Kirsten Johnson

Bintou in Paris

Kirsten Johnson, Julia Pimsleur

A "fictional documentary" concerning the volatile topic of female excision, Bintou In Paris tells the story of a young Malinese mother faced with the critical decision of whether or not to excise her baby daughter.

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Kirsten Johnson

James Forman

James Forman, a 31-year-old public defender and son of a civil rights leader, provides representation for black youth in Washington, D.C., who can't afford their own attorneys in this riveting documentary that goes inside the criminal justice system. Director Kirsten Johnson's award-winning film also sheds light on the difficulties that ex-offenders face when trying to break the cycle of crime and imprisonment.

Editing Cameraperson

Nels Bangerter, Kirsten Johnson

In the Service of the Film

Kirsten Johnson, Gini Reticker

The following roundtable conversation features director Kirsten Johnson along with documentary filmmaker Gini Reticker and sound recordists Wellington Bowler and Judy Karp, frequent collaborators of Jonhson’s whose work is featured in CAMERAPERSON. It was produced in 2016.

Deadline

Kirsten Johnson, Katy Chevigny

Anthony Amsterdam, George W. Bush

In 2000, Illinois Gov. George Ryan ordered a moratorium on the death penalty after university students uncovered new evidence proving the innocence of 13 men on death row. This documentary follows the hearings held by a panel Ryan appointed to study the issue and interviews activists, scholars and prisoners, while examining the history of the American death penalty. As Ryan's time in office comes to an end, he must decide what steps to take to reform the judicial system.

Dick Johnson Is Dead

Kirsten Johnson

Richard Johnson, Kirsten Johnson

With this inventive portrait, director Kirsten Johnson seeks a way to keep her 86-year-old father alive forever. Utilizing moviemaking magic and her family’s dark humor, she celebrates Dr. Dick Johnson’s last years by staging fantasies of death and beyond. Together, dad and daughter confront the great inevitability awaiting us all.

Cameraperson

Kirsten Johnson

Kirsten Johnson, Jacques Derrida

As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Kirby Dick

Kimberly Peirce, Jon Lewis

Kirby Dick's provocative documentary investigates the secretive and inconsistent process by which the Motion Picture Association of America rates films, revealing the organization's underhanded efforts to control culture. Dick questions whether certain studios get preferential treatment and exposes the discrepancies in how the MPAA views sex and violence.

The Above

Kirsten Johnson

A U.S. military surveillance balloon floats on a tether high above Kabul, Afghanistan. Its capacities are both highly classified and deeply mysterious.

ROOM H.264: Brooklyn, NY, June 2016

Jeff Reichert, Damon Smith

Kirsten Johnson

Made from footage captured at Brooklyn’s BAMcinemafest in June 2016 in which filmmakers were left alone in a hotel with a camera and a question: "Is cinema a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?" An homage to Wim Wenders’s documentary Room 666, in which the same question was posed to directors such as Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ROOM H.264: Brooklyn, NY, June 2016 serves as a revealing document about the current state of American independent film, as well as a provocative rumination about how we see and experience the world.