Jason Sondhi
As I sit on my couch these evenings, bored, and tuckered out from a day of work on the site, I realize I miss the Olympics. After years of scarcely paying attention, this year I watched a TON of the Rio Games. Now there is a sports-sized hole in my day, and my life. If any part of you feels the same as me, than maybe today’s short can cheer you up, a dynamic and enlightening sports profile doc of Claressa Shields who at Rio fought to become the first athlete, man or woman, to defend a gold medal in boxing. Google can tell you how that turned out, but I won’t do so here!
Directed by Zackary Canepari, the short is a follow-up to a feature film called T-Rex that Canepari directed with his frequent collaborator Drea Cooper. That film told Shields’ story from her Flint, MI roots through to triumph at London 2012, and is available to check out now. This film is different, brash and confident as ever, Shields is somehow, despite her earlier triumph, back in the role of underdog. Despite the acclaim she received, her life has yet to be dramatically transformed, and with a quick cutting, observational style, Canepari directs the camera at Shields who is not shy about addressing her critics. Blending boxing, scenes of domesticity, and cutaways of the beleaguered community of Flint, site of a water crisis that made national headlines earlier in the year, the film is a fresh and dynamic presentation of the profile doc genre—a format we had begun to find stale.
That Canepari could breathe some life into a tired form is not surprising. Along with Cooper, Canepari helped popularize the modern short profile doc with their series California is a Place. 2010, shortly after the advent of DSLR’s, and paired with the rise of Vimeo as a community, a golden age emerged for the short profile doc released direct to online. These shorts, emphasizing colorful characters but also stylish photography, were an interesting development in documentary as a whole, and would greatly influence feature filmmaking to come. Notable creators to rise out of this period include Sean Dunne and Eliot Rausch, and while we don’t think of documentarians as hot-shot commercial directors, the facility these directors have in conveying emotion proved to be quite in demand for brands. Rausch and a contemporary internet documentarian from that Vimeo era, John X. Carey, have gone on to be some of the most in-demand commercial directors in the business now, winners of the industry’s highest prizes. This short film is produced in collab with Great Big Story and Victory Journal, two content outlets we’ve featured on the site before, and it’s hard to imagine their model of short form doc filmmaking existing without this prior era.
Canepari and Cooper are accomplished on the commercial front too, with a notable Super Bowl advert to their resumé, but emphasized the feature path with making T-Rex. Now, Canepari is looking to recapture the magic of California is a Place, with a new series Flint is a Place—a cross-platform web series of which this short film is a part. The project has some great collaborators, and we look forward to hearing more about it soon, it’s scheduled to go live later this Fall.