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Jennifer Fox's Shortlist

Published on September 18, 2007

The Shortlist article series is your opportunity to learn about the films that inspire intellectual, artistic and activist leaders--leaders like filmmaker Jennifer Fox. We asked Jennifer to share her favorite films and her thoughts on the power of documentary to change the world. So what films make Jennifer Fox's Shortlist? Keep reading to find out.

Filmmaker Jennifer Fox

Who is Jennifer Fox?

Jennifer Fox is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning director, producer, camera woman and educator who has been involved in countless documentaries over the last twenty-five years. Her first film, Beirut: The Last Home Movie was broadcast in twenty countries and won seven international awards, including Best Documentary Film and Best Cinematography at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival and Best Documentary of the Year at 1988 Cinema Du Reel Festival. She directed the groundbreaking ten hour PBS television series An American Love Story, which received a Gracie Award for Best Television Series and was named "One of the Top Ten Television Series of 1999" by The New York Times and five others major American papers. Her current work, the cutting edge six part film Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, was made through a unique Danish American co-production and was funded by the Danish Film Institute, TV-2 Denmark, BBC, ARTE, YLE-1, SBS, SVT, ICON & Humanist Channels Netherlands and HBO--and was awarded a prestigious Creative Capital Grant. Fox is currently preparing to edit a new feature documentary, filmed over fifteen years, called Learning to Swim, co-produced with the Dutch Buddhist Television Network (BOS). Fox has executive produced many films including the award-winners: Love & Diane; On the Ropes; Double Exposure; Project Ten: Real Stories from South Africa; Cowboys, Lawyers and Indians; and the soon to be released, Absolutely Safe?. She has consulted on numerous documentaries, including Southern Comfort and Stone Reader. Fox is one of the subjects of two documentaries on filmmaking, The Heck with Hollywood! by Doug Block, and Cinema V�rit�, Defining the Moment by Peter Wintonic.

Jennifer Fox on the Power of Film

For me, film is the medium that allows you to grab people's emotions and make them feel and see something freshly with their own eyes. This is why I wanted to make films from the time I was really little--I really wanted to move people. And I think what makes documentary specifically special is the translation of reality into form. The reality of life is so complex and so chaotic that human beings need to give it form in order to understand it. We need to synthesize, we need to simplify, we need to give structure, and documentaries are literally the structuring of life in a way that it can be understood. This is why the role of the editor in documentaries is so vital. They are too often overlooked, but they play an essential role in turning the chaos of reality into a comprehensible form.

And documentaries are transformative. The subjects are transformed by seeing their lives put into an ordered story, the filmmaker is transformed by having witnessed and structured the story, and the viewer is transformed by having seen a story they couldn't have envisioned before. This transformative power comes through whether the film is about love or about politics or about changing the world. This is a very important thing both psychologically and physically. Consider all the films that are coming out now about the environment; global warming is being synthesized and given order and story so that people will realize that we are destroying our future and that they need to take action.

Jennifer Fox's Film Picks

Love & Diane: I actually produced this film, but I can take no artistic credit for it. I love this film because it represents an extraordinary effort by the filmmaker, Jennifer Dworkin, and by the editor, Mona Davis. It's an incredible example of what it means to enter profoundly into the lives of a family, and the result is a powerful depiction of the effects of the welfare system. It's also a demonstration of a filmmaker's will to make a film despite all of the obstacles, including funding.

Southern Comfort: I love this film. You really see in the film the extraordinary relationship between Kate Davis, the director and editor, and the subject. I feel like the main character intentionally offers us his life to teach us that gender is ultimately not important. Watching this film changed my relationship to gender. It is transformative.

Stevie: This film is simultaneously an extraordinary investigation of filmmaker Steve James' relationship with a young man who he was a big brother to and of the personal history of a man who becomes a sexual abuser after being abused as a child. I revel in James' ability to examine his motives as a filmmaker and to really investigate the causes of sexual abuse, which as a society we never do--we usually just blame the abuser without understanding how they may have become the way they are.

