Notizie

Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck and Canadian cinematographer Iris Ng will be honoured at the 25th edition of Canada’s documentary festival Hot Docs (April 30 – May 1).

Peck, best known for the Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, will be presented with the outstanding achievement award. His other credits include Lumumba, HBO miniseries Exterminate All The Brutes and most recently Silver Dollar Road.

A selection of Peck’s work will be shown at the festival where the director will participate in several post-screening Q&a’s.

Previous recipients of the outstanding achievement award include Werner Herzog, Patricio Guzmán and Tony Palmer.

Filmmaker Raoul Peck’s next documentary will delve into the 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise. The film, tentatively titled “The Hands That Held the Knives,” has been in production for over two years.

The documentary will be a thriller “in the tradition of Graham Greene or John Le Carré,” according to a press release. It will offer access to people involved in the murder of Moise, who was shot inside his home in July 2021. It will also feature secret footage from Haiti’s prisons and an encounter with a fugitive who witnessed the killing.

“The Hands That Held the Knives” will attempt to unpack Haiti’s politics, its relationship with the United States, as well as corrupt business empires and criminal organizations that deal drugs and contraband throughout the Caribbean. Per the official announcement, “the film will take us right up to the present moment, as ruthless gangs backed...

Director Raoul Peck, who helmed the 2016 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” has announced his new documentary project. “The Hands That Held the Knives” will detail the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

The documentary, which took over two years to make, is said to be in the same vein as the works of Graham Greene and John Le Carré. Peck was given access to the people involved in Moïse’s killing, and even secretly filmed in Haiti’s prison system. The documentary will lay out Haitian politics, its relationship to the U.S. and the corruption and criminality the country deals with, including drugs and weapons trafficking.

“I am eager to tell my country’s real story beyond the usual exotic clichés and preposterous clickbait,” Peck said in a prepared statement. “I want to reveal for once, without holding back, the core stories and real reasons for Haiti’s tragic situation.

Raoul Peck is in production on his latest documentary The Hands That Held The Knives which explores the 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise.

Haitian-born Peck is producing through his Velvet Films alongside Jigsaw Productions, with Imagine Documentaries, Anonymous Content, and Double Agent, who are also financing the project.

Editing is underway and shooting continues in Haiti, the US, Canada, France, and North Africa.

More than two years in the making, the documentary thriller is described as being in the vein of Graham Greene or John Le Carré and explores the politics of Haiti and its relationship with the United...

Raoul Peck, the filmmaker behind Academy Award-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, is in production on his next feature doc — an investigation into the 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise, tentatively titled, The Hands That Held the Knives.

Over two years in the making, with unprecedented access to many of those involved, and including secret filming in Haiti’s prisons and an unexpected encounter with a fugitive who was an eyewitness to the murder, Peck’s film taking him back to his home country will be a documentary thriller, in the tradition of Graham Greene or John Le Carré.

His investigation takes him deep into the politics of Haiti, its relationship with the United States, and the corrupt business empires and criminal organizations — dealing drugs and contraband throughout the Caribbean, using weapons trafficked from the U.S. — which have now rendered the country a hellscape for its citizens. The...

Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events. Predictions are updated every Thursday.

Visit the prediction pages for the respective ceremonies via the links below:

Oscars | Emmys | Grammys | Tonys

2024 Oscars Predictions:

Best Original Score Killers of the Flower Moon Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone Credit: AppleTV+

Weekly Commentary: It’s Ludwig Göransson taking home another Oscar for “Oppenheimer,” following his first win for “Black Panther.”

Next.

Will Win: “Oppenheimer” (Ludwig Göransson)

Could Win: “Killers of the Flower Moon...

Best Narrative Film American Fiction Barbie Godzilla Minus One The Holdovers Killers of the Flower Moon Oppenheimer Past Lives Poor Things Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse The Zone of Interest Best Documentary Film American Symphony May the Lord Watch: The Little Brother Story The Mission Silver Dollar Road Still: A Michael J Fox Movie Best Animated

The post “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” Lead North Carolina Film Critics Association (Ncfca) Nominations appeared first on Manny the Movie Guy.

Our Pmc sister website Variety is reporting that the motion picture academy has named 94 tunes as eligible for Best Original Song at the 2024 Oscars. See the complete list below of every song currently on the ballot for the music branch. A total of 15 will be announced this Thursday, December 21, on the Oscar short list. A final five will be revealed on January 23 as the the actual nominees.

