Critical Interventions (2020)

On Wednesday March 11, 2020, Reverse Shot hosted its first ever "live" symposium as part of Museum of the Moving Image's new First Look Festival initiative "Working on It," a series of events focusing on the creative process. This symposium featured private in-person conversations and experiments among critics, filmmakers, and programmers. The assembled group discussed process, creativity, and inspiration, and the participating critics were given cameras to document the event. Critical Interventions, edited remotely and under quarantine by filmmakers Ben Garchar, Michael Koresky, Jeff Reichert, Olivia Sattan and Farihah Zaman, is both a record of this day and a film that makes itself up as it progresses. The participants, just days away from having all their worlds shaken by the pandemic, strike optimistic, passionate notes about film writing and making, and forged new connections that resulted in a series of essays published over the last year (links in the right sidebar). Quite unexpectedly, Critical Interventions casts an elegiac glance back at a moment when it was still possible to physically congregate to discuss matters of the art.