Radio Bikini: I adore this film by Robert Stone, and I think it's a perfect archival film. It's about the Bikini Island atomic tests in the fifties. The whole film consists of archival footage and two single interviews that run throughout. Its simplicity is sort of mind-bending because I know that Stone did tons of other interviews, and that they eventually got cut out. It's also Stone's first film. I think that sometimes first films are the best because they are where people put their souls on the line. It becomes hard to do that over and over again.

Family: This Danish film was made by boyfriend/girlfriend team Sami Saif and Phie Ambo. The film is about Saif's search for his father who was an airline pilot who disappeared. The intimacy and the profoundness of the film and the aesthetics actually totally changed my life. It made me want to do a Danish co-production because I wanted to figure out how they got that kind of intimacy in a personal film.

The Reincarnation of Khensur Rinpoche: The film is by an Indian filmmaker and a Tibetan filmmaker who are a husband and wife team, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam. They follow a monk whose master has died as he searches for the master's reincarnation. He finds the boy in Tibet and then brings him back to India to be tested by the Oracle. What's extraordinary about the film is that it captures spirituality at work and simultaneously presents the love of this monk for his master and then the love of the monk for the boy. It's just really beautiful.

Ochre and Water: This is a South African film by Craig Matthew and Joelle Chesselet about the fight of a tribe to keep their water rights. African people are usually portrayed as the "other"--covered in little pieces of cloth, bare-chested. But in this case they filmed them in such an intimate way that you hear their ordinary conversations about getting their hair done and about different beautification processes, and we see them as just like us. And on top of this day-to-day footage, the film covers the tribe's decision to fight the government that wants to take their river and make it into a dam. You see the tribal elders fighting the system and adapting western strategies in their efforts. It's really amazing.

Images of the Absence: This is a German film by German Kral. It's about his parents' divorce. He interviews them both and then has this very associative way of reconstructing his childhood around these conversations--inspiring.

Who Killed Vincent Chin?: I adore this film by Renee Tajima and Christine Choy and edited by Holly Fisher. The film is not about who killed Vincent Chin, because within five minutes into the film it is revealed that he was killed by a Detroit autoworker. Chin was Chinese but the guy thought he was Japanese and it was during the auto lay-offs in Detroit. So the film is really about what killed Vincent Chin. It's constructed like a puzzle and it's one of the most extraordinary revelations of how the autoworker system in Detroit began to fail and the vast repercussions. It's really a special film.

Damned in the USA: This is an essay film by Paul Yule about the death of the NEA (National Endowment of the Arts) that began when the Republicans started to attack the NEA's funding of artists that "promoted homosexuality." The film unravels the killing of the NEA by the government by contrasting a stand-up comedian in New York who bases his jokes around politics and government, a Christian right-wing head of a newspaper out west, and the media. It's really clever and, ironically, was banned in America--it was never aired in the United States!

Death by Design: This is a totally different kind of film by Peter Friedman and Jean-Francois Brunet. It's an incredible science film about programmed cell suicide in our bodies. Even though it's primarily made up of interviews with scientists and images from nature, the story is emotional and dramatic. It's an extraordinarily crafted film.

Nobody's Business: Alan Berliner's film is a classic story of a father and a son, but it is also a brilliantly edited archive piece. It's the best example I know of "casting is everything" because his father is just such an amazing foil for his investigation.

Dialogues with Madwomen: Allie Light's film is about a group of women who went mad and experienced being institutionalized. It combines interviews with each of the women with artistic scenes created by the women to demonstrate their lives. The structure unravels the effects of madness and then at the climax you realize that the filmmaker is one of the women and that she herself was institutionalized. It's just so amazing both in terms of form and content.

Repeating Grandpa: In this personal Danish film, filmmaker Pernille Rose Gr�nkj�r goes on a vacation with her grandfather. At first she's angry with him for being a bully, but then the roles flip and he begins to see that she's lonely. It's a very powerful film about love and relationships and about the grandmother who has since passed away and how they both loved her. It's a half an hour long, and it's sort of a perfect short. Pernille recently completed a film called The Monastery that's playing at the Film Forum.