For eight years, Pure Nonfiction has been a leading podcast in covering documentary film. The Ankler partners with host Thom Powers for his first-ever live taping in Los Angeles.
The esteemed Thom Powers, returning to L.A. for the first time since 2017, will interview the accomplished filmmakers behind the season's most raved-about documentaries. Panels will feature exclusive clips, behind-the-scenes revelations and candid in-depth conversations, and unveil unique storytelling elements as we approach the final stretch of voting. The event will offer concessions and a post-event reception at the Culver Hotel.
Director Luke Lorentzen’s A STILL SMALL VOICE follows Mati, a chaplain completing a year-long hospital residency, as she learns to provide spiritual care to people confronting profound life changes. Through Mati’s experiences with her patients, her struggle with professional burnout, and her own spiritual questioning, we gain new perspectives on how meaningful connection can be and how painful its absence is.
Panelist:
Luke Lorentzen (Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Editor)
Born in the slums of Kampala, Bobi Wine, Ugandan opposition leader, former member of parliament, activist and national superstar musician, risks his life and the lives of his wife, Barbie, and their children to fight the ruthless regime led by Yoweri Museveni. Museveni has been in power since 1986 and changed Uganda’s constitution to enable him to run for yet another five-year term.
Running in the country’s 2021 presidential elections, Bobi Wine uses his music to denounce the dictatorial regime and support his life mission to defend the oppressed and the voiceless people of Uganda. In this fight, he must also take on the country’s police and military, which are not afraid to use violence and torture in a vain attempt to intimidate and silence him and his supporters.
Panelists:
Moses Bwayo (Director, Cinematographer)
Bobi Wine (Film Participant)
Barbie Kyagulanyi (Film Participant)
Travels through time and space to reveal the enduring influence of Nikki Giovanni, one of America’s greatest living artists and social commentators. Giovanni reckons with the inevitable passing of time in intimate vérité and revealing archival footage. The film is a collision of memories, moments in American history, live readings, and visually innovative treatments of her poetry.
Panelists:
Joe Brewster (Director, Producer, Writer)
Michèle Stephenson (Director, Producer, Writer)
Tommy Oliver (Producer)
The film, which incorporates documentary, archival and scripted elements, recounts Fox’s extraordinary story in his own words — the improbable tale of an undersized kid from a Canadian army base who rose to the heights of stardom in 1980s Hollywood. The account of Fox’s public life, full of nostalgic thrills and cinematic gloss, unspools alongside his never-before-seen private journey, including the years that followed his diagnosis, at 29, with Parkinson’s disease. Intimate and honest, and produced with unprecedented access to Fox and his family, the film chronicles Fox’s personal and professional triumphs and travails, and explores what happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease. With a mix of adventure and romance, comedy and drama, watching the film feels like … well, like a Michael J. Fox movie.
Panelist:
Davis Guggenheim (Director, Producer)
Michael Harte (Editor)
The Eternal Memory tells a profound and moving love story that balances vibrant individual and collective remembrance with the longevity of an unbreakable human bond. Augusto and Paulina have been together and in love for 25 years. Eight years ago, their lives were forever changed by Augusto’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. As one of Chile’s most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory. Now he turns that work to his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of his beloved Paulina, whose own pre-eminence as a famous actress and Chilean Minister of Culture predates her ceaselessly inventive manner of engaging with her husband. Day by day, the couple faces this challenge head-on, relying on the tender affection and sense of humor shared between them that remains, remarkably, fully intact.
Panelist:
Maite Alberdi (Director)
On the night of a family wedding in a village in India, Ranjit’s 13-year-old daughter is abducted and sexually assaulted by three men. Ranjit takes on the fight of his life when he demands the men be brought to justice. With tremendous access to all facets of this story, To Kill a Tiger charts the emotional journey of an ordinary man thrown into extraordinary circumstances—a father whose love for his daughter forces a social reckoning that will reverberate for years to come.
Panelist:
Nisha Pahuja (Director, Writer)
Luke Lorentzen is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and a graduate of Stanford University's department of Art and Art History. His most recent film, A Still Small Voice, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival where it won the U.S. Documentary Best Director Award. His previous film, Midnight Family, has won over 35 awards from film festivals and organizations around the world including a Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Editing from the International Documentary Association, and the Golden Frog for Best Documentary from Camerimage. Midnight Family was shortlisted for the 2020 Best Documentary Oscar and was a New York Times ‘Critics’ Pick’. Luke’s other work as a director and cinematographer includes the Netflix original series, Last Chance U, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Serialized Sports Documentary in 2020. With Kellen Quinn, Luke is a co-founder of the independent production company Hedgehog Films.
Lauren Domino is a writer and producer. She is a 2017 Sundance Institute creative producing fellow. Her work as a producer includes Alone, The Earth is Humming, Black Folk Don’t, Like, America, and Academy Award Nominated, TIME (Amazon Studios). Lauren has produced branded content and live events for The New Yorker, Elle Magazine, The Oscars, Microsoft, and Essence Festival. Lauren co-hosted the podcast The Secret Lives of Black Women, which has been highlighted by The New York Times and Forbes.
