But first! An announcement!
I recently recommended Corey Feldman vs. the World, and mentioned I was dying to know how it was made. I wrote to director and asked her to do a live chat and answer all my burning questions. She kindly agreed!! I’m excited to dig in with her on the promise and the peril of celebrity docs, and to bombard Marcie with praise for how beautifully she navigated this tricky genre.
Monday Feb 16, 1pm ET! I will ask Marcie:
• how she gained such intimate access to Corey and the “angels”
• what happened when Corey sent a cease-and-desist the day before their premiere
• how she seems to have made this film with apparently little or no involvement from “the film industry” (including not playing film festivals)
• how she’s feeling now that her film has been #1 on the Apple documentary charts for many weeks!!!
There are many adjectives I could use for the Corey doc, but “romantic” is not one of them. On to the main event.
6 Romantic Documentaries for Valentine’s Day
I made this short film (16 mins) as a wedding gift to my now ex-husband. It’s an interesting artistic prompt to make a film for an audience of one person. It’s a quite sincere take on Frank O’Hara’s tongue in cheek manifesto “Personism.” It’s also probably the best thing I’ve ever made, despite — or more likely because — it being made as a gift to one person. I put it on Vimeo, somehow Maria Popova found it and then it really took off. Anyway, it’s about NASA’s Voyager project, chance and fate, and taking a chance on love. I won’t often recommend my own films, but it felt a bit silly not to include this one this time around. 🚀
A kinetic portrait of visionary trans artist and industrial music pioneer Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and their partner Lady Jaye, each of whom spent years doing various body mods and plastic surgeries in order to look more and more like one another. A love story that is also an enduring work of performance art, and a perfect subject for the mischievous 16mm filmmaker Marie Losier, who weaves in all the surrounding art historical context with what feels like a permanent smile on her face.
This charming film is about two people who want to get married. The trouble is if they do, they’ll lose their disability benefits. What could be a small story expands to something pretty epic under the playful but deep direction of Ted Passon, and with the sheer charisma of its lead. Patrice is a star, plain and simple — an incredible storyteller, she also plays herself in a series of goofy recreations that bring all kinds of new information and new dimensions to the story. At times heartbreaking, even infuriating, it’s ultimately a work of “turn that frown upside down” uplift.
I only recently heard of this funny film from and I’m so glad I did! The very likeable Ravi is co-director, co-writer and subject of the film, who at the start of the film is dating a white woman but too afraid to tell his parents. He needs to ideally marry not only an Indian woman, but a Patel (for fascinating reasons that are explained). He launches into the Indian marriage market, and both sociology and hijinks ensue.The unavoidable comparison is of course to the more recent Netflix hit Indian Matchmaking (a series I also love). This is a much less slick, and more handmade affair, and its laidback nature really works.
I still remember the first time I watched Dina. I saw it alone at a theater and I walked out bursting with the need to discuss it. I never really got the chance, I now realize, so please watch this so we can!?! Dina is a 49-year-old woman with a tragic past. Scott, who has never lived away from his parents, is a Walmart greeter. Both are autistic. This whole love and sex thing has a lot of challenges for them. Yes, there are some parallels to Patrice: The Movie — including the fact that Dan Sickles is long-time friends with Dina just as Ted Passon is long-time friends with Patrice — but formally, the two films are worlds apart. Dina is more austere and mysterious in its construction. It’s gorgeous. It really got under my skin.
If you’ve living the single life and want to be inspired about just how much love that life can contain if it is driven by curiosity, creativity and joie de vivre: look no further! I love all of Varda’s docs — I mean, she’s a goddess — but this is one of my favorite films of all time. The first of her films to be made on a cheap digital camera, it has that nostalgic late 90s look, but watching it you can also feel how free she felt with this new tech. As she is free with her life, one feels; she wanders, she explores, she connects with strangers. That cheap little camera opened up new ways of moving through the world, new ways of filming, for the already veteran filmmaker. It’s pure cinema, and pure love. (If you want a film where she details her own love story with Jacques Demy: check out The Beaches of Agnès, another masterpiece.)
What are your favorite romantic documentaries?