ANNOUNCING THE 2023 Critical Content SERIES
A Documentary Film Event curated by Nō Studios Founder and Oscar-winning Screenwriter,
John Ridley
and team, featuring conversations with some of the most important voices in documentary filmmaking this year.
Sponsored by
John Ridley discusses All That Breathes with filmmaker Shaunak Sen.
BAD AXE
BAD AXE captures a closely knit Asian American family living in a rural Michigan community as they now fight to keep their American dream alive. As owners of a local prominent restaurant, they reckon with a global pandemic, racial tensions, and generational scars from Cambodia’s killingfields.
DAVID SIEV
After leaving NYC for his rural hometown of Brad Axe, Michigan, at the start of the pandemic, Asian American filmmaker David Siev documents his family's struggles to keep their restaurant afloat. As fears of the virus grow, deep generational scars dating back to Cambodia’s bloody “killing fields” come to the fore, straining the relationship between the family's patriarch, Chun, and his daughter, Jaclyn. When the BLM movement takes center stage in America, the family uses its collective voice to speak out in their conservative community. What unfolds is a real-time portrait of 2020 through the lens of one multicultural family’s fight stay in business, stay involved, and stay alive.
"This [our experience] wasn't specific to our family, it was specific to so many families - so many Americans in our country."
- David Siev
John Ridley discusses Bad Axe with Director David Siev.
RETROGRADE
RETROGRADE captures the final nine months of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan from multiple perspectives: one of the last U.S. Special Forces units deployed there, a young Afghan general and his corps fighting to defend their homeland against all odds, and the civilians desperately attempting to flee as the country collapses and the Taliban take over.
From rarely seen operational control rooms to the frontlines of battle to the chaotic Kabul airport during the final U.S. withdrawal, Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Matthew Heineman’s latest film offers a cinematic and historic window onto the end of America’s longest war, and the costs endured for those most intimately involved.
MATTHEW
HEINEMAN
Matthew Heineman
is an Academy Award®-nominated and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. The Sundance Film Festival called Heineman “one of the most talented and exciting documentary filmmakers working today”, while Anne Thompson of Indie Wire wrote that Heineman is a "respected and gifted filmmaker who combines gonzo fearlessness with empathetic sensitivity.”
"Throughout my career, if there's one through line, it's trying to take the large amorphous subject...and trying to humanize it, trying to personalize it..."
- Matthew Heineman
John Ridley discusses Retrograde with Matthew Heineman.
ALL THAT BREATHES
In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital. Director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the Muslim brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.
SHAUNAK SEN
Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and film scholar based in New Delhi, India. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, among others) and won 6 international awards. Shaunak received the IDFA Bertha Fund (2019), the Sundance Documentary Grant (2019), the Catapult Film Fund (2020), the Charles Wallace Grant, the Sarai CSDS Digital Media fellowship (2014), and the Films Division of India fellowship (2013). He was also a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2018) and has published academic articles in Bioscope, Widescreen and other journals.
"The best films are often like Trojan horses - they sneak ideas in."
- Shaunak Sen
John Ridley discusses All That Breathes with Shaunak Sen.
