Marah Al-Za'anin, an 18-year-old Palestinian artist, has transformed a tent in Gaza City's Al-Rimal neighborhood into a studio. Al-Za'anin can't have been more than 15 or 16 years old when the genocide began, but she continues to pursue her passion for art and uses her brother's phone as a light source while she paints and draws late into the night. (photo by Saeed Jaras/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
"The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist," co-directed by Oscar-winning film-maker Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, examines the promises and risks of AI through a personal lens, while bringing together some of the most influential voices shaping the global AI conversation. The film arrives at a moment when AI systems are being adopted faster than regulatory frameworks can keep pace, raising urgent questions about safety, governance and social impact.
The Canadian film-maker, who won an Oscar in 2023 for the documentary Navalny, first became interested in the topic while experimenting with tools released by OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT. The sophistication of the public tools the ability to produce whole paragraphs in seconds, or produce illustrations both thrilled and unnerved him. AI was already radically shaping the filmmaking industry, and proclamations on the promise and peril of AI were everywhere, with little way for people outside the tech industry to evaluate them.
Upon reaching Cologne, however, it quickly became apparent to the directors that the most fraught and complicated portion of Israa's exodus was just beginning. The journey from Aleppo had almost been as dangerous as it would have been for her family to stay there, but neither artillery shells, overcrowded boats, nor the constant threat of being sent back were as difficult for the girl to survive as the twin pains of exile and assimilation.
During the summer of 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, the documentary director Matt Nadel was back home in Boca Raton, Florida. He remembers one particular evening walk that he took with his father, Phil, as they weathered out those early months. As they strode through the neighborhood, Nadel, now 26, said that the prospect of a vaccine was exciting, but the idea of pharmaceutical executives profiting off a devastating virus left him feeling uneasy.
Bernardo grew up in Monterrey, Mexico. From a young age, movement was part of his life. He rode BMX and mountain bikes daily. That routine shaped his mindset. "Being on a bike teaches you focus," he says. "You fall, you get back up, and you keep going." That early discipline stayed with him. It later showed up in his professional life, even when the work looked very different.
When Omar calls back, the 5-year-old Hind picks up. Her voice is tiny and direct. She says everyone else is dead. "Will you come and get me?" she asks Rana, one of the other dispatchers. They alternate speaking with her as they wait for approval from the Israeli military to send an ambulance. The paramedics are an eight-minute drive away, but the process takes hours. Hind doesn't understand why - and, really, it's senseless.
There's a spectre haunting modern documentary filmmaking-the eternal return of Jason Holliday, the subject of Shirley Clarke's 1967 film " Portrait of Jason." It's not the first portrait film but it's the definitive one-not least because its raison d'être is built into it. Holliday, an unsuccessful actor, gives of himself with a reckless, unself-sparing profligacy, and Clarke turns the audiovisual recording of him into a work of art in itself, one in which Holliday's presence and performance aren't merely preserved but enshrined and exalted.
Vladimir Putin's government had begun cracking down on independent journalists covering the protests, branding them as "foreign agents" a designation that effectively stigmatized them and forced them to include disclaimers with their work. Loktev began filming several of these journalists who courageously kept reporting on the abuses of the regime, including her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk-show host for the independent channel TV Rain.
He served 27 years in prison before being granted parole. As soon as he was released, he was taken into ICE custody. Although not currently incarcerated, Prasad is haunted by the fear of deportation, given the administration's escalated actions against immigrants. Additionally, as a queer man, he faces potential persecution in Fiji. Prasad and his legal team are seeking a full pardon from Governor Newsom.
For the filmmaker Werner Herzog, 83, the truth that matters transcends mere fact. Starting in the 1990s, he began using a term he coined himself: ecstatic truth, which refers to poetic truth, emotional truth, a stylized truth that illuminates and moves. It's not about delivering fake news, but about delivering beautiful news, he vigorously clarified before the packed auditorium of New York's 92NY cultural center, where he was presenting his seventh book, The Future of Truth.
My relationship with the stretch of Sixth Avenue running between West 3rd and West 4th Streets, on one corner of which stands New York City's legendary IFC Center, mirrors my relationship with cinema, bad tattoos, crushing hangovers, and a whole mess of memories that sit in the back of my brain like luggage stuffed in a collapsing mid-flight Ryan Air jet.
In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott's approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev's latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times,