Moses Bwayo is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker known for shooting and co-directing the award-winning feature documentary “Bobi Wine: The People’s President” (2023). Born in the village of Bududa on the slopes of Mount Elgon in eastern Uganda, Moses was introduced to filmmaking by peeking through cracks in the walls of local kibandas, bootleg movie theatres housed in wooden shacks. Wrapt in the exciting camerawork and storytelling of Hollywood’s martial arts films, Moses immediately fell in love with cinema.
Bobi Wine
Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, famously known as Bobi Wine, is a musician turned politician who is the current leader of the National Unity Platform (NUP) and the People Power Movement. Bobi was born in Mpigi District in Uganda on Feb. 12, 1982. He grew up in the Kamwokya slums in the northeast part of Kampala. His mother was a nurse, and his father was a veterinarian and farmer.
Bobi is a singer, musician, actor and activist. He has campaigned for hospital sanitization, malaria prevention, refugees’ rights and children’s education. His songs are known as peaceful protest and edutainment (a mix between education and entertainment), focusing on the struggles of Uganda’s underprivileged and low-income earners and calling upon young people to join politics and change their country’s destiny. He is married to Barbara Itungo Kyagulanyi, known as Barbie, with whom he has four children.
His characteristic enthusiasm for democratic discourse and the popularity he had earned from his prior artistic and philanthropic endeavors successfully endured his transition to politics. Bobi Wine continues to lead the NUP, the largest political opposition party in Uganda and has become the main opposition leader to President Museveni’s rule.
Barbie Kyagulanyi
Barbara “Barbie” Itungo Kyagulanyi is an author, philanthropist and human rights activist.
Barbie’s 2012 book, “Golden Memories of a Village Belle,” gives insight into her early childhood experiences with village politics and local council elections, her African family unit, and the abject poverty that led to the early marriages of her childhood friends.
In 2013, Barbie founded Caring Hearts Uganda, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that seeks to champion development projects in rural areas, prioritizing health care, maternity, education and sanitary programs. The NGO supports empowering leadership in girls through HIV/AIDS eradication, menstrual hygiene instruction, and continuing education, teaching traditional Ugandan values while encouraging girls to stay in school. In the community, the NGO has extended entrepreneurship skills to teen mothers for personal development and sustainability.
With a master’s degree in human rights law from the University of London, Barbie has taken on the mantle of demanding equity and equality for women in political spaces through the women’s wing of the National Unity Platform political party, which is led by her husband, Robert “Bobi” Kyagulanyi Ssentamu.
Joe Brewster is a Harvard trained psychiatrist who uses his training as the foundation in approaching the social issues he tackles as an artist and filmmaker. Brewster wrote and directed his first film, The Keeper (1995), after a two year-long stint as a prison psychiatrist at the notorious Brooklyn House of Detention. The Keeper was screened at the Edinburg, Toronto, and Sundance Festivals; receiving numerous awards.
For his first work, Brewster was Spirit Award nominee and has never looked back. In the past three decades, Brewster has produced and directed narrative, documentary films, and immersive media. His feature documentary, American Promise, was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. In 2022, Brewster produced the O-DOGG: An Angeleno Take on Othello, featuring Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His groundbreaking room-scale production premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received a jury prize at the Tribeca Festival in 2021 for Best Immersive Experience.
Brewster has produced and directed documentary works on PBS, Netflix, Amazon, Aljazeera, Vice, the Sundance Channel, Comcast, Disney, and the World Channel. He is a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Film Institute, BAVC, MacArthur Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Rada Studio is currently in post-production on projects with MRC, CBC and ESPN. Brewster is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and a four-time Emmy nominee. He has two children and resides in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and cat, Tama.
Filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, pulls from her Haitian and Panamanian roots and experience as a scuocial justice lawyer to think radically about storytelling and disrupt the imaginary in non-fiction spaces. She tells emotionally driven personal stories of resistance and identity that center the lived experiences of communities of color in the Americas and the Black diaspora. Grounded in a Black Atlantic lens, Stephenson tells stories that intentionally reimagine and provoke thought about how we engage with and dismantle the internalized impact of systemic oppression. She draws on fiction, immersive and hybrid forms of storytelling to build her worlds and narratives. Her feature documentary, American Promise, was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance.
Her work, Stateless, was nominated for a Canadian Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Most recently, Stephenson collaborated as co-director on the magical realist virtual reality trilogy series on racial terror, The Changing Same, which was nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Interactive Media Innovative category and premiered at Sundance Film Festival. It also won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Immersive Narrative at the Tribeca Film Festival. Along with her writing partners, Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, Stephenson won an NAACP Image Award for Excellence in a Literary Work for their book, Promises Kept. Currently, Stephenson is in post-production on a feature on the death of Freddie Gray, an ESPN story on Black girls’ hand-games, and a program for the CBC on the Black Power movement in Canada. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, a Guggenheim Artist Fellow, a Creative Capital Artist awardee.
