1091 Pictures has acquired worldwide digital rights to A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem, a feature documentary directed and produced by Yu Gu, written and produced by Elizabeth Ai and co-produced by Jin Yoo-Kim. The film, which had its world premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, will be available to buy on platforms January 26, 2021, and rent February 2.
The doc follows Lacy, an Oakland Raiders cheerleader who sued the team in 2014 for wage theft, and Maria, a former cheerleader for the Buffalo Bills who filed a similar suit with three others, as they fight for fair compensation from the NFL amid a structure in which some cheerleaders are compensated at less than minimum wage, compared with the teams’ players, mascots and concession workers. In the process, they reveal a culture of toxic masculinity and the devaluation of women’s labor in society. The Raiders eventually settled their suit and increased their cheerleaders’ pay.
The doc follows Lacy, an Oakland Raiders cheerleader who sued the team in 2014 for wage theft, and Maria, a former cheerleader for the Buffalo Bills who filed a similar suit with three others, as they fight for fair compensation from the NFL amid a structure in which some cheerleaders are compensated at less than minimum wage, compared with the teams’ players, mascots and concession workers. In the process, they reveal a culture of toxic masculinity and the devaluation of women’s labor in society. The Raiders eventually settled their suit and increased their cheerleaders’ pay.
- 12/17/2020
- by Patrick Hipes
- Deadline Film + TV
1091 Pictures has acquired the digital worldwide rights to “A Woman’s Work: The NFL Cheerleader Problem,” a documentary that highlights the pay gaps and toxic workplaces faced by cheerleaders in the NFL.
The film directed and produced by Yu Gu and written and produced by Elizabeth Ai premiered at Tribeca in 2019, and 1091 will make “A Woman’s Work” available for purchase on January 26 and for rental on February 2, 2021.
“A Woman’s Work” follows two former NFL cheerleaders, one for the (then) Oakland Raiders and another for the Buffalo Bills, as they fight for fair compensation after they received less than minimum wage for their work. One of the cheerleaders, Lacy, is seen as she’s struggling under mounting debt after paying out of pocket for beauty and transportation in order to fulfill her dream job of working with the NFL.
We see her hire an all-female employment law firm...
The film directed and produced by Yu Gu and written and produced by Elizabeth Ai premiered at Tribeca in 2019, and 1091 will make “A Woman’s Work” available for purchase on January 26 and for rental on February 2, 2021.
“A Woman’s Work” follows two former NFL cheerleaders, one for the (then) Oakland Raiders and another for the Buffalo Bills, as they fight for fair compensation after they received less than minimum wage for their work. One of the cheerleaders, Lacy, is seen as she’s struggling under mounting debt after paying out of pocket for beauty and transportation in order to fulfill her dream job of working with the NFL.
We see her hire an all-female employment law firm...
- 12/16/2020
- by Brian Welk
- The Wrap
It’s been a couple months since the last edition of What’s Up Doc? placed Michael Moore’s surprise world premiere of Where To Invade Next at the top of this list and in the meantime much shuffling has taken place and much time has been spent on various new endeavors (namely my Buffalo-based film series, Cultivate Cinema Circle). Finally taking its rightful place at the top, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hagedus’ Unlocking the Cage is in the midst of being scored by composer James Lavino, according to Lavino’s own personal site. Though the project has been taking shape at its own leisurely pace, I’d expect to see the film making its festival debut in early 2016.
Right behind, the American direct cinema masters is a Texan soon to make his non-fiction debut with Voyage of Time. Just two weeks ago indieWIRE reported that Ennio Morricone, who scored...
Right behind, the American direct cinema masters is a Texan soon to make his non-fiction debut with Voyage of Time. Just two weeks ago indieWIRE reported that Ennio Morricone, who scored...
- 11/5/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
The fall festival rush is upon us. Locarno is currently ramping up. Venice has released their line-up and Thom Powers and the Toronto International Film Festival team have dropped a bomb with a previously unannounced new feature from powerhouse docu-provocateur Michael Moore. It is truly a miracle that the production of a film such as Moore’s upcoming Where To Invade Next (see still above) managed to go completely undetected by the filmmaking community until it was literally announced to world premiere at one of the largest film festivals in the world. Programmed as a one of the key films in the Special Presentations section at Tiff, the film sees Moore telling “the Pentagon to ‘stand down’ — he will do the invading for America from now on.” Also announced to premiere at Tiff was Avi Lewis’ This Changes Everything, which has slowly been rising up this list, as well as...
- 8/7/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
It’s been a surprisingly interesting month of moving and shaking in terms of doc development. Just a month after making his first public funding pitch at Toronto’s Hot Docs Forum, legendary doc filmmaker Frederick Wiseman took to Kickstarter to help cover the remaining expenses for his 40th feature film In Jackson Heights (see the film’s first trailer below). Unrelentingly rigorous in his determination to capture the American institutional landscape on film, his latest continues down this thematic rabbit hole, taking on the immensely diverse New York City neighborhood of Jackson Heights as his latest subject. According to the Kickstarter page, Wiseman is currently editing the 120 hours of rushes he shot with hopes of having the film ready for a fall festival premiere (my guess would be Tiff, where both National Gallery and At Berkeley made their North American debut), though he’s currently quite a ways away from his $75,000 goal.
