documentaries Archives

Review: ‘Surviving Ohio State,’ starring Dan Ritchie, Mike Schyck, Mark Coleman, Al Novakowski, Mike DiSabato, Adam DiSabato, Colleen Marshall and Ilann Maazel

July 7, 2025

by Carla Hay

Dan Ritchie in “Surviving Ohio State” (Photo courtesy of HBO)

Directed by Eva Orner

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Surviving Ohio State” features a predominantly white group of people (with one African American) who are connected in some way to the accusations and lawsuits against Ohio University that allege that the university covered up decades of student sexual abuse by a doctor employed by the university.

Culture Clash: Some of the estimated thousands of survivors of Dr. Richard Strauss (who committed suicide in 2005) have come forward with harrowing stories of university officials not doing anything when they heard complaints that Strauss was a sexual predator who targeted male students for sexual assaults.

Culture Audience: “Surviving Ohio State” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries about getting justice for sex crimes that were enabled and covered by well-known institutions.

Mike Schyck in “Surviving Ohio State” (Photo courtesy of HBO)

“Surviving Ohio State” (about Ohio State University’s responsibilities in an employee’s longtime sexual abuse of students) makes a clear and convincing case that enabling and covering up crimes are just as heinous as the crimes themselves. This powerful documentary doesn’t uncover a lot of new information but it has interviews with the people who matter the most: the survivors. Because there was ongoing litigation against Ohio State University (which is based in the city of Columbus) at the time this documentary was released, officials who have been named as enablers declined to comment for the documentary. But even if there hadn’t been litigation, it’s easy to see why these accused enablers won’t publicly comment for a documentary because of all the damning evidence that has already been presented.

Directed by Eva Orner, “Surviving Ohio State” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The movie chronicles the sexual abuse accusations about Dr. Richard Strauss, who was employed by Ohio State University (OSU) from 1978 to 1998, the year that he retired from OSU. Strauss was a medical doctor at OSU’s Athletic Department and at the Student Health Center for most of his tenure at OSU, but he was also a professor at the university. It is believed that he sexually abused thousands of male students from the 1970s to the 1990s. An independent investigation commissioned by OSU revealed in 2018 that the first known reported abuse happened in 1979.

Strauss was never arrested or sued for any of these accusations against him. He committed suicide by hanging himself in 2005, at the age of 67. The abuse survivors interviewed in the documentary say that Strauss abused them when they were OSU students from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Most of the documentary’s interviewees used to be on OSU’s wrestling team. Many of those interviewed are plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit against OSU.

The survivors interviewed are:

Dan Ritchie, who was an OSU wrestler from 1988 to 1992
Mike Schyck, who was an OSU wrestler from 1988 to 1993
Mark Coleman, who was an OSU wrestler from 1987 to 1988
Rocky Ratliff, who was an OSU wrestler from 1995 to 1997
Will Knight, who was an OSU wrestler from 1991 to 1996
Mike DiSabato, who was an OSU wrestler from 1986 to 1991
Adam DiSabato (Mike DiSabato’s younger brother), who was an OSU wrestler from 1988 to 1993
Al Novakowski, who was an OSU hockey player from 1987 to 1988
Stephen Snyder-Hill, who was an OSU non-athlete student from 1991 to 2000

All share similar stories about how they were proud to be students at OSU (whose team name is the Buckeyes) because of OSU’s reputation of being a school what regularly won national championships. But their pride also came with the shame of knowing that Strauss (who was a trusted doctor because of his “nice guy” image, his work experience and his credentials) sexually abused them during medical examinations, which they all say was an “open secret” at OSU. Because the abuse was so accepted by the university, many students did not come forward to report the abuse at the time it was happening.

Another reason why many of Strauss’ victims didn’t come forward at the time the abuse was happening because Strauss had the power to decide if they were “fit” to participate in OSU athletics. It’s mentioned in the documentary that Strauss seemed to particularly target students who had athletic scholarships that the students needed to attend the university. Strauss also usually targeted students who were sexually inexperienced and naïve. These students often came from small towns and had sheltered upbringings.

Most of the survivors describe Strauss’ sexual abuse as unwanted fondling of their genitals, which he would lie to them about by saying the fondling was necessary to check if they had hernias. He would do this fondling even if the student was there for a reason that had nothing to do with genitals. Whenever Strauss was questioned about this inappropriate touching, his standard response was he was just being “thorough” in his examinations.

His accusers say that Strauss often asked them inappropriate and illegal questions about their sex lives. He also never used gloves and always made sure that he did the sexual abuse in the dark with no one else in the room. Some of his victims (such as Novakowski) say that Strauss’ abuse went beyond fondling and turned into rape.

And because it was Strauss’ word against any the word of victim who reported the abuse, Strauss was more likely to get away with it when there was no evidence. Knight comments in the documentary about Strauss’ abuse: “It was a dirty little secret that we just tiptoed around, and we just dealt with it because we were Buckeyes.”

Strauss was also allowed to regularly take locker room showers with OSU’s male athletes from several sports departments, and he would openly masturbate in front of the athletes during these showers. And not all of the accusers were students. Frederick Feeney, who was a wrestling referee from 1988 to 2024, breaks down in tears when he describes having one of these shower sexual abuse incidents perpetrated by Strauss, who Feeney says fondled Feeney on the rear end during this abuse.

The survivors all say that many officials knew about the abuse but did nothing when complaints about Strauss were reported. Russ Hellickson (OSU’s wrestling head coach from 1986 to 2006), Jim Jordan (OSU’s wrestling assistant coach from 1986 to 1994) ,Dr. John Lombardo (OSU director of sports medicine from 1990 to 2004), and Dr. Ted Grace (OSU head of student health from 1992 to 2007) are all mentioned as enablers who were responsible for helping keep Strauss employed by OSU, despite the now-uncovered hundreds of complaints against Strauss when Strauss was employed by OSU.

Hellickson, Jordan (who is now a U.S. Representative) and OSU declined to comment for this documentary. However, “Surviving Ohio State” has archival news footage of Jordan repeatedly denying that he knew about these complaints when Jordan worked for OSU. The documentary has some footage of Lombardo, Hellickson and Grace in videotaped depositions from 2019 regarding the lawsuit where Mike DiSabato is the lead plaintiff for a group of former OSU athletes. Grace is the only OSU official who gets some credit in the documentary for eventually being the first OSU official to take disciplinary action against Strauss, but whatever Grace did to hold Strauss accountable wasn’t enough to completely terminate OSU’s employment of Strauss.

Several of the survivors say that their shame and reluctance to come forward had a lot to do with the macho culture of being a male Buckeye athlete who was expected to be tough. Many of the survivors say when they went public about the abuse, many people did not believe that the abuse happened because they think the athletes would have and should have punched and or physically defended themselves against Strauss, who was not tall or muscular. However, what these critics often forget is that Strauss had power and influence over his victims’ enrollment at OSU. Anyone who physically attacked him could be expelled and/or arrested. Many of his abuse survivors didn’t want to take the risk of getting in that type of trouble.

“Surviving Ohio State” also addresses the issues of adult male sexual abuse victims usually getting less sympathy and less support from society than sexual abuse victims who are children (of any gender) or women. As an example, the documentary compares and contrasts the settlement offers in similar sexual abuse lawsuits against universities. Ritchie says in the documentary that he believes he and other plaintiffs got lower settlement offers because they were adults when Strauss was said to have abused them.

Pennsylvania State University offered $1.5 million to each of the plaintiff victims who were children when the unversity’s former football coach Jerry Sandusky (who is prison for various sex crimes) used the university campus to sexually abuse children who were part of the Second Mile, which was Sandusky’s non-profit athletics group for children. Michigan State University offered $1.2 million to each of the women and girls who were victims of the university’s former athletic department doctor Larry Nassar, who is a convicted sex offender serving the rest of his life in prison. By contrast, OSU offered $250,000 to each victim of Strauss. This offer was rejected by the plaintiffs, who also rejected a settlement clause where OSU would not admit to any wrongdoing in how it handled the accusations against Strauss.

The documentary also has accusations and suggestions that Strauss illegally gave steroids to OSU athletes. Several of the interviewees say that Strauss gave them what Straus said were vitamin B-12 injections, but what these former OSU athletes how believe were steroid injections. Ironically, Strauss was a nationally recognized steroid expert who wrote medical reports and was interviewed on TV about the dangers of steroid use. Strauss was never arrested or sued for these steroid accusations.

Some of the interviewees, such as Ritchie and Novakowski, say that Strauss’ sexual abuse of them were the reasons why they left OSU before they could graduate, but they were afraid to tell their families the real reasons at the time. The emotional and psychological damage for survivors has gone far past any college careers. Coleman says that many of the survivors have had divorces, mental health issues (including suicide attempts) and addiction issues that they all attribute to being directly or indirectly caused by the trauma of Strauss’ sexual abuse.

In this documentary that has very bleak and harrowing information, perhaps one of the most encouraging and positive outcomes is that several of the survivors formed informal support groups for each other. Novakowski says that many of the survivors no longer trust medical doctors, which means that many survivors might not be getting the medical treatment that they might need. “Surviving Ohio State” could have included information about any professional therapy that the survivor interviewees might or might not be receiving to deal with their trauma.

Also interviewed in the documentary are NBC4 Columbus TV anchor Colleen Marshall, civil rights attorney Ilann Maazel, journalist Jon Wertheim, and Csilla Remenyik-Smith, who was an OSU fencer athlete from 1981 to 1984. Remenyik-Smith’s mother Charlotte Remenyik was an OSU fencing coach (for male and female students) from 1978 to 1999 and was the first faculty member to make formal complaints about Strauss to OSU, which did not action against Strauss until 10 years after Remenyik made her first annual complaint against him.

In 1996, OSU terminated Strauss from his positions with OSU’s Athletics Department and OSU’s Student Health Department. However, OSU allowed him to keep his job as a tenured faculty member in OSU’s School of Public Health until Strauss voluntarily retired in 1998. OSU’s excuse for stalling in investigating the complaints was that Remenyik was reporting hearsay and gossip with no evidence. Maazel comments, “If there’s one thing OSU is good at—other than football—it’s deceit.”

Although “Surviving Ohio State” is very thorough in how it presents these survivor stories, the movie doesn’t delve far enough into the backgrounds of Strauss and the enablers to give more context for their horrific actions and cover-ups. The documentary does not answer many unanswered questions about who Strauss was outside of his job. Still, there’s enough information in the documentary to show that full justice has yet to be served to the survivors, many of whom might never find peace.

HBO premiered “Surviving Ohio State” on June 17, 2025.

Review: ‘Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print,’ starring Gloria Steinem, Pat Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Suzanne Braun Levine, Marcia Ann Gillespie, Alan Alda and Annie Sprinkle

July 3, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print”

Directed by Salima Koroma, Alice Gu and Cecilia Aldarondo

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” (which covers the 1970s and 1980s decades) features a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans) in the media and entertainment industry discussing the impact of Ms. magazine, the first nationally distributed American devoted to feminism.

Culture Clash: Ms. magazine covered controversial topics such as domestic violence, sexual harassment and pornography while also dealing with its internal problems of racial inequality and disagreements about the magazine’s editorial direction.

Culture Audience: “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries about feminism and visionary magazines.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Gloria Steinem and Suzanne Braun Levine in “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” (Photo courtesy of HBO)

“Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” is an illuminating chronicle of the first decade of feminist-oriented Ms. magazine. The documentary (which has interviews with the founding leaders and many of the original staffers) doesn’t sugarcoat the magazine’s problems and failings. Because the documentary only covers the history of Ms. in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s not a comprehensive story of the magazine, but it does give some fascinating history lessons on how Ms. magazine affected culture and vice versa.

“Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The documentary includes excerpts from many letters sent by Ms. magazine readers in the 1970s and 1980s. “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” is told in three parts, each helmed by a different director. Having each director for each of these three parts is both an asset by havng different director perspective and a flaw because the documentary’s production inconsistency. For example, in the last part of the documentary, the interviewees are not shown on camera.

Part One, titled “A Magazine for all Women” and directed by Salima Koroma, covers the origins and earliest years of Ms., beginning with the magazine’s launch in 1971 and the criticisms from people on both ends of the political spectrum. Part Two, titled “Ms.: A Portable Friend” and directed by Alice Gu, chronicles how Ms. became the first American women’s magazine to delve into problems such as domestic violence and sexual harassment. Part Three, titled “No Comment” directed by Cecilia Aldarondo, tells how Ms. was affect by feminists’ varied opinions on pornography and definitions of sexual exploitation.

Part One dutifully describes how Ms. magazine came to be, as told through interviews with Ms. co-founder Gloria Steinem, Ms. founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Ms. founding publisher Pat Carbine, Ms. founding editor Suzanne Braun Levine, Ms. contributing writer Jane O’Reilly and Marcia Ann Gillespie, who became the first black woman to be the editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine. Steinem says she was inspired to start Ms. after covering a women’s rights movement meeting for New York magazine. “I suddenly realized that the women’s liberation” movement was being born.

