Event

Performance and the Documentary

Join three filmmakers in a discussion about point of view, covering real people, and the difference between performance and re-enactment in documentary film.

About This Event

What is the difference between re-enactment and performance in a documentary and non-fiction? Meet three filmmakers pushing this form forward. All three tell powerful stories using performance in three different ways. All three experiment wth point of view, actors, and real people involved in the story.

Join ZOOM WEBINAR

About the Speakers

NANFU WANG used performance in her HBO series, Mind Over Murder. She used amateur players in a local theater to perform excerpts from courtroom transcripts of a murder trial that shook up the small town of Beatrice, Nebraska. Wang’s focus is not just on the murder story, but how both a community and a victim’s family can be split on the question of a person’s innocence even in the face of solid exonerating evidence. Nanfu’s films also include Hooligan Sparrow, One Child Nation and In the Same Breath. She is a graduate of NYU Journalism News and Documentary program.

KIRSTEN JOHNSON is renowned for her extensive career as a cameraperson. She reimagined how to use footage from her 25 years in cinematography in the creation of her documentary, Cameraperson. Her next film on Netflix, Dick Johnson is Dead, features her father suffering from dementia. His daughter Kirsten Johnson involves him in a series of imaginative enactments of his impending death, through staged accidents. She also has him act out his own funeral to understand the meaning of death and in turn, life.

ROBERT GREENE serves as the filmmaker-in-chief at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. His recent film, Procession (2021) highlights six men who suffered sexual abuse by Catholic priests, who band together and find empowerment by creating fictional scenes depicting rituals of power in the church. His film Bisbee’17 (2018) also uses performance to tell the story of a traumatic moment in a community’s past. Robert was an inaugural Sundance Art of Nonfiction fellow in 2015. He writes criticism for Sight & Sound and many other outlets.

Moderated by Marcia Rock.