SEEDiane Warren interview: ‘The Fire Inside’ from ‘Flamin’ Hot’

Gold Derby has been offering you the opportunity to predict the Best Original Song category for the past few weeks. Among some of the surprise omissions:

“Barbie” producers have chosen not to submit “Barbie World,” “Speed Drive” and “Pink.” That film’s three official submissions are “I’m Just Ken,” “Dance the Night” and “What Was I Made For?”

“Trolls Band Together” producers have not entered “Family,” “Watch Me Work” and “Let’s Get Married.

Deadline on Tuesday launched the streaming site for Contenders Film: Documentary, its annual showcase of the year’s best nonfiction films that are in the running for the Documentary Feature Oscar.

Click here to launch the streaming site.

A total of nine buzzworthy films participated in panel discussions during Sunday’s virtual event, featuring movies from Amazon MGM Studios, Apple Original Films, HBO Documentary Films, National Geographic Documentary Films, Paramount+ and MTV Documentary Films, Sony Pictures Classics, and Telemark and Greenwich Entertainment.

Panelists who joined to discuss their projects included directors Davis Guggenheim (Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie), Peter Nicks (Stephen Curry: Underrated), Jesse Moss and Amanda McBain (The Mission), Christopher Sharp (Bobi Wine: The People’s President), Raoul Peck (Silver Dollar Road), Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal (They Shot the Piano Player), Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson (Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project), Jakub Piątek (Pianoforte) and...

Silver Dollar Road follows a Black family’s struggle to save their North Carolina land from cutthroat developers. The patriarch Mitchell Reels died without a will, leading to family disputes about the land. White developers swooped in, making a deal with one Reels uncle who was willing to sell against Mitchell’s wishes.

“After a member of the family dies, sometimes all the really crazy emotion comes up and some of the crazy uncle or the crazy niece come out of the woods,” Peck said on a panel for the Amazon MGM Studios movie at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary. “Then the outside world came crashing and they had to basically try to submit them to what was happening all over the country.”

The coastal land that was in the Reels family had become advantageous to the tourism, real estate and tech industries. Peck said the modern legal issues extend from the founding of America,...

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

The Academy has announced the long list for this year’s Best Documentary Feature category. 168 titles have qualified for members of the doc branch to whittle down to a 15-wide shortlist and then a nominated five. That figure is higher than last year, which had 144 eligible titles and which culminated in a win for Daniel Roher’s Navalny.

If you were to ask me right now what titles I expect to find on this year’s shortlist, I might say the following: Against the Tide (Sarvnik Kaur), American Symphony (Matthew Heineman), Anonymous Sister (Jamie Boyle), The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi), Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania), Lakota Nation vs United States, Little Richard: I Am Everything (Lisa Cortés), The Mission, Occupied City (Steve McQueen), Silver Dollar Road (Raoul Peck), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen), Still: A Michael J Fox Movie (Davis Guggenheim...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Thursday unveiled the films eligible for consideration for the 2024 Oscars in the categories of Documentary Feature Film and International Feature Film and Animated Feature Film.

A total of 167 documentaries have made the cut for the 96th Academy Awards, while 88 countries are eligible for the International Feature. Shortlists of 15 films in both categories will be revealed December 21.

In the Animated Feature race, 33 films are eligible for the 2024 race.

Final Oscar nominations will be revealed January 23, 2024, with the 96th Oscars to air Sunday, March 10 on ABC hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.

Here are the film lists revealed today, with AMPAS noting that not all have had their qualifying release yet, a requirement to advance in the voting process.

Animated Feature

The Amazing Maurice

Blue Giant

The Boy and the Heron

Chang’an

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

Deep Sea

Elemental

Ernest & Celestine: A...

Every year the race for the Oscar for best documentary feature gets more expensive and less inclusive.

The challenging doc marketplace favors a handful of big-name filmmakers commissioned to make one-off films or docuseries. During the last two years, directors of independently made docs, especially those tackling hard-hitting social issues, have been facing an uphill battle to secure distribution.

The major streaming services, who just a few years ago were spending millions to acquire indie fare, seem to no longer be interested in garnering titles out of festivals.

There have, of course, been exceptions. Matthew Heineman’s “American Symphony” sold to Netflix immediately after the film’s Telluride premiere in September, and HBO Documentary Films/Max picked up Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize U.S. Documentary winner “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project” eight months after it debuted in Park City. Netflix acquired Laura McGann...

