Arts

With a prime-time Virginia film fest screening at the Paramount Theater, the movie Stay Awake has made longtime Charlottesville resident Jamie Sisley an indie-festival darling again. Sisley first produced Stay Awake, which chronicles a family’s struggles with a mother’s addiction, in 2015 as an award-winning short. After securing Best Narrative Short honors at the Slamdance […]

The first use of a black panther in the Black power movement didn’t start in Oakland, California. The symbol came from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, where 80 percent of the population was Black and none were registered to vote, a place nicknamed “Bloody Lowndes.” Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, […]

Joyce Chopra, known for her documentary, television, and filmmaking career, recounts her experiences in a new no-holds-barred memoir,Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television and Beyond. But it wasn’t until she read her book’s promo blurbs that Chopra says she understood she had completed “a history of how hard it was for women to ever get […]

Descendant  The United States outlawed international slave trade in 1808, but more than a half century later a ship called the Cotilda smuggled a group of enslaved Africans into Mobile, Alabama. The expedition was illegally chartered by a plantation owner named Timothy Meaher, who ordered the Cotilda be burned and sunk to hide all evidence […]

Justin Black grew up on the James River and didn’t realize some people thought it was “disgusting,” including two friends he met at the University of Virginia. Years later, the three paddled 250 miles down the James—and made a documentary. Black, Will Gemma, and Dietrich Teschner had never made a film before. What they had […]

You don’t forget Eugenio Caballero’s production designs. There’s the otherworldly Pan’s Labyrinth, for which he won an Academy Award. There’s the black-and-white Mexico City in Roma, for which he was nominated for another Oscar. And his most recent efforts in director Alejandro Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will be screened at […]

Writer/director/producer Dustin Lance Black’s films and television work—including his Academy Award-winning Milk script—are frequently outspoken about LGBTQ+ issues. The Mormon Church also resurfaces throughout his work, as in the hit FX series “Under the Banner of Heaven.” The two topics merge in director Laurent Bouzereau’s new documentary Mama’s Boy, which focuses on Black and his […]