The purpose of Ms. was to cover issues that other women’s magazines weren’t covering. At the time, women’s magazines were mostly about domestic responsibilities, fashion and/or beauty. Ms. wanted to challenge the status quo and celebrate that women should have options besides being wives and mothers.

Ms. magazine’s first issue, which was quickly put together in five months, was an insert in New York magazine’s December 1971 issue. The cover of Ms.’s first issue was an illustration by Miriam Wosk of a pregnant woman with several arms, inspired by Hindu goddess Kali, juggling various household and work items. Ms. became a stand-alone magazine with its January 1972 issue, which featured Wonder Woman on the cover. Ms. was an immediate success, selling out its first stand-alone issue. (Ms. began as a monthly magazine and switched to being as quarterly magazine since 1987.)

Some of the article titles in the Ms. magazine’s first few issues were “How to Make Your Own Marriage Contract” and “The Black Family and Feminism.” Steinem wrote an essay titled “Sisterhood.” The emphasis of Ms. wasn’t on how women could be better wives and mothers but how women could be better human beings whose worth was not dependent on whether or not a woman is a wife or mother.

O’Reilly’s “Click” essays is still cited as one of Ms.’s most memorable breakthrough articles. In the article, O’Reilly remembers seeing her family members walk over a pile of folded laundry that she had placed at the bottom of the stairs in the house. When her husband asked her why she didn’t put the laundry away, she had a “click” moment when it suddenly “clicked” with her to say what she felt: “Why don’t you carry it [the pile of laundry] up yourself?”

However, the magazine had its share of controversy and critics from the beginning. Harry Reasoner, who was a TV anchor for ABC News at the time, predicted on television that Ms. would be an embarrassing flop. He later made an on-air apology for being very wrong with this prediction. (Reasoner apparently had a pattern of being sexist toward women, since he reportedly treated Barbara Walters very badly when they worked together as co-anchors of “ABC Evening News.” The 2025 documentary “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” has more details.)

“A Magazine for All Women” is steeped in irony because Ms. magazine certainly doesn’t speak to all women. Many women are not believers in the feminist ideology that is the core of Ms. magazine. Similarly, the documentary acknowledges that in its earliest years, Ms. had many of the same problems with racial inequality and socioeconomic inequality that the feminist movement had overall: The self-appointed leaders were middle-class and affluent white women.

Cottin Pogrebin admits in the documentary that it was mistake that all of Ms.’s founding editors were white instead of having diverse leadership. Ms. made an attempt to remedy its racial equality problem by hiring former Essence editor-in-chief Gillespie as a contributing writer, but that didn’t happen until 1980. Gillespie rose through the ranks at Ms. by becoming a contributing editor, executive editor and editor-in-chief. Gillespie was editor-in-chief of Ms. from 1992 to 2001.

Essence magazine (a publication geared to black women) was launched in 1970, a year before the launch Ms., and the documentary acknowledges that in many ways, Essence helped paved the way for Ms. magazine because Essence covered civil rights and political issues at a time when most other women’s magazine were not. In the documentary, Gillespie admits that she was upset that Alice Walker’s 1974 “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” essay was published in Ms. instead of Essence, where Gillespie was editor-in-chief at the time. Gillespie says that Ms. got preference over Essence because Ms. was considered more “mainstream” (in other words, led by white people), so Ms. automatically got more media coverage.

Walker (who later found massive fame for writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel “The Color Purple”) was a contributing editor at Ms. from the late 1970s to 1986, and resigned from that position because she publicly stated that Ms. was not putting enough people of color on the cover of Ms. magazine. Walker is not interviewed in the documentary. However, feminist writer Michelle Wallace (who is also African American) gives credit to Walker for giving Wallace important coverage in Ms. magazine. Wallace notes that when she did a separate photo shoots with Ms. and Essence, the people at Ms. made Wallace remove her braids, while the people at Essence let her keep her braids exactly the way that Wallace wanted.

Even with these racial inequalities within the Ms. magazine staff, the magazine championed black women in some ways that other “mainstream” magazines would not. Ms. was the first “mainstream” magazine to put Democratic politician Shirley Chisholm on the cover (for the March 1972 issue of Ms.), knowing that several magazine stands in the U.S. South would refuse to carry this issue because of Chisholm was on the cover. Ms. also lost out on advertising revenue from companies that refused to do business with Ms. because of the magazine’s editorial coverage of civil rights and politics.

Part Two of the documentary is well-researched but is the most laudatory section of the documentary because it essentially gives constant praise to Ms. for being the first nationally distributed American women’s magazine to do cover stories on domestic violence (“Battered Wives,” August 1976 issue) and sexual harassment (“Sexual Harassment on the Job and How to Stop It,” November 1977 issue). Many of magazine’s sales staff nearly quit over the decision to show a battered woman’s face (he right eye was bruise) on the cover of the domestic violence issue. For the sexual harassment cover photo, a man’s hand is shown touching the inside of a female puppet’s blouse because many of the Ms. staffers thought it would be inappopriate to have a real woman pose for that type of photo. The magazine weathered these controversies and supported legislation to hold people accountable for these abuses and to give more protection to victims/survivors.

In the documentary, Steinem says feedback from readers was crucial in influencing many of the editorial decisions and to encourage the magazine to keep going during difficult times. “The letters [from readers] were a lifeline,” Steinem comments. “They let us know that we were needed.” Not all of the reader feedback was positive, of course. A recurring theme in Ms. magazine’s history is that people feel threatened or dislike what feminism is all about.

True feminism isn’t about bashing men. True feminism is about believing in gender equality in a society where men usually have most of the power. That’s why when Ms. did a Men’s Issue in 1975, it was a controversial decision. Cottin Pogrebin explains why Ms. had a Men’s Issue: “We were liberating men from a straightjacket as well.” She adds that this straightjacket was choosing work over family and suppressing emotions.

Alan Alda (the actor best known for starring in the TV series “M*A*S*H*”) is the only man interviewed for this documentary. Steinem describes Alda as a “pioneering male feminist.” In his documentary interview, Alda says he is still proud to call himself a feminist but he also remembers the sting of criticism that he got for being a male feminist: He was called “king of the wimps” for his progressive views on feminism.

In addition to political issues that could alienate some people, Ms. wasn’t afraid to tackle health and business issues that could alienate potential advertisers. In the documentary, Steinem comments: “Advertisers censured women’s magazines in ways that they didn’t with Time or Newsweek. We needed advertising, but we weren’t selling our souls to advertisers” As an example, Steinem names Clairol (a leading company for hair products) as a company that refused to advertise in Ms. because Ms. did an article on the dangerous chemicals found in hair dye.

Part Three of the documentary skillfully handles the messy controversies within feminism and at Ms. magazine over how to cover the topics of pornography and other sex work. Within the ranks of Ms. magazine, the decision was made to make the distinction between erotica and pornography. It ended up being a cover story titled “Erotica and Pornography: Do You Know the Difference?” for Ms.’s November 1978 issue. Essentially, the article said that erotica was about sexuality, while pornography was about power and using sex as a weapon.

But with these arguable and subjective parameters, people still disagreed on what was “offensive” when it comes to pornography and other sex work. Andrea Dworkin (who died in 2005, at the age of 58) was a feminist who firmly believed that all pornography was bad for women. Steinem describes Dworkin as being “like an Old Testament prophet, raging from the hills.” Cottin Pogrebin adds, “Andrea was like a hero for all of us.”

The documentary mentions the work that the activist group Women Against Pornography did to shut down adult entertainment businesses back in the 1980s. And it’s also mentioned that left-wing feminists who railed against pornography also had this anti-porn stance in common with the right-wing conservatives who also wanted to eradicate pornography. Carole S. Vance, an anthropologist interviewed in the documentary, says it’s a slippery slope to have legal punishment for porn made by consenting adults. Dworkin was a contributing writer for Ms. until 1985, when she cut ties with the magazine because she felt that Ms.’s editorial acceptance of some pornography was a betrayal of her feminist values.

Another group of people who felt betrayed by Ms. were porn actresses and other sex workers, who were excluded from being interviewed in Ms.’s November 1978 erotica/porn cover story and other public discussions of how porn was affecting women. Interviewed in the documentary are best friends Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera, who were porn actresses and sex workers in the 1970s and 1980s and later documented adult entertainment as journalists. Sprinkle, Vera, and Robin Leonardi (daughter of 1970s porn star Gloria Leonard) says that Ms. magazine should not have excluded the input and perspectives of sex workers from that article and other editorial coverage of similar subject matter.

Ellen Sweet, who was a senior editor and writer at Ms. Magazine from 1980 to 1988, comments in the documentary about Ms. magazine’s coverage of porn: “This was probably the hardest thing we had to do. There were feminists on both sides of the issue.” When Sweet hears about an unpublished letter to Ms. from former porn actress/director Candida Royalle lamenting about Ms. ignoring the perspectives of women who work in porn, Sweet says: “I’m very sorry she was excluded.”

Toward the end of the documentary, it’s briefly mentioned that Sprinkle finally got to be a contributing commentator in the pages of Ms. when she wrote an article for Ms. in 2000. Sprinkle’s Ms. article wasn’t about sex. It was about cookies. Other people interviewed in the documentary are Dr. Lisa Coleman, president of Adler University; Lindsy Van Gelder, former Ms. magazine staff writer; and feminist activist Robin Morgan, co-founded Women’s Media Center with Jane Fonda and Steinem in 2005.

“Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” is an undoubtedly an inspiring historical documentary for people who believe in feminism. The movie doesn’t fully acknowledge that the trailblazing that Ms. magazine did was in the context of the 20th century, when magazines had much more influence in the media than magazines do now. Therefore, the documentary exists in somewhat of a time capsule bubble, with no mention of what Ms. is doing for feminism since the Internet has become a dominant force in the media. As it stands, “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” is still worth watching for nostalgia and as an example of struggles in feminism that are still relevant today.

HBO premiered “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” on July 2, 2025.

Review: ‘Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything,’ starring Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey, Cynthia McFadden, Connie Chung, Bette Midler, Peter Gethers and Victor Neufeld

June 28, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything”

Directed by Jackie Jesko

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” features a predominantly white group of people (with one African American and one Asian) in the media and entertainment industry discussing the life and career of pioneering TV new journalist Barbara Walters.

Culture Clash: Walters battled sexism in her career and a turbulent personal life (including a volatile childhood, failed marriages and long estrangements from her adopted daughter), all while breaking down barriers and creating controversies in TV news journalism.

Culture Audience: “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Walters and documentaries about famous media people.

Barbara Walters and Muammar el- Quaddafi in a 1989 interview shown in “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” (Photo courtesy of American Broadcasting Companies, Inc./Hulu)

The documentary “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” is more about being carefully curated than being completely candid in telling the life story of trailblazing TV news journalist Barbara Walters. Some interviews and archival footage are revealing, but the documentary doesn’t mention her health decline and cause of death. Although the documentary has a treasure trove of highlights from her career, it misses an opportunity to tell her entire story and lessen the stigma of being an elderly person with health issues.

Walters died on December 30, 2022, at the age of 93. She reportedly was diagnosed with dementia in 2017. And although it can argued that the documentary left out this crucial information for privacy reasons, this type of cover-up defeats the purpose of Walters’ reputation and legacy of being a journalist who always strived for the whole truth to be revealed, no matter how embarrassing it would be for the people she exposed in her work. Even with these omission flaws, “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” is worth watching for a history lesson on how TV news evolved when Walters (who spent most of her career at ABC News) was alive and how she made her mark in TV news journalism.

Directed by Jackie Jesko, “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Emmy-winning news producer Jesko got her start in professional journalism as a producer at ABC News (she worked for ABC’s “Nightline” from 2014 to 2017), and ABC News Studios produces “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything.” Therefore, the documentary has a tone that its was very sanctioned and filtered by whatever ABC News wanted the public to see about Walters in this documentary.

It’s a catch-22 for celebrity biography documentaries in these circumstances: Doing an authorized biographical documentary will usually give the documentarians better access to footage and interviews about the documentary subject. But the compromise is usually that the documentarians are explicitly or implicitly pressured to leave out the most unflattering information or the most uncomfortable topics.

Walters was born in Boston on September 25, 1929, but she spent most of her life and career being based in the New York City metropolitan area. Her father Lou Walters was a nightclub owner and live entertainment promoter, most notably owning the Latin Quarter nightclub in Boston. Growing up in a showbiz family meant that Barbara was accustomed to being around entertainers and celebrities from an early age. Not much is said about Barbara’s mother Dena, but it’s mentioned that Barbara’s parents had an unhappy marriage.

Barbara can be heard in voiceover narration in the documentary, which compiles this narration from various archival interviews that Walters did over the years, including some interviews that were previously unreleased. In one of the interviews, Barbara admits that she used to be ashamed of her mentally disabled older sister Jacqueline, who died of ovarian cancer in 1985. Barbara mentions having vivid childhood memories of Jacqueline being bullied by other kids in their community.

