Director Contessa Gayles’ award-winning film offers a firsthand account of the power of restorative justice

Grasshopper Film has acquired North American digital and non-theatrical rights to How to Have an American Baby, directed by Chinese-American filmmaker Leslie Tai, the company said in a press release. The company will release the film tomorrow, August 19, on digital platforms. From the press release: A decade in the making, the film is a haunting and intimate portrait of the shadow economy of Chinese birth tourism in the United States. With rare access and remarkable empathy, How to Have an American Baby takes viewers inside a hidden network of maternity hotels, expectant mothers, brokers, and medical providers operating at […]

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Spike Lee and ESPN began collaborating on a documentary series about Colin Kaepernick in early 2022. The project was part of Kaepernick’s first-look deal with Disney. The documentary series was titled “Da Saga of Colin Kaepernick.”

However, the series, which was completed by Lee in late 2023, still hasn’t seen the light of day, and now we know why.

Here’s an exclusive report from Reuters stating that the project will never be released and has been canceled due to “creative differences” among Lee, Kaepernick, and ESPN.

Lee confirmed the cancellation, stating, “It’s not coming out. That’s all I can say,” and declined to provide further details because “I signed a nondisclosure. I can’t talk about it.”

Kaepernick was a former NFL quarterback who played six seasons for the San Francisco 49ers before he began kneeling during the National Anthem in protest of police brutality toward Black people. His protests drew both champions and criticism, but started a domino effect with other athletes in the league, who also began taking a knee during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Kaepernick left the 49ers in 2016 and has been unsigned ever since. Many are saying no team has vowed to sign him because of the toxicity surrounding him, whereas others, especially in the media, have said it is nothing more than a blatant case of racism to not have a man of his talents signed.

Having Lee and Kaepernick sign nondisclosure agreements means we might never know the true reason why the doc was shelved by ESPN—or, in the best-case scenario, we may eventually have sources close to the production leak the information. Regardless, this one’s officially DOA.

Julia Loktev’s long, hard look at Russia’s suppression of free speech is a chilling portrait of how authoritarianism works. It looks eerily familiar right now

Julia Loktev’s long, hard look at Russia’s suppression of free speech is a chilling portrait of how authoritarianism works. It looks eerily familiar right now

Actor Daniel Dae Kim is no stranger to breaking barriers. From his groundbreaking role on Lost, to his Tony-nominated turn in Yellow Face, Kim continues to affirm his title as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. With his new show, Butterfly, he steps into the spotlight as the leading man of a high-stakes international spy thriller.

In this episode, Daniel Dae Kim reflects on his upbringing and how an early fascination with American pop culture became the foundation for a career in the arts. He explores television’s power to foster empathy across cultural divides, shares the story behind developing Butterfly, and opens up a new dialogue on the issue of ethnic-specific casting.

Actor Daniel Dae Kim is no stranger to breaking barriers. From his groundbreaking role on Lost, to his Tony-nominated turn in Yellow Face, Kim continues to affirm his title as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. With his new show, Butterfly, he steps into the spotlight as the leading man of a high-stakes international spy thriller.

In this episode, Daniel Dae Kim reflects on his upbringing and how an early fascination with American pop culture became the foundation for a career in the arts. He explores television’s power to foster empathy across cultural divides, shares the story behind developing Butterfly, and opens up a new dialogue on the issue of ethnic-specific casting.

Last week, we shared that a company is creating a new folding instant camera inspired by the iconic Polaroid SX-70. It’s quite nice timing, then, that shortly after we saw that news, we stumbled on Mr. Polaroid, a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary about Polaroid and its creator, Edwin Land.

The documentary provides a fascinating look into Land’s background, the history of Polaroid and the cultural importance of instant photography. It touches on how Land enrolled in Harvard at 17 but dropped out after only one semester. He moved to New York City in 1927, and soon after, developed polarizing filters intended to reduce headlight glare – though they were never used for that purpose.

Those polarizing filters were of significant importance to the military during WWII, which led to success for Polaroid. But Land knew he would need something new when the war effort was over. Photography became his new focus, and he dreamed of a camera that could give people a printed photograph on the spot, instantly. So, in 1943, he launched a secret project nicknamed SX-70. However, it wasn’t until 1969 that the prototype of what we now know as the SX-70 was created because of the project’s complexity.

Edwin H. Land, founder, Polaroid Corp. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, [Reproduction number e.g., LC-USZ62-12345]

The documentary takes us through the company’s history, including the public reveal of the first instant photograph (taken with an 8×10 view camera) and the camera models that came with further development. It was interesting to learn a little about Meroë Morse, a pioneering chemist at Polaroid, and how Polaroid was hiring women at a time when there weren’t many jobs available for women. It was also fascinating to learn that Land was closely involved with the CIA and the US military during the Cold War.

