Behind the Mask: The Batman Dead End Story (2017)

Eric Dow’s “Behind the Mask” should be seen by every aspiring filmmaker out there as a course on how to navigate Hollywood and how to basically approach any kind of endeavor involving the Hollywood system. Sandy Collora is a consistently fascinating and interesting artist who has been making waves online for years thanks to his amazing special effects and consistent efforts to get a movie made. He’s also one of the forefathers of the fan film who helped make fan films not only legitimate works of cinematic art, but also a cause for Hollywood to take notice. Sandy Collora, for those unaware, is a brilliant and talented special effects artist who spent years hoping to emulate his favorite creators including Batman artist Neal Adams.

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Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975)

Documentary filmmaker Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself), began this nonfiction feature as his UCLA thesis project and finished it a decade later; it was rejected by the Los Angeles PBS station that helped finance the project, but later had a brief theatrical release before mostly vanishing from circulation until its 2013 restoration and 2015 inclusion on the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.

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Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison (2016)

Kristi Jacobson’s HBO-aired documentary goes inside the segregation units at Red Onion State Prison, a supermax facility located in rural Virginia. The convicts incarcerated here are among the most violent in the penal system – and while they initially come across as articulate and charismatic in their on-camera interviews, the insouciant manner in how they detail the carnage that landed them behind bars is more than a little unsettling.

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Unseen (2017) [San Francisco Documentary Film Festival 2017]

In Cleveland, a murderer and rapist is accumulating victims while people do not seem to care about the missing women.  This documentary explores his victims, through surviving family members and, most importantly, through surviving victims.  This is done with interviews, court footage, and information written on the screen.

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