For the descendants of Elijah Reels, an area of coastal North Carolina in Carteret County has been their sanctuary – where they could raise their families, earn a living, and enjoy the bounty and the pleasures of the waterways.

But in recent decades, those descendants — Gertrude Reels, her children, and their children — have been trying to hold onto the family land, caught up in a legal system that historically advantages white interests over those of African Americans like the Reels.

The family’s long struggle — which has seen two members of the family, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, jailed for years for defying a court order — is told in the documentary Silver Dollar Road. The film directed by Oscar nominee Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) is now streaming on Prime Video.

Gertrude Reels (seated) surrounded by her children.

“When you are there, you feel that you in a sort of,...

By Glenn Charlie Dunks

Raoul Peck has proven himself several times over to be one of the great workers of non-fiction today. Whether its biography or history lesson, he applies a deeply clinical look at his chosen subjects without the tar of stale formula or compromised intent. In the Haiti-born filmmakers latest work, he has taken a ProPublica article by Lizzie Presser, “Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It”—a title too long for a film, but which tells you exactly what is at the heart of its story.

For Peck, Silver Dollar Road is actually part biography and part history lesson, taking in a large family tree and the forces that came together to break their connection to the place they’ve known as home since emancipation.

The 39th International Documentary Awards have announced their shortlists for the best nonfiction entries of the year, with a ceremony to take place during the week of Dec. 11 in Los Angeles in a venue to be named. The films were selected by independent committees comprised of 280 documentary makers, curators, critics, and industry experts from 40 countries. IDA received 669 total submissions in all categories from 48 countries.

New York Times Op-Docs dominated the Documentary Short category with seven mentions, including entries from the Netherlands (“Neighbour Abdi”), Mexico (“Victoria”) and Hungary (“Away”) among the shortlisted selections. The Documentary Feature category appeared to favor less-buzzy international titles this season.

What is surprising about the IDA shortlist is how many of the year’s presumed top contenders are not included. Of the 21 nonfiction films that have been nominated by the Critics Choice Documentary Awards or placed on the Doc NYC shortlist of likely awards titles, only...

The Oscar-nominated director tackles a shocking case of black land disposession in his acclaimed new film Silver Dollar Road

To the naked eye, Silver Dollar Road is a lush strip of pavement on a coastal flat, leading south to tidewater shoreline near Beaufort, North Carolina. The land teems with katydid choruses, the water with shrimp – enough for several members of the Reels family to make a living as fisherman, their boats dotting the sandy shore. There are creeks to either side of the Reelses’ 65 acres of land, some wooded and some open, purchased by Mitchell Reels just one generation removed from slavery.

To the Reels family, the land is indispensable, precious, indisputable. As captured in decades’ worth of home video and photos assembled in Silver Dollar Road, documentarian Raoul Peck’s riveting and infuriating new film, the land was a Black community haven – a rare beachfront away from white surveillance and suspicion,...

It’s a big week for documentaries. Three major nonfiction films are hitting digital platforms, including two made by previous Oscar nominees. Check them out when you get home from seeing “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The contender to watch this week: “Silver Dollar Road“

Raoul Peck‘s last documentary feature, 2017’s poignant James Baldwin profile “I Am Not Your Negro,” earned him an Oscar nomination. Four years later, his HBO docuseries “Exterminate All the Brutes” won a Peabody Award. Now Peck has returned to the awards race with a portrait of a Black family in North Carolina fighting to save their property from land developers who want to drive them out. Based on a ProPublica article by Lizzie Presser, “Silver Dollar Road” opened in theaters last week and is now available on Prime Video.

Other contenders:

“The Pigeon Tunnel”: It’s hard to believe, but Errol Morris has only snagged one Oscar nomination,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Afire (Christian Petzold)

Writing recently about the introduction of video umpires in baseball, of all things, Zach Helfand was skeptical: “accuracy is not the same as enjoyment,” he wrote, “baseball is meant to kill time, not maximize it.” The best films of German director Christian Petzold do both, though you sense his heart might belong to the latter. Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella. It stars Thomas Schubert as a struggling writer who travels with a friend to a secluded house near the Baltic Sea. Their car breaks down. They encounter a beautiful woman. Somewhere in the distance, a forest fire rages. Soon, inevitably, another burns inside. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream:...