When Barbara was in her 20s, her father lost all of his businesses and nearly overdosed on pills. She took on the responsibility to be the family breadwinner. She began her TV career doing publicity/public relations for the NBC affiliate in New York City (WNBT-TV, now know as WNBC-TV) , before moving on to producing and writing in television at various other TV outlets.

Her on-camera breakthrough was on NBC’s “Today” (also known as “The Today Show”), where she did lifestyle segments aimed at appealing to women. Although she shared the “Today” anchor desk with male co-hosts Hugh Downs and later Frank McGee, McGee refused to conduct joint interviews with Walters until he could ask the first three questions first. Barbara used this sexist treatment to her advantage by getting exclusive interviews outside of the TV studio.

She garnered a reputation for being persistent and tough in her interviews, where she often asked uncomfortable questions when the person she was interviewing was caught off guard. Barbara officially became a co-host of “Today” in 1974, after McGee died of cancer. This job promotion made her the first woman to co-anchor a nationally televised morning newscast in the United States. In 1975, she earned her first Daytime Emmy for co-hosting “Today.”

Barbara broke gender barriers again in 1976, when she was recruited to work for ABC News as co-anchor of “ABC Evening News,” with Harry Reasoner as her co-anchor. This position made her the first woman to co-anchor a nationally televised primetime newscast in the United States. She had a then-unprecedent salary for a female news journalist: A five-year contract that would pay her $1 million for each year of the contract.

By all accounts, Barbara’s time working with Reasoner (from 1976 to 1978) was miserable because he and most of the male staff members were either condescending to Barbara or refused to talk to her. Barbara was eventually moved to ABC’s primetime newsmagazine “20/20” in 1979, first as a correspondent and then as a co-anchor. She made the most impact with her ABC News specials, where she interviewed almost every imaginable famous person, such as political leaders, entertainers, business moguls and notorious criminals. Her last televised interview was with Donald Trump in 2015.

Barbara is credited with being a pioneer of mixing “hard news” (politics and breaking news) with “soft news” (pop culture and lifestyle) in her TV reports and TV specials. At the time she started doing that in the 1970s, this blend was controversial, but it is now commonplace. At the peak of her popularity, Barbara’s TV specials were “event television” that people watched at the exact time that the specials aired on television. This type of “event television” has become increasingly rare for pre-recorded TV news programs, which release clips in advance online. TV host/executive producer Andy Cohen comments in the documentary: “Barbara Walters represented, for me, event television.”

In 1997, Barbara co-created (with Bill Geddie) the ABC News daytime talk show “The View,” where she was a co-host until 2014. She returned as an occasional guest co-host until 2016, and she retained her executive producer title for the show until her death 2022. The documentary ends her story with her 2014 retirement from co-hosting “The View,” a show where she encouraged the all-female co-hosts to express their political views. (The majority of “The View’s” co-hosts have been politically liberal.)

Included is a clip from Barbara’s memorable retirement/farewell episode of “The View,” when several notable female TV news journalists from various TV outlets showed up to pay tribute to her. Joy Behar, a longtime co-host of “The View,” is interviewed in the documentary but plays it safe by not saying much that’s substantial about Barbara. It’s a contrast to Behar’s persona as being one of the most outspoken and most controversial co-hosts of “The View.”

The documentary mentions that McGee, Reasoner and ABC News anchor Peter Jennings (who are now all deceased) were Barbara’s three biggest bullying co-workers. Although Barbara undoubtedly experienced sexism in her career, the mistreatment described in the documentary pales in comparison to the horrific work-related abuse stories that have been part of the #MeToo movement. According to this documentary, the worst things that Barbara experienced in the workplace were rude comments or deliberate isolation from some of her male co-workers. Considering that certain discrimination laws didn’t exist when she started her career, you get the feeling that she experienced a lot worse than what she was willing to publicly discuss.

The documentary doesn’t acknowledge that Barbara’s racial privilege was a factor in her rise to the top of the TV news business. The documentary also doesn’t seem completely forthright because it only mentions male enemies that Barbara had, when she surely had female enemies too. Barbara’s rivalry with ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer (who joined ABC News in 1989) was a source of tension that was fueled by their boss Roone Arledge (president of ABC News from 1977 to 1998), who pitted the two women against each other, according to people interviewed in the documentary.

Barbara was reportedly very insecure about Sawyer (whom she called a “blonde goddess”) being younger and more physically attractive than Barbara. Bob Iger, who was president of the entire ABC network from 1994 to 1995, says in the documentary: “It was the most painful period of my life,” when commenting on how this rivalry affected his job. Victor Neufeld, a former ABC News executive producer, says that Barbara’s insecurities were “nightmarish.”

According to ABC News correspondent Cynthia McFadden, who worked with both women: “I never had a conversation with Diane about her feelings about Barbara, but I had plenty with Barbara about her feelings about Diane, because she was certainly dogged by Diane’s very existence.” Sawyer reportedly declined to comment for this documentary. In archival interviews, Barbara and Sawyer both don’t deny the rivalry but deny reports that they hated each other.

Barbara’s failed marriages and her rocky relationship with her adopted daughter Jacqueline “Jackie” Guber (Barbara’s only child) are also given some screen time. All three of Barbara’s ex-husbands are deceased. Barbara’s first marriage (from 1955 to 1957) to businessman Robert Henry Katz was annulled. Barbara said in interviews that she was too young to be married when she was married to Katz.

Barbara’s second marriage (from 1963 to 1976) to theater owner/producer Lee Guber ended in divorce because Barbara said that she and Lee eventually grew apart. Barbara (who had some miscarriages during the marriage) and Lee adopted Jacqueline in 1968, when Jacqueline was a baby. In her teenage years, Jacqueline (who spent some time in a facility for troubled kids) had problems with drugs and juvenile delinquency. The up-and-down relationship between Jacqueline and Barbara was reportedly estranged in the last few years of Barbara’s life.

Barbara was married to television executive Merv Adelson twice—from 1981 to 1984 and from 1986 to 1992—with each marriage ending in divorce. Adelson (who co-founded the production company Lorimar Television) and Barbara lived and worked in separate cities—she was in New York, he was in Los Angeles—during much of their relationship. In a voiceover comment, Barbara can be heard in an interview saying: “I don’t think I was good at marriage.” Peter Gethers, who was the editor of Barbara’s 2008 memoir, “Audition,” says of Barbara’s marriages and many of her romantic relationships: “A lot of the relationships she developed were career moves.”

Jacqueline declined to be interviewed in for the documentary, although a clip is included of a rare TV interview that Jacqueline did with McFadden in 2001 for the ABC News adoption special “Born in My Heart: A Love Story.” “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” has footage of Barbara watching the interview as it happened and making occasional comments under her breath. One of the best parts of “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” is how it includes previously unreleased outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage of Barbara. These are glimpses into what she was like at work when she knew whatever was being filmed was not going to be part of her packaged television report.

Although publicly, Barbara said that adopting Jacqueline was the best decision that Barbara ever made, other people in the documentary say they aren’t convinced that being a parent was truly a top priority for Barbara. Oprah Winfrey, who describes Barbara as Winfrey’s “role model,” says that Winfrey she saw from how Barbara lived that if women wanted to be at the top of the TV news business, women couldn’t be completely devoted parents because the work demands are so high in TV news. Winfrey comments, “That’s why I did not have children. I knew I couldn’t do both well.” Gethers says that Barbara’s career was the greatest love of Barbara’s life.

Barbara was also contradictory about other things that she said in public and what she did in private, according to people interviewed in the documentary. Although she said in interviews that she wasn’t star-struck by celebrities, Gethers says that in reality, “She was obsessed with money, fame and power.” And although Walters presented herself as having high standards in journalism ethics, Gethers says: “She didn’t have the strongest moral compass.”

It’s mentioned that Barbara enjoyed sex and having flings with men. Lori Klein, a makeup artist who worked with Barbara for about 29 years, says in the documentary: “She definitely was a romantic kind of person, but romance never worked in her life for long.” She was certainly attracted to men with power: Among her former paramours were Alan Greenspan in the 1970s (Greenspan later became U.S. Federal Reserve chairman) and former U.S. Senator John Warner in the 1990s, after he was divorced from actress Elizabeth Taylor.

Even though it’s a breach of journalistic ethics for a journalist to have a sexual or romantic relationship with anyone the journalist is interviewing for a story, it’s hinted that Barbara crossed that line many times, although only one man is named in the documentary as someone with whom she had this type of forbidden affair: Republican politician Edward Brooke, who was a U.S. Senator representing Massachusetts from 1967 to 1979.

She had an affair with married man Brooke (who died in 2015), whom she interviewed in the midst of their once-secret affair. Gossip about the affair essentially ended his political career. In a documentary voiceover, Barbara can be heard saying that Brooke was in a “horrible marriage,” and her breakup with Brooke was mutual.

Barbara also admitted that the celebrity she was most attracted to was Clint Eastwood, whom she interviewed multiple times. The documentary has a clip from her 1982 interview with Eastwood, where he openly flirts with her and hints he’d be open to hooking up with her. Publicly, Barbara said she and Eastwood never got sexually involved with each other.

The documentary also mentions Barbara’s longtime close relationship with controversial (and eventually disbarred) attorney Roy Cohn, who was a mentor to Trump. Cohn, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1986, was a closeted gay man who publicly denied having AIDS. At times, Cohn presented Barbara as his “romantic girlfriend” when they went on dates together. Gethers says in the documentary that Walters was extremely loyal to Cohn because when Barbara’s father had serious tax and financial problems in the 1950s, Cohn made all of those problems disappear.

Cohn had a reputation for being very corrupt and for the cruel ways that he destroyed people’s lives, but Barbara stayed loyal to Cohn throughout all of his scandals. Gethers comments: “She could forgive anyone who was good to her, no matter what they did in other parts of their lives.” Gossip columnist Cindy Adams says of the relationship that Barbara and with Cohn: “They were two people who loved PR [public relations].”

“Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” also has the expected clips of several of her most famous interviews, with not much additional insight. The documentary includes some behind-the-scene details about of the ultra-competitive ways that Barbara and her producer colleagues would cajole and entice people to do interviews. Neufeld, David Sloan (ABC News senior executive producer) and former ABC News producers Martin Clancy, Chris Vlasto and Katie Nelson Thomson all give anecdotal comments about what it was like to work with Barbara, by describing it as a work environment that was more cutthroat than conducive to camaraderie.

Long before this documentary was made, it was already well-known years ago that Barbara’s March 1999 interview with Monica Lewinsky (which remains the highest-rated TV news interview of all time, with 74 million U.S. viewers) was the result of Barbara and her team “poaching” Lewinsky for this exclusive interview from Winfrey, who had an informal agreement with Lewinsky to do the interview. Under the ABC News deal with former White House intern Lewinsky (the woman at the center of Bill Clinton’s biggest sex scandal), Lewinsky was not paid for the interview, but she was free to be paid by other news outlets for interviews after Lewinsky’s ABC interview aired. The interview was also televised in its edited entirety only once on ABC, as part of the deal.

In the documentary, Winfrey is diplomatic about losing out on this exclusive interview by saying that ABC could offer a bigger audience than Winfrey could at the time. It’s obvious that not getting this interview still has a certain sting for Winfrey. Lewinsky is also interviewed in the documentary and says she chose to give the exclusive interview to Barbara because she felt more comfortable telling her story to Barbara.

It’s a testament to how Barbara could make her interview subjects feel at ease while also knowing that she could ask unnerving questions. This interview style is commented on in a montage shown in the beginning of the documentary. Winfrey says: “She asked the questions that nobody else had asked—and asked it in a way that hit a nerve.” (Later in the documentary, Winfrey talks about when Barbara interviewed her for the first time, it was also the first time that Winfrey revealed in an interview that Winfrey had been sexually abused as a child.)

McFadden says of Barbara’s signature interviewing style: “Sitting down with Barbara Walters, no one ever really got out totally unscathed.” TV journalist Katie Couric comments, “She could talk to anyone about anything.” Actress/singer Bette Midler (the only entertainer interviewed for the documentary) says, “She was fearless, and sometimes she got under people’s skin.” Midler, who was interviewed by Barbara multiple times, adds that although she considered Barbara to be her friend, Midler never forgot that Barbara was also a journalist, so “I was very careful.”

Also interviewed in the documentary is TV news journalist Connie Chung. In 1993, Chung became the second woman to co-anchor a nationally televised primetime newscast in the United States. Just like Walters, Chung’s male co-anchor (Dan Rather) had uncomfortable friction with her, and she left the co-anchor job after two years.

In 1997, Chung joined ABC News, thinking that she would have more female solidarity at a network that employed her idol Barbara Walters and Sawyer. Chung says in hindsight, it was a “stupid” mistake to join ABC News at the time, because Chung got caught in the middle of the Walters/Sawyer rivalry and because Chung was perceived as more female competition for these more-established TV divas. Chung left ABC News in 2003.

“Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” is a somewhat ironic title because it doesn’t tell everything about her as the subject of this documentary. It presents her as a flawed human being, but there are many aspects of her life, especially in her last years, that are completely ignored. However, the movie succeeds as a tribute to Barbara Walters and the untold numbers of ways that she influenced TV news and the people who present it.

