TIFF 2022: New Films From Werner Herzog, Laura Poitras & More Join TIFF Docs And World Cinema Sections

Werner Herzog turned 80 on September 5, and he did so at a place that loves him dearly (and where he serves as an executive director): the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. There, you can be immersed in the festival’s fare thanks to a booming, massive theater named for the enigmatic director, smack-dab next to a mountain where you can tempt your own “Grizzly Man” experience.

When Werner Herzog makes a new documentary, you can always count on one of the most satisfyingly strange occurrences in nonfiction filmmaking: the dulcet Germanic tones of Mr. Herzog making odd connections and going deep into the mystic, even when he’s talking about science.His new doc, “Theater of Thought,” doesn’t contain anything as wonderful as Herzog’s musings on prehistoric radioactive crocodiles in “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” or his dismissal of dogs too stupid to know about geologic history in “Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds.” But letting the 80-year-old Herzog loose to explore the human mind is predictably fertile territory, in which serious scientific inquiry must make room for questions like these, posed to various scientists and researchers by our director and interlocutor:“Do fish have souls?”“How stupid is Siri?”“Does a mouse suspend disbelief?”“Could a dying man send a message (through a computer-brain interface) that there is a heaven?”Those questions, for the record, are typically met either by laughter or by variations on “I have absolutely no idea,” but that’s fine with Herzog: His goal isn’t to get answers, it’s to make the exploration as wide-ranging, philosophical and off-the-wall as possible.

Werner Herzog’s “Theater of Thought” may be the most egg-headed documentary to ever open with a quote “ascribed to Chuck Berry.” To wit: “In my Theater of Thought I am rocking. / In the Dance of my Mind, I am swinging.

“Photography was always a way to walk through fear,” says Nan Goldin in her raspy voice as photos fill the screen. Nuzzled within the textures of the snapshots live friends, lovers, and drifters, all eternally preserved through the eyes of the consecrated artist who rose to prominence in the 80s thanks to her visual chronicling of queer life and culture in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

The scourge of the opioid crisis has been documented in the press and in government reports; the culpability of the Sacklers, the multi-billionaire pharmaceutical family whose former company Purdue made the painkiller Oxycontin, has been successfully dramatized. The Sacklers are everywhere in Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but they are supporting players.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the photographer Nan Goldin tells a woeful, revealing, and in its way rather funny anecdote about how in the 1980s, when she first gathered up her photographs — casually transgressive images of her and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, along with shots of the assorted other people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village New York subculture — and tried to shop them around to galleries and museums, they were roundly rejected, because the arbiters of taste, who were inevitably men, favored photographs that were black-and-white and composed in elegant meticulous ways. Goldin’s photographs were in garish verité color, set in environments that were so scruffy (messy bohemian apartments, ordinary people just lolling around) that it looked, to the gallery mavens, like there was no visual organization to them, no art.

Neon in association with National Geographic Documentary Films said director Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love will cross $1 million at the box office this weekend, becoming the biggest documentary release of the year for combined domestic and international gross. The film opened this summer and is entering its ninth week in theaters nationally. It will stream on Disney+ later this year.

WAKEONE has announced that TO1 member Chan will be absent from the upcoming New York stop of the KCON US Tour 2022 amid health concerns.The South Korean label took to the K-pop boyband’s official Twitter page yesterday earlier today at New York local time (September 1) to announce that member Chan will not join the rest of his bandmates in the group’s performances at the upcoming New York stop of the KCON US Tour.“Chan wasn’t feeling well during a rehearsal for the KCON 2022 US Tour New York, and he is currently taking a rest,” read the company’s English statement. “Although the artist has a strong will to participate in the performance, we have decided [for] Chan not to attend the New York performance to prioritise the artist’s health and condition.”“We apologise to the fans for causing concern with the sudden news, and we promise to do our best for Chan’s recovery,” WAKEONE concluded.The New York iteration of the ongoing KCON US Tour, which is scheduled for tonight at local time, is the final stop of the tour, after a slew of performances across the US in the past month, in cities such as San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta and more.Aside from TO1, other acts who are part of the KCON tour include girl groups STAYC and LIGHTSUM, as well as boyband CRAVITY.