As the year-end holidays start to become everyone’s main focus here’s a documentary feature that zeros in on the desired destination of travelers…home. But what if it’s denied you? Is it worth fighting for, even risking imprisonment? That’s the focus of this film, the value of the home, and most importantly the land. Sounds a bit similar to the epic docudrama arriving today from Martin Scorsese, eh? Now, that’s set one hundred years ago with murder stemming from a lust for oil-rich land. This doc concerns the lust for water, rather than oil. It’s a valued beachfront property. Plus it all happened in the last dozen or so years. Despite all the nefarious plans of developers, could anyone possibly displace the families on Silver Dollar Road?

Oh, and unlike the other big film this weekend, we’re not talking about a tribe, but another minority.

The land troubles for the Reels family, which are chronicled in Raoul Peck’s new documentary “Silver Dollar Road,” all started when Elijah Reels passed away without a will. This left everyone in the family as a stakeholder in the property. “Because everybody is a stakeholder of the property, whether you live on it or move to New Jersey or Texas, you somehow have a piece of the property and one particular brother pretended that he owned that little 13 acres on the water,” Peck tells Gold Derby during our recent web chat (watch the exclusive video interview above). This has allowed the property to be sold to Adam’s Creek Associates, despite the Reels family having lived on that property for more than a century. “The justice itself has not played a good role in that story because they allowed the exploitations of loopholes and that the family was not properly informed of the situation.

Competition comes from Paramount’s ‘Paw Patrol’ and ‘Sumotherhood’.

Pop icon Taylor Swift is looking to extend her cultural reach to cinemas this weekend, through the event cinema release of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.

Opening in 651 UK-Ireland venues through Trafalgar Releasing, the film is a 168-minute recording of three Swift gigs from the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles in August 2023, as part of Swift’s ongoing tour playing music from across her career.

It is the latest concert film from UK- and US-based director Sam Wrench, a former competitive slalom skier who has also directed BTS: Permission To Dance...

From Academy-Award Nominee Raoul Peck, Silver Dollar Road follows the story of the Reels family as told by the matriarch Mamie Reels Ellison and her niece Kim Renee Duhon, two fierce and clear-eyed women bending to safeguard valiantly their ancestors’ land and their brothers and uncles Melvin and Licurtis, who were wrongfully imprisoned for eight years – the longest sentence for civil contempt in North Carolina history. This documentary, based on the 2019 ProPublica article, highlights the covert ways the legal system has been exploited to keep Black land ownership fragile and the racial wealth gap growing. Coming to Prime Video on October 20th.

The Advance Screening is on Wednesday, 10/18, 7pm at the B&b Creve Coeur West Olive 10 (6 Pm Suggested Arrival Time)

Enter At The Link, available while supplies last: https://amazonscreenings.com/UnjTH57449...

A host of Oscar hopefuls — among them Origin writer/director Ava DuVernay, May December director Todd Haynes, Saltburn writer/director Emerald Fennell and American Fiction writer/director Cord Jefferson — will head south later this month for the Scad Savannah Film Festival, a regional fest that has become a high-profile stop on the road to the Academy Awards, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

The fest, which will run Oct. 21-28, will honor Jefferson with its Breakthrough Director Award (Oct. 22), Haynes with its Outstanding Achievement in Directing Award (Oct. 23), Fennell with its Spotlight Director Award (Oct. 24) and DuVernay with its Virtuoso Director Award (Oct. 28).

Other awards hopefuls set for honors: Barbie production designers Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, who will receive the Outstanding Achievement in Production Design Award (Oct. 23); Maestro makeup artist Kazu Hiro, who will receive the Career Achivement Award (Oct. 24); The Bikeriders writer/director Jeff Nichols, who will receive the Auteur Award (Oct.

While the sheer power of Taylor Swift scared off a number of October releases to flee further into the year, this month still offers no shortage of heavy hitters. From one of the most-anticipated films of the last many years to acclaimed documentaries to the final feature from a legendary director, there’s plenty to seek out.

13. Beyond Utopia (Madeleine Gavin; Oct. 23)

One of the most acclaimed documentaries of the year, Madeleine Gavin’s Sundance audience award winner Beyond Utopia tracks the intense, harrowing journey of a handful of individuals who attempt to flee North Korea. Considering how few dispatches we see from inside the country, this promises to be a rare, vital look at the costs of freedom.

12. Once Within a Time (Godfrey Reggio & Jon Kane; Oct. 13 in theaters)

Godfrey Reggio, the legendary director of the Qatsi trilogy, is back with Once Within a Time, co-directed by Jon Kane.

