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In 10 short years, Sffilm’s Doc Stories has established itself as one of the premiere documentary festivals in North America, perfectly timed on the calendar to showcase work with Oscar ambitions.

This year, its lineup included The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, from director Benjamin Ree, Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury, Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko, Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, and No Other Land, the Berlin Film Festival award winner directed by a collective of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers.

Doc Stories also featured special events including – we are proud to say – a taping of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s documentary awards editor. We gathered at Sffilm offices for a conversation with Anne Lai, executive director of Sffilm, and the organization’s Director of Programming, Jessie Fairbanks, discussing the...

On September 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old single mom, drove into downtown San Francisco, pushed her way to the front of a crowded barricade, reached into her purse, pulled out a pistol, and fired two shots at President Gerald R. Ford as he walked out of the St. Francis Hotel. The first bullet missed him by inches; the second was deflected by a Marine standing beside her. Had Moore used a gun that didn’t have a faulty target, Ford’s appointed Vice President Nelson Rockefeller would have likely assumed the highest office without ever being elected, a sequence of events she felt would expose the country’s flawed and rotting democratic process.

That’s the primary reason Moore says she decided to open fire that afternoon, but it’s easy to be skeptical. In the chaotic aftermath of her assassination attempt, most authorities and Ford himself assumed Moore had lost her mind.

I went into “Suburban Fury,” a documentary about Sara Jane Moore, who tried to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford in 1975, not knowing much about her and never having given a lot of thought, frankly, to that particular freak spasm of 1970s violence. Moore, at the time, seemed the unlikeliest of assassins — a 45-year-old single mother who looked like she could have been played by Maureen Stapleton. The question that hangs over any shooting like this one is “Why?” (Assuming you think the answer stands apart from the person in question being seriously mentally ill.) And that question really lingered over the Moore case. Yet “Suburban Fury” does that rare thing and offers a highly specific motivation for Moore’s infamous crime.

Only one person is interviewed in the entire film, and that person is Sara Jane Moore. Moore, even in her 90s, is quite the babbling brook — twinkly and self-possessed,...

by Cláudio Alves

On September 22nd, 1975, just seventeen days after Squeaky Fromme had attempted the same, Sara Jane Moore fired at President Gerald Ford. Neither of the 45-year-old woman's shots hit their target, though she came dangerously close. Had Moore noticed the sight on her revolver was 6 inches misplaced, she might have done it. Such violent actions came less than two years after this housewife from the San Francisco suburbs had been recruited by the FBI as an informant, going into militant groups and becoming radicalized in the process. Her thwarted presidential assassination led to much media hullabaloo, pithy dismissals of Moore as being "off her mind," and a life sentence, of which she served 32 years.

Nearly half a century after the shooting, director Robinson Devor puts her at the center of Suburban Fury, a new documentary where the would-be assassin is given ample opportunity to tell her own story…...

Among the individuals who’ve attempted to assassinate an American president, perhaps none is as unexpected as Sara Jane Moore. Moore’s unsuccessful attempt on the life of Gerald Ford in San Francisco in 1975 peeled back the then-45-year-old suburbanite mother’s veneer of normalcy to reveal a complex web of conflicting personal and political associations, one that Robinson Devor’s documentary Suburban Fury does its best to untangle.

The film opens with a title card stating that Moore was, at her request, the only person interviewed by Devor. What follows is a subjective account of the years leading up to Moore’s fateful act, built entirely around the on-screen recollections of the now-94-year-old parolee. In giving control of the narrative over to Moore, Devor and co-writer Charles Mudede have crafted something a historical corrective for a misunderstood and quickly villainized figure, albeit one that arguably raises more questions...

Seventeen days after Charles Manson cultist Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to kill President Gerald Ford, Sara Jane Moore, a run-of-the-mill suburban mother, attempted to do the same. After waiting outside the downtown San Francisco hotel where Ford was staying, she fired her pistol from among a crowd of eager onlookers. Like Fromme before her, Moore did not succeed, and her story was absorbed into the annals of history — destined, it seems, to become one of those facts that sounds too strange to be true.

Now, nearly 50 years later, the filmmaker Robinson Devor (Police Beat, Zoo, Pow Wow) has returned to Moore’s story. His fascinating new documentary, Suburban Fury, which premiered at New York Film Festival, tries to construct a consistent portrait of an eely figure. Using archival footage and exclusive interviews with Moore, who was freed in 2007 after serving more than three decades in prison, Devor explores how this...

It’s one of the wilder footnotes in modern American history: At 3:30pm on the afternoon of September 22, 1975, a conservative 46-year-old single mom named Sara Jane Moore attempted to assassinate the President of the United States on the street outside of San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. And she didn’t miss by much — had Moore known that the sights on her newly acquired .38 caliber revolver were off by six inches, the first of the two bullets she fired would have struck Gerald Ford directly in the head.

President Ford would later declare that his assailant was “off her mind,” but Moore insisted upon her sanity throughout the sentencing process. In fact, never in her life had she been more sure of her purpose. While only 19 months had passed since the F.B.I. recruited her as an informant, that was plenty long enough for Moore to become radicalized against the...

The long-running New York Film Festival, now in its 62nd year – one of the longer film festivals, with a span of more than two weeks — is showcasing some of the longest documentaries on record.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, directed by Julia Loktev, measures almost 5.5 hours long. Taken together, Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming) and Youth (Hard Times), both playing at NYFF, run over 6 hours. That’s brief compared to exergue, the documentary directed by Dimitris Athyridis that clocks in at 14 hours.