- 7/6/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Well folks, after a rather long and brutal winter (at least for me here in Buffalo), we are finally heading into the wonderful warmth of summer, but with that blast of sunshine and steamy humidity comes the mid-year drought of major film fests. After the Sheffield Doc/Fest concludes on June 10th and AFI Docs wraps on June 21st, we likely won’t see any major influx in our charts until Locarno, Venice, Telluride and Tiff announce their line-ups in rapid succession. In the meantime, we can look forward to the intriguing onslaught of films making their debut in Sheffield, including Brian Hill’s intriguing examination of Sweden’s most notorious serial killer, The Confessions of Thomas Quick, and Sean McAllister’s film for which he himself was jailed in the process of making, A Syrian Love Story, the only two films world premiering in the festival’s main competition.
- 6/1/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
It should come as no surprise that Cannes Film Festival will play host to Kent Jones’s doc on the touchstone of filmmaking interview tomes, Hitchcock/Truffaut (see photo above). The film has been floating near the top of this list since it was announced last year as in development, while Jones himself has a history with the festival, having co-written both Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P. and Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage To Italy, both of which premiered in Cannes. The film is scheduled to screen as part of the Cannes Classics sidebar alongside the likes of Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words, which will play as part of the festival’s tribute to the late starlet, and Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna’s Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans (see trailer below). As someone who grew up watching road races with my dad in Watkins Glen,...
- 5/1/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Now that the busy winter fest schedule of Sundance, Rotterdam and the Berlinale has concluded, we’ve now got our eyes on the likes of True/False and SXSW. While, True/False does not specialize in attention grabbing world premieres, it does provide a late winter haven for cream of the crop non-fiction fare from all the previously mentioned fests and a selection of overlooked genre blending films presented in a down home setting. This year will mark my first trip to the Columbia, Missouri based fest, where I hope to catch a little of everything, from their hush-hush secret screenings, to selections from their Neither/Nor series, this year featuring chimeric Polish cinema of decades past, to a spotlight of Adam Curtis’s incisive oeuvre. But truth be told, it is SXSW, with its slew of high profile world premieres being announced, such as Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs...
- 2/27/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
The Ebola outbreak may be grabbing headlines now, but CNN Films and Sierra Tango Productions have pacted to co-produce a feature film about deadly viruses and bacteria that could cause a far bigger pandemic. See more A Guide to Fake Film Diseases The untitled documentary co-production will be directed and produced by Emmy-winning Janet Tobias, with Michael Ehrenzweig, Peter W. Klein and Rogger Lopez co-producing. To help with tracking new pathogens, the film will follow virus hunter Larry Brilliant, a doctor and scientist who helped eradicate smallpox. The film will be released theatrically in late 2015,
read more...
read more...
- 11/6/2014
- by Etan Vlessing
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Hot on the heels of extensive coverage of the Ebola epidemic, CNN announced Thursday that it plans to partner with Sierra Tango Productions on a global influenza film. Through the lens of the historic 1918 global influenza pandemic — which killed between 30 and 50 million globally — the documentary will dig deep into the potential pathogens that pose the greatest risk of the next pandemic. Also read: CNN's Jeff Zucker Says His Network Might Make Scripted Films The medical film will be directed and produced by the Emmy Award winner Janet Tobias. Michael Ehrenzweig, journalist Peter W. Klein, and Rogger Lopez will co-produce with.
- 11/6/2014
- by Jordan Chariton
- The Wrap
Interview: In The Nick of Time: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman Document Gay Victims of the Holocaust
by Aaron Krach
(indieWIRE/ 9.19.00) — “”Paragraph 175” could have been just another holocaust documentary — reverent, somber and chilling. But soon after taking on the project, about the mistreatment of gay men and lesbians in Germany during World War II, filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman decided to go another route. They wanted to tell a bigger story about how gay life in Germany changed from wide acceptance at the beginning of the 20th Century to total imprisonment under Hitler, followed by continued persecution after the war until the anti-gay statute, Paragraph 175, was finally repealed in 1969.
The film covers the entire time frame, but the years during World War II when gay men were carted off to concentration camps is given the most attention. That the nightmares are in direct contrast to the happier years before...
by Aaron Krach
(indieWIRE/ 9.19.00) — “”Paragraph 175” could have been just another holocaust documentary — reverent, somber and chilling. But soon after taking on the project, about the mistreatment of gay men and lesbians in Germany during World War II, filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman decided to go another route. They wanted to tell a bigger story about how gay life in Germany changed from wide acceptance at the beginning of the 20th Century to total imprisonment under Hitler, followed by continued persecution after the war until the anti-gay statute, Paragraph 175, was finally repealed in 1969.
The film covers the entire time frame, but the years during World War II when gay men were carted off to concentration camps is given the most attention. That the nightmares are in direct contrast to the happier years before...
- 9/19/2000
- by Indiewire
- Indiewire
The underreported Nazi persecution of homosexuals before and during World War II, including the incarceration of 10,000-15,000 victims in concentration camps, is the subject of a vital documentary by the Oscar-winning team of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ("Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt," "The Celluloid Closet").
