Pure Nonfiction: Inside Documentary Film

"While We Watched" profiles the Indian TV journalist Ravish Kumar during a period when he's under extreme pressure including death threats for trying to do his job. The film is a cautionary tale over threats to journalism around the world. Director Vinay Shukla is among a new wave of Indian documentary filmmakers that have gained international recognition. Earlier this year on episode 154 , the Os...

"Casa Susanna," playing on PBS Passport, tells the secret history of a Catskills resort in the late 1950s and early 1960s that was a safe haven for transgender expression. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviews director Sébastien Lifshitz on how he won the trust of the film’s participants to share their stories after six decades. Further reading: photo historian Isabelle Bonnet on Casa Susann...

Maite Alberdi has become Chile’s most prominent documentary maker. Her films include "Tea Time," about a monthly salon of women; "The Grown-Ups", about adults with Downs Syndrome; and "The Mole Agent" that’s a comic detective story inside a nursing home. Her new work is "The Eternal Memory." She follows the journalist Augusto Gongora and his wife Paulina Urrutia as they cope with Augusto’s experie...

No shade to Barbie, but our favorite summer film is "Kokomo City" that won audience prizes in Sundance and Berlin for its raw and raucous profile of four black transgender sex workers. First time filmmaker D. Smith had a successful career as a Grammy-nominated music producer. But when she came out as transgender, she was effectively blacklisted from that industry. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers...

Asif Kapadia has won renown for his biographical portraits in "Senna", "Diego Maradona" and the Oscar-winning "Amy". In this wide-ranging conversation, he speaks about the setbacks and breakthroughs in his career. The topics include his clash with Harvey Weinstein over his fiction feature "The Warrior" and being plunged into an Oscar campaign with "Amy". Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviewe...

John Leguizamo has a versatile writing and acting career from Broadway to Hollywood. Now he hosts the series "Leguizamo Does America" that explores Latin American communities across the country. He makes stops in New York, Miami, Washington, Chicago, Puerto Rico and Los Angeles interviewing prominent locals on their history, cuisine and culture. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers talks to Leguizamo...

Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams has a bounty of new releases this year. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviewed Williams at the CPH:DOX festival about three of those works: Love to Love You, Donna Summer on HBO, The 1619 Project on Hulu and his fiction feature debut Cassandro coming this fall from Amazon Studios. Williams also discusses his stint serving on the AMPAS Board of Gover...

Elvis Mitchell explores the flourishing of American Black cinema from 1968 to 1978 in the documentary "Is That Black Enough for You?!?" (Netflix). Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers sat down with Elvis in their hometown of Detroit during the Freep Film Festival. The conversation delves into Elvis’s Detroit roots - with local references ranging from the Fox Theater to the Electrifying Mojo. He shares...

Showtime's acclaimed series "Couples Therapy" is now in its third season. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers sat down with its star Dr. Orna Guralnik along with co-creators Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg and one of its directors Pax Wasserman. The interview was recorded before a live audience at New York's IFC Center. This week, Pure Nonfiction debuted the email newsletter Producer's Notebook tha...

Lisa Cortés has a multi-faceted career working for Def Jam and executive producing the award-winning fiction film "Precious". Now she's directed the documentary "Little Richard: I Am Everything" that helps to rewrite the history of rock and roll. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviews Lisa about her background in the Black church, the music business and her move into making document...

Harry Belafonte died this week at age 96. Years ago he resolved to leave behind an account of his life in the memoir "My Song" and the documentary "Sing Your Song". Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviewed Belafonte and his daughter Gina in 2013 as part of the Montclair Film Festival. The conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at NJPAC in Newark, New Jersey. "Sing Your Song", di...

E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have explored the mentality of risk takers over several films. They won an Oscar for Free Solo. Their latest documentary "Wild Life" tells the love story of Doug and Kris Tompkins who earned a fortune leading the clothing brands North Face and Patagonia, then left their corporate lives to devote themselves to conservation. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers intervie...

