A Curator
Marcus Chen
Documentary & essay filmWiseman, Morris, Marker, Herzog, Oppenheimer, Kirsten Johnson, RaMell Ross
"I was a journalist before I was anything else. I covered city government in Los Angeles for four years. I learned in those years that the most interesting story is almost never the one being told — it is the one being avoided. The films I send are films that go straight at the avoided story."
"Most of my slate is documentary. Some of it is fiction that uses documentary's tools. Some of it is documentary that uses fiction's tools. The films I am most interested in are the ones where it is not entirely clear which is which."
— Marcus
From recent slates
An essay film by Chris Marker. Not La Jetée — the other one, the longer one. Watch it in two sittings if you need to. He is talking to you.
RaMell Ross's Hale County. The closest thing American documentary has produced to poetry in the last decade. Almost no narration. Long shots of a porch.
A film that pretends to be a documentary and then turns out not to be. I am sending this to you not for the trick, which is fine, but for what is actually a remarkably tender film inside the trick.
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