In “Silver Dollar Road,” documentarian Raoul Peck foregrounds two resolute women, Mamie Reels Ellison and Kim Renee Duhon — the heir of a deceased landowner and her niece — to tell a story of familial grit, land grabs and the failings, if not the outright biases, of the courts.

“Going to the water for me was always magical,” Ellison says early in the film, reminiscing about the pier and beach at one end of the family’s 65 acres in Carteret County, N.C. A montage of home movie footage and photo stills of children splashing, teens striking poses and adults having a fine time captures the warmth of the place. It was, says Duhon, recalling her summertime visits from Louisiana, “a place of freedom.”

Freedom figures into the story of how Ellison’s grandfather, Elijah Reels, came to own so much land off Adams Creek. And Peck makes effective use of the...

"Whatever you do, don't let the White man have my land." Amazon's Prime Video has revealed the official trailer for the new documentary film from acclaimed filmmaker Raoul Peck, of the docs Fatal Assistance, I Am Not Your Negro, Exterminate All the Brutes. His latest is called Silver Dollar Road, another story about American racism. It's premiering at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival, with screenings at the Camden, Aspen, & Nashville Film Festival as well. A Black family in North Carolina has been harassed for decades by land developers attempting to take their waterfront property. For generations, the North Carolina property known locally as Silver Dollar Road was passed through the hands of an African American family, the Reels. But the Reels family's fortunes changed in the 1970s when developers sought to drive out Black landowners and profit from the real estate. Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck tells the story of how the...

When it comes to documentary filmmakers, Alex Gibney, Errol Morris and Raoul Peck are at the top of their game. Along with tremendous talent, each helmer possesses what every successful documentarian needs — business savvy — which in turn has allowed them to experience continued success over many years. The trio also has what most documentarians desire — clout and final cut.

But despite their respective success and power, Gibney, Morris and Peck agree that the film festivals where they first found success are still as important to their respective careers as ever before.

This year, Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” Morris’ “The Pigeon Tunnel” and Peck’s “Silver Dollar Road” will all screen at TIFF.

“The celebratory nature of festivals is awesome,” says Gibney. “It’s one of the reasons you make movies.”

Gibney spent three years making “In Restless Dreams,” a 209-minute film about Simon’s...

There’s no doubt that, at this very moment, scores of documentary filmmakers, both those new to the game and more wizened veterans of the genre, are kicking around ideas for their next great project, one that will hopefully capture the minds of audiences, open eyes to a subject previously untouched and/or inspire society into making some sort of cultural change. It can be difficult to find that balance, as is the case with any narrative feature.

Continue reading ‘Silver Dollar Road’ Review: Real Estate Drama And Familial Woes Make For An Unremarkable Watch [TIFF] at The Playlist.

At a film festival with plenty of big picture movies about race (Roger Ross Williams’ “Stamped From the Beginning” and Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” among them), Raoul Peck’s “Silver Dollar Road” is a specific and damning case study of one place, one family and one monumental case of injustice.

Peck, director of the Oscar-nominated James Baldwin doc “I Am Not Your Negro,” is attuned to exploring larger issues through the reverberations of a single incident, in this case the eight-year jail terms served by two Black men for remaining on the land that had been taken from them in North Carolina.

The film, which premiered on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, would be baffling, except that cases of racial injustice can and have been both inexplicable and predictable. It’s infuriating, to be sure, but Peck makes sure that the takeaway is not so much talking points...

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Amazon releases the film in select theaters on Friday, October 13, and it will be available to stream on Prime Video on Saturday, October 21.

Captured in soaring overhead shots, Silver Dollar Road is hazy, lush, and calm, with tall pine trees towering over grassy fields on the way to the shoreline. Down on the ground, things are less tranquil. The road, which gives its name to Raoul Peck’s latest documentary, leads down to a sprawling beachfront property in North Carolina that’s been the site of a raging legal battle between the Reels, a Black family that owned the land for over a century, and the real estate developers trying to take it from them. Eventually, two Reels family members, Melvin Davis and Licurtus Reels, serve an eight-year prison sentence for failing to vacate their own homes.

The I Am Not Your Negro director’s adaptation of a 2019 ProPublica investigation effectively connects one family’s story with the larger scourge of legal Black land theft

In swift succession, the documentarian Raoul Peck has built a reputation as a connoisseur of the visual essay. His Oscar-nominated 2017 film I Am Not Your Negro reinvigorated the astonishing legacy of essayist and critic James Baldwin through a dramatization of notes on his relationships with such civil rights luminaries as Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. The 2021 series Exterminate All the Brutes assembled an impressive bricolage of historical documents, archival footage, personal history, cultural ephemera, scripted scenes, animation and infographics to illuminate nothing less than the genocidal origins and cascading impacts of European colonialism.

