What would it mean to try to “see” the entire southwest border at once? To travel the whole 1,954 miles in, say, six minutes?
Might simply looking at a place that has been so heavily politicized — a place abstracted into a sound bite — give a small amount of texture and meaning to a phrase like “build that wall”?
The southern border is a space that has been almost entirely reduced to metaphor. It is not even a geography. Part of my intention with this film is to insist on that geography.
By focusing on the physical landscape, I hope viewers might gain a sense of the enormity of it all, and perhaps imagine what it would mean to be a political subject of that terrain.

- Josh Begley, director of Best of Luck With the Wall. Full article here.

One of the first things that deserve to be noted about “Rich Hill”—and that may make it controversial in some quarters—is its beauty. Any description of the film that only describes its people and events would largely miss what it feels like to experience it. From its first moments, when several jump-cut shots of a teenage boy getting ready for school give way to lyrical views of Rich Hill as it comes to life in the morning, the combination of editing rhythms, Nathan Halpern’s music and Palermo’s strikingly luminous images conjure a world that seems to pulse with its own inner warmth and radiance.
Yet any charge that this approach inappropriately prettifies a bleak social landscape would be entirely misplaced. The filmmakers are both native Missourians (Dragos’ father was from Rich Hill and she spent summers there), and the film’s stylistic tone first of all reflects their feelings about a native landscape and communities they know first hand. And, rather than simply being a surface value, it helps establish an empathy that invites us to see not only the hardship but the beauty in lives that are buffeted by difficulty from many directions.
[...]
​On the one hand, we can see the pluck and resilience of Harley, Apachee and Andrew to the extent of imagining that these qualities and their individual talents might rescue them from bad later lives. Yet, coming at a time when the dire effects of America’s economic inequality are more and more in the news, we’re given potent reminders of how limited and bleak the chances of such kids usually are.Some viewers might prefer a film that embraces only one side of that paradox, just as others might prefer a movie about poor people to offer only unrelieved grimness, not beauty. But “Rich Hill” asks us to think about complex issues in a way that avoids simplicities and clichés, and that helps make it a documentary to rank alongside such classics about indigence and family as “Grey Gardens” and “Hoop Dreams.”

I can see something true through the camera that is not immediately visible. If I start from you and your expectation as a participant of what cinema should be, you will start staging yourself, you’ll start acting out an idealized image of yourself, you’ll start acting out the fantasies that you hold of yourself. And I’ll be able to know how you dream of yourself, how you imagine the world. And that’s also how I tried to use the camera, especially in The Act of Killing. And I think that’s the state of nature for the non-fiction camera. If I put a camera on anybody, they start to perform. And from that performance we can see how people want to be seen. And we can infer how they really see themselves. In short, we can see the role of fiction storytelling and fantasy in constituting our apparently factual reality.

- Joshua Oppenheimer, interviewed by Dana Knight for The Independent

"Anyone who agrees to be interviewed must decide where to draw the line between what is public and what is private," Gross says. "But the line can shift, depending on who is asking the questions. What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being 'found out.' It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood."
http://www.npr.org/people/2100593/terry-gross

... to me these are really, really, really important issues. 
[...]
... the claim that everybody sees the world differently, is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim. What really surprised me on re-watching Rashomon is that you know what really happened at the end. It's pretty damn clear. Kurosawa gives you the pieces of evidence that allow you to figure out what really happened. So, it's not what many people imagine it to be, but it is a very powerful story about self-interest, about wishful thinking, about self-deception, about people imagining scenarios at variance with the truth. And so I found Rashomon to be far more interesting than I had remembered it. With an underlying theme very much like The Thin Blue Line. Truth exists, but people have a vested interest in not knowing it.
[...]
I was surprised at the time that The Thin Blue Line came out that people reacted to the reenactments as blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. Between documentary and drama. My feeling was the exact opposite. It was telling us how images can confuse us. Images are not reality, nor do I claim that they are. In fact, they usually bear a very complicated relationship to reality. And when people talk about reenactments, I like to point out that consciousness, itself, is a reenactment. Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray-matter of the brain. Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real. Take the first line in Vernon, Florida: "Reality. You mean, this is the real world. I never thought of that."
http://errolmorris.com/content/interview/believer0404.html

Even from the privileged vantage point of a Golden Age, it’s possible to see a medium in need of freshening up, as nonfiction filmmakers fall into the trap of relying on their charismatic, timely subjects to engage viewers, rather than bold, daring or artful filmmaking itself.
​- Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, full article here

I don’t shy away from talking about the current era as a golden age of documentaries. I believe it. And I’m not just talking about box office. I am specifically talking about the sort of innovations in artistry that Ms. Hornaday is somehow missing. They’re everywhere. That’s a fact.
- Tom Roston, PBS, full article here