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WEEK IN WOMEN: Laura Poitras to be Guest of Honor at IDFA – Brandy McDowell reports

Brandy McDonnell , , , , ,
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Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras has been named the Guest of Honor for the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, set for Nov. 9-20 in the Netherlands.

Poitras (Citizenfour, My Country, My Country) will be honored at the Dutch festival with Top 10 and Retrospective programs.

With the Top 10 program, she will curate 10 films “key to the human condition.” The program includes reflections on political imprisonment (including Hunger by Steve McQueen and This is Not a Film by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), incarceration and psychiatry (Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies), and genocide (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah), among other interventions so influential on Poitras’ own view of the world – and film’s place in it.

As part of the Top 10, Poitras will be in conversation with several of her selected filmmakers during the festival’s public talks program.

In the Retrospective section, the festival will present all seven films directed by Poitras from 2003 to today.

Alongside titles that made Poitras a household name, the program includes lesser-screened films such as Risk, the years-in-the-making portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and her first feature, Flag Wars, a cinéma vérité film co-directed with artist Linda Goode Bryant on the gentrification of a working-class African American neighborhood by white gays and lesbians.

Poitras’ latest film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, premiered earlier this fall at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the top prize, the Golden Lion. Continue reading on THE WEEK IN WOMEN

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Brandy McDonnell

Brandy McDonnell writes features and reviews movies, music, events and the arts for The Oklahoman, Oklahoma's statewide newspaper, and NewsOK.com, the state's largest news Web site. Raised on a farm near Lindsay, Okla., she started her journalism career in seventh grade, when she was elected reporter for her school's 4-H Club. Taking her duties seriously, she began submitting stories to The Lindsay News, and worked for the local weekly through high school. She attended Oklahoma State University, where she worked for The Daily O'Collegian and earned her journalism degree with honors. She worked for three years at small Oklahoma dailies The Edmond Sun and Shawnee News-Star. In 2002, she joined The Oklahoman as a features reporter, writing about movies, the arts, events, families and nonprofits. She moved to The Oklahoman's entertainment desk in 2007. In 2004, she won a prestigious Journalism Fellowship in Child & Family Policy from the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Along with her membership in AWFJ, she also is a founding member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. Brandy writes The Week In Women blog for AWFJ.org.