Chase Joynt has explored transgender topics in several films including "No Ordinary Man" about jazz musician Billy Tipton and his latest "Framing Agnes", now available on VOD. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviews Chase to discuss how trans experience has traditionally been filtered by outsiders across the spectrums of medicine, academia and media. Chase also reflects on what it means to be...

Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is profiled in the Oscar-nominated film “Navalny” at a critical stage when he’s trying to uncover the Russian agents who tried to kill him. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviews director Daniel Roher who completed the film in his late 20s. Today, its success may seem preordained, but Daniel explains it was anything but that.

"All That Breathes" won top prizes at Sundance and Cannes for its portrayal of two brothers in New Delhi who dedicated themselves to rescuing birds from the hazards of the polluted city. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers talks to director Shaunak Sen about how he scrapped his first year of filming to start over. Shaunak discusses the contributions of cinematographer Benjamin Bernhard ("Aquarela") a...

Joyce Chopra broke the glass ceiling for women in film by directing classic works such as the ground-breaking personal documentary "Joyce at 34" and the fiction film "Smooth Talk" that won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1986. Those films and others are now streaming in a collection of her work on the Criterion Channel . Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviews Joyce about her new memoir...

During China's feudal era, women kept in seclusion developed a secret language called nüshu. Hidden Letters profiles two millennial women in China who are among the very few people keeping the language alive. The film was named to the Oscars' Short List of 15 documentary features that will be narrowed to five nominees later this month.  Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviews di...

Rebeca Huntt tells her own coming of age story in her debut documentary "Beba," now streaming on Hulu. She uses the medium of film to explore the personal, political and poetic. The New Yorker critic Richard Brody describes the film as "an intimate story with a grand scope." It's been nominated for the Cinema Eye Honors in three categories including Best Director and was named by Indiewire as one...

La Madrina: The [Savage] Life of Lorine Padilla profiles the South Bronx “godmother” who transitioned from life in the Savage Skulls street gang to become a beloved community activist. Filmmaker Raquel Cepeda tells a nuanced portrait of Lorine, drawing upon previously unseen footage captured in the 1970s and ‘80s for documentaries such as "80 Blocks from Tiffany’s" and "Flyin’ Cut Sleeves” that fo...

W. Kamau Bell has a wide-ranging career in stand-up comedy, TV hosting, podcasting, and more. Now he directs the four-part Showtime series "We Need to Talk About Cosby". It explores the once beloved entertainer who's been accused by over 60 women of rape, sexual assault, and harrassment. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers talks to Kamau about how he navigated the intense emotions around Cosby's lega...

Abigail Disney made headlines three years ago when she launched a critique on the labor practices of Walt Disney Company that was co-founded by her grandfather Roy O. Disney. Now she pushes that argument further in the documentary The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales that she directed with Kathleen Hughes. Pure Nonfiction host Thom Powers interviewed Disney and Hughes as the film was making it...

Stanley Nelson's latest film "Attica" was picked for the Oscar Documentary Short List. It's playing on Showtime and available free for a limited time on YouTube. In February, the Criterion Channel will present a retrospective titled "Black History Rising: Documentaries by Stanley Nelson." The collection covers five films: "The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords" about African-American-owned news...

The burning of the Amazon rainforest is a global tragedy. Filmmaker Alex Pritz collaborates with members of the Uru-eu-wau-wau indigenous community to document what's happening on the ground in The Territory . Premiering at Sundance, the film has been hailed as "riveting" (Variety), "gorgeously and sometimes ingeniously conceived" (Indiewire). Alex describes the making of the film with host Thom P...

We Met in Virtual Reality , premiering in the Sundance World Documentary Competition, profiles several users on the platform VRChat during the pandemic. Director Joe Hunting uses a camera built for VR so he can film people's avatars in their imagined worlds. The film is more about relationships than technology. Joe's previous short films set in VR can be viewed on his website joeahunting.com . Gue...

Filmmaker Ramin Bahrani is best known for his fiction films such as "99 Homes" and "The White Tiger" that was Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Now he directs his first feature documentary "2nd Chance," a complex profile of Richard Davis who invented a lightweight bullet proof vest. Davis called his company 2nd Chance and his products helped save hundreds of lives. Pure Nonfiction host...