Hulu premiered “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” on June 23, 2025.

Review: ‘Yanuni,’ starring Juma Xipaia and Hugo Loss

June 16, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Yanuni”

Directed by Richard Ladkani

Portuguese and Xipaya with subtitles

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Yanuni” features a predominantly Indigenous group of people (with some white people and Latin people) who are connected in some way to Brazil-based environmental activist Juma Xipaia.

Culture Clash: Xipaia became the first female chief of her tribe and experienced resistance and assassination attempts in her activism to protect the rights of Indigenous land.

Culture Audience: “Yanuni” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Felix and are interested in documentaries about athletes who became activists.

Occasionally unfocused but always compelling to watch, “Yanuni” is a laudatory documentary about Brazilian environmental activist Juma Xipaia. Her story is an example of fearlessness and tenacity in the face of various obstacles. As a person, Xipaia is a passionate and inspiring leader who doesn’t believe in using extreme tactics that would be counterproductive to the causes she supports.

Directed by Richard Ladkani, “Yanuni” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The movie is a fairly straightforward chronicle of her life in 2022 and 2023, when most of the documentary was filmed. In 2015, at the age of 24, Xipaia became the first female chief of the Middle Xingu region, leading the village of Tukamã. In 2023, she became the Secretary of Articulation and Promotion of Indigenous Rights for Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, which was formed that year to give Indigenous people better representation in Brazil’s federal government.

The documentary follows Xipaia as she participates in protests, political summits, and meetings with various people in her battles to protect Indigenous land. The Ministry of Indigenous Peoples got some inevitable backlash from certain people who felt that the ministry was not acting quickly enough for its intended goals. Xipaia was inevitably on the receiving end of some of this backlash, which affected her.

At times, the movie seems to also be about her husband Hugo Loss, the leader of special operations for Brazil’s IBAMA agency that shuts down illegal mining. (IBAMA is an acronym that translates in English to the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources.) A significant amount of screen time shows what he does in his job. Xipaia and Loss seem to have a supportive relationship throughout the challenges of their marriage, including their job travels requiring the spouses to spend time apart from each other.

The documentary doesn’t gloss over some of the dangers involved in their work. During a harrowing part of the movie, Xipaia watches a friend die in front of her during a protest that becomes violent. In another scene, Loss and some of his team members frantically try to escape death when their boat is chained to an illegal mining boat that has just exploded. Xipaia, who has survived assassination attempts, gets tearful when she talks about the emotional pain of being separated from her children when her children sometimes have to be sent to live in another home for the kids’ safety.

The movie shows Xipaia and Loss to be devoted parents, as they raise son Tuppak Tawary Xipaia (her biological child from a previous relationship), who was about 4 or 5 years old at the time. The documentary also chronicles her pregnancy journey with the spouses’ daughter Yanuni Xipaia Loss, who was born while this documentary was being filmed. Xipaia says of her ongoing environmental battles and the resistance she gets from people: “The greatest destruction isn’t in the Amazon but mainly in people’s minds.” “Yanuni” gives a fascinating inside look at what it takes to be a dedicated environmentalist, but it’s also a sobering account that a lot more progress needs to be made.

2025 Tribeca Festival: complete list of winners

June 12, 2025

The following is a press release from the Tribeca Festival:

The 24th annual Tribeca Festival, presented by OKX, today announced competition winners with Charliebird, Happy Birthday, and Natchez taking top honors in the U.S. Narrative, International Narrative, and Documentary competitions, respectively. Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn shared the Performance Award for Dragonfly, leading a strong showing by women who claimed top honors across the majority of categories at the ceremony held at Racket NYC. The awards also highlighted breakthrough achievements by first-time feature directors and a notable presence of Latin American cinema throughout the competition. The Competition categories represent the breadth of Tribeca’s programming with awards for U.S. Narrative, International Narrative, Documentary, Viewpoints, Nora Ephron, Short Film, Best New Directors, Audio Storytelling, Games, AT&T Untold Stories, and Tribeca X. The Festival concludes on June 15 in New York City.

“Every year at Tribeca we set out to spotlight the most exciting new voices from around the world,” said Tribeca Festival Director and SVP of Programming Cara Cusumano. “We are thrilled our jury honored this mission with winners that brilliantly represent the vibrancy and diversity of global independent storytelling today.”

All winning films in the U.S. Narrative category are first-time directors, including Libby Ewing for Charliebird, Cristian Carretero and Lorraine Jones Molina for Esta Isla (This Island), who also won the Best New Narrative Director Award, and Isabel Hagen for On a String. Other first-time filmmakers include The Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director honorees Augusto Zegarra for Runa Simi and Rowan Haber for We Are Pat, and Walter Thompson-Hernandez who took home the Viewpoints Award for Kites.

Sarah Goher, also a first-time filmmaker, earned three awards on behalf of her film Happy Birthday, including Best International Narrative Feature, Best Screenplay in an International Narrative Feature and the prestigious Nora Ephron Award, which honors exceptional female filmmakers who represent the spirit and vision of the legendary filmmaker and writer. Meanwhile, Latin American cinema made its mark with award winners A Bright Future, Cuerpo Celeste, Runa Simi, and Kites.

Select categories receive the unique Tribeca Festival Art Award from a selection of artists led by curator Zoe Lukov. Supported by CHANEL, the world-class artists donated work to honored filmmakers.

Winners of the Audience Award, which are determined by audience votes throughout the Festival, will be announced at a later date.

2025 Winners and Special Jury Mentions, as selected by the 2025 Festival Jury, are as follows:

U.S. NARRATIVE COMPETITION

Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature: Charliebird, director Libby Ewing (United States) – World Premiere. Jury Statement: “A deeply affecting portrait featuring grounded and complex performances, this film is an assured and well-crafted debut.“ This award is presented by OKX.

Special Jury Mention for Best U.S. Narrative Feature: Esta Isla (This Island), directors Cristian Carretero and Lorraine Jones Molina (Puerto Rico) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “A compelling depiction of a place, this film is a lush and stunningly realized reckoning with class, love and history.”

Best Performance in a U.S. Narrative Feature: Gabriela Ochoa Perez for Charliebird (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “This actor delivers a fresh performance that is at once ferocious and vulnerable. She grounds a young woman’s painful journey in humanity and truth.”

Best Screenplay in a U.S. Narrative Feature: Isabel Hagen for On a String (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “A nimble, witty and accomplished story that chronicles the ups and downs of a young woman who has to face the music.”

Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature: Cedric Cheung-Lau for Esta Isla (This Island) (Puerto Rico) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “Beautifully lensed, this film is full of unforgettable and evocative imagery. Lovingly rendered, it is equally adept at capturing the intimate details and grandest vistas.”

INTERNATIONAL NARRATIVE COMPETITION

Best International Narrative Feature: Happy Birthday, director Sarah Goher (Egypt) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “For its authentic and complex portrayal of class, motherhood, and loss of innocence, along with outstanding performances – especially by its young star – and its brilliant nuanced writing.”

Special Jury Mention for International Narrative Feature: Cuerpo Celeste, director Nayra Ilic García (Chile, Italy) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “For its fantastic central performance, arresting visuals, and subtle storytelling that touches on both a changing political landscape and the aftermath of grief.”

Best Performance in an International Narrative Feature: Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn for Dragonfly (United Kingdom) – World Premiere. “For an audience, there is nothing as exciting as watching actors bravely and fully immerse themselves in characters who leave us filled with both empathy and dread – and so for their daring and electrifying turns, we are thrilled to present Best Performance in and International Film to Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn.”

Best Screenplay in an International Narrative Feature: Mohamed Diab and Sarah Goher for Happy Birthday (Egypt) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “For its profound and yet economical storytelling, compelling characters, and wonderfully crafted dialogue.”

Best Cinematography in an International Narrative Feature: Lev Predan Kowarski for Little Trouble Girls (Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Serbia) – North American Premiere. Jury statement: “For its evocative tone and rich sensual texture, which conjured the fragility of a singular summer.”

DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

Best Documentary Feature: Natchez, director Suzannah Herbert (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “Who tells America’s story? In a country where the rewriting and abject erasure of African American history threatens a truthful understanding of who we are, the jury applauds this film’s focus on a southern town, once one of America’s largest slave markets, whose economic mainstay is now historic tours. The film’s incisive, razor-sharp craft, its deft navigation of myriad participants without ever losing clarity, its timeliness, its humor, its confrontation of naked racism, yet its refusal to flatten its Mississippian storytellers—however flawed—into easy villains, for being artful, honest, and deeply compassionate, the jury—unanimously and unequivocally—awards a film that brings us hope not for an America that can agree, but one that might understand each other.”

Special Jury Mention for Documentary Feature: An Eye for an Eye, directors Tanaz Eshaghian and Farzad Jafari (Denmark, Iran, United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “At a time when women’s rights are eroding globally, the jury would be remiss if we did not recognize the courageous, unflinching, gut wrenching, verité virtuosity of a film set in a society that severely limits women’s rights, even those of victims of extreme domestic violence. The story unfolds in real time with life and death hanging in the balance, leaving the audience breathlessly invested in the outcome.”

Best Cinematography in a Documentary Feature: Chance Falkner and Johnny Friday for The Last Dive (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “After a passionate debate, we award a film which immersed us in a natural world where the meeting between man and animal literally changes the course of preservation history, and the redemption of a broken soul. For its sweeping aerial and underwater footage, shocking archival witness, and intimate portrait of a person confronting morality.”

Special Jury Mention for Cinematography in a Documentary Feature: Noah Collier for Natchez (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “For its idiosyncratic visual storytelling, masterfully timed and restrained camerawork, and photography as close, wide and open as the film’s curious heart.”

Best Editing in a Documentary Feature: Soren B. Ebbe and Hayedeh Safiyari for An Eye for an Eye (Denmark, Iran, United States) – World Premiere. “For its narrative precision, for locking us inside a moral crucible without relief, and for weaving a multigenerational, deeply personal story that gives equal weight to all participants with searing emotional impact, and for the clarity and courage of its storytelling. Not one frame feels gratuitous as the film barrels relentlessly towards its conclusion.”

Special Jury Mention for Editing in a Documentary Feature: Pablo Proenza for Natchez (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “The editing seamlessly balances all the elements of an extremely complicated story, and delivers a powerful impact that resonates long after the film concludes.”

VIEWPOINTS AWARD

A Bright Future, director Lucia Garibaldi (Uruguay, Argentina, Germany) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “This year’s Viewpoints award goes to a film driven by an original, inventive voice. The filmmaker creates a seamless world that is captivating, thought-provoking, fresh and increasingly relevant. Weaving themes of the fetishization of youth, the timeless pursuit of dreams, and what makes us human, and anchored by a pitch perfect performance from their lead actress, we are pleased to award this year’s Viewpoint prize to A Bright Future. We believe Lucia Garibaldi has a very bright future.”

Special Jury Mention for Viewpoints: Kites, director Walter Thompson-Hernandez (Brazil) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “Special Jury Prize goes to a film with astounding cinematography that balances verite with magical realism and upends conventional story structure. The love the filmmaker has for his characters and their community writ large was infectious. We all think we have time but the angels let us know we have to hurry and become the people who want to be.”

BEST NEW NARRATIVE DIRECTOR AWARD

Zion Ortiz and Fabiola in “Esta Isla (This Island)” (Photo by Cedric Cheung-Lau)

Lorraine Jones Molina and Cristian Carretero for Esta Isla (This Island) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “The award for Best New Narrative Director goes to a film that straddles crime fiction and ethnography; it balances poetic imagery, lush landscapes, and cinematic tension; it takes audiences deep into the crisis of survival of a young man on an island that’s both a paradise and a prison.” This award is presented by Canva.

ALBERT MAYSLES AWARD FOR BEST NEW DOCUMENTARY DIRECTOR

Fernando Valencia and Dylan Valencia in “Runa Simi”

Augusto Zegarra for Runa Simi (Peru) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “This award goes to a film that takes us on a seemingly lighthearted journey while tackling an essential question: why storytelling matters. From the casting, to the frame, to the editorial pacing, this director creates the total cinematic package, revealing one man’s fight to preserve his people’s culture.”

Special Jury Mention for New Documentary Director: Rowan Haber for We Are Pat (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “This award goes to a film that tackles a morally urgent issue with a fresh and unique directorial vision that made us think, cry, and most unexpectedly laugh. For powerfully centering the voices of the community it represents, inventive visual approach, and for helping us see a complex pop cultural figure in a new way.”

NORA EPHRON AWARD

The Nora Ephron Award will honor an exceptional female filmmaker who represents the spirit and vision of the legendary filmmaker and writer.

Sara Goher for Happy Birthday (Egypt) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “This film was not only compelling as an audience experience, but like all great works of art, it did not confine itself to the story, and was resonant on a larger canvas. It explored the intersection of innocence and class from the eyes of a child longing for a birthday party and reluctantly understanding her place in society, being on the outside, and longing to be invited to the inside.”

