Imagine discovering that your father was a Nazi war criminal who escaped justice. Imagine if that was not the worst secret in your family... What do we really know about our parents? How clearly do we remember our childhoods? 16mm of Innocence tells the story of three estranged siblings who have reluctