This is Thom Powers stepping in for Anisha Jhaveri as she takes a summer break. I spent my summer on the programming team of the Toronto International Film Festival where we considered over 900 feature documentary submissions to select 21 titles. The TIFF Docs line-up was announced on Wednesday. You can read more about it in Indiewire, Variety, Deadline and POV.
In the weeks leading up to the festival (on September 5-15), we’ll preview various titles with insights from the filmmakers.
This week, we’re focusing on two topics that were prominent in recent news.
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story profiles the Irish novelist who was a feminist trailblazer in her work and personal life. Filmmaker Sinead O’Shea has a strong history of covering Irish topics in her films Pray for Our Sinners and A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot. This past year, she was in a race against time to interview O’Brien in her 90s though still as incisive as ever. The film draws upon revelations from O’Brien’s diaries (read by Oscar-nominated actress Jessie Buckley) and other interviews. One surprise for me is Walter Mosley who credits O’Brien for launching his career as an author.
It’s a bittersweet moment to announce the film because Edna O’Brien died just a week ago at age 93. Suddenly there has been a surge of testimonials to her, including by Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian and Lucy Scholes in The New York Times.
Sinead explained to me how she came to the film:
I interviewed Edna about ten years ago for a US magazine, Publisher’s Weekly. My encounter with her was par for the course for people who meet Edna. You know, we laughed, we cried, we hunted for imaginary mice in her kitchen. She cast such a spell on people. She's intensely charismatic. And I sort of never got over it. I just thought she was amazing. The extra and most important piece was that until then, I'd never read her books. And I'd studied English literature in university. I'd always just heard through the grapevine — it wasn't even overtly said — that she was quite frothy and very old-fashioned. She just definitely wasn't part of the canon in Irish literature.
So in preparation for that interview, I'd read her books. And they're brilliant! They're so great. They're so funny, so incisive. I mean, so genuinely good. I just can't understand how she could have fallen out of fashion. I can understand the controversy that arose out of them, but I just can't understand the lack of respect.
Paid subscribers can hear the full interview with Sinead below.
Another documentary subject making headlines is Jordan Goudreau of the film Men of War, directed by Billy Corben and Jen Gatien.
Goudreau helped organize an attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela in 2020 during the Trump administration. The plan was to install Trump’s preferred opposition leader Juan Guaido. But the mission was poorly planned and wound up a disaster.
Men of War explores the shadowy world of mercenaries and their vague relationships to the US government. It also sheds light on the world of veterans who are trained to be combatants. What happens to them when the government no longer needs their services?
Jen Gatien started filming with Goudreau just after the coup attempt four years ago. She had a prior connection to the Miami-based production company Rakontur, best known for Cocaine Cowboys. She teamed up with director Billy Corben for Men of War.
I interviewed them this week. Billy told me:
We always refer to our genre as “Florida fuckery" or "Florida men behaving badly with geopolitical implications." This is certainly one of those stories. [After the coup attempt] we got a call almost instantaneously from Jen saying, “Are you interested in this?” And certainly, the story of a Venezuelan coup that was initially hatched at a WeWork in downtown Miami was absolutely the kind of thing that we would be interested in.
Just a week before Men of War was announced for TIFF, Goudreau was arrested in the US on charges of arms smuggling, as reported in Associated Press and other outlets.
Jen gave me her perspective on what the charges mean for Goudreau:
I think that of all the wars that he's fought, this is going be the biggest fight of his life. These federal charges are incredibly serious and they came as a surprise to me, but maybe not to others. Four and a half years later, he got arrested. I don't know enough about the case. It literally just happened that a week ago, the indictment came out, but he's facing some serious time.
Paid subscribers can hear the full interview with Billy and Jen and read further excerpts below.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Doc Voices to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.