A winner of both the Sundance Film Festival Jury Award for best direction of a documentary feature and the Fipresci International Film Critics Award at Berlin, "Paragraph 175" silenced and educated the crowd in its Los Angeles debut at Outfest. Slated for theatrical release in September through New Yorker Films, the project has been in the works for several years. It originated with the efforts of German historian Klaus Muller, the European project director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The title refers to the 1871 German Penal Code, which deemed "unnatural" sex acts between males as punishable by imprisonment and possible loss of civil rights. While this sodomy law remained on the books and was enforced until 1969, there was a period between the wars when Berlin became a center of gay culture. But the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party led to a harsh change of atmosphere.
In its early sections, "Paragraph 175" does a commendable job of summarizing the history of Nazi attitudes toward homosexuals, including the rise and fall of Hitler's close friend and strongman Ernst Rohm, who was gay and was eventually purged in a power struggle in June 1934. According to Nazi documents, from 1933-45, some 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality. Roughly half of these men were sentenced to prison.
As with the many other nonfiction works about the Holocaust, "Paragraph 175" is most moving and disturbing when the interviewed survivors tell their stories. The film interweaves these personal stories to great effect. Rupert Everett's sober narration, written by Sharon Wood ("Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press"), supports the film's structure.
Among the interviewees are Gad Beck, who joined a Jewish resistance group in Berlin and succeeded in liberating his lover from a Gestapo transfer camp by posing as a Hitler Youth member. Beck saw his lover turn around to rejoin his doomed family. Another subject is Heinz Dormer, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth in 1933 but was arrested two years later for Paragraph 175 violations. There is also Pierre Seel, a Frenchman in annexed Alsace-Lorraine who was caught in the Nazi crackdown on "antisocial" elements. Seel was interned at Schirmeck, where he was forced to help build a crematorium at the nearby concentration camp Struthof.
These individuals and several others remind us how systematically and ruthlessly the Nazis used pink triangles, the Star of David and several other symbols to mark the many religious and ethnic minorities that they deemed expendable in the insane blood bath that was the Third Reich.
PARAGRAPH 175
New Yorker Films
A Telling Pictures production
Directors: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Producers: Rob Epstein,
Jeffrey Friedman,
Michael Ehrenzweig, Janet Cole
Director of research: Klaus Muller
Writer: Sharon Wood
Director of photography: Bernd Meiners
Editor: Dawn Logsdon
Music: Tibor Szemzo
Narrator: Rupert Everett
Color/stereo
Running time - 77 minutes
No MPAA rating...
A winner of both the Sundance Film Festival Jury Award for best direction of a documentary feature and the Fipresci International Film Critics Award at Berlin, "Paragraph 175" silenced and educated the crowd in its Los Angeles debut at Outfest. Slated for theatrical release in September through New Yorker Films, the project has been in the works for several years. It originated with the efforts of German historian Klaus Muller, the European project director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The title refers to the 1871 German Penal Code, which deemed "unnatural" sex acts between males as punishable by imprisonment and possible loss of civil rights. While this sodomy law remained on the books and was enforced until 1969, there was a period between the wars when Berlin became a center of gay culture. But the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party led to a harsh change of atmosphere.
In its early sections, "Paragraph 175" does a commendable job of summarizing the history of Nazi attitudes toward homosexuals, including the rise and fall of Hitler's close friend and strongman Ernst Rohm, who was gay and was eventually purged in a power struggle in June 1934. According to Nazi documents, from 1933-45, some 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality. Roughly half of these men were sentenced to prison.
As with the many other nonfiction works about the Holocaust, "Paragraph 175" is most moving and disturbing when the interviewed survivors tell their stories. The film interweaves these personal stories to great effect. Rupert Everett's sober narration, written by Sharon Wood ("Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press"), supports the film's structure.
Among the interviewees are Gad Beck, who joined a Jewish resistance group in Berlin and succeeded in liberating his lover from a Gestapo transfer camp by posing as a Hitler Youth member. Beck saw his lover turn around to rejoin his doomed family. Another subject is Heinz Dormer, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth in 1933 but was arrested two years later for Paragraph 175 violations. There is also Pierre Seel, a Frenchman in annexed Alsace-Lorraine who was caught in the Nazi crackdown on "antisocial" elements. Seel was interned at Schirmeck, where he was forced to help build a crematorium at the nearby concentration camp Struthof.
These individuals and several others remind us how systematically and ruthlessly the Nazis used pink triangles, the Star of David and several other symbols to mark the many religious and ethnic minorities that they deemed expendable in the insane blood bath that was the Third Reich.
PARAGRAPH 175
New Yorker Films
A Telling Pictures production
Directors: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Producers: Rob Epstein,
Jeffrey Friedman,
Michael Ehrenzweig, Janet Cole
Director of research: Klaus Muller
Writer: Sharon Wood
Director of photography: Bernd Meiners
Editor: Dawn Logsdon
Music: Tibor Szemzo
Narrator: Rupert Everett
Color/stereo
Running time - 77 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 7/24/2000
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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