race science, its extraction‑driven infrastructures, and the white male techno‑fantasies shaping it. Veatch unpacks how a “secret” artist program around OpenAI’s Sora jolted her from curiosity t...

This vHopeful Conversation features director–producer Rowan Haber and Emmy‑winning producer Caryn Capotosto discussing their documentary We Are Pat, which revisits SNL’s 1990s “It’s Pat” sketches through a contemporary trans and non‑binary lens. We talk about why this is the right cultural moment to unearth Pat again, how Ro’s realization that “the punchline wasn’t about me, it was me” became the...

In this vHopeful Conversations episode, filmmaker Katie Camosy joins me to talk about her new Greenpeace‑backed documentary GASLIT, which follows Jane Fonda, Connie Britton, and Maggie Rogers through Texas and the Gulf South as they bear witness to LNG export terminals, petrochemical corridors, and the communities living in their shadow. Katie traces how a shocking first encounter with the Permian...

This vHopeful Conversation features creator, producer, and host Janet Hsieh whose journey runs from MIT pre‑med and the long‑running Discovery travel series Fun Taiwan to funding and creating her new YouTube travel show GET AWAY with Janet Hsieh. We talk through the “drought” Janet faced moving back to the U.S., how a chance reunion with high‑school friend and Emmy‑winning producer Joe Litzinger l...

In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope speaks with Emmy‑nominated documentarian Ivy Meeropol about her new film Ask E. Jean, a portrait of advice columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll that goes far beyond the courtroom headlines to explore her Miss Cheerleader USA past, gonzo magazine career, TV show, and late‑in‑life decision to publicly confront Donald Trump. They discuss the chall...

In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with Brazilian filmmaker Marianna Brennand about MANAS, her powerful narrative feature debut rooted in a decade of documentary research into sexual abuse and exploitation of women and girls in the Amazon rainforest. Brennand discusses why the story had to become fiction rather than documentary, how she transformed real testimonies into a protectiv...