Sundance 2023: ‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’ Directed by Nicole Newnham
U.S. Documentary Competition
The Hite Report, a groundbreaking study of female sexuality, remains one of the bestselling books of all time since its publication in 1976. The Hite Report brought the female orgasm out of unspoken shadows into the light of day by revealing the most private experiences of thousands of anonymous survey respondents. Shere Hite’s findings rocked the American establishment and presaged current conversations about gender and sex.
Drawn from anonymous survey responses, the book challenged restrictive conceptions of sex and opened a dialogue in popular culture around women’s pleasure. Its charismatic author, Shere Hite, a feminist sex researcher and former model, became the public messenger of women’s secret confessions. With each subsequent bestseller, she engaged television titans in unforgettably explicit debates about sexuality while suffering the backlash her controversial findings provoked. But who remembers Shere Hite today? What led to her erasure?
The takeaway of The Hite Report was that female expression of sexuality should not be defined by patriarchal power. This idea deeply offended the male establishment and consequently, the media made as much of their wounded ideas of themselves as of the book itself whose authentic and anonymous findings were treated with intense controversy.
The astonishing beauty of Shere Hite herself lies outside of the cliche perameters of the “scholarly” (i.e., “homely) woman. And so her methodical research was called “unscientific” and was called into question (and answered smartly by her). Her background as a working-class, bisexual, former nude model with photographs appearing in Playboy did not sit well with the offended and offensive men who interviewed her on top TV shows after the book became a runaway success. All of her many identities are displayed in the movie.
Digging into exclusive archives, as well as Hite’s personal journals and the original survey responses, filmmaker Nicole Newnham transports viewers back to the 70s, a time of great societal transformation around sexuality (See Fairyland, about queer life in San Francisco, also playing here in Sundance,for another take on the 70s and Food and Country about the coming of age of California cuisine in the 70s under the guiding hands of Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse). Newnham’s revelatory portrait brings us to reconsider a pioneer who broke the ground for our current conversations about gender, sexuality, and autonomy. Her story also is a timely, cautionary tale of what too often happens to women who dare speak out.
Nicole Newnham is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary director and producer and four-time Sundance alum. She co-directed Crip Camp (2020) with Jim LeBrecht. Crip Camp was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Sundance U.S. Documentary Audience Award. Newnham’s other documentary directing credits include the Emmy-nominated films The Revolutionary Optimists, Sentenced Home, and The Rape of Europa.
U.S. Sales and Distribution: Josh Braun, Submarine Entertainment
There is no international sales agent. Maggie Pisacane at WME is the producers rep along with Josh Braun.
Directed and Produced By: Nicole Newnham (Crip Camp) Produced By: Molly O’Brien, R.J. Cutler, Elise Pearlstein, Kimberley Ferdinando, Trevor Smith Co-Produced By: Erica Fink, Eleanor West Executive Produced By: Elizabeth Fischer, Liz Cole, Noah Oppenheim, Andy Berg, Eli Holzman, Aaron Saidman
Sundance 2023: ‘Little Richard: I Am Everything’ directed by Lisa Cortés
U.S. Documentary Competition
Born in Macon, Georgia in 1937, Richard Wayne Penniman stood up loud and clear for who he was and what he deserved. The history of the Black queer origins of rock ’n’ roll, beginning with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, clearly the mother of rock ’n’ roll who gave Little Richard his first break when he was 14, may have been obliterated but for Little Richard’s vociferous objection to such an event.
But before acknowledging Little Richard’s vast contribution to rock ‘n’ roll, we should also give credit to the Indigenous Americans as depicted in the 2017 documentary by Catherine Bainbridge called Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World. Without acknowledging their contribution we would be guilty of doing what this documentary stives to correct, that is the obliteration of the black queer origins of the genre. The genre’s musicological roots lie as much in the beat of the Native American drums as in brazenly displayed performances which electrified White audiences and got them onto their feet.
Little Richard, courtesy of Sundance Institute
Little Richard: I Am Everythingtakes us on a ride through the complex evolution of a man of many qualities, from generosity to bragadoccio, from flamboyantly queer and hyper sexualized to extremely and conservatively religious. All facets were true and he was true to them. The testimonials from legendary musicians and cultural figures, Black and queer scholars, Little Richard’s family and friends, and interviews with the artist himself are insightful and interesting. The treasure trove of rarely seen archival footage of Penniman and of Black southern life lift this documentary beyond his performances and talking heads. Among the gems are scenes with his Black and queer predecessors and his own mother and other women, depictions of household and field chores and churches. Cortés exuberantly reclaims a history that was appropriated by white artists and institutions.
