In my position as writer about film, I sometimes get to interview filmmakers and performers about their work. One man I’ve interviewed twice is Errol Morris, an amazing documentarian who alternates between making films about oddballs and films about political issues. Following you’ll find my latest interview with him about the nutty and apolitical new doc, “Tabloid,” followed by my 2008 profile of him for his prior film about the Abu Ghraib photo scandal, 2008’s “Standard Operating Procedure.”

First, the “Tabloid” story:

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Errol Morris may not be as famous as Michael Moore, but he’s had a profound influence on the documentary genre with 14 films over the past 33 years. While Moore places himself front and center as the entertaining and emotional heart of his films, Morris has largely remained off-camera, preferring to allow his compelling subjects to speak for themselves.

It’s Morris’ unique choice of subject matter, which he classifies as being either “oddball” or political,  and the striking visuals with which he surrounds his interview subjects that have made his films cinematic events for connoisseurs. In 2004, he won an Oscar for Best Documentary with his startling profile of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in “The Fog of War” and later returned to dead-serious wartime matters by exploring the circumstances behind the Abu Ghraib scandal with his last film, 2009’s “Standard Operating Procedure.” (more…)

“We will obtain the liberty of the Cuban people.” — Doctor Oscar Elias Biscet

Filmmaker Jordan Allott’s documentary, “Oscar’s Cuba” paints a compelling portrait of Cuban dissident Oscar Elias Biscet, whom Armando Valladares, former Reagan administration Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and himself a former political prisoner of the Castro dictatorship, cites as the most important living figure in the struggle for Cuban liberty.

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In 1998 Doctor Biscet dared to publish a report in which he interviewed many Cuban mothers who testified that their infants had been born alive and then killed by the regime. The totalitarian regime that controls Cuba views problematic pregnancies or unhealthy infants as a threat to their much-touted low infant mortality rates. Cuba has the highest abortion rates in our hemisphere, with 6 in 10 pregnancies ending in abortion. Thanks to Dr Biscet, we now know that many of these abortions were not the choice of the mothers involved, that said abortions were coerced, and indeed that many of these infants were born alive…then terminated. When Dr. Biscet made this issue a matter of public record, he gave the regime a black eye. The regime was not going to let this go unpunished. Dr Biscet continued to speak out for human rights and democracy on the island, and he paid a price for it: in 1998 and 1999 he was arrested more than 20 times.

On March 18, 2003, seven years ago today, Dr Biscet was arrested along with more than 70 other dissidents in what has come to be called “la Primavera Negra,” the Black Spring of 2003.  He was sentenced to a 25-year sentence, which he is currently serving in the notorious Combinado del Este prison outside of Havana. Dr. Biscet spends much of his time in solitary confinement, incarcerated in an underground cell. Yet Biscet endures, and continues to defy the regime. (more…)

“Have mercy on the souls in purgatory, and especially on those that are most forsaken. Do Thou deliver them from the dire torments they endure. Call them, and admit them to Thy most sweet embrace in paradise.”

Devout Catholics might recognize this as a prayer for those lost souls who, as penance for the sins committed in life, have not yet ascended to heaven. Others might view it as just another silly superstition in desperate need of squashing by the enlightened mythbusters of our time.

As stated earlier, in his teen years Herzog had a deeply affecting flirtation with Catholicism that has echoed down throughout his life. “I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years,” he says. “The characters in this story are all desperate and solitary rebels. . . They know their rebellion is doomed to failure, but they continue without respite, wounded, struggling on their own without assistance.” Herzog maintains, and I agree, that when the history of his career is written Grizzly Man “will be a centerpiece” of his canon. But it was only after many viewings that it occurred to me (a veteran of eight years of Catholic grade school) that one of Grizzly Man’s chief virtues is that it’s a supremely decent film, acting as a kind of extended novena for the lost soul of Timothy Treadwell. (more…)

Documentary filmmakers spend plenty of time examining the Bush administration, the Iraq War and the aftermath from Hurricane Katrina. All are fair game, but few directors tackle the horrifying impact Communism had across the globe during the 20th century. Last year’s “The Singing Revolution” did just that, recalling the Soviet’s cruel occupation of Estonia and how the country kept its culture alive through several torturous decades under Communism.

Now, Hungarian filmmaker Klaudia Kovacs gives us “Torn From the Flag,” a film the Hollywood Reporter dubbed “perhaps the most comprehensive chronicle of the [1956] Hungarian uprising yet caught on film.” “Torn,” which won First Prize at the Beverly Hills Hi-Def Film Festival, will be shown at 4 p.m. Saturday (Feb. 21) at The Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills. (more…)