Email Author Ernest Hardy

2011 Stories by Ernest Hardy

• Interview with Dee Rees, Director of Pariah

  published December 28, 2011

  One of the biggest success stories of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival was writer-director Dee Rees’s film Pariah, about... More >>

• Under Fire

  published November 30, 2011

  One of the first things explained in director Martyn Burke's documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat is that war correspondents... More >>

• Government Corruption and the BP Oil Spill in The Big Fix

  published November 30, 2011

  Josh Tickell, a Louisiana native, had two questions he wanted to answer when he set out to make his documentary: What were we not told by the... More >>

• An African Election

  published November 30, 2011

  'None of the parties are offering a paradigm shift," says a Ghanaian political analyst on the eve of Ghana's 2008 presidential election. "All... More >>

• Kinyarwanda

  published November 30, 2011

  One of the goals of writer-director Alrick Brown's Kinyarwanda, set in the midst of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, is to remind us that... More >>

• DZI Croquettes

  published November 16, 2011

  There’s a wonderful moment in the documentary DZI Croquettes in which footage of half-nude androgynous men dancing up a storm... More >>

• Oranges and Sunshine

  published October 19, 2011

  Based on the true story of the collusion between British and Australian governments to illegally ship tens of thousands of children from the... More >>

• New Orleans' Gay Ball Culture, For the Record, in The Sons of Tennessee Williams

  published October 5, 2011

  Not until the final minutes of Tim Wolff’s The Sons of Tennessee Williams does the documentary come to life. As images of an... More >>

• A Mash Note to Fishbone in Everyday Sunshine

  published October 5, 2011

  They should have been the band that went way beyond any of us who were influenced by them,” says Primus’s Les Claypool about... More >>

• Congolese Street Musicians, Making Themselves Heard, in Benda Bilili

  published September 28, 2011

  When French filmmakers and music lovers Renaud Barret and Florent de La Tuyalle landed in the Congo in 2004 with the intention of recording some... More >>

• Matt Damon Will School You: In Praise of Educators in American Teacher

  published September 28, 2011

  One of the right wing’s favorite punching bags—and even, increasingly, the left’s— is the teaching profession. Director... More >>

• The Power to Heal Others, But Not Himself, in One Fall

  published September 14, 2011

  If director Marcus Dean Fuller had synthesized the genres referenced and tones struck in the script he co-wrote with Richard Greenberg, One... More >>

• Asking Why Some Enlist in Where Soldiers Come From

  published September 7, 2011

  The strength of director Heather Courtney's documentary as it follows a group of young, small-town friends on their journey from aimlessness to... More >>

• Paying It Forward After 9/11 in New York Says Thank You

  published August 31, 2011

  Founded in 2003, its inception sparked by a five-year-old's comment, the New York Says Thank You Foundation, was started by Jeff... More >>

• The Hooker and the Shrink: Everyone's Selling Something in Special Treatment

  published August 24, 2011

  Isabelle Huppert's cerebral, prickly, glacial screen presence—which she has calibrated throughout her career to portray gorgeously... More >>

• Mozart's Sister: When Your Brother is Wolfgang Amadeus, Life Is Hard

  published August 17, 2011

  In heavily outlining the tragedies and injustices that befell the musically gifted older sister of Wolfgang "Amadeus," writer-director... More >>

• Uplift Interrupted at 2011 DocuWeeks

  published August 10, 2011

  "I wish I had good news," says the poet Li-Young Lee in the documentary "Poetry of Resilience." "You know, to say that [the human] spirit is... More >>

• The Harvest

  published July 27, 2011

  There’s not a wasted frame in U. Roberto Romano's documentary The Harvest, in which he illustrates the real costs of the produce on... More >>

• Farmageddon: What You Are Eating Still Is Not Good

  published July 6, 2011

  Writer-director Kristin Canty’s Farmageddon joins recent documentaries like Food, Inc. and King Corn in sounding the... More >>

• Clock Ticking, Love Blooms in Late Autumn

  published June 22, 2011

  There’s not a more gorgeous couple gracing movie screens at the moment than Late Autumn’s Tang Wei and Bin Hyun (she from Ang... More >>

• Going Through the Mobster Motions in Angel of Evil

  published June 15, 2011

  The French bio-flick Mesrine, released stateside last year, took four hours and spanned two films in order to tell the tale of its... More >>

• Talent Gone Missing in The Abduction of Zack Butterfield

  published May 25, 2011

  The best thing about The Abduction of Zack Butterfield is TJ Plunkett’s performance as the title character. Teenage Zack is meant... More >>

• An Outcast Takes on the Mean Girls in Spork

  published May 25, 2011

  Mirroring the way that many gay men adopted the film The Wizard of Oz as a potent cultural totem, frizzy-haired, white, adolescent... More >>

• Harry Shearer's The Big Uneasy: How N.O. Got So F'd Up

  published May 18, 2011

  Written and directed by New Orleans resident Harry Shearer, The Big Uneasy illustrates in detail what many folks intuited or pieced... More >>

• The Lives Behind Teen Poetry Slams in Louder Than a Bomb

  published May 18, 2011

  Co-directors Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel stick close to template in this fast-moving, visually polished documentary that tracks four... More >>