SHORTS COMPETITION

Best Narrative Short: Beyond Silence, director Marnie Blok (Netherlands) – International Premiere. Jury statement: “Covering an enormous subject with beautiful minimalism, brilliant performances combine with a skillful script to give new meaning to ‘finding your voice.’ Raw and devastating. Impressive and emotional.”

Special Jury Mention for Narrative Short: Chasing the Party, director Jessie Komitor (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “With a compelling combination of character and world, this nostalgic look at young hope on a wild night is filled with surprises of fantasy and nightmare. We’ll be thinking of this fresh, provocative film for a long time and cannot wait to see what this director does next.”

Best Documentary Short: I hope this email finds you well, director Asia Zughaiar (Palestine) – World Premiere. Jury Statement: “Our choice for the Best Short Documentary Award poses the question: what even is a documentary? A documentary can be anything that allows the viewer to connect with what the filmmaker has experienced. We believe this film helps us not only see, but feel.”

Special Jury Mention for Documentary Short: Natasha, directors Mark Franchetti and Andrew Meier (Italy, Russia) – World Premiere. Jury Statement: “In times like these, it’s important to honor those who came before us, those who fought to make the world a more just and livable place. Our Special Jury choice reflects on one such hidden figure, whose legacy left an outsized impact on the world we live in today.”

Best Animated Short: Playing God, director Matteo Burani (Italy, France) – New York Premiere. Jury statement: “Visceral and experimental, using the form to its greatest abilities — this beautiful exploration of existential turmoil is at the heart of cinema — why are we here, how did we get here, what would it be like to have the thumb of god in your hand, and what is the price when one yearns to be free?”

Special Jury Mention for Animated Short: Petra and the Sun, directors Malu Furche and Stefania Malacchini(Chile) – North American Premiere. Jury statement: “The attention to detail, the specificity of longing and loneliness, and the immersive quality of this stop-motion character study created a moving experience. The texture and visible traces of the human hand brought a delicate realism in this story about an unusual and unforgettable chance encounter.”

Best Music Video: “Rock The Bells” – LL COOL J, director Gregory Brunkalla (United Stated). Jury statement: “To honor our first-ever Music Video Jury Competition winner, we found it only fitting to celebrate the great city of New York—with a music video that captures the style, swag, and sound of Tribeca’s hometown.”

Student Visionary Award: Manya Glassman for How I Learned to Die (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “Our choice for the Student Visionary Award manages to make a capital-M Movie out of a short student film. We, the jury, believe this film is filled with ambition, hope, and personality—paired with complex, emotional subject matter that touches on something we will all experience: death.

Special Jury Mention for Student Visionary: Jiayi Li for āyí (United States) – World Premiere. Jury statement: “Sometimes, the people who are the fabric of our lives are the ones most often forgotten. With this film, we catch a glimpse of what it feels like to be overlooked—but not erased. We would like to give a Special Jury Mention.”

TRIBECA GAMES AWARD

Cairn (France) – New York Premiere. Jury Statement: “All the nominated games represent a wide, healthy range of what games can aspire to be, and how games can tell stories through both traditional elements but more importantly through gameplay interactions. The chosen winner among this amazing group of nominees was compelling, immersive, and reminds us that every choice we make is meaningful. The jury loved the dedication to simulation, the cohesion of the project, and the ambition. This game is bigger than climbing done right; it is imbued with substance beyond the physical act.”

AT&T PRESENTS UNTOLD STORIES

Liz Sargent for Take Me Home

TRIBECA X AWARD COMPETITION

Best Feature: Abnormal Beauty Company from The Ordinary, directed by Aref Mahabadi

Best Short: First Speech by Reporters without Borders, directed by Giordano Maestrelli

Best Commercial: Century of Cravings from Uber Eats, directed by Jim Jenkins

Best Episodic: A New York Minute from Mejuri, directed by Gia Coppola

Best Content Creator/Influencer: A Robot’s Guide to Happiness from Brilliant Labs, directed by Lucas Rizzotto

Best Games/Immersive: WICKED RP: The Official Experience on Roblox from Wicked & NBCU, creative directed by Ben Caro

Best Audio/Podcast: Dragon Age: Vows & Vengeance from Electronic Arts, BioWare, directed by Matt Sav

Social Impact Award: Daniel Really Suits You from Human Rights Campaign, directed by Karimah Zakia Issa

Environmental Impact Award: A Vital Sun from Fordham University, directed by Alison Bartlett

June 14, 2025 UPDATE:

AUDIENCE AWARDS

Dominique Jackson and Tomás Matos in “Queens of the Dead”

Audience Award, Narrative: Queens of the Dead

Audience Award, Documentary: How Dark My Love

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For more updates, follow @Tribeca and #Tribeca2025 on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A Tribeca Membership can be purchased at tribecafilm.com.

About the Tribeca Festival
The Tribeca Festival, presented by OKX, brings artists and diverse audiences together to celebrate storytelling in all its forms, including film, TV, music, audio storytelling, games, and immersive. With strong roots in independent film, Tribeca is synonymous with creative expression and entertainment. Tribeca champions emerging and established voices, discovers award-winning talent, curates innovative experiences, and introduces new ideas through exclusive premieres, exhibitions, conversations, and live performances.

The Festival was founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2001 to spur the economic and cultural revitalization of lower Manhattan following the attacks on the World Trade Center. The annual Tribeca Festival will celebrate its 24th year from June 4–15, 2025 in New York City.

In 2019, James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems bought a majority stake in Tribeca Enterprises, bringing together Rosenthal, De Niro, and Murdoch to grow the enterprise.

About the 2025 Tribeca Festival Partners
The 2025 Tribeca Festival is presented by OKX and with the support of our partners: AT&T, Audible, Bulleit Frontier Whiskey, Canva, CHANEL, City National Bank, DIRECTV, Don Julio Tequila, FIJI Water, Indeed, iQIYI, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, NBC4 and Telemundo 47, NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, National CineMedia, New York Magazine, Purina, Spring Studios New York, The Wall Street Journal, Variety, Vulture, and Whalar.

Review: ‘She Runs the World,’ starring Allyson Felix

June 8, 2025

by Carla Hay

“She Runs the World”

Directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill

Culture Representation: The documentary film “She Runs the World” features a predominantly African American group of people (with a few white people) who are connected in some way to champion track and field athlete Allyson Felix.

Culture Clash: In 2018, Felix took a big risk in her career by taking on her then-sponsor Nike with public criticisms about the pregnancy clauses in Nike’s sponsorship contract and by becoming an activist for maternity rights for professional athletes.

Culture Audience: “She Runs the World” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Felix and are interested in documentaries about athletes who became activists.

A 2019 photo of Allyson Felix, her husband Kenneth Ferguson and their daughter Camryn in “She Runs the World”

“She Runs the World” is an inspiring documentary about track-and-field champion Allyson Felix’s challenges in attaining Olympic gold medals and her maternity rights activism for sponsored athletes. More perspectives would’ve made this a better film. The only people interviewed in the movie are Felix, her husband, her parents, her brother, and a few past and present colleagues.

Directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill, “She Runs the World” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Felix retired as a professional athlete in 2022, at the age of 36. The documentary mostly covers Felix’s life as a professional athlete, although there is some mention in the beginning of the film about her childhood.

Felix is known for being the most decorated woman in Olympic track and field history and the most decorated American track and field athlete in Olympic history. She’s won 11 Olympic medals, seven of which are gold medals. Felix has 20 career medals (seven from individual events and 13 from team events) from the World Athletic Championships, making her the most decorated athlete in World Athletic Championships history.

Early on in “She Runs the World,” Felix makes a statement that can describes how she’s been such a high achiever: “I like it when people tell me I can’t do something because I’m going to show you that I can.” The documentary shows that many times in her life, Felix proved her doubters and critics wrong. And she made some history along the way.

Born in Los Angeles on November 18, 1985, Felix wasn’t an athlete who had a parent pushing her into sports. Her parents Paul Felix (a pastor) and Marlean Felix (a schoolteacher) say that they weren’t very enthusiastic about Allyson’s interest in athletics, but they didn’t discourage her either. Paul and Marlean describe Allyson as a sweet child, which is why she had the nickname Shug, short for Sugar.

In high school, Allyson broke many national records. In 2004, a year after graduating from high school, she won a silver medal at the Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. She was the first female track and field athlete to become a professional after graduating from high school, but she also still found the time to get a university education. In 2008, Allyson graduated from the University of Southern California, degree in elementary education. That same year, she won her first Olympic gold medal. In 2010, Nike became her main sponsor.

“She Runs the World” dutifully shows the highlights from the rest of Allyson’s track-and-field competitions. But many times, the documentary looks like a long promotional video because it makes Allyson look like she has a close-to-flawless personality. Just by the way she’s presented in the documentary, her biggest insecurity (or strength, depending on your perspective) is that she’s very hard on herself and always wants to be the best in everything that she does.

For example, when she won a silver medal at her very first Olympics in 2004, everyone else around her seemed to be happy and proud for her, but she admits that she hid her disappointment on camera. She says in the documentary about not winning a gold medal for her first Olympics: “I felt like I failed. I felt like I let the country [the United States] down.”

Jackie Joyner-Kersee, another Olympic champion in track and field, is one of the people interviewed in the documentary. Joyner-Kersee says she considers herself a mentor of Allyson, whom Joyner-Kersee describes as “very shy but very determined.” Joyner-Kersee further comments on Allyson: “She somewhat reminds me of herself.”

Also interviewed in the documentary are Allyson’s former coaches: Bob Kersee (Joyner-Kersee’s husband) became Allyson’s coach when she turned pro. Pat Connolly was Allyson’s coach in high school. Naturally, they praise Allyson too.

Even the love story of Allyson and her husband Kenneth Ferguson is presented as idyllic. They were friends from high school and a romance developed between them later. The couple got married in 2018. Ferguson seems content and secure with being married to someone famous. In the documentary, Ferguson says of Allyson: “I don’t see her as a public figure. I see her as just her.”

Allyson’s athletic accomplishments have gotten a lot of media coverage, so the documentary doesn’t reveal anything new in that respect. “She Runs the World” is at its most interesting when it covers the riskiest thing that Allyson did in her career: Speak out against her then-sponsor Nike and demand salary protections for pregnant athletes.

Prior to the changes that Allyson helped make in how pregnant athletes were treated by their sponsors, she and Joyner-Kersee say in the documentary that sponsors usually canceled or reduced payments for professional female-track-and-field athletes if these women got pregnant. It’s one of the reasons why many professional female athletes wait until they retire if they want to get pregnant. There was also no paid maternity leave for these athletes.

“Pregnancy in sport has always been the kiss of death,” retired hurdler Joanna Hayes says in the documentary. Hayes, who won a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics, comments on how being a professional athlete affected her family planning: “I wanted to have kids earlier, but I was afraid to do it.” Hayes says she waited to have kids after she retired as a professional athlete.

Allyson and her older brother Wes Felix (who became her agent early on in her career) candidly speak about the volatile contract negotiations that motivated Allyson to speak out about maternity rights for professional athletes. Wes, who is two years older than Allyson, says he’s always felt protective and proud of her. He says he became her agent because he felt he was the best person for the job.

In 2016, even after winning another gold medal that year, Nike reduced her pay by 60%, according to Wes and Allyson. “I felt discarded,” Allyson said of the pay cut that she thought was an insult to her, considering all that she had accomplished as an athlete. It’s not quite said out loud in the documentary, but the implication is that women athletes who get older can get more negative financial penalties than their male counterparts who get older.

In 2018, when Allyson got pregnant with her first child, Nike stipulated in the contract that if she didn’t make it onto the podium” (getting first, second or third place) in a major competition within eight months after giving birth, then her salary would be reduced by an additional 25%. Allyson told Nike that if Nike was going to give her that additional 25% pay cut, then Nike could no longer use her image in marketing campaigns. Nike disageed and wanted to be able to use her image in the campaigns even if she got that additional 25% pay cut.

The contract negotiations reached a stalemate. And that’s when Allyso decided to speak out. A turning point was her New York Times opinion-editorial essay, titled “My Own Nike Pregnancy Story,” which was published on May 22, 2019. In the article she openly gave criticism about discriminatory policies that major sponsors such as Nike have toward pregnant athletes and called for changes in contracts to have pregnancy/maternity rights.

The article opened the floodgates for more women and allies to speak out about pregnancy/maternity rights for sponsored athletes. But speaking out in the first place was a risk because Allyson and her supporters didn’t know what type of backlash she would get. Wes says in the documentary, “We didn’t have the words for what we were dealing with: maternity protection.”

In the end, Nike and other sponsors changed their policies to give paid maternity leave and other maternity rights for athletes. By 2019, Allyson decided to move on from Nike and opted not to renew her contract. And even though she made it onto the Olympic team in 2020 (the 2020 Summer Olympics were postponed until 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic), she couldn’t get any sponsors.

Wes says companies told him that they rejected Allyson because she was too closely associated with Nike. But were the rejections also because of her outspoken activism about maternity rights for athletes? The documentary lets viewers make up their own minds.

