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Movies Our Nixon, Nuts!, The Voyagers Nominations Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary Similar Dwight Chapin, James Belfer, John Ehrlichman, H R Haldeman, Jeff Pillars Profiles | ||
Penny Lane (born March 6, 1978) is an American independent filmmaker. She is best known for Our Nixon (2013), which she directed and co-produced with Brian Frye. Filmmaker Magazine named Lane one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2012 for the films, Our Nixon and NUTS! (2016).
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Lane is an assistant professor of Art and Art History at Colgate University.
Life and career
Penny Lane was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. She received a BA in American Culture and Media Studies at Vassar College in 2001 and an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2005. She has taught film, video and new media art at Bard College, Hampshire College and Williams College. She started teaching at Colgate University in 2013.
Lane became interested in filmmaking when she was working at Children’s Media Project, a nonprofit youth media center in Poughkeepsie, NY. She started to direct and produce nonfiction films in 2002. Connect is her first screened documentary. Since then, she successively made shorts, including The Abortion Diaries, and The Voyagers.
Lane met Brian Frye in 2008, and the two began to collaborate on Our Nixon, her first feature-length documentary. The all-archival documentary premiered at 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2013, winning numerous awards and nominations at Seattle International Film Festival and Ann Arbor Film Festival.
In 2016, the director’s second feature-length film NUTS! world premiered at Sundance Film Festival, and won the Special Jury Award for Editing.
Our Nixon
Brian Frye introduced Lane to the Super 8 home movies confiscated by FBI during the Watergate investigation to her. The archival footage inspiring Lane and Frye became the basis of the 2013 released nonfiction film Our Nixon.
The documentary depicts an unique portrait of Richard Nixon and his closest aides, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman, and special assistant Dwight Chapin. The film contains footage from 26 hours of Super 8 home movies filmed by Haldeman, Enrlichman, and Chapin, as well as relevant news broadcasts and interviews. Among numerous films about the Nixon and Watergate era, Our Nixon stands out for its distinct, intimate perspective and the stylized all archival editing choice.
Our Nixon had its world premiere at the 42nd International Film Festival in Rotterdam and its North American premiere at 2013 South by Southwest. The film screened at multiple film festivals, including Ann Arbor Film Festival, where it won the Ken Burns Award for “Best of the Festival,” and Seattle International Film Festival, where it won the Best Documentary Award. Our Nixon was selected as the Closing Night Film at 42nd New Directors/New Films. On August 1, 2013, CNN broadcast the film, and Cinedigm handled the film’s theatrical release.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that the "highly personal view of the Nixon years is, for obvious reasons, a sad and wrenching one - a film that is nonetheless filled with spirit, humor and a bountiful sense of irony.” Amy Entelis, senior vice president for development for CNN worldwide, praised the film for its “original material” and “unconventional” story telling.
NUTS!
After encountering Charlatan, an authorized biography written by Pope Brock, in her local public library in 2009, Lane developed an interest in John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor who attempted to cure impotence via goat testicle transplantation in 1917. The experimental documentary NUTS! mainly consists of animated reenactments and narration voiced by both actors and Brinkley himself. “Brinkley’s story is not presented as the object of a neutral nonfiction gaze, but opportunity for viewers to actively wrestle with the ethical and epistemological issues central to the narrative nonfiction form,” Lane wrote in the home page of NUTS!.
NUTS! premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 22, 2016, and won the Special Jury Award for Editing in U.S. Documentary Competition of the festival. The documentary is announced to be released theatrically beginning on June 22, 2016, at the Film Forum in New York City.
Rolling Stone named NUTS! as one of the 12 best movies they saw at Sundance 2016, saying “the fact that it’s all true didn’t stop Lane’s film from ending with the best twist of this year’s fest.”