The Melania documentary is up to $13.5 million at the worldwide box office, an impressive number for a nonfiction film. But whether the feature about First Lady Melania Trump constitutes a financial success is another matter.
On the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey dig into the Melania numbers and another set of figures – the toll of layoffs at the Washington Post. What Melania and the Post have in common, of course, is Jeff Bezos, who owns the heralded newspaper and serves as executive chair of Amazon, the company that shelled out millions through its Amazon MGM Studios to acquire the Melania Trump documentary.
On today’s show, we also welcome the makers of two of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts: Joshua Seftel, director of All the Empty Rooms, and Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton, directors of The Devil Is Busy (Gandbhir is separately nominated for directing the feature documentary The Perfect Neighbor).
Seftel explains how he paired up with CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and commercial photographer Lou Bopp to explore the most heart-wrenching of topics – the bedrooms left behind by children killed in school shootings, rooms preserved in their original state by parents of the victims. The director tells us how he sought to make a film that speaks to the impact of gun violence and yet “take it out of that political debate that we’re stuck in.”
For The Devil Is Busy, Gandbhir and Hampton filmed at a clinic in Georgia that provides women’s health care services, exploring the real-world implications of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. They tell us why they decided to focus much of the film on Tracii, a woman of strong Christian faith who oversees security operations at the clinic. And the filmmakers share their thoughts on the double meaning of the documentary’s title.
That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
English (US) ·