Gregg Goldstein Since 2007, Venice’s Queer Lion Award has reflected and elevated the best in LGBTQ cinema. Fifteen years later, founder Daniel N. Casagrande said this year’s Venice Film Festival will be “the most queer edition ever.” Among the fest’s 30 LGBTQ-themed titles, 19 are competing for the Queer Lion, including a record six films from the main competition. They include Todd Field’s orchestra conductor drama “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett; Darren Aronofsky’s estranged gay father study “The Whale,” featuring Brendan Fraser; Laura Poitras’ doc “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” chronicling bisexual artist Nan Goldin’s life and anti-opioid crusade; Andrea Pallaoro’s trans woman family drama “Monica”; Emanuele Crialese’s “L’immensità,” starring Penélope Cruz as the mother of a transgender child; and Gianni Amelio’s “Il signore delle formiche,” the true story of an Italian artist jailed under an infamous anti-gay law.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Adding to its slate of auteurs from all over the world, Raphael Berdugo’s Cité Films has boarded “The Fire Doll,” from Chilean director-to-track Niles Atallah (“Rey”) and “Left Over,” from San Sebastian Gold Shell winning Turkish director Yesim Ustaoglu (“Pandora’s Box”). Produced by Catalina Vergara at Chile’s Globo Rojo Films, “The Fire Doll” (“La muñeca de fuego”) is one of the 14 projects to be pitched at this month’s San Sebastian Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, one of the Spanish festival’s centerpiece industry events. Atallah, whose second film, “Rey,” won a Rotterdam Special Jury Prize in 2017, turns in “The Fire Doll” to the transformation process experienced by a 9-year-old girl, Aurora, who loses part of her memory and goes to her the countryside to spend Easter wither father, an alcoholic in remission.

Over the past decade, The Telluride Film Festival has made itself something of an Oscar-kingmaker. Numerous Best Picture winners, including “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Argo,” “12 Years A Slave,” and “Moonlight,” each had their world premieres at the picturesque Colorado fest.

Manori Ravindran International Editor Utopia has acquired Participant Media’s feature documentary “Unseen Skies,” which the U.S. distributor will release on Sept. 13. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Yaara Bou Melhem, “Unseen Skies” explores the evolution of state and corporate surveillance. The film follows American artist and geographer Trevor Paglen as he launches an artwork called “Orbital Reflector” into space, visible with the naked eye from Earth, to highlight the global impact of technology in the modern world. Having achieved international notoriety for his conceptual art, which fuses photography and large-scale multidisciplinary events, Paglen’s work reveals the largely unseen power structures of technology and surveillance that shape, impact and increasingly define the framework of our lives.

Neon has acquired the U.S. distribution rights to Park Chan-wook’s award-winning title Oldboy. Neon is planning a theatrical release in celebration of the pic’s 20th anniversary.

Michaela Zee editor DCTV’s new documentary-dedicated theater, “Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film,” will open its doors Sept. 23. Located in DCTV’s historic Chinatown firehouse building in New York, the nonprofit theater will begin its opening week with an exclusive screening of Abigail Disney and Kathleen Hughes’ “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.” “I’m so excited that my new documentary, ‘The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,’ will kick off the opening of DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema,” Disney said in a statement. “I can’t wait to meet the first audiences who will be enjoying and shaping this vital new addition to New York City’s arthouse film scene.”

Altitude has boarded international sales and UK and Irish distribution on Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras’s Nan Goldin bio-pic All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, ahead of its world premiere at Venice and North American debut at Toronto.

Naman Ramachandran Altitude is handling international sales and U.K. and Irish distribution for Laura Poitras’ documentary about artist and activist Nan Goldin, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.”The film is scheduled to make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it will compete for the Golden Lion, an opportunity rarely accorded to non-fiction titles.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and Media“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras’s new documentary about artist and activist Nan Goldin, has sold to Neon. The indie studio acquired the film before it was scheduled to make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It has also landed prominent spots at the Toronto Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, where it will get the centerpiece slot.

NEON has acquired rights to the Participant Laura Poitras docu All the Beauty and the Bloodshed which will hit theaters this fall followed by an ancillary and digital release.

The documentary follows artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid overdose crisis. It will premiere in competition for the Golden Lion at Venice.

tiff.net.The full list of new additions:TIFF DOCS“752 Is Not a Number,” Babak Payami | Canada“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras | USA“Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On,” Madison Thomas | Canada“Casa Susanna,” Sébastien Lifshitz | France, USA“Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels,” Mila Turajlic | Serbia, France, Croatia, Montenegro“The Colour of Ink,” Brian D.