ABSTRACT
This chapter features a biography of filmmaker Jennifer Fox along with two interviews—one published in 2005 in The Independent Film & Video Monthly and an original interview based on conversations with Fox during 2017 and 2018. Fox’s award-winning work as a filmmaker has spanned documentary, television series, and, most recently, narrative film. Fox has become well known for each of her documentaries having its own style, and she resists classifying her films as cinéma vérité, saying that projects such as Beirut: The Last Home Movie (1987), An American Love Story (1999), and My Reincarnation (2011) are more a “collusion” between her and her subjects who “accept” rather than “forget” the camera’s presence. In Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (2006), she took this philosophy even further, developing a “pass the camera” technique that blurs the line between filmmaker and subject, as Fox filmed her friends and acquaintances, and they filmed her. After a 30-year career as a documentary filmmaker, in 2018, Fox made her debut as a narrative film writer and director with her film The Tale (2018), starring Laura Dern.
