Daniel J. Jones worked tirelessly in a nondescript Washington, D.C., room for the better part of a decade, trying to connect the dots between the CIA’s detention and torture of terrorist suspects at black sites and the Bush White House. The Senate staffer, whose work was passionately backed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), not only had to contend with members of the Senate who would rather his torture report not see light of day, but

The Arab Spring events of 2011 got filmmaker Mati Diop thinking: What if that search for a better life were told from the viewpoint of a teenage girl in Senegal who stayed behind as her sweetheart crossed the seas in search of new opportunity?

“We could say the film is following the ‘spring’ of a young woman in terms of the season from… dark to light, and it’s like an openness blooming,” said Diop.

When making a documentary out in nature, sometimes the story will find the filmmakers along the way. Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble spent four years solidly with a small team on the African savanna following an elephant pack led by a female named Athena for their new documentary, “The Elephant Queen,” but they always wanted to do it their own way, and not have financiers dictating the direction of their story.

The scandal surrounding the revelations contained in the Panama Papers is labyrinthine. So complex, in fact, that Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Jake Bernstein spent years unearthing the intricacies of the enmeshment of the financial system and Russian interests for his book, “Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite,” which came out in 2017.

Marie Adler’s story about an intruder raping her in the middle of the night seemed incredible. So impossible, in fact, that she later retracted her story, earning her the enmity of police, her friends and the entire community.

The thing was, Marie wasn’t lying. The teen had, in fact, been violated in her own home by a man who bound her and took photos of her body amidst hours

Filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar have watched as the industrial Midwest has cratered around them. High-paying factory jobs once stretched from western Pennsylvania to Michigan, providing a comfortable working-class living enabling workers to buy a home, two cars and send their children off to college.

All of that changed as plants closed and jobs outsourced

Given his background in journalism, it’s little wonder that director Edward Zwick turned to an investigative reporter’s work as the basis for his latest film, “Trial by Fire.” The film is based on an article of the same name by David Grann published in the New Yorker in 2009 about a Texas man who was almost certainly wrongfully executed for the murder of his three children; DNA evidence exonerated him too late. Zwick and Grann had

What would it be like if you existed six minutes in the future, ahead of everyone? Things around you look familiar, being young is still cool and institutional repression hasn’t caught on with your latest act of rebellion. This is the world of Karim Huu Do, director.Some of the most esthetically-intense, visually-rousing short films come from advertising work. And some of the most esthetically-intense, visually-rousing short films

Filmmaker Jonathan Levine stood in front of a packed theater in Washington, D.C., Wednesday evening to introduce a screening of his new film, “Long Shot,” a political comedy. He opined that it was somewhat of a challenge, in such surreal times as now, to make a comedy that satirizes politics. Nonetheless, he felt the time was right for such a rib-tickler like his new film.“We started making this eighteen months ago

Actor Michael Ealy was in the midst of renovating his own home when a script came his way about a man who sells his house to a young couple, but then, at first mysteriously but later ominously, refuses to leave them be after turning over the keys.“I understand this whole idea of the American dream and buying your first house, starting your family,” Ealy said, comparing real life with his new film “The Intruder.”