Who: Alexandra Pelosi, Sheila Nevins
What: Live discussion (preregister to watch film in advance)
Where: The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center online
When: Tuesday, January 19, free with RSVP, 6:00
Why: Documentary filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi turns her camera lens on the country in her latest work, American Selfie: One Nation Shoots Itself. Over the course of one year, Pelosi journeyed across the United States, filming citizens, immigrants, and tourists as they gathered for various causes (abortion, gun rights, BLM, masks) and took pictures with their phones of themselves and others, bitterly fighting over hot-button issues or waiting online for the latest iPhone, cheering people like heroes as they emerged from the store with the treasured item under their arm. “I think phones are much more dangerous than guns,” Pelosi, the daughter of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, told the Guardian last October.
Pelosi, who has previously made such nonfiction films as Journeys with George, Right America: Feeling Wronged – Some Voices from the Campaign Trail, Fall to Grace, and Goodbye, Congress, clearly chooses her targets, but even so she reveals an America that we are all aware of but don’t always get to see so directly. Unsurprisingly, the film has gotten mostly good reviews from critics, but its online rating is low, perhaps because Americans on all sides of the political spectrum are not so fond of what they really look like these days. On January 19 at 6:00, Pelosi will speak with MTV Studios documentary films head Sheila Nevins in the program “American Selfie: One Nation Divisible through the Lens of Alexandra Pelosi.” The film ends prior to the 2020 election, so it should be fascinating to see what Pelosi has to say about what has happened since. Free registration is required and comes with access to the film.