TFI Grantee Selected to 25 New Faces of Indie Film

Filmmaker Magazine's annual 25 New Faces of Independent Film were unveiled yesterday and the directors of 2012 TFI Documentary Fund grantee Our Nixon were among those selected.

Penny Lane and Brian Frye dive into the forgotten Super 8 home movies of Richard Nixon for their film, which gives a new glimpse into his presidency. The film is currently in post-production.

According to Vadim Rizov, who wrote their profile, some 500 hours of footage had been confiscated by the FBI during the Watergate scandal, and in 2010 the husband and wife team bought the first batch of video transfers. The result, Rizov adds, "is Our Nixon, an archly evocative compilation documentary solely composed of pre-existing video and audio sources. Silent footage from three of Nixon’s core staff — H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin — is supplanted with careful audio snippets of the events and ironic musical counterpoints from the likes of The Carpenters (“the exemplar of square America,” Lane notes). The title underscores the pathos; after leaving the White House, Nixon would never speak to his fatally loyal aides again."

Congrats to Lane and Frye. Expect to see Our Nixon on the fest circuit by this winter.