Awards & Press

“Forget trying to fit the images or narrative into one neat box or another, and just give yourself over to Sutherland’s storytelling. The film draws you in with one moving scene after another.”

“Sutherland’s film, while disarmingly intimate, feels epic in scope. Coming at a time of particular politicization of the issue of the US’s broken immigration system and its deleterious impact on families, the film is also notable in its resistance to easy partisanship or demonization of either side, instead using the story of the Perez family to humanize and universalize the immigration issue in the hopes of finding a better way forward.”

“As in his previous films, Sutherland masterfully depicts the passage of time and its effect on his subjects.”

“Kind Hearted Woman [is] one of the most compelling documentaries on modern Native American life to date.”

“Compelling…a film like “Kind Hearted Woman” comes around only once every several years.”

“Kind Hearted Woman is not out to make a point but to show you a life.”

“Filmmakers like Ken Burns and Bill Moyers talk a lot about ‘the American character’ but David Sutherland actually shows it to us in THE FARMER’S WIFE. In a league with Marcel Ophuls’ great 1970’s documentary THE SORRROW AND THE PITY, THE FARMER’S WIFE saves the very soul of the new television season and shows how good television can be when it’s not all about commercialism and profit … as good a documentary as has ever been made for television. It is documentary as social conscious and window on the American soul.”

“Sutherland lets the scenes percolate before pouring the cup of coffee. Editing is all about rhythm, and he understands that. But the rhythms in this show are not fast and snappy, but slow and natural.”

“A great documentary.”

“Start off with Melissa Franklin, a Canadian at Harvard because Toronto turned her down, as much at home in the music of Frank Zappa as she is in the world of supercolliders, and equally funny about both. You’ll be hooked.”

“Rarely has TV made science look like this much fun. Harvard Professor Franklin, the subject of … HIGH ENERGY, designed a 70-ton collider detector microscope to track the tiniest particles in the universe in the hopes of better understanding the process that caused life on Earth. She described the excitement of her first college physics project as a rush akin to staying up all night listening to Frank Zappa, except ‘You got to stay up all night building things. What could be better?’ A free spirit with a stand-up comic’s timing and contagious self-confidence, Franklin is shown in a rare moment of relaxation listening to Nirvana at head-splitting levels.”

“As producer David Sutherland’s at-work and at-home portrait reveals, this facinating female breaks ground and opens doors everyday, and as she practices science, it’s anything but dull.”

“David Sutherland has spent the past decade trying to redefine the stylistic limits of the documentary. With OUT OF SIGHT he goes further, creating what … is closer to soap opera than the traditional talking heads documentary.”

“A fascinating immersion in the intimate details of a stranger’s life … a great film … pushes the documentary to a new level.”

“Twin Peakish non-fiction story of a blind cowgirl who loves independence and sex.” (★★★½)

“Gives us a facinating portrait of a man more remarkable than we could have imagined from grammar school history lessons. There is no doubt that in myth, Washington echoes through time. At the end of this portrait, he resounds.”

“Independent filmmaker David Sutherland goes beyond the stiff textbook portrait to fill in the details of a complex man. Using dramatic re-enactments of battle scenes and beautiful footage of eastern landscapes, Sutherland’s unconventional documentary portrays Washington as a man who started his career as a social climbing, land-hungry opportunist. With THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T BE KING, Sutherland goes a long way toward making Washington real.”

“A mezmerizing psychological study of Washington from his youth through a disastrous early military career to the end of the American Revolution and the moment he seized his place in history by eschewing power and rejecting complete control over a nation desperate to give birth to itself.”

“A thoroughly fascinating tale.” (★★★★)

“Wonderful … as riveting as a detective thriller.”

“B+”

“A relentlessly stunning film. With the possible exception of ‘The Thin Blue Line,’ no documentary in recent memory delivers more psychological insight – or emotional wallop. The pacing is flawless, the editing superb.”

“A remarkably absorbing confessional documentary.”

“Watching the emotional layers peel away is fascinating.”

“This peach of a collaboration between subject and Sutherland displays both their geniuses.”

“The symbiosis between director and subject is so pure that nothing distorts the relationship between audience and artist.”

“★★★★ One of the ten best films of 1986! A feast of a movie.”

“David Sutherland’s splendid 1986 documentary, a spare and to-the-point 60 minutes, [features] the works and reminiscence of Paul Cadmus. Now inching up to age 90, the artist was, in a sense, an enfant terrible to the extent that he painted by no rules but his own and had his 15 minutes of fame early on, not that he hasn’t continued to produce sometimes quite wondrous paintings and drawings. The item that drew controversy to him, he surely didn’t intend to be controversial even though his approach to portraying reality was, and to some extent long remained, distinctive, was a 1934 painting, “The Fleet’s In!,” which showed sailors, their tight whites leaving little to the imagination, cavorting with women of, shall we say, easy virtue. The Navy found this outrageous; the Works Project Administration (WPA), which had sponsored it, found it unacceptable; an admiral hit the roof, whence came national attention with its customary invective, excoriation, and dire prophesies of the desecration of art, the insult to the flower of American manhood and all the rest.

In this award-winning documentary, “The Fleet’s In!” is given a half-minute or so, maybe a minute, no more. The artist, shown often with his favorite model, and, evidently, his lover, Jon Andersson, reflects on a wide range of his paintings and drawings, explaining that he often used himself in his paintings – “I was the most available and least costly model” – and also put his friends in his works. No surprise there. His symbolic models were often Renaissance and medieval paintings, which we see juxtaposed to his own works, and to the extent tht his sexuality is discussed it is often in the context of remarks about, and quotations from, letters from his friend E.M. Forster, and from W.H. Auden. We learn also what egg tempera painting involves. (I always wanted to know; didn’t you?)”

“Cadmus is a consummate draftsman and a keen social satirist whose subjects of predilection have been gay male cruising rituals, sailors with bulging baskets, and the boys on the beach … the director has sensibly let the ribald representational painter perform as a one-man band.”