The history of jazz dance is the history of America. That history is not well documented, however, especially when it comes to the leading role played by African Americans. In Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance , filmmakers Khadifa Wong and Zak Nemorin trace jazz dance back to its roots in Africa, and follow its evolution up to the present. Along the way Khadifa and Zack address difficult subjects such as appropriation, racism and sexism within this quintessential American art form, and in the ...
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 3 min
For those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 90s, the arcade was a home away from home. And most likely we were playing a video game that was the creative genius of a scrappy group of renegade designers in Chicago. In his film Insert Coin (2020), director Josh Tsui captures what it was like for the fellows at Midway Games to revolutionize the video game industry. And along the way, Josh perfectly captures 1990s pop culture. Insert Coin is an interesting take on the arcade gaming world, showing u...
Jul 28, 2020•56 min
What is it about old abandoned buildings that can be so compelling and alluring? We find out today as we welcome filmmakers Jake Williams and John Shaw to the podcast. Their film Closed For Storm is about a theme park left for ruin in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 15 years ago. Closed For Storm shows Six Flags New Orleans in its glory days and current state of abject dereliction. Along the way, the film also captures the broken dreams and fleeting aspirations of a community still looking fo...
Jul 21, 2020•1 hr 16 min
The US is a nation of immigrants. And there’s no better example of this than Hamtramck, Michigan, America’s first Muslim-majority city. No bigger than two square miles, Hamtramck is home to a myriad of nationalities and ethnic groups. Over 30 different languages can be heard on its streets. Using a city government election as a backdrop, producers and directors Justin Feltman and Razi Jafri eloquently capture the dynamism stemming from successive waves of immigration. Is America a melting pot or...
Jul 14, 2020•52 min
In 1976, Sylvester Stallone was a struggling actor with a big dream and the courage of his convictions. That dream became Rocky , one of the most iconic films of all time. Using home movies shot mostly by the director John Avildsen, director and producer Derek Wayne Johnson perfectly captures the moment when Sylvester Stallone became a superstar. 40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of a Classic , as it is known in the USA and Canada, or Becoming Rocky: The Birth of a Classic , as it is known everywhere...
Jul 07, 2020•53 min
In the late 1950s, doo-wop music took America by storm. And its legacy lasts to this day in the music of such recording artists as Bruno Mars and Meghan Trainor. Award-winning director and producer Brent Wilson is shining a light on this genre of pop music. Using original interviews with doo-wop recording artists, and those they influenced, Brent’s documentary Streetlight Harmonies perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the 50s and early 60s. Doo-wop originated with African-American teenagers on th...
Jun 30, 2020•53 min
In the 1970s Camp Jened was not just any old summer camp in the Catskills. Hippy values, the Grateful Dead and pot smoking shaped this utopia for teens with disabilities. Before long, a generation of summer campers with disabilities became a social movement that soon changed the world. We welcome Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham, co-directors of the Netflix documentary Crip Camp , to the podcast. Jim and Nicole share their experiences making a documentary about one of the most compelling, previou...
Jun 23, 2020•51 min
Stewart Brand has been at the forefront of multiple societal trends since the 1960s, and now he’s trying to bring back the woolly mammoth and other species from extinction. Is this folly or is he once again ahead of the curve? Stewart might just be one of the most influential people that none of us have heard of. He traveled around with the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Afterwards, he kick-started the modern environmental movement, by pressuring NASA to release a satellite image o...
Jun 16, 2020•58 min
Baywatch was a 1990s phenomenon well ahead of its time, going ‘viral’ long before there was something called social media. Director and producer Matt Felker is an acclaimed observer of pop culture and social media trends. As a result, Matt is making a documentary that takes a serious look at Baywatch – a show that still resonates with a global audience 20 years later. Recently, Factual America caught up with Matt, producer Nicole Eggert, who played Summer Quinn on the show, and Jeremy Jackson, w...
Jun 09, 2020•1 hr 12 min
Natalie Wood was an iconic American actress, featuring in many influential Hollywood movies in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Her life was tragically cut short when she drowned at the age of 43. Today we talk with Laurent Bouzereau, the director and producer of the recently released HBO documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (2020). The film explores Natalie’s life and career through the unique perspective of her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and others who knew her best. Had she lived, Nat...
Jun 02, 2020•1 hr 1 min
The Hart Family had the perfect American life. At least, that is what their social media accounts showed the world. But the reality was very different. A Thread of Deceit: The Hart Family Tragedy documents a family’s spiral into abuse and despair. Ultimately, Jennifer and Sarah Hart decided to drive their family SUV off a cliff, killing them and their six adopted children. How could this happen? The Harts’ social media accounts were full of beautiful images – playing in the garden with the kids,...
May 26, 2020•51 min
Cowboys are as American as hot dogs and apple pie. But what is life like for the modern-day American cowboy? Filmed on eight of the nation’s largest cattle ranches across ten states in the American West, Cowboys: A Documentary Portrait (2019) provides an intimate look at life in the modern world for this most American of icons. A cowboy’s life has always been one of solitude and hard work. This is still the case. Even as they adapt to modernity, the modern-day cowpoke provides us with lessons in...
May 19, 2020•1 hr 2 min
Narrated by Samuel L Jackson, I Am Not Your Negro (2016) uses James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript to tell the horrific history of racism in America. Following the lives of three slain civil rights leaders, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr, Baldwin’s words still resonate today. Since the beginning, race has defined America and racism permeates its politics to this day. To discuss the issue, Dr Richard Johnson, lecturer in US politics and international relations at Lancaster Un...
May 12, 2020•43 min
Warning: This Drug May Kill You (2017) by broadcast journalist Perri Peltz is a heart-wrenching account of opioid addiction in the US. Before the coronavirus, a different epidemic plagued America. Medical researchers will hopefully develop a vaccine for Covid-19 in the near future. But more than 2 million Americans remain addicted to opioids. Is there any hope in sight? Norman Stone, award-winning director, producer and screenwriter, joins Factual America to discuss Peltz’s film. Norman has rese...
May 05, 2020•52 min
In America religion and politics are inextricably linked, despite what the US Constitution might say. Using The Most Hated Family in America (2007) by Louis Theroux and its sequel, America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis (2011), Factual America explores the history of religion in US politics. Not only does religion polarise American society, but it also played a big role in determining the winner of the 2016 US presidential election. Will the same be true in 2020? Emma Long, Senior Lecturer in Ame...
Apr 21, 2020•51 min
How many of us think about where the meat on our tables comes from? Well, we all should! That’s the message of Eating Animals (2017), produced and narrated by Natalie Portman and based on the best-selling book on factory farming by Jonathan Safran Froer. The film shines a light on corporate farming. Besides being inherently cruel to animals, it has destroyed entire ways of life and is devastating our environment. Now factory farming is threatening to kill us all by fostering a pandemic. However,...
Apr 07, 2020•57 min
Is it ever right to kill someone? Are lethal injections really humane? Is capital punishment going to be around forever? In some parts of the world the US is infamous for its continued use of the death penalty. Using the BBC’s Life and Death Row – The Mass Execution as a backdrop, Dr Vivien Miller discusses the history of capital punishment in America. In doing so, she reveals how the death penalty divides the US along several different fault lines: race, gender, religion and region. The first e...
Mar 24, 2020•46 min
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) won two Academy Awards, and turned former Vice President of the United States Al Gore into an international celebrity. More importantly, it brought climate change and global warming to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Drawing on his own research, our guest Dr James Lyons shows how director Davis Guggenheim uses performance to dramatically animate risk in the film. In doing so, does he change the focus, away from climate change? Do the camera lights inst...
Mar 10, 2020•45 min
Factual America caught up with director and producer Adithya Sambamurthy, who is heading to the US to cover the 2020 American election for The Guardian newspaper. We discuss the upcoming elections and take a look back at President Donald Trump’s rise to power. In 2016 and 2018 Adi spent weeks on the campaign trail filming and producing Anywhere but Washington . He shares his experiences criss-crossing America, where he was able to meet with Trump supporters and observe first hand the changing Am...
Feb 25, 2020•51 min
Soyalism (2018) explores how factory farming has become a giant global business concentrated in the hands of a few Western and Chinese companies. Across the globe, people are eating more and more meat. Demand has increased sevenfold since 1960 with 70 billion animals currently being killed per year. That number is set to reach 120 billion by 2050. To meet this demand, corporate giants have taken over farming, creating massive ‘factories’ for the housing and feeding of livestock and waste disposa...
Feb 11, 2020•30 min
America’s love affair with guns is one of its defining attributes, and the number of mass shootings hit an all-time high in 2019. While politicians vow to tackle the problem, a powerful gun lobby stands in the way. To help us understand why the US struggles with gun violence on such a massive scale, Dr Peter Squires, an expert on the subject, joins the show. He is a sociologist and professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton, who has worked with many different police...
Jan 28, 2020•48 min
As a tribute to documentary film pioneer DA Pennebaker, who passed away in August 2019, Factual America explores his groundbreaking Dont Look Back (1967), considered one of the best documentary films of all time. Dr Stella Bruzzi, author of the acclaimed New Documentary , demonstrates how the film about Bob Dylan is a shining example of the direct cinema style pioneered by Pennebaker and in the process shows us why people like Michael Moore have called him the “grandfather of modern American doc...
Jan 14, 2020•48 min
In Silicon Valley, where “fake it till you make it” is a mantra, Elizabeth Holmes stood out. Theranos, the company she founded, drew the support and accolades of investors and senior statesmen alike – that is until a Wall Street Journal reporter’s prying questions spelled the beginning of the end. What originally looked like a revolutionary technology in blood sampling quickly became a scandal that swept the nation. Today we are joined by award-winning business and tech broadcaster, and host of ...
Jan 14, 2020•43 min
In The River and the Wall (2019), a group of modern-day adventurers led by filmmaker Ben Masters sets out on a 1,200-mile journey along the Texas-Mexico border to understand the economic, environmental and social impact of President Donald Trump’s border wall. They not only encounter a land of soaring vistas, outstanding natural beauty and unrivaled ruggedness but also discover something about themselves and the immigrant experience. In this episode we are joined by Sebastian Sauerborn, German e...
Jan 14, 2020•34 min
Award-winning journalist, Kevin Turley, joins Factual America to discuss Albert and David Maysles’ seminal documentary. Kevin places Salesman in the context of 1960s America and traces the film’s influence on documentary filmmaking to this day. Along the way Kevin and host Matthew Sherwood discover that the film about hard-luck Bible salesmen is actually about so much more — namely the pursuit of the American Dream. They talk about the day to day difficulties that many people had to face back th...
Jan 10, 2020•37 min