Silver Dollar Road, Peck’s latest film, focuses on one Black family’s decades-long legal fight to maintain ownership of their coastal property in North Carolina,...

If Raoul Peck’s previous two films––the sweeping essay documentary I Am Not Your Negro and the painterly authorial portrait The Young Karl Marx––set aims to national and global-scale politics, then his new documentary Silver Dollar Road pulls the microscope out and offers a far more intimate, distinct example of the grander sociological themes he’s been excavating throughout his filmography. His latest forgoes the landmark figures and events of racial and class history. Instead our sights are set on an extended Black family in North Carolina and the white developers who aim to steal their rightful, generationally owned property known as Silver Dollar Road.

Peck supplements the events of the film, taken from Lizzie Presser’s in-depth reporting for ProPublica and The New Yorker, with contextual title cards that give an idea of what happened to Black-owned properties following Reconstruction in the South. A family-tree diagram takes...

In 2021, Raoul Peck released Exterminate All the Brutes, an extraordinary HBO docuseries chronicling the history of white supremacy, its mythology and the rise of fascism around the world. It was a powerful project that, like his Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, presented a cogent thesis about the rot of racism. In these works, the director foregrounded an essayistic narrative, using words to guide viewers through the brutality of Western civilization.

Peck takes a more conventional route in his latest documentary, but the results are no less stirring. In Silver Dollar Road, the Haitian filmmaker constructs an intimate drama about one family’s decades-long struggle to protect their land from developer encroachment. The Reels’ story will be familiar to anyone attuned to the contradictions embedded in America’s legal system and the failed promises of Reconstruction.

When Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reel refused to leave the waterfront portion of...

Raoul Peck returns to the big screen with the documentary “Silver Dollar Road,” based on the harrowing American story of the Reels family in North Carolina.

Directed by the Oscar-nominated “I Am Not Your Negro” filmmaker, “Silver Dollar Road” follows the story of the Reels family as told by the matriarch Mamie Reels Ellison and her niece Kim Renee Duhon, two strong-willed women vying to take back their ancestors’ land in the South alongside their brothers and uncles Melvin and Licurtis, who were wrongfully imprisoned for eight years, the longest amount of time anyone has ever been sentenced for civil contempt in North Carolina history.

The official synopsis adds that though they were finally released from jail in 2019, Melvin, Licurtis, Kim, and Mamie continue their painstaking struggle to reclaim the land that was unjustly ripped from their ancestral embrace.

The film is set to premiere at TIFF and is based...

The Hollywood Reporter arts and culture critic Lovia Gyarkye shares her list of the 10 must-see films at this month’s Toronto Film Festival.

The Boy and the Heron The Boy and the Heron

How lucky for us that Hayao Miyazaki, the animation master with a gift for enchanting world-building, didn’t stay retired? The prolific Japanese filmmaker makes an exciting return with The Boy and the Heron, which opened in Japan earlier this summer. Inspired by Genzaburo Yoshino’s novel How Do You Live?, The Boy and the Heron chronicles the adventures of a young, bereft boy who discovers an abandoned tower and a persistent grey heron while exploring his new town.

Dicks: The Musical

A24’s first musical feature is a ride that, for better or worse, I’m ready to get on. Comedians Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp play two businessmen who find out they are twins and try to reunite their parents.

The 19th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, kicking off Sept. 14, will feature a handful of award-contending documentaries fresh off showings at Toronto, Sundance, South by Southwest, Berlin and Tribeca film festivals. The Maine-based film festival will unfold in a hybrid format, with both in-person events over a four-day period concluding Sept. 17, and online screenings available from Sept. 18 to Sept. 25 to audiences across the U.S.

This year’s Ciff highlights include the U.S. premiere of Oscar-winning director, Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music Of Paul Simon,” a portrait docu about the songwriter; Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck’s “Silver Dollar Road,” a documentary about a Black family’s decades-long fight to maintain waterfront land in North Carolina they’ve rightfully owned for generations against corrupt developers; Errol Morris’ “The Pigeon Tunnel,” an inventive interview with spy novelist John le Carré; and Oscar nominee Karim Amer’s “Defiant,...