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Exclusive: Cinema Guild has picked up U.S. distribution rights to Richland, the latest feature from British-American nonfiction filmmaker and artist Irene Lusztig.

The film debuted at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and has gone on to play across the international circuit, including IDFA, Sheffield, Doctober in Chicago, and the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Doc Stories. Cinema Guild will release the film on DVD and digital platforms on June 11.

The pic is set in Richland, a town in Washington State next to the Hanford Nuclear Site which, from the early 1940s, housed nuclear government workers at the height of the Manhattan Project. It’s also a town that produced weapons-grade plutonium for decades, and its citizens have pridefully embraced their identity. The official synopsis reads: Richland offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely...

In the town of Richland, Washington, which was created in 1943 as part of a clandestine government program, there’s a street named Proton Lane, the high school football team is called the Bombers, and the school mascot is a mushroom cloud. It’s been decades since the nearby Hanford Nuclear Site was decommissioned, but Richland remains, in many ways, a company town — one that’s explored with openheartedness and piercing insight in Irene Lusztig’s eloquent documentary.

For more than 40 years, the Hanford Site produced weapons-grade plutonium, 14 pounds of which went into “Fat Man,” the bomb the United States detonated over Nagasaki as its final, deadly strike in World War II. In what might be called a sign of overkill, about 70 metric tons of plutonium remained in storage at the sprawling plant when it was shuttered. Today, underground tanks filled with more than 50 million gallons of radioactive waste present an intractable cleanup problem.

Nuclear panic has been part of American life for years. Whole generations, past and present, have defined their childhoods on the fear of nuclear annihilation—but tucked up in the snug little pocket known as the Northwest one small town sees things differently. In Irene Lusztig’s new documentary “Richland,” premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, we are introduced to a mindset of pride, shame and unrelenting identity that comes at a cost. “Richland” is a unique and heart-wrenching portrait of a town willingly taken advantage of and is a necessary documentary in an age of nuclear unease.

The film tells the true story of its namesake town, a small Washington state suburb positioned right next to the Hanford Nuclear Site. It was active back in the 1940s when Richland was a working town producing weapons-grade plutonium—the very ammunition that was responsible for the atomic bomb devastation on Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The UK documentary festival runs June 14-19.

The UK’s Sheffield DocFest (June 14-19) has unveiled the line-up for its 30th edition and includes new films from Chris Smith, Paul Sng, Julie Cohen, and Patrick Forbes.

The selection includes 37 world and 20 international premieres, with 52 countries featuring across the entire lineup.

Titles include the world premiere of Smith’s Wham! in the Rhythms strand which celebrates the iconic musical duo and will be released on Netflix later this year. The Fyre and Jim & Andy director will also deliver a masterclass.

Opening the festival is Sng’s documentary Tish about the trailblazing...

The denizens of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences need to get their eyesight checked. 2019 was another watershed year for women on and off-screen, even if the accolades accrued at the Golden Globes and Oscars did not reflect it. Greta Gerwig released her highly anticipated Little Women, Olivia Wilde made her directorial debut with the sassy, Gen Z Booksmart, Big Little Lies Season 2 aired on HBO, and a slew of films ushered in a horror renaissance featuring astonishing female leads including Florence Pugh in Midsommar and Lupita Nyong’o in Us. But 2019 also marked a year of great loss: the prolific filmmaker Barbara Hammer passed away, as did luminary Agnès Varda and the performance artist and experimental filmmaker, Carolee Schneemann. Which is to say, women were in the news when it came to cinema; some of us just had to know where to look.

While feminist film theory from...

In 2018 we've published 70 interviews whose subjects have ranged from old masters to emerging new voices, and including some unexpected conversations, including those with curators (Dave Kehr of the Museum of Modern Art), as well as archival finds (a 1971 talk with Jerry Lewis).Below you will find an index of our conversations throughout the year, listed in order of publication date.Blake Williams (Prototype)Samira Elagoz (Craigslist Allstars)F.J. Ossang (9 Fingers)Jerry LewisAndré Gil Mata (The Tree)Christian Petzold (Transit)Raoul Peck (Young Karl Marx)Ashley McKenzie (Werewolf)Penelope SpheerisTed Fendt (Classical Period)Dominik Graf (The Red Shadow)Blake Williams ("Stereo Visions")Arnaud Desplechin (Ismael's Ghosts)Ruth Beckermann (The Waldheim Waltz)Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias (Cocote)Esther GarrelPhilippe Garrel (Lover for a Day)Jonas MekasJohann Lurf (★)Karim Aïnouz (Central Airport Thf)Juliana Antunes (Baronesa)Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra (Birds of Passage)Wang Bing (Dead Souls)Donal Foreman...

