Screened as part of NZIFF 2014

Regarding Susan Sontag 2014

Directed by Nancy D. Kates Portrait of an Artist

This documentary of novelist, critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag is rich with insight and biographical details about the defining impact on her life and work of key relationships with several highly accomplished women.

USA In English
100 minutes

Director, Producer

Screenplay

Nancy D. Kates
,
John Haptas

Photography

Sophia E.Constantinou

Editor

John Haptas

Music

Laura Karpman
,
Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum

With

Susan Sontag
,
Noel Burch
,
Terry Castle
,
Lucinda Childs
,
Judith Sontag Cohen
,
Mark Danner
,
Nadine Gordimer
,
Peter Haidu
,
Richard Howard
,
Alice Kaplan

Festivals

Tribeca 2014

Documentaries about well-known public figures can often feel like glorified infomercials. But this portrait of the influential writer and public intellectual somehow manages to do justice to both the breadth of her work (with passages from her writing read by Patricia Clarkson) as well as the ins and outs of her personal life, including her long-term lesbian relationships at a time when homosexuality was still seen as problematic even among the liberal intelligentsia. That director Nancy Kates manages to hit so many important pivot points in Sontag’s life and career in a cinematically engaging way feels like a small miracle.” — Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine.

“Sharp as a scalpel in print and often as prickly in person, Sontag was the last of the dazzling New York intellectuals – to many, her name is still incendiary. (A courageous essay published only days after September 11, 2001, incited citywide fury.) Nancy D. Kates’ profile does well by the early years, critical texts and novels, but gets even further into the writer’s evolving private persona: unsatisfied, unbowed, unapologetic.” — Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out NY