Director Lisa Cortés. Courtesy of Sundance Institute, photo by Paul Morejon
Also the producer of Invisible Beauty which is also at Sundance this year,director Lisa Cortés has just entered into a first-look development agreement with the Museum of the City of New York, where she will create documentaries based on the museum’s exhibitions. She plans for projects on food, social justice, music, and more. The first being made under the deal is a docuseries based on Gingerbread NYC: The Great Borough Bake-Off, an exhibition inviting bakers from every borough to design New York City-inspired gingerbread creations.
Sundance 2023: ‘Invisible Beauty’ Directed by Bethann Hardison and Frédéric Tcheng
Premieres
How to write and how to make a film about one’s life is an ongoing discussion between Bethann Hardison and Frédéric Tcheng as Bethann’s life reveals itself. She is new to writing and filmmaking but she has the confidence to go forward without putting obstacles in front of herself. Her procrastination or preparation for writing takes a role in the film as well. This immediately allies me to her. Don’t we all procrastinate about the most important things in our lives?
Raised by her mother and grandmother in the South til the age of 12, she then moved in with her father in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Her mother was very social; her father was very intellectual. He was an Iman at the local mosque and was a mentor to Malcolm X himself. He made her aware of things poltically and socially as well as directing her reading about the Moslem religion and the Koran. Raising consciousness was most important to her father. When she turned 18 she yearned for teen freedom and her father returned her to her mother and grandmother. Subsequently she attended NYU.
Bethann Hardison
Over the five decades of her career, from working in New York City’s Garment District, modeling and founding her eponymous modeling agency, she has become an advocate, mentor and muse. To hear her honest and forthwright assessment of the state of her own life is inspirational.
She was a fashion revolutionary, but to her, fashion was merely the vehicle for her revolutionary ideas which changed the fashion industry’s diversity of models to include people of all colors. Her main concern was changing the world. “I always know — because I have lived life long enough — you can change things.”
From walking runway shows alongside Iman to discovering supermodels like Tyson Beckford (that gorgeous black model for Ralph Lauren) and mentoring icons like Naomi Campbell, Hardison has been at the epicenter of major representational shifts in fashion. Catalyzing change requires continuous championing, and as the next generation takes the reins, Hardison reflects on her personal journey and the cost of being a pioneer.
In tandem with Frédéric Tcheng (Halston, Dior and I), the co-directors trace Hardison’s impact on fashion from runway shows in New York and Paris in the ’70s to roundtables about lack of racial diversity in the early 2000s. Hardison’s audaciousness and candor are inspiring and inviting. Interviews with industry speak to the state of fashion, while friends and family attest to Hardison’s rebellious and ambitious spirit. The film is an absorbing record of Hardison’s accomplishments and a rare contemplation on the life of a radical thinker.
The arc of Bethann’s life was easily illustrated through archival and commentary, but the great depth of the film is created by Bethann herself. The film centers on Bethann writing her memoir as much as it does the events of her life. She’s filled with adages and life lessons, “Bethann-isms” as her crew called them. The process of Bethann writing her memoir gives the opportunity to better inject her personality and humor into the film, both through traditional voiceover and with an incredible cache of recorded phone calls between Fred and Bethann. Many of these conversations are the two co-directors discussing how best to tell such an expansive story. They give a genuine sense of an artist in process. Putting together such disparate elements to make a unified whole is not an easy process. For successfully integrating the scenes of reflection and introspection, the feeling of Bethann’s inner thought processes, credit goes to the editing by Chris McNabb. Read his enlightening interview in Filmmaker Magazine.
McNabb in turn also give much credit to the music in the film. His own great muse is music. States he, “I’d say one of my biggest influences is actually music. I grew up playing percussion and carry a lot of that experience with me in the edit room when locating the internal rhythm of footage. I think it helps me build scenes that can affect a viewer on a corporeal level rather than just an intellectual one. In terms of film influences, Paris Is Burning, despite its thorny ethical history, was a formative film for me on a personal and creative level.” About the Invisible Beauty: “And music! Music was very important, and composer Marc Anthony Thompson did a great job capturing the vibe we wanted.”
Frédéric Tcheng is a French-born filmmaker based in Brooklyn. His specialty is fashion. He co-directed Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, and his award-winning directorial debut, Dior and I, premiered at Tribeca in 2014. Halston, with CNN Films and Amazon Studios as executive producers, premiered at Sundance in 2019.
