Kirby Dick
Kirby Bryan Dick (born August 23, 1952)[2] is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor best known for directing documentary films. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Feature for directing Twist of Faith (2005) and The Invisible War (2012).[3][4][5] He has also received numerous awards from film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and Los Angeles Film Festival.
Kirby Dick
Director, producer, screenwriter, editor
1981–present
Rita Valencia (1985–present)
Themes[edit]
Dick's work often focuses on issues of secrecy, hypocrisy, and human sexuality. Many of his films explore subjects and issues that have traditionally been taboo, such as homosexuality, sadomasochism, and sexual abuse. In Variety, Owen Gleiberman called Dick a "a deadly earnest but instinctively dramatic filmmaker."[45] Ryan Stewart of Cinematical wrote, "Kirby Dick has been compared to photographer Diane Arbus in the way he prefers to open the camera lens to the pained, the freakish and the inexplicable that exists on the margins of everyday life."
Dick often employs intricately edited montages that blend together television news clips, archival footage, music videos, documentary interviews, and other sources. Beginning with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, he has also pioneered applying the "fair use" doctrine to appropriate copyrighted footage without obtaining licenses or compensating rights holders.[35]
Dick often employs a cinéma vérité style. He has said that he prefers to work this way because it allows for a more complex relationship with his subjects.[46] In many cases, Dick has also encouraged his subjects to record their own footage, which is then incorporated into his film.
Critics have increasingly remarked on the impact of his films as investigative journalism, with The New York Times's A. O. Scott writing, "Kirby Dick has become one of the indispensable muckrakers of American cinema, zeroing in on frequently painful stories about how power functions in the absence or failure of accountability"[47] and Entertainment Weekly including three of his films on its list of documentaries that have "changed the world".[28]