But true to Allyson’s nature, she turned an obstacle into an opportunity. Instead of feeling defeated by her lack of sponsorship, she decided to start her own athletic lifestyle shoe brand: Saysh. Tiffany Beers, a former Nike designer, became her business partner in this venture. Beers is interviewed in the documentary and talks about how Saysh defied the industry norms of making female shoes smaller versions of shoes made originally for men.

Allyson gave birth to her first child—a daughter named Camryn Grace—in November 2018 The documentary also includes family video footage of the ordeal that Allyson and her family went through when Camryn was born prematurely (at 32 weeks old) because of severe preeclampsia, which includes hypertension and organ dysfunction. Allyson had to have a C-section. Camryn (whose heart stopped a few times) was put in intensive care for a few weeks until she was ready to go home.

This experience motivated Allyson to become an advocate for maternity health care—particularly for black women, who are much more likely than white women to die in childbirth or from pregnancy complications. The documentary doesn’t show too much of Allyson’s activism for maternity health care. It’s one of the areas where “She Runs the World” seems to be inadequate. (Allyson’s second child—a son named Kenneth Maurice Ferguson III, nicknamed Trey—was born in April 2024. The documentary shows Allyson telling her husband that about this pregnancy.)

Although “She Runs the World” is ultimately a feel-good documentary, it’s a little too insular to be comprehensive. A broader perspective was needed instead of just interviewing people who’ve been close to Allyson. For example, one of the ways the documentary could have been more well-rounded is by interviewing at least one or two female athletes who don’t know Allyson but whose lives have been affected by pregnancy clauses in sponsorship deals. And at least one other sports agent should’ve been interviewed. Nike’s perspective is also left out of the documentary.

As it stands, “She Runs the World” isn’t as extraordinary as Allyson herself. The documentary did not need to be a tabloid-styled movie or a “tell-all” exposé biography. But for a documentary that keeps praising Allyson for all the changes she made to the sports industry, there are surprisingly no interviews with people outside of Allyson’s inner circle to talk about those changes. It’s a competently made movie but so much more could have been told that is not in this documentary.

Review: ‘Underland’ (2025), starring Bradley Garrett, Fátima Tec Pool and Mariangela Lisanti

June 7, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Underland”

Directed by Rob Petit

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Underland” (filmed in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Canada), which is based on Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 book “Underland: A Deep Time Journey,” features a predominantly white group of people (with some Latin people) who are connected in some way to exploring underground environments.

Culture Clash: Researchers and scientists in the documentary say that climate change and pollution are the biggest threats to destroying these environments.

Culture Audience: “Underland” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching nature documentaries that have some scientific information.

“Underland” is a relatively short but immersive complement to Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 non-fiction book “Underland: A Deep Time Journey,” about underground environments. This documentary has excellent cinematography but might leave science enthusiasts wanting more information. At the very least, “Underland” is an entertaining look at environments that aren’t usually seen by the average person.

Directed by Rob Petit, “Underland” had its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The movie, which is told in six chapters, focuses on three individuals who describes themselves as underground explorers/researchers. The cameras tag along as they go on various exploration missions and adventures.

Bradley Garrett is an American “urban explorer” who likes to go to underground tunnels around the world. The documentary shows what he finds in underground tunnels in Las Vegas. Fátima Tec Pool is an archaeologist who explores caves in her native Mexico and is particularly interested in anything related to the history of the Mayans, who are her ancestors. Mariangela Lisanti is an American theoretical physicist and Princeton University physics professor. She is particularly interested in dark matter in the universe that can’t be seen with human eyes.

“Underworld,” which is narrated by actress Sandra Hüller, clocks in at just 79 minutes. The documentary is not particularly educational, but it is absorbing in how it shows different underground environments. Hannah Peel’s emotionally stirring music score is especially noteworthy and is one of the standout features of the movie, along with Ruben Woodin Dechamps’ cinematography. Although “Underland” tends to downplay the dangers of these underground explanations, the enthusiasm of Garrett, Pool and Lisanti is very engaging to watch and serve as a testament to the spirit of environmental exploration and curiosity.

Review: ‘Videoheaven,’ a comprehensive documentary about the earliest decades of video stores and the home video revolution

June 6, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Videoheaven”

Directed by Alex Ross Perry

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Videoheaven” is an archival documentary about how home videos and video stores changed pop culture from the 1970s to the 2010s.

Culture Clash: The home video revolution created a business boom for video stores from the 1980s to the 2000s, until the rise of streaming services and other digital distribution made video stores obsolete.

Culture Audience: “Videoheaven” will appeal primarily to pop culture enthusiasts who want to see a deep-dive look at how the home video business, especially video stores, affected movies and television.

Depending on your perspective, “Videoheaven” can be enjoyable or an endurance test. This three-hour documentary (about how video stores changed pop culture) is a history presentation that’s better as a three-episode series instead of a feature-length film. Maya Hawke gives delightful narration. “Videoheaven” had its world premiere at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam and its North American premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival.

Written and directed by Alex Ross Perry, “Videoheaven” will have the most appeal to people who avidly collect movies and TV shows to watch at home. These are pop culture enthusiasts who don’t want to wait until they casually stumble upon something to watch. They actively seek out their preferred movies and TV shows and want to own the movies and TV shows they like the most.

“Videoheaven” also has a huge nostalgia factor for viewers who know what it’s like to spend countless hours in a video store—or at least remember when brick-and-mortar video stores were as common as grocery stores. A cinema screen is still considered the most ideal way to watch a movie, but home videos allowed watching of movies and TV shows to be more accessible and more convenient than ever before. And for kids who aren’t old enough to see certain movies, home videos have been a gateway to that access.

“Videoheaven” is told in six chapters, with an epilogue. Except for Hawke’s narration that was written specifically for “Videoheaven,” the documentary consists entirely of archival clips. No one is interviewed for the documentary, which is a wise choice because the clips and the narration already provide a wealth of details. However, “Videoheaven” really did not need to be three hours long. The movie could have used tighter editing by making the same points with fewer clips as examples.

The first chapter of “Videoheaven” gives an overview of the invention of the videocassette recorder (VCR) and how VCRs transitioned in the 1970s from being electronic equipment used only in professional environments to being a luxury item that people could use in their homes. By the early 1980s, VCRs became smaller and more affordable for home use—much like computers evolved in the marketplace to become common household items by the 1980s.

As VCR sales began to rise, the entertainment industry jumped on this popularity by releasing movies and TV shows on videocassettes. To this day, home video sales and rentals are still dominated by movies and TV shows. The Beta tape format was eventually overtaken by VHS. DVDs get a brief mention toward the end of the documentary, which focuses mostly on the decades when videocassettes were the main format to rent and sell movies and TV shows.

The 1980s was the first decade of the video store boom, which gets considerable exploration in the documentary. The majority of “Videoheaven” is a deep-dive look at how video stores have been depicted in scripted movies and scripted TV shows from the 1980s to the 2010s. “Videoheaven” doesn’t just include the obvious mainstream choices but also gives considerable screen time to obscure independent films that prominently feature video stores. Two of these obscure movies mentioned include 1984’s “Disconnected” and 1987’s “Video Violence.” Troma Entertainment movies (known for their low-budget kitsch), which people often discovered first on home video, get frequent mentions in “Videoheaven.”

“Videoheaven” points out that in the early-to-mid 1980s, films such as “Videodrome” (1981) and “Body Double” (1984) often depicted video stores and video watching as alluring but potentially dangerous. By the late 1980s, video stores had become so common, they were usually depicted as community-oriented independent stores or high-tech and flashy corporate retailers. Blockbuster Video is the obvious template for many video stores that fit the corporate-owned description.

Perhaps the most amusing part of the documentary is in showing how pornography impacted the home video business because of porn’s popularity on home video. The “adults only” sections of video stores (which were not allowed at corporate-owned stores but thrived in independently owned stores) were often used as fodder for jokes in numerous movies and TV shows. Another frequently used joke was having people being caught buying, renting or browsing porn videos in video stores. (Clips from the 2004 movie “Jersey Girl” and TV shows “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” are used as some examples of porn embarrassments in video stores.)

Video stores weren’t always used as the source of mockery on screen. There’s a very good analysis of what the video store represents in the 2007 zombie apocalypse film “I Am Legend,” which was adapted from Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name. “Videoheaven” points out that if “I Am Legend” took place during a time when video stores were obsolete, then that video scene would not have existed in “I Am Legend.”

What “Videoheaven” conveys very well through its meticulous assembling of clips and thoughtful narration is the significance that video stores (in their heyday) were many things to many people. Video stores could be emporiums of overwhelming entertainment choices, community gathering places, pickup joints, informal schools of pop culture, or places where kids could get access to movies they were too young to see in theaters—just to name some of the ways that people could perceive or use video stores.

And sometimes in action flicks or horror films, video stores were places for some brutal fights and showdowns. “Videoheaven” names many examples, including 1987’s “The Lost Boys,” 1988’s “Remote Control,” 1989’s “The Dead Next Door,” 1989’s “The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie,” and 1998’s “The Big Hit.” And in 1993’s “The Last Action Hero,” Arnold Schwarzenegger (as the action movie star Jack Slater) poked fun at himself when Jack and his kid sidekick Danny Madigan (played by Austin O’Brien) go into a Blockbuster-type video store and see a display of Sylvester Stallone as the star of “Terminator 3: Judgment Day,” which in real life had Schwarzenegger as the star.

The video store clerk also became a common character in movies and TV and was often stereotyped as a (1) a nerdy cinephile, who could very judgmental about customers’ choices or (2) a rude, lazy or unhelpful employee. “Videoheaven” mentions Dawson Leery of the 1998-2003 TV drama series “Dawson’s Creek” as one of the few on-screen depictions of a video store clerk as being conisistently polite and not neurotic.

Hawke gives the narration a lively and engaging tone that is more like a conversation than an academic lecture—even though much of the script is written as pop culture history lessons, with some opinions sprinkled in here and there. Hawke portrayed video store clerk Robin Buckley in the Netflix horror series “Stranger Things” (which takes place in the 1980s), so it’s inevitable that “Videoheaven” has a few “Stranger Things” clips of Robin Buckley and her video store co-worker Steve Harrington (played by Joe Keery) on the job at Family Video, the fictional video store in “Stranger Things.”

“Videoheaven” references several movies where owners or employees of video stores are the protagonists, including 1994’s “Clerks,” 2007’s “Watching the Detectives,” 2008’s “Be Kind Rewind” and 2008’s “Good Dick.” It’s noted that by the time “Be Kind Rewind” and “Good Dick” were released, video stores were a dying business. In the case of “Be Kind Rewind,” the screenplay was written long before the decline of video stores.

Before he became a filmmaker, Perry was a video store clerk at Kim’s Video, a retail chain of video stores in New York City. (The documentary “Kim’s Video,” released in 2024, captures a similar nostalgic sentiment toward the bygone era of brick-and-mortar video stores. Perry is one of the people interviewed in “Kim’s Video.”) There was obviously a lot of passion and care that went into the research, clip compilations and narration script for “Videoheaven.” The movie’s three-hour run time will be too exhausting for some viewers. But for viewers who want to soak up a lot of on-screen history about video stores, “Videoheaven” is an immersive ride worth taking.

Cinema Conservancy will release “Videoheaven” in New York City on July 2, 2025, and in Los Angeles on August 6, 2025, with an expansion to other cities on various other dates.

Review: ‘Men of War’ (2025), starring Jordan Goudreau, Sebastiana Barráez, Cliver Alcalá Cordones, J.J. Rendón, Mark Denman, Javier Nieto Quintero and Paul Goudreau

May 30, 2025

by Carla Hay

Jordan Goudreau in “Men of War” (Photo courtesy of Neon)

“Men of War” (2025)

Directed by Billy Corben and Jen Gatien

Some language in Spanish with subtitles

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Men of War” features a white and Latin group of people discussing Operation Gideon, failed attempt to overthrow Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, involving 60 troops and some former U.S. Army Special Forces members, in May 2020.

Culture Clash: Jordan Goudreau, a former Green Beret/U.S. Army Special Forces member, who led Operation Gideon, says he was under contract by Venezuelan politician Juan Guaidó to do this mission, and had the backing of the U.S. government, but other people dispute Goudreau’s claims.

Culture Audience: “Men of War” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries about war, international politics and the U.S. military.

“Men of War” is a fascinating documentary about a botched attempt to overthrow Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The subject matter covers international politics, but this story is also about the psychological effects of being addicted to war combat. “Men of War” presents various sides of Operation Gideon, the failed and controversial 2020 mission to change Venezuela’s leadership. There’s a lot of blame being passed around about what went wrong. The documentary lets viewers make up their own minds.

Directed and produced by Billy Corben and Jen Gatien, “Men of War” had its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Corben, a former child actor, is a documentarian whose specialty is covering scandals, with a filmography that includes the “Cocaine Cowboys” movies, 2019’s “Screwball” (about the performance-enhancing drugs scandal in Major League Baseball) and 2022’s “God Forbid: The Sex Scandal that Brought Down a Dynasty,” about the ménage à trois between former Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife Becki Falwell, and their former employee Giancarlo Granda. Men of War” is Gatien’s first feature-length movie as a director.