The producer of Invisible Beauty, Lisa Cortés directed another Sundance 2023 film, Little Richard: I Am Everything. After its critical success there, being nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in U.S. Documentary Competition (Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni won) and being picked up by Magnolia for U.S. and international distribution, Cortés entered into a first-look development agreement with the Museum of the City of New York, where she will hone documentary IP based on the museum’s exhibitions. She plans for projects on food, social justice, music, and more. The first being made under the deal is a docuseries based on Gingerbread NYC: The Great Borough Bake-Off, an exhibition inviting bakers from every borough to design New York City-inspired gingerbread creations.
Invisible Beauty invites comparison with Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project as both are autobiographical docs about notably important Black women. Bethann is an activist forever aiming to reach objectives and Niki is a poet, looking inward, exposing herself and making changes in the awareness around her. Bethann on the other hand, as she states it, always held her hand close to her chest and rarely let her emotional have free rein.
They make a good pairing though if I were to have to choose one, I would choose Invisible Beauty. The film ranges broadly from the outer world of fashion itself to Bethann’s part in it and to her inner reflections whereas the Nikki Giovanni doc mostly shows her speaking to others.Moreover, and on a strictly personal level, I would rather be in Bethann’s company. Bethann is a positive, strong nurturing woman. Nikki’s inner pain and anger often seem to vent in the doc and I think I would feel uncomfortable in her company. In fact I don’t think she would like me much either. Bethann’s fortitude sets the tone of Invisible Beauty and it is fortitude and love that will propel us forever forward.
Sundance 2023: ‘Food and Country’ Directed by Laura Gabbert
Premieres Section
During the lockdown time of COVID, trailblazing food writer Ruth Reichl started to make a documentary to show COVID and the shutdown’s effect on the food system, from farmers to restaurants. But her worries over the fate of small farmers, ranchers, and chefs as they wrestled with both immediate and systemic challenges also exposed the broken food system as political and social, and ended with her forging true relationships on a personal level with the originators, suppliers and consumers in the food chain.
Starting in March 2020 Reichl reached out to those who were innovativing new ways of structuring their businesses. She speaks with Brandon Jew, a San Francisco restauranteer in Chinatown, who notes that people are scared to go to Chinatown because COVID has been politicized as Chinese. Reem Assil,a young Arab woman with a restaurant in Oakland, makes her staff co-owners as a way to share and get through this time. Reichl’s contemporary and close friend in the Bay Area, Alice Waters, the first to use local homegrown produce in her restaurant Chez Panisse discusses how much better it is to deal directly with the farmers rather than middlemen.
She speaks to farmer Bob Jones Jr. of the White Oak Pastures, fourth generation farmer who in the mid 90s gradually moved away from his father’s industrialized farming techniques as it produced waste and did not consider the welfare of its animals who need to express their instinctive behaviors. Over 20 years he changed the soil from a dead mineral medium to a live, organic medium teaming with life. Supplying the food conscious restaurant innovators directly also mandated starting his own meat processing. “Everything is tied to everything else,” he states.
Bob Jones Jr. of the White Oak Pastures
Rancher Steve Stratford discusses the cattle business as a US and international problem and points out there are only four big meat packers, so large that if two don’t operate because of a problem like swine fever, the nation suffers and lots of livestock goes unused. “It is all about how cheaply you can produce and it results in waste that could feed a small country. Other countries do not have the discretionary income of American because they spend on food.” Amercans buy food cheaply, but it is problematic (and inferior) because it is mass produced
Meat producers and consumers must rely on these four meat packing companies. JBS is 100% Brazilian owned, National Beef is 51% Brazilian and Tyson and Cargill are in the hands of two giant American corporations. The Department of Justice Anti Trust Regulatory should take action and the government should encourage smaller meat plants every 3 to 400 miles supplying 2–3% of the daily slaughter and the meat producers should own the plants. Now, should one of the four go down, 15% of the food supply is impacted.
Since the time of this writing, the N.Y. Times has published an expose on meat packers and food processing plants in general which villainize them even more! Their knowing use of illegal immigrant child labor is chilling and will make readers of this and viewers of the film even more passionate about eating well and avoiding the evil of unhealthy processed and mass produced food. See FoodProcessing.com reflect the N.Y. Times article on Feb. 26's exhaustive investigation that went far beyond the early-February fine against Packers Sanitation Services Inc., which provides mostly nighttime/ third-shift sanitation services to many food & beverage plants. That investigation by the U.S. Dept. of Labor found at least 102 children 13 to 17 years old working for the contract sanitation company in 13 meat-processing facilities in eight states.
