Oscar-nominated writer/director Debra Granik is one of those rare phenomenal talents working today that can excel at helming both narrative and documentary film projects. Just as an example, even though she has won a number of awards for her 2010 4-time Oscar nominated film “Winter’s Bone” (including the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival), her recent 2014 documentary “Stray Dog” – a portrait of Vietnam vet and biker Ron “Stray Dog” Hall – recently garnered almost as many accolades, including “Best Documentary Feature” wins from the likes of the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival, the Cleveland International Film Festival, the Memphis Indie Film Festival and the Twin Cities Film Fest.
It is looking like Granik will be staying with the documentary form for a bit, at least for her next feature film, which she revealed during a recent interview with Bomb Magazine to be about life after prison: “I’m working on a documentary about life after incarceration. It’s a big topic right now in our national discourse. This is a group of young men, and hopefully a woman, who have to figure out how to reenter a culture that would love to see you have a mark of pain for the rest of your life—or at least facilitates and mandates that you have that mark of pain. It makes it extremely hard to regain a sense of self-worth and a place in a society. It’s really about another kind of PTSD, if you will, after incarceration, and being shunned. It’s the American caste system. We created a demographic of pariahs."
Sounds pretty awesome, and looks like it will make for a compelling documentary. Granik’s “Stray Dog” is also playing limited in theaters currently — if you need more persuasion, here’s our review of the film.