UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art

S&Man skitters around a couple of big, interesting questions about our relationship to images of violence and cruelty. But as the film barrels towards its conclusion, it becomes apparent that, instead of knotting the various strands that comprise the film, director JT Petty has...

The videos collected in Chen Tamir’s Life Stories program are as much about biographers as the lives they depict. Though each of these four works are more-or-less straight interviews, none of the artists here are content to let us believe that their documentation provides us with a direct...

During the second program of Pay As You Go, the short clip from Sex Workers (And Proud of It) stood out. Though only a series of talking head interviews, professionally, but not impressively staged, with prostitutes and sex-work advocates, the 15-minute segment exudes an urgency unseen in the...

I am in no position to evaluate the political efficacy of Pray the Devil Back to Hell, but I think that is the criterion by which a documentary such as this lives or dies. Gini Reticker’s movie portrays the efforts of a group of Christian and Muslim women who joined to end the civil war...

Compared to his father, Jeremiah Zagar is deeply concerned with his audience. At Union Docs this past weekend, during both the masterclass for the UD collaborative and the question-and-answer segment that followed the screening, he spoke frequently of his effort to make his dad Isaiah, the...

Examined Life is a bad idea made good. I remember feeling, about forty-five seconds into my first viewing of the trailer, the attractive-repulsive sting of being pandered to. A film comprised of ten-minute segments with brand name philosophers would have to be pretty deft to serve a purpose...

Until its last ten minutes, there is nothing in It is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, but the Situation in Which He Lives resembling a political program. Daniel, the protagonist of Rosa Von Praunheim’s ironic soap opera, sits on bed facing a group of men, whose number and state of...

If you were hired by the Chicago Police Department to make a film teaching police officers the proper way to deal with suicide attempts, which method of suicide would you make your primary example? I’m guessing you’d have to make a pretty long list before coming up with a man so...

Sita Sings the Blues never really feels like a documentary. It is not merely that the film is drawn rather than photographed, or that it is packed with unmotivated musical interludes. These tactics have all appeared in other films more convincingly categorized as documentary, but Nina...

The T.A.M.I. Show, as it is available to us now, does not document a concert as much as a variety of aesthetic experience. It is imaginatively informative rather than didactic. The film does not tell us anything we haven’t already heard a thousand times before in lesser films, but makes...