Tommy Oliver is the Founder & CEO of Confluential Films, a production company and financier devoted to championing authentic and culturally specific stories. An award-winning multi-hyphenate
filmmaker and creator, Oliver also serves as Founder & Chairman of Black Love, Inc., a fast-growing
media company that celebrates 360 degrees of Black Love 365 days a year.
Most recently, Oliver produced four films selected as part of the official 2023 Sundance Film Festival:
Fancy Dance, starring Lily Gladstone and Shea Whigham; Young. Wild. Free., starring Algee Smith,
Sanaa Lathan, and Mike Epps; To Live and Die and Live, and Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.
Also premiering later this year for Oliver are Netflix’s The Perfect Find, starring Gabrielle Union, Gina
Torres, and Keith Powers, and Die Like A Man, from Nicholl-winning writer/director, Eric Nazarian.
Oliver’s past projects include AFI Fest Audience Award winner Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss (2021) and
the critically acclaimed HBO documentary 40 Years A Prisoner (2020), both of which he directed,
produced, shot, and edited, as well as the Sony thriller The Perfect Guy (2015), which he produced
and ranked No. 1 in the U.S. during its opening weekend. Other projects for Oliver include the
groundbreaking docuseries, Black Love (2017), which he created and executive produced along with
his wife, Codie Elaine Oliver; Sundance and AFI Fest Audience Award winner Kinyarwanda, which he
produced and Roger Ebert ranked as the No. 6 film in his top 10 of 2011; and Lionsgate’s critically
acclaimed indie film 1982, which he wrote, directed, produced and edited.
Davis Guggenheim is a critically acclaimed, Academy Award-winning director and producer. He has directed and produced three distinct films ranking in the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “It Might Get Loud,” and “Waiting for Superman’”).
The film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” produced and directed by Guggenheim and featuring former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2007.
Davis also directed several films on behalf of former U.S. President Barack Obama, including the President’s biographical film broadcast during the 2008 Democratic National Convention;
the October 2008 Obama infomercial receiving cinematic praise from The New York Times; and “The Road We've Traveled,” a 17-minute short film on the President, released in 2012. Davis
also directed the 2020 Democratic National Convention film for President Joe Biden.
IIn 2019, Davis created and directed the celebrated Netflix documentary miniseries, “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates.” He also produced and directed the 2015 documentary film, “He
Named Me Malala,” highlighting the activism and work of Malala Yousafzai, the world’s youngest Nobel Prize laureate. Guggenheim’s documentary, “Waiting for ‘Superman’” received the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for best documentary just two years after he released, “It Might Get Loud,” a documentary offering a glimpse into the lives of guitarists Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. Davis previously served as producer and director of the Emmy Award-winning HBO series, “Deadwood,” in 2004. Other television directing credits for Guggenheim include episodes of “The Shield,” “Alias,” “24,” “NYPD Blue,” “ER” and “The Unit” (pilot episode). More recent notable nonfiction projects executive produced by Davis include: “Summer of Soul,” “Boys State,” “Time,” “A Thousand Cuts” and “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”
Davis Guggenheim founded Concordia Studio in Venice, CA in 2017. He currently serves as Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Nonfiction for the company.
An Academy Award® Nominated Director and Producer, Maite Alberdi is the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Oscar®. She has developed a particular style that is characterized by the intimate portrayal of small worlds and her unique approach has led her to become one of the most important voices in Latin American documentary. In 2011, she released her first feature film, THE LIFEGUARD. Through Micromundo, her production company, Maite directed her second film, TEA TIME (La Once), which has won more than a dozen international awards and was nominated for the 2016 Goya for Best Ibero-American Film. In 2016, she released the short film I AM NOT FROM HERE, which was nominated for the European Film Awards, and she also premiered her third feature film, THE GROWN-UPS, which received 10 international awards. In Sundance 2020, she premiered THE MOLE AGENT, the first Chilean documentary to be nominated for an Academy Award®. Her latest film, THE ETERNAL MEMORY premiered at Sundance 2023, where it won the Grand Jury Award for World Cinema Documentary, and had its international premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Nisha Pahuja is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker based in Toronto. Her latest film, TO KILL A TIGER, had its world premiere at TIFF where it won the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film. Since then, it’s won 19 awards including Best Documentary Feature, Palm Springs International Film Festival and three Canadian Screen awards. The film grew out of a long career of addressing various human rights issues, notably violence against women in India. In 2015, she won the Amnesty International media award for Canadian journalism after making a short film about the Delhi bus gang rape for Global News. Pahuja’s other past credits include the multi-award-winning THE WORLD BEFORE HER (2012 Best Documentary Feature, Jury Award Winner, Tribeca Film Festival; Best Canadian Documentary, Hot Docs; TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten; Best Documentary nominee, Canadian Screen Awards, the series Diamond Road (2008 Gemini Award for Best Documentary Series) and Bollywood Bound (2002 Gemini Award nominee).
The Culver Theater provides two-hour parking for any of the following Culver City lots. In addition, the city provides one hour free. Parking is available from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., Monday through Friday.
9099 Washington Blvd.*
3846 Cardiff Ave.
3844 Watseka Ave.
*Electric vehicle parking available