There’s a lot of information packed into the hour-long documentary, including where the Polaroid shake came from and some of the science behind instant photography. It doesn’t shy away from some of the controversy surrounding Land and Polaroid, either. It’s well worth a watch for instant photography fans and history buffs alike.

Andrew James made his first documentary as a lark.

The Utah native co-directed “Cleanflix,” the story of movie studios suing companies for editing out their films’ mature content, during his BYU days.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” a humble James tells Hollywood in Toto.

“Cleanflix” earned a slot at the Toronto International Film Festival and generated strong reviews. The accidental fame upended his professional goals. “That was it … I wanna make movies now.”

The experience gave James a golden ticket, of sorts, into the documentary film arena. He spent time at the Sundance Institute, sharpening his storytelling skills. Other film-related invitations followed, including pitch sessions and mentorships.

And, along the way, James saw how the docu-sausage was made.

“It was eye-opening,” he says.

His follow-up project, “Street Fighting Men,” followed three black Detroit residents eager to improve their lives and those around them.

He earned a Sundance grant to finish the project, along with unsolicited advice.

“It wasn’t political enough for them,” he says of the chronic feedback for a film that hit the festival circuit from 2017-2019 before its 2020 release. Collaborators, along with those adjacent to the project, wanted a film that captured the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of Michael Brown’s 2014 death.

The experience taught him hard lessons about both the industry and its cultural expectations.

“The art is secondary to the messaging,” he says. “If the art is also there, they get really excited.”

He tried to diplomatically listen without compromising his vision.

“I consider myself a Leftist … I was trying to please these people while being true to my art,” he says. Those experiences taught him conflicting themes about non-fiction storytelling in the modern era.

“Objectivity doesn’t exist … there’s no truth,” he recalls of the teachings, pushed through funding from groups like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. “Lived experience” mattered more, the experts insisted.

“That’s what I was up against,” he says.

In the end, James didn’t take his peers’ advice. That decision had professional consequences.

“First, I was treated really well. That shifted. [Later] I was treated like the enemy,” he says. “Eventually, I just drifted away from the whole scene. They won’t speak to me now. I can only assume why.”

His current project, “Generation-Covid,” won’t win them back.

The world wants to forget what happened during covid.

But our children are still paying the price.

Generation-Covid is a documentary feature film that tells the story of this forgotten generation. pic.twitter.com/9VRxWdqMDI

— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) August 7, 2025

He first read entrepreneur and author Jennifer Sey’s views on COVID-19 on Twitter. Sey waged rhetorical war against lockdowns, arguing they dramatically impacted children’s lives. For that, she famously lost her plum job at Levi’s.

A few clicks later, James was invited into a private chat on the subject, during which he mentioned he was a documentary filmmaker.

Sey, who previously produced the gymnastics exposé “Athlete A,” wanted to make a movie about the lockdown’s punitive effect on kids. It’s a subject the Legacy Media reluctantly acknowledged years after the fact, but she felt it deserved more attention.

James agreed, setting the stage for “Generation-Covid.”

The upcoming documentary lets children and censored experts alike share how the U.S. Government needlessly punished Americans, all in the name of “science.” The film’s official description explains more:

Despite clear and incontrovertible real-time evidence of the harms being done, especially to the poor and working class, powerful forces sought to censor, silence and vilify anyone who questioned the efficacy of these unprecedented and unscientific decisions, and our children are still paying the price.

We all are.

James isn’t a parent yet. He and his wife are expecting their first child. He went into the project as someone fearful of authoritarian overreach. He also understood a core truth about life.

“Adults forget what it’s like to be a teenager or to be in grade school,” he says. “That’s your whole world, and you had it stripped away [with the lockdowns].”

Cynics may label “Generation-Covid” a conservative film, given some of the arguments in play. Right-leaning Americans were more skeptical of COVID-19 overreach than their liberal peers. Key figures on the Left celebrated vaccine mandates, for example.

James says politics play a part in the film, but only by necessity.

“The film isn’t a pro-Trump movie. We’re not letting him off the hook either,” he says. “The film points out that this was a systemic problem. Both parties played a role … it’s baked into the story.”

One problem facing “Generation-Covid?” Some may wish to forget about the lockdowns and the damage done.

“There is definitely cultural resistance to revisiting this from all political perspectives. A lot of people participated in it and feel some shame around it,” he says, referring to a period of “mass hysteria.”

“People don’t want to think that it could happen again … but it will happen again if we don’t have this conversation. It could be much worse … that’s why the film is being made,” he says.

James remains disconnected from the documentary field, which he sees as collectively out of touch.