The story is complicated, but the “Men of War” filmmakers keep things simple by not overstuffing the documentary with too many people being interviewed. It’s a well-edited documentary that keeps viewers interested because of the compelling way the story is told as a saga of personal and political betrayals. The catalyst for his controversy is the years-long political turmoil over the presidency of Venezuela. Maduro (who was perceived as an unpopular elitist with dictator tendencies) and Maduro’s populist political rival Juan Guaidó, who was Venezuela’s interim president from January 2019 to January 2023. Donald Trump’s first U.S. presidential administration (2017 to 2021) supported Guaidó in this power struggle.

The person driving most of the documentary’s narrative is Jordan Goudreau, a former Green Beret/U.S. Army Special Forces member, who led Operation Gideon. Goudreau says he was initially backed by the U.S. government for this mission, but then certain things went wrong, and he decided to forge through with the mission on his own. Goudreau also claims he had a binding contract with Guaidó to do this mission. Other people interviewed in the documentary either corroborate or dispute Goudreau’s side of the story.

The movie begins by showing various images of Goudreau (who’s muscular and often shirtless) dong physical activities, such a jogging and riding his motorcycle. It’s all to project an image of being macho and still primed for combat. But beneath the image of physical prowess, as Goudreau tells more of his story, a portrait emerges of a man who feels lost without being in war combat and who feels betrayed by the U.S. government that he pledged to serve.

Goudreau gives some personal background information to explain how he ended up where he is and why Operation Gideon is his biggest claim to fame and his biggest career mistake. Born in Canada on July 30, 1976, Goudreau was raised by in a middle-class family in the Ontario city of Mississauga. He studied computer science at the University of Calgary from 1994 to 1998, but he dropped out to join the Canadian Armed Forces.

Other members of Goudreau’s family were also in the military, such as his grandfather and great-grandfather. Goudreau says he’s always had an intense drive to be “the best,” even when he was in military training. In the documentary, Goudreau says he moved to the United States in 2001 to join the U.S. Army, mainly because he knew he’d have a better chance of being deployed, compared to being in the Canadian Armed Forces.

When 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, Goudreau describes feeling excited about going off to war in the Middle East. He describes the surge of enrollment in the U.S. military at the time of being a lot like the 1997 movie “Starship Troopers,” a sci-fi story about military soldiers fighting an invasion from alien creatures. By joining the U.S. Army Special Forces and becoming a Green Beret, Goudreau had to renounce his Canadian citizenship and become a U.S. citizen, which he says eagerly did so at the time.

Goudreau comments about how he feels about being in war combat: “The more you do it, the more you get comfortable with it. It’s like a drug.” He eventually rose through the ranks in the U.S. Amy Special Forces, and peaked as a sergeant first class. However, Goudreau was honorably discharged from the military in 2016, after sustaining injuries to his head and back in a 2014 parachuting accident. Goudreau says he was also discharged because he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the documentary, Goudreau repeatedly talks about how no longer having a purpose in the military was more stressful and depressing for him than being in war combat. Goudreau says that missed the adrenaline rush of being in war combat. And so, he eventually started a private security company called Silvercorp USA, with the aim to be hired out for covert military operations.

It was through Silvercorp that Goudreau became acquainted with Keith Schiller, a former bodyguard of Donald Trump. Schiller co-founded the security companies KS Global Group and Global Governments and retained close ties to Trump during Trump’s U.S. presidency. Goudreau says that it was through Schiller that he first heard about the U.S. government’s intention to overthrow Maduro and support Guaidó.

Goudreau says that in June 2019, he was hired by Global Governments to go to Colombia to do a feasibility study that could serve as a template to overthrow Maduro. However, Goudreau says that this deal with Global Governments fell through and was never made official. He says he personally lost $100,000 for the work he did in Colombia and other places.

This bad experience did not deter Goudreau from wanting to get involved in any military-styled mission to overthrow Maduro, since he believes Maduro’s downfall is what the U.S. government wanted. Goudreau says he was recruited for a group called Opposition Force to “liberate Venezuela.” He claims that he signed a contract in October 2019 with Guaidó, with pro-Guaidó politician Juan José “J.J.” Rendón acting as a strategic advisor. (The documentary shows the contract that Goudreau says is legitimate.)

According to Goudreau, under the terms of the contract, he was to received $212, 900,000 for 245 days of work. He received a promissory note of $1.5 million, with $50,000 going toward his retainer. Cliver Alcalá Cordones (also known as Cliver Alcalá), a former major general of Venezuela was on the Opposition Force team to head the military operations.

Goudreau says he also personally recruited two men who were his buddies in the U.S. Army Special Forces: Airan Berry and Luke Denman. Goudreau describes Berry and Denman as extremely loyal and not motivated by money but by a patriotic sense of duty. Goudreau say this contract was vetted by Schiller’s attorney Travis Lucas, which is a something that Lucas denies. Lucas is not interviewed in the documentary but issued the denial to the filmmakers of “Men of War.”

There are many twists and turns to the story which won’t be revealed here. But it’s enough to say that the Opposition Force was such a disaster, Goudreau decided to act on his own (with Berry and Denman as his cohorts) for a hastily planned mission called Operation Gideon. Things went from bad to worse.

Other people interviewed in the documentary are Rendon, Alcala, Venezuelan journalist Sebastiana Barráez, Mark Denman (Luke’s brother), Paul Goudreau (Jordan’s father) and Javier Nieto Quintero, a Venezuelan Army captain. Denman is Jordan Goudreau’s most vocal critic in the documentary and says one of the few things he agrees about with Jordan Goudreau is Jordan Goudreau’s description that Luke Denman and Berry were not motivated by money.

The documentary has epilogues describing what happened to the major players, updated through the movie’s May 2025 theatrical release. “Men of War” isn’t about showing a lot of combat footage. Instead, it’s a riveting display of wars that happen off the battlefield that include power struggles for loyalty, patriotism and self-identity.

Neon released “Men of War” in select U.S. cinemas on May 30, 2025.

Review: ‘Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,’ starring Sherri Papini, Richard Graeff, Loretta Graeff, Suzanne Papini, Denise Farmer, Stephen Diggs and Veronica Alegria

May 25, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie”

Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer

Culture Representation: The four-episode documentary series “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few people of color) discussing the case of Sherri Papini, who claimed to be kidnapped from her home city of Redding, California, for 22 days in November 2016, and was convicted in 2022 of faking the kidnapping.

Culture Clash: Sherri Papini, who is interviewed extensively in the documentary, has changed her story again and says that she was kidnapped and abused by her ex-boyfriend James Reyes during her 2016 disappearance.

Culture Audience: “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about fraud and people who went missing, but there is something distasteful about giving a convicted fraudster a platform to tell more questionable stories.

Whether or not you believe Sherri Papini—the California woman who’s told contradictory stories about her 22-day disappearance that happened in 2016—there’s no doubt that “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” can be perceived as an attempt to repair her tarnished reputation and to rewrite a closed case. This four-episode docuseries is more exploitative than investigative. It’s so tacky to have convicted fraudster Sherri Papini recreate her controversial disappearance for the cameras. The documentary also fails to ask some questions that need answers.

Directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer, “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” tries to give the impression that it has journalistic integrity by interviewing a variety of people: those who support Sherri Papini, those who don’t support her, and those who want to give the appearance of being neutral. This documentary also has the first extensive interviews that Papini has given since she was released from prison in 2023. The year 2023 was also the year that the divorce of Sherri Papini and her ex-husband Keith Papini became final. In addition to having original footage that was filmed specifically for the documentary, “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” has archival footage (such as TV news reports and audio/video police interviews), much of which has been seen in other documentaries and news reports about the Sherri Papini case.

Any attempt that “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” might have made to have journalistic integrity is ruined when it’s revealed that Rittenmeyer and the other people involved in making this documentary came up with idea for Sherri to recreate on camera the moment that Sherri says she was kidnapped, despite Sherri’s therapist warning that this recreation was not a good idea. Sherri says in the documentary that she doesn’t remember what happened when she was in the vehicle that took her to the house where she stayed during the disappearance. The recreation was supposedly intended to help Sherri remember what happened.

However, Sherri can only recreate jogging on the road where she was last seen before she disappeared. When the recreated “kidnapping” car drives up, she starts crying on camera and says she can’t go through with getting near the car. At one point, she can’t even look at the car. While Sherri shows obvious signs of emotional distress (whether it’s real or not), Rittenmeyer can be heard off camera callously and repeatedly telling Sherri to look at the camera. This tasteless stunt is not responsible documentary filmmaking. It’s the type of bottom-of-the-barrel trashy fakery that many reality shows do in pathetic attempts to get ratings.

Let’s be honest here: What was supposed to happen for this on-camera recreation when that vehicle drove up on the road and stopped neared Sherri? The documentarians couldn’t have someone jump out of the car and “kidnap” Sherri, because that would be a contradiction to what law enforcement and Sherri’s on-the-record criminal conviction say really happened. On the flip side, Sherri wasn’t going to recreate willingly going into the car because she repeatedly says in the documentary that she can’t remember how she got into the car that took her away. Simply put: This recreation “experiment” was an exploitative and dismal failure.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” also has Sherri do a lie detector test, which gets mixed results for her. The lie detector test is a less-exploitative part of the documentary, but it still comes across as something you’d see on a low-level reality show. Sherri makes shifty excuses when it’s revealed which parts of the lie detector test found her to be deceptive.

First, some background information on the case: In 2022, Sherri Papini was arrested for faking her 2016 kidnapping. Investigators say that Sherri was the master planner for this phony kidnapping, and she lied about it to federal investigators, which is a felony. In 2022, she confessed to law enforcement that she planned the fake kidnapping, and she was the one who decided when she wanted to go home. She pled guilty to this hoax and was convicted of crimes related to this hoax. Her ex-husband Keith Papini gave his side of the story in the 2024 Hulu docuseries “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini.”

Sherri (who was born on June 11, 1982) and Keith (who was born on March 25, 1982) got married in 2009. Their son Tyler was born in 2012. Their daughter Violet was born in 2014. The family seemed to have an idyllic middle-class life in Redding, California. Keith was born and raised in Redding, which is in Shasta County. Sherri was also born and raised in Shasta County. Several people who knew homemaker Sherri described her as a “supermom.”

On November 2, 2016, Sherri disappeared from Redding. On that day, she had planned to go jogging while her two kids were at a daycare center, and her then-husband Keith was at work. When Keith arrived home, he couldn’t find Sherri, but he used the Find My Phone app to find her cell phone, which was abandoned in an area about a mile from where the couple lived. Keith immediately reported Sherri’s disappearance to authorities. His 911 call is included in the documentary.

Sherri’s disappearance made international news. Although investigators received many tips, none of them led to finding Sherri. When Sherri was missing, some people in the general public speculated that Keith could’ve been involved in abducting, even though Keith had an alibi (he was at work), and investigators ruled him out as a possible suspect.

On November 24, 2016 (which was Thanksgiving Day), Sherri was found partially bound by chains, outdoors in Yolo County, California, about 150 miles south of Redding. She claimed that two Spanish-speaking Latina strangers kidnapped her and held her captive for the past 22 days, but the two so-called kidnapper women decided to let her go. Sherri had several bruises and burns on her body, she was branded with letters on her right shoulder, and she was emaciated.

Sherri could not describe the vehicle that was used to transport her because she claimed that she could not remember anything about the vehicle. She described the Latina kidnappers as one who was young and one who was middle-aged. Sherri said she couldn’t see their entire faces because she claimed that she only saw the two women wearing bandanas covering the lower halves of their faces, which is also the description that she gave to a police sketch artist.

Police could not find the women whom Sherri described as her kidnappers. The FBI was also involved in the investigation. Four years later, in 2020, there was a major break in the case: DNA that was found in Sherri’s underwear that she wore during her so-called kidnapping was traced back to James Reyes, her ex-fiancé who lived in Costa Mesa, California, which is about 585 miles south of Redding.

When interrogated by investigators, Reyes at first denied anything do with Sherri’s disappearance. But then, he confessed that Sherri had asked him to pick her up in his car at a designated meeting place and hide her in his house for the period of time that Sherri went missing. Reyes said that he and Sherri used pre-paid “burner” phones to secretly communicate with each other before the disappearance, which is why Keith didn’t know that Sherri had been contacting Reyes.

Sherri and Reyes have reportedly said in separate law enforcement interviews that their relationship when Sherri and Keith were married was an emotional affair, not a sexual affair. Sherri has also denied speculation and gossip that she had sexual affairs with other men when she was married to Keith. She will only admit that during her marriage to Keith, she would flirt and get emotionally involved with other men, mostly through online communication.