Irene Lusztig's Yours in Sisterhood (2018) is showing October 21 – November 19, 2018 on Mubi in the United Kingdom.Yours in SisterhoodThe title is a promise, a chorus, a farewell: Yours in Sisterhood. Since 1972, these three words have encompassed a world of experience for the readers of Ms., the first mainstream feminist magazine published in the United States. Throughout the decade—in which Time awarded its 1975 Man of the Year to “American women,”—Ms.’ mailroom received thousands of letters addressing newly-visible and vocal women’s issues, seeking advice on employment, relationships, and civil rights (the fight to ratify the Era amendment began in 1972), among others. With only a small margin for reader’s contributions, many of these letters never made it to print, and they were eventually archived in the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.Now, drawing on a collection running from 1972—1980, director Irene Lusztig has selected hundreds of...

This year’s Camden International Film Festival is joining a growing push into gender parity in the festival world. When the festival launches later this week, it will present 37 features, 43 short films, 1 episodic series, and 20 virtual reality and immersive experiences from over 30 countries, most of them helmed by women. As gender parity continues to spread through the festival world, Camden has taken it one step further: Across all sections, not just film selections, half or more of the selections are directed or co-directed by women.

Other festivals have recently achieved gender parity among their slates, including this year’s Hot Docs. New York’s Tribeca Film Festival has moved closer to parity in recent years as well; last year’s lineup included 48 percent of films directed by women. The Sundance Film Festival is also pushing forward; for the 2018 edition of the festival, 37 percent of its 122 features were directed by women.

Docaviv, Israel’s only festival devoted exclusively to documentary filmmaking, will celebrate its 20th birthday in May with a jam-packed screening schedule focusing on women’s empowerment, refugees and the ever-complicated politics of globalization. In the lineup are films about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

The festival, considered one of the most prestigious documentary festivals in the world, takes place annually in Tel Aviv, with screenings across the city. This year, 121 films – both from promising Israeli documentarians and established international directors – will be shown at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and a number of other locations.

Among the highlights: Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski will present “The Prince and the Dybbuk,” which won Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival last year; Switzerland’s Markus Imhoof will compete in the international competition with “Eldorado,” his hard look at the current refugee crisis in Europe; and Maryam Ebrahimi,...

This week we're going to the Art of the Real festival in NYC from April 26 to May 6, which will feature documentaries by big names of international cinema like Sergei Loznitsa, Corneliu Porumboiu and Kazuhiro Soda, and will open with Julien Faraut's John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection.

By Glenn Dunks

I finally just finished season one of The Handmaid’s Tale, which feels appropriate to note as I sit down to write about the incredible documentary Yours in Sisterhood. If people thought that the themes of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel remained pertinent to present day society, then what can be said about this documentary that repurposes unpublished letters to the editor of Ms. magazine from the 1970s as a reflection on the struggles of women in contemporary society.

This compelling documentary by Irene Lusztig, full of rich words and thought-provoking dichotomies, takes its name from Amy Erdman...

Irene Lusztig, Director, Producer, Director of Photography, Editing.The best film I saw in the recent Berlinale Film Festival / Forum section was a Us feature documentary Yours In Sisterhood . Political, feminist, deeply personal this is literally the best and strongest political film about U.S. women and their thinking of their lives, politics, social position I have ever seen.

Amazing. See the trailer here.

In the Forum section of the program was this stunningly simple and effective feminist documentary: completely personal and political.

Yours In Sisterhood takes an idea and makes it an investigation.

Director Irene Lusztig travels to towns across the USA where at one point in the 1970s, a local woman wrote a letter to Ms. Magazine.

Ms Magazine principal then 1970s Gloria Steinem with Ms. Magazine cofounder Dorothy Pitman Hughes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Pitman_Hughes

Due to the sheer volume of...

The fourth annual London Underground Film Festival is the first edition of the fest to be run by new caretakers Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais, two accomplished filmmakers. The festival will run November 14-17 at the legendary avant-garde media center, the Horse Hospital.

Fawcett and Pais have programmed a bold fest, which begins on the 14th with the London-based documentary Grasp the Nettle by Dean Puckett. The film follows the challenges faced by a group of land rights activists fighting for a piece of disused land in West London. Also on opening night is Randy Moore’s Escape From Tomorrow, which was filmed surreptitiously at Disneyland; and Táu by Daniel Castro Zimbrón.

Other films screening at the fest include the award winning doc A Body Without Organs, directed by Steven Graves; Alex Munt’s Warhol homage Poor Little Rich Girls (After Warhol); Irene Lusztig’s history of childbirth, The Motherhood...