Rebel Citizen

In 2015, Cinéma du réel organised Europe’s first retrospective of Haskell Wexler’s activist cinema. The filmmaker, then 93, feared that European audiences would not have the keys to understanding his films, and was unsure of being able to accompany them himself. This sparked the idea of recording his testimony. His close collaborator Pamela Yates and director Travis Wilkerson went to California to interview him. Their conversations brought back to the surface memories that the filmmaker – better known for his work as a twice-Oscared cinematographer – had in fact had little chance to revisit. Pamela Yates worked on this material to make it into a film, integrating excerpts from the Skype master class he gave at Cinéma du réel. What emerges is an insight into the commitment of an entire life, which captures the filmmaker’s great generosity, only a few months before his disappearance. (Maria Bonsanti)