Exergue, which premiered at the Berlinale in February before playing at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, explores the 14th iteration of Documenta, the quinquennial event that is considered the most important contemporary art exhibition in the world.

“There’s something about the way that film really digs into this extremely fascinating process of making an art exhibition,” says Dennis Lim, artistic...

In 2021, when the New York Film Festival returned to in-person screenings, organizers noticed a surprising pattern in the ticketing and survey data.

Twentysomething moviegoers, they realized, had become the lifeblood of the festival. Their embrace of the beloved New York institution has since helped it make remarkable strides, surpassing pre-Covid attendance and sales levels. For more than six decades, the festival has occupied a key berth as the last big fest of the year, with a buzzy lineup of selections from Cannes, Sundance, Venice, Telluride and Toronto.

NYFF’s 62nd edition, which opens tonight with RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, is pretty much sold out. Uptake of passes for multiple films, or to gain the right to jump to the front of a wait list, jumped 14% vs. last year.

“I mean that’s the dream, right? Every cultural organization is worried about that. We really need to foster that next generation,...

Like many of the fall film festivals, New York Film Festival had to mount its 2023 edition during the actors strike and without major stars like Emma Stone (“Poor Things”), Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore (“May December”) or Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal (“All of Us Strangers”) in attendance to promote their movies.

So, NYFF’s artistic director Dennis Lim is relieved the annual celebration of cinema is returning in 2024 with business as usual. This year’s fest runs from Sept. 27 through Oct. 14. “We are very happy to not have to work around those restrictions this year,” he says. “And we have many, many actors attending for some of the bigger films.”

He’s referring to movies like director Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” starring Moore and Tilda Swinton; filmmaker Sean Baker for Palme d’Or-winner “Anora”; Steve McQueen’s historical drama “Blitz,” featuring Saoirse Ronan; Pablo Larraín’s...

Exclusive: Sffilm’s prestigious Doc Stories is set to welcome a slew of Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated filmmakers to its 10th anniversary event next month, along with industry heavyweights Keri Putnam, Laura Kim, Carrie Lozano, and Justine Nagan.

The documentary festival, which runs from October 17-20 in San Francisco, unveiled its full lineup this morning, highlighted by new work from Kevin Macdonald, Ben Proudfoot, Raoul Peck, Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk, and Pedro Kos, as well as a classic from Amy Berg about a singer who stunned San Francisco with her talent more than 50 years ago. [Scroll for the full program]

Macdonald opens the festival with One to One: John and Yoko, co-directed by Sam Rice-Edwards, “which chronicles John and Yoko’s musical, personal, artistic, social, and political world set against the backdrop of a turbulent era in American history.”

The closing night film belongs to Suburban Fury,...

The 2024 edition of Sffilm Doc Stories is celebrating a milestone year as the festival toasts its 10th anniversary.

This year’s four-day program will take place from October 17 through 20, and open with Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ “One to One: John & Yoko,” about John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 18 months living in the U.S.

The festival will close out with a full circle moment, marking the premiere of Robinson Devor’s “Suburban Fury,” which was funded in part by a 2012 Sffilm Rainin Grant. “Suburban Fury” tells the story of Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford on a crowded sidewalk in San Francisco’s Union Square in September of 1975.

The 2024 Sffilm Doc Stories lineup includes 10 features, two shorts programs, two filmmaking and industry talks, and a documentary filmmaking workshop for teens.

The Doc Stories weekend will kick off with a free, retrospective screening of Amy Berg...

Gone are the days when cinephiles could just expect “Cannes on the Hudson” from the New York Film Festival. In his fifth year since assuming leadership of the selection committee from Kent Jones, artistic director Dennis Lim continues to bring both vitality and variety to the festival. If there’s a near-constant among the changes, it’s Hong Sang-soo having two movies in the main slate. (This year it’s By the Stream and A Traveler’s Needs.)

Elder statesmen like David Cronenberg, Mike Leigh, and Paul Schrader return with their latest films. But this 62nd edition of the festival, which runs from September 27 to October 24, doesn’t belong to the veterans. If any streak runs through the main slate, it’s the prominence of second features, including RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (this year’s opening-night selection), Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light.

Film at Lincoln Center announced today the Main Slate lineup of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Among the lineup are the latest from David Cronenberg (The Shrouds), Paul Schrader (Oh Canada) and Mike Leigh (Hard Truths) are world premieres by younger American auteurs, including Julia Loktev, who will debut the 332-minute, five-part My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, about the young female independent journalists at Russia’s TV Rain during the first week of the invasion of Ukraine. Robinson Devor world premieres his documentary Suburban Fury, about would-be presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore. […]

The post New Films by RaMell Ross, Julia Loktev, Brady Corbet Among 2024 New York Film Festival Lineup first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Film at Lincoln Center announced today the Main Slate lineup of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Among the lineup are the latest from David Cronenberg (The Shrouds), Paul Schrader (Oh Canada) and Mike Leigh (Hard Truths) are world premieres by younger American auteurs, including Julia Loktev, who will debut the 332-minute, five-part My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, about the young female independent journalists at Russia’s TV Rain during the first week of the invasion of Ukraine. Robinson Devor world premieres his documentary Suburban Fury, about would-be presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore. […]

The post New Films by RaMell Ross, Julia Loktev, Brady Corbet Among 2024 New York Film Festival Lineup first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.