According to Reyes, he agreed to the plan to help Sherri go into hiding because Sherri told him that Keith was abusing her, and she wanted to get away from Keith for a while. Reyes said that Sherri asked him to use a brand on her and cause many of the injuries that were found on her body. Reyes also claimed that some of Sherri’s injuries were deliberately self-inflicted, which is an allegation that Sherri continues to deny. Reyes was not charged with any crimes in this case and so far has not given any media interviews. There has been no evidence that Keith physically abused Sherri. Keith has also not been charged with any crimes in this case.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” shows footage of an unidentified private investigator (hired by the documentarians) ambushing Reyes in November 2024, at a house in Nogales, Arizona, where Reyes says he’s helping take care of his grandfather. Reyes is heard but not seen on camera. Reyes politely declines to answer any questions about Sherri and says repeatedly that he’s going to have to contact his lawyer in California.

In 2022, Sherri was arrested for lying to federal agents and committing mail fraud because she collected Social Security disability benefits as a result of reporting that she was an injured kidnapping victim. The case never went to trial because in 2022, Sherri eventually entered a plea deal. She pled guilty to one count of making false statements and one count of mail fraud. As part of the deal, she confessed to masterminding the kidnapping hoax.

Keith filed for divorce after Sherri’s guilty plea. He got full custody of their two children. Sherri was sentenced to 18 months in prison and served 10 months before getting an early release in August 2023. She was also ordered to pay more than $300,000 in restitution for the costs of the investigation and for the money that she got from disability benefits and the therapy she got that was funded by the California Victim Compensation Board.

All of this has been widely reported already. But now, Sherri wants to change the story about her 2016 disappearance again. In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” she claims that Reyes really did kidnap and physically abuse her during the period of time in 2016 when she disappeared. She now vehemently denies that any of it was her idea.

Sherri also says that she was pressured by William “Bill” Portanova, her defense attorney at the time, to admit that she came up with the idea for the hoax as part of the plea deal. According to Sherri, Portanova said that if she didn’t admit to masterminding the hoax in the plea deal, then she would be facing additional charges. Portanova is interviewed in the documentary, and he denies telling Sherri to lie about masterminding the hoax. He also says that Sherri would still be facing charges of lying to federal agents, regardless if her physical injuries were self-inflicted or inflicted by Reyes.

In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” Sherri’s story is that she arranged to meet with Reyes and misled him to believe she wanted to run away with him, but he took things too far and kidnapped her. Sherri says she lied about two Latina women kidnapping her because she was scared of Reyes and what he might do to her if she told authorities that he kidnapped her. She also repeats her previous accusations that Keith was emotionally abusive to her during their marriage. The documentary has disclaimers that Reyes and Keith have denied all of Sherri’s accusations.

The way Sherri acts in this documentary ranges from emotionally guarded to emotionally messy. She sometimes acts like a vulnerable victim and other times acts like an angry person who’s out for revenge. If she did this documentary to clean up her image, this attempt is a failure because she’s too contradictory in presenting who she really is.

Whenever director Rittenmeyer (who is not seen on camera but can be heard asking questions) confronts Sherri about Sherri’s proven lies, Sherri gets very defensive and snaps in response by saying that everyone is guilty of lying. Sherri’s lack of self-awareness is on full display. Yes, everyone is guilty of telling lies. But Sherri wants to ignore the fact that most people don’t fake their own kidnapping and most people don’t commit the felony crimes that landed Sherri in prison.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” has four episodes called “chapters” but they all essentially repeat the same pattern: Facts of the case are presented. Sherri disputes almost all the facts and tells another version of the story. People who are interviewed offer their own opinions.

Chapter 1 is titled “Exodus” and does a summary of the case, with Sherri’s added comments about why her story has changed. Chapter 2 is titled “I Am a Liar” and has some psychoanalysis of what’s going on with Sherri. Chapter 3 is titled “Multiple Truths” and shows the documentary’s aborted recreation of Sherri’s November 2016 disappearance. Chapter 4 is titled “It’s Complicated” and features the lie detector test.

In the beginning of the documentary, Sherri is asked why she wanted to be in this documentary. She giggles nervously before she comments solemnly: “The story that the world thinks they know is that I’m a master manipulator who’s fooled everyone.”

Sherri then waves her hand like she’s waving a wand. “That’s my magic wand,” she giggles again. “Sorry. I’m going to do ridiculous things because some of this is ridiculous.” (She’s right about that.) Sherri continues, “The Sherri Papini that’s out there is not me. It’s just this version of me that has been created to fit the narrative for the media’s version of what happened.”

Denise Farmer, who was the FBI’s lead investigator of the Sherri Papini case in 2016, is the only person interviewed in this documentary who was also interviewed in “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini.” Farmer, who is now retired from the FBI, is more candid in “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” when it comes to voicing her thoughts on how she was suspicious of the kidnapping claims from the beginning.

According to Farmer, one of the “red flags” was that Sherri’s abandoned phone had its headphone wires wrapped in a way that looked staged, not like someone had dropped it during a kidnapping. Farmer says that she thought Keith was very image-conscious and he wasn’t a complete ally to law enforcement. She comments that Keith often got in the way of the investigation, but she doesn’t go into specifics.

Peter French, another retired FBI agent, is also interviewed in the documentary, but he says he never worked on the Sherri Papini case and can only speak about FBI protocol. Also interviewed is assistant U.S. attorney Veronica Alegria, who was the lead prosecutor on the Sherri Papini case. Alegria doesn’t have anything new to add that isn’t already on public record.

Keith’s sister Suzanne Papini is another person in the documentary who echoes the description of Keith being image-conscious. Suzanne says that when Keith and Sherri were married, he was caught up in the idea of having a perfect wife, which was an unattainable standard. After Sherri was released on bail in 2022, Sherri and Suzanne lived together. Suzanne is one of Sherri’s supporters and says she has a sibling-like relationship with Sherri that Suzanne doesn’t have with Keith. However, the documentary doesn’t explain why Keith and Suzanne are apparently estranged.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” also has interviews with Sherri’s parents Richard Graeff and Loretta Graeff, who have reconciled with Sherri after a period of estrangement. For a while, Sherri lived with her parents after she got out of prison in 2023. Loretta and Suzanne have different opinions of Sherri’s 22-day disappearance. Loretta says emphatically, “It wasn’t a kidnapping.” Suzanne says she believes Sherri’s latest version of the story that it was a date that turned into a kidnapping.

What does it say about Sherri that her own mother doesn’t believe Sherri’s kidnapping story? Sherri is never asked about her mother’s opinion in the documentary. That’s not the only thing the documentary fails to ask.

“Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” irresponsibly doesn’t ask Sherri’s parents about allegations that the parents raised Sherri and her sister Sheila Koester in an abusive household. Sherri’s childhood friend Jennifer Harrison and Koester both made these allegations in “Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini,” a documentary that is mentioned several times in “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie.” Harrison said she personally witnessed Sherri’s mother physically assault Sherri when Sherri was a child.

In “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie,” the only abuse from her childhood that Sherri and her parents mention (but don’t go into too many details about) is Sherri’s allegation that she was sexually abused by someone who was not either of her parents. Sherri and her parents do not identify who this alleged abuser is but Sherri’s father says that they know the abuse happened because the abuser was caught in the act. Sherri’s parents say that this sexual abuse was not talked about in the family because they found it difficult to discuss.

Sherri becomes infuriated when she is asked about her ex-husband Keith’s allegations in “Perfect Wife” that Sherri made their kids wear rags of soaked with alcohol and placed in Ziploc bags around the kids’ necks. Sherri’s version of the story is that the kids wore “cotton balls” soaked with “essential oils.” She also says that Child Protective Services investigated these allegations in 2022, and they found no evidence of abuse, which is why Sherri says that Keith should’ve never brought up these accusations again in the “Perfect Wife” documentary. There’s also a self-made video (apparently filmed shortly after Sherri watched the “Perfect Wife” documentary) of an angry Sherri saying that she just mailed a cease-and-desist letter to Keith to stop him from further making this accusation.

Sherri’s mental health is discussed mostly by her therapist Dr. Stephen “Steve” Diggs, a licensed psychologist. Diggs and Sherri say that she has successfully undergone eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy as treatment for her mental health issues. Diggs says that Sherri is a survivor of major trauma. He has diagnosed Sherri with having a self-defeating personality disorder. He also says that her personality is histrionic, not narcissistic.

Diggs comments on Sherri: “I absolutely believe she was abducted. She is now—most of the time—quite honest. She has now stopped telling big lies.” Diggs says he believes Sherri’s most recent version of her disappearance story that says Keith was abusive to her, and she asked Reyes for help in getting away from Keith, but Reyes ended up kidnapping her. Sherri says she believes Reyes let her go because she convinced him that she wouldn’t tell people that he was her kidnapper.

Someone else in the documentary who speaks up in support of Sherri is Mo De La Mora, who spent time in prison with Sherri and describes herself as Sherri’s friend. De La Mora (who identifies as Mexican American) says that Sherri got a lot of hostility from other prisoners—especially Latina prisoners—because of the lie Sherri told about two Latina women kidnapping Sherri. De La Mora comments with awe that Sherri was able to win over many of the prisoners, including herself, after Sherri explained her side of the story.

Van Kinney and Chase O. Kinney—a father-and-daughter attorney team who represented Sherri in her divorce from Keith—also express their support for Sherri in the documentary. Chase takes a moment to vape on camera before she does her documentary interview. Whatever was in her vape pen is not mentioned, but Chase looks very stimulated in her interview. Chase says she believes Sherri’s kidnapping story because Chase says Chase was kidnapped and raped by five male strangers in 2006 when she was partying on a boat.

Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist who says in the documentary that she has never met Sherri, gives the most pointed comments about the ethics of this documentary and Sherri’s changing stories: “I’ve heard so many different versions of this story, I struggle with what to believe.” In another part of the documentary, Durvasula adds, “Can a person fake it? Sure, they can. A person can fake anything. But that’s not where a psychologist is going to start this journey with someone. Our first duty is to believe. It’s not to doubt. We are not detectives. We are mental health practitioners. We are healers. And in a trauma-informed model, we believe.”

Durvasula speaks directly to Rittenmeyer on the approach that this documentary is taking to showcase someone with mental health issues and who has admitted to telling numerous lies that are crimes: “It’s such a tough line for you to skirt between journalism and compassion, being trauma-informed and, frankly, ego in not wanting to look stupid—because that’s really what this comes down to. And I can say this to you as a psychologist: You can’t win.”

Sherri gives a glimpse of her living situation by saying she’s staying at the house of “a friend,” who let her live at the house because it had been unoccupied. She shows her home office where she says she likes to make arts and crafts. Sherri also says she used to do branding of letters in her arts and crafts, but now she no longer uses a branding tool because it reminds her of the branding that Reyes did to her. She still has the branding scar on her shoulder.

In the documentary, Sherri makes a quick apology for the harm she caused with her lies, but most of her energy in the documentary is spent trying to convince whoever’s watching that she’s telling the truth this time, and she wants to prove that she is misunderstood. She expresses sadness about having limited supervised visits with her children (she can also talk to them on the phone once a week), but she mostly talks about her kids in the context of how it hurts her that she can’t see her kids as often as she wants, and not how her kids must be hurting from the harm that she caused. The documentary has a video clip of one of these phone conversations—the kids’ voices are not heard, to respect their privacy—and when Sherri hangs up after the conversation ends, she lets out an anguished scream.

Sherri becomes furious when she rants about Keith allowing the children to be filmed in the “Perfect Wife” documentary. However, she lacks the decency and remorse to admit that whatever she did to end up in prison caused much more damage to her children than the children being shown in a documentary for a few minutes. And let’s not forget that documentaries about Sherri Papini aren’t about what a great parent she thinks she is. These documentaries are about the crimes she committed that got her sent to prison and brought shame that her children have to live with for the rest of their lives.

Brett Bartlett is the polygraph examiner who administers the polygraph test on Sherri. He asked her specific questions about her disappearance and how much of it she planned. This review won’t detail all the results of the polygraph test except to say that Sherri failed the test questions where she denied knowing in advance that she was going to meet Reyes on November 2, 2016. Barlett shares his opinion on Sherri by saying she can be both a liar and a victim.

A very telling part of the documentary happens when Rittenmeyer confronts Sherri about Sherri’s stating over the years that she used what Reyes’ mother looks like to describe one of the fabricated Latina “kidnappers.” When Rittenmeyer says that Reyes’ mother is actually of Irish (white) heritage, Sherri’s eyes turn into a cold stare, and Sherri’s attitude becomes rude and abrupt. Sherri dismissively says that she only met Reyes’ mother once or twice, and she doesn’t “give a fuck” what his mother’s real ethnicity is. It’s a moment when Sherri’s “poor innocent me” mask falls off, and she turns into an unrepentant, foul-mouthed fraudster caught in another lie.

At the end of the documentary, Sherri is playing the vulnerable victim again and asks Rittenmeyer in a worried tone: “Do you think this film will do more harm than good for me?” If Rittenmeyer gave an answer, it’s not shown in the documentary, which lets the question remain unanswered. However, based on the exploitative nature of “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” and Sherri continuing to contradict herself on many embarrassing levels, there are no real winners here.

Investigation Discovery will premiere “Sherri Papini: Caught in the Lie” on May 26, 2025.