“Every movie is about climate change or LGBTQ+ or trans issues … they all follow the same aesthetic tropes… I don’t want to keep doing that,” he says. “I wanted to make something challenging.”

The post Why ‘Generation-Covid’ Doc Could Prevent Future Lockdowns appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

With a runtime of more than five hours, My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow might seem like overkill. Couldn’t an editor have cut the thing down to average feature length and still gotten its point across? The documentary follows seven women journalists in Russia in the months leading up to their country’s invasion of Ukraine and then during that tense first week of the war. Early into the film (that is, a little over an hour into its runtime), we learn that almost all of these women will end up leaving Russia when the last of the nation’s independent media outlets are shut down. That simple premise could be told more briefly. Indeed, Askold Kurov’s latest documentary, Of Caravan and the Dogs, depicts the same timeframe in just 90 minutes. The 2023 Frontline episode Putin vs. the Press, focused on Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov and his newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, is only 53 minutes.

All of these documentaries involve Russia’s “foreign agent” law, which is used to label any NGOs, media outlets, or independent journalists not in agreement with Putin’s propaganda as enemies of the state, influenced by the West. The distinction of My Undesirable Friends is that it’s an immersive, character-driven film more than just a record of recent events. We spend so much time with these women that it becomes personal rather than merely historical. Still, as a record of recent events, it’s the sort of documentary that shows history as it’s occurring. Despite the captions that foretell what will happen to these characters well in advance of showing these outcomes playing out on screen, the story unfolds in a linear chronology that gives us the sense that we’re experiencing it in real time. That’s not to say it’s slow, let alone that it feels longer than its 324 minutes. Quite the opposite, the film flies by the deeper you get.

Because the director, Julia Loktev, is close to some of the characters and films them with only an iPhone and no additional crew, My Undesirable Friends is more intimate than most observational documentaries of its kind. Yet, it’s still removed enough not to feel overly involved. Loktev makes a point to feel present without interacting much. The women often talk to her directly, but they might as well be talking through her to get to the audience. Loktev has acknowledged that she wanted her lens to be like a stand-in for the viewer, and that is the effect. Enough that maybe the title should be Your Undesirable Friends. And who knows, maybe this virtual sense of being embedded among political outcasts will be foreshadowing for Americans at a time when this country appears to be going down a similar path. Where Petra Costa’s new film, Apocalypse in the Tropics, plays like a remake for American viewers, My Undesirable Friends could be a prequel. Never mind that the film is already spawning a sequel.

As with a TV series, or a novel, or any narrative medium, the longer you’re engaged with characters, the more you should be invested in them, and that’s part of why the runtime is less of a problem as it goes on. But even looking back afterward, I couldn’t tell you much about most of the individual women. A few worked at the independent news channel TV Rain, a couple of them collaborated on a podcast called Hello, You Are a Foreign Agent, another two of the women worked for Important Stories, and one worked for Novaya Gazeta. But their lack of distinction is just reality. Not everyone in life gets an easily defining arc, though one character in My Undesirable Friends does have a more compelling story within the broader narrative. Kyusha has a fiancé who is in jail for alleged treason, and this adds a greater bit of drama when all of these journalists consider fleeing Russia at the end of the film. She has the most to leave behind. She will be the one I’m most interested in continuing to follow (assuming she’s still part of it) when My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile is released.

While the platform of choice for My Undesirable Friends is theatrical, I assume that more people will eventually see the documentary digitally at home, and I want to address its runtime and how to watch it. The theatrical release implies it’s a lengthy, five-and-a-half-hour feature with an intermission, but it’s also divided into five chapters, each of which concludes with a short credits sequence. If it’s to be released online or via a streaming service as a series, this documentary should still be watched in as few sittings as possible. That’s to get the best impression of the intensity and immediacy of what these women are going through as they wonder about their country and their freedom. Even with those foretelling captions, the film plays like a political thriller if you allow yourself to be empathetically entrenched with the characters as they fear being followed, raided, abducted, detained, or worse.

As a film about journalists, My Undesirable Friends paints a heroic picture of professionals who aren’t well paid, aren’t well-respected enough by the public, and are under constant threat of imprisonment or death, but who believe that the truth and accountability matter. There aren’t a lot of triumphant stories of journalism right now, and nothing as big as what’s depicted in Hollywood movies like All the President’s Men or Spotlight. Not only are journalists having less of an impact than they should or used to, due to misinformation and widespread accusations of biased or fake news by those who might be exposed, but many are killed while doing their jobs. Not just as collateral damage, either; some are murdered in targeted attacks. The profession isn’t the most appealing at the moment, which adds to its endangerment. But there is triumph in the strength and integrity these women exhibit, no matter their results.

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