The list specified underage immigrant workers at JBS USA's Grand Island, Neb., plant, Cargill plant in Dodge City, Kan., a JBS facility in Worthington, Minn., Buckhead Meat, George's Inc., Gibbon Packing, Greater Omaha Packing, Maple Leaf Farms, Turkey Valley Farms and Tyson. At least three of the minors reportedly suffered injuries while on the job with PSSI. Read the NY Times expose and weep. You will surely become more conscious of the issues raised in this documentary which never mention the abuse of child labor.
Farmers (and ranchers) must take out huge bank loans every year at the beginning of planting, hope for good crops to pay off the loan and in the end, make very little profit whereas the suppliers and food processing firms make millions as they supply supermarkets and chain restaurants. America’s largest corporate restaurant food supplier Sysco has 32 states to supply and is supported by USDA. Even during COVID, USDA bailed them out and shut out the smaller suppliers who then must abide by Sysco’s system which in 2021 made $51 billion in sales.
In the early 1900s there were more Black farmers than White. In the 1920s 19% of farms were Black owned. Today it is 1%. Food Apartheid is explored in the course of Ruth’s discussions. Of the 57,000 farms in NY State, ony 139 are Black. 96% of the land owners of farms are white; government interventions help Whites, not Blacks, with subsidies. This makes the food system structurally racist.
As part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the minimum wage was established. But black workers, who had been hired as food service workers immediately after slavery, were not included. They were not paid wages at all. They were expected to live off of tips. Tips had just been introduced to the US from Europe. The Blacks, along with immigrants, other racial minorities, women, and the disabled were not included in Roosevelt’s New Deal minimum wages and in fact, only 80 years later did legistration finally grant them a miunum wage of $2.13 per hour. The lowest paid employee is the restaurant worker; next are the farmworkers.
This principal of cheap abundant food started after World War II hand in glove with the arms race when the huge stockpile of ammunition was turned into fertilizer and the government encouraged farms to replace animals with machines thus creating the factory model of food production along with a great debt taken on by the farmers. It was seen as a way to fight Communism to have the cheapest most abundant food on earth. The nutritive value of American food from 1940 to 2000 fell to 40%.
When President Nixon and Khrushchev held the “Kitchen Debates” a point of pride was fast food. The industrialization of food and food processing, and the rise of chain restaurant limited the number of processors and wholesalers to be used by farmers and ranchers. This drove farmers to marginal living as the middlemen’s high costs took most of the farmers’ and cattlemen’s profits.
As you can see, I learned a great deal from this film and found it fascinating as future viewers will as well. America’s decades-old policy of producing cheap food at all costs hobbles farmers and ranchers who are striving to stay independent. Ruth Reichl, a fascinating woman in her own right, coming of age on a commune founded by her then husband in Berkeley in the 60s and writing little vignettes about food for marginal publications, she became a renowned food writer for the New York and Los Angeles Times. As Reichl witnesses and follows intrepid characters puzzling through intractable circumstances, she takes stock of the path she hersef has traveled and the ideals she left behind. Through her eyes, we learn to understand the humanity and struggle behind the food we eat.
Food is elemental; without it we die, but with it, we can either become healthier or ill, depending upon its provenance and processing. Cheaper is not better. Food and Country, along Sundance’s other film Against the Tide, and the 2018 Telluride/ Toronto premiering film The Biggest Little Farmshould be seen in economic classes, culinary arts schools and ecological studies.
Filmmaker Laura Gabbert (City of Gold, 2015 Sundance Film Festival) with Reichl gives the expansive history behind an ever-more consolidating food industry. The film covers a rich cultural spectrum, from fine dining rooms to farmlands, discovering passionate, inspirational changemakers along the way. Laura Gabbert’s City of Gold (Sundance, SXSW 2015), was released theatrically in 50+ markets by IFC and included in Vogue magazine’s “78 best documentaries of all time.” Gabbert also directed the feature documentaries Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles (Tribeca 2020, IFC/Hulu), No Impact Man (Sundance 2009, Oscilloscope), and Sunset Story (Tribeca 2005, Independent Lens).
Directed and Produced By: Laura Gabbert (City of Gold) Produced By: Ruth Reichl, Paula P. Manzanedo, Caroline Libresco Executive Produced By: Jamie Wolf, Nathalie Seaver, Sigrid Dyekjær, Melony Lewis, Adam Lewis, Jana Edelbaum, Rachel Cohen, Janet Tittiger, Peter Tittiger, Jenn Lee Smith, Andrea van Beuren
Jessica Lacy and Oliver Wheeler of Range Media Partners, a subsidary of Anton Films is representing the film which to date seems to have no U.S. or international distribution set.
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