Thomas, BTRtoday

Jenni Olson is the director of the new film, The Royal Road. She describes the film as a cinematic essay, and it's structure is simple: patient static shots of urban California landscapes captured on 16 mm film, and a voiceover narration written and spoken by Jenni.

Photographer Brian Ulrich has spent the last 15 years photographing the landscape of American consumerism. After 9/11, when the Bush administration encouraged all of us to go shopping, Brian travelled the country making images of big box chains, thrift stores, and later the abandoned shopping complexes that started popping up as the economy slid into the Great Recession.

This week on the show I talk with filmmaker and anthropologist J.P.Sniadecki about his new documentary The Iron Ministry. J.P. spent three years traveling through China by train, and in the film, he weaves countless trips into one impressionistic journey of people, sound, and clanking metal. We talk about trains in China, non-narrative documentary, and what it's like to make a documentary on a train.

Rodney Asher is the director of the new documentary, The Nightmare. The film tells the stories of eight people who chronically suffer from a terrifying disorder called sleep paralysis. During sleep paralysis sufferers wake up to find themselves unable to move or speak, and many experience extremely vivid and frightening visual and auditory hallucinations.

Michael Madsen is an artist and filmmaker. In his new documentary The Visit, he tackles perhaps one of the biggest questions of all: What would happen if intelligent life from another world landed on Earth?

Artist Rithika Merchant's new series, Luna Tabulatorum, tell a story inspired by the moon. In the paintings human-like figures, animals, plant life, and other strange beings interact in symbolic rituals that evoke both religious and folk art tradition as well as the work of painters like Frida Khalo...

For the several years photographer Daniel Cronin attended The Gathering of the Juggalos, an annual festival for die-hard fans of the horrorcore rap group The Insane Clown Posse. In his photographs, Daniel depicts Juggalos of every stripe, likening his approach to that of early 20th century German photographer August Sander who made egalitarian portraits of his countrymen...

Fred Ritchin is an authority on the future of photography. He's written several books on the subject, and his newest, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary and the Citizen, is published by Aperture. In the book Ritchin takes a critical look at the state of documentary photography and visual journalism in the twenty-first century media landscape...