Second Wave Verité: The Cinema of Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker
Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, New Haven - 7:00 PM
Award-winning documentarians Pennebaker and Hegedus have played a crucial role revitalizing the cinema verité tradition in the digital era. Our selection of their recent documentaries spans twenty-five years of filmmaking from a behind-the-scenes look at Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for president (The War Room) to Unlocking the Cage, their animal rights feature that was first shown in 2016 but will be screened in a newly updated version. The filmmakers will be present to discuss their films over the long weekend.
- Startup.com (Jehane Noujaim, Chris Hegedus, 2001) – 108min (Q&A with DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus follows screening) Picking up where today’s headlines leave off, Startup.com examines the current troubled state of the Internet revolution, in which inflated ideals and dreams of instant wealth have been supplanted by harsh economic realities and broken promises. Graced with sensitive storytelling and a dynamic, intimate cinéma-vérité style, the film also manages to personalize this crisis with intensely private views of the people involved.