La Camera Passe-Partout - A Documentary Film Legacy

Running time: 60 mins

"Soon it became evident that the camera was almost totally uninhibited by the usual complications that come with changing position in the midst of shooting." - Richard Leacock, Cahiers du Cinema 1959

Master filmmaker Richard Leacock delighted and challenged audiences when he received the Cinequest Maverick Spirit Award in 2001. Director Jane Weiner has spent almost four decades celebrating Leacock?s work through film.

The title, La Camera Passe-Partout, inspired by an article written by Leacock for Cahiers du Cinema in April 1959 wherein he, at this very early stage of the development of a 'new kind of cinema', begins to articulate his aesthetic ambition and artistic aspiration as a filmmaker.

Weiner's camera enters the world of American Direct Cinema through 35 years of conversations with Leacock and four others—D.A. Pennebaker, Bob Drew, Terry Macartney Filgate and Al Maysles. In La Camera Passe-Partout, we discover how these five cineastes came together at an incredibly dynamic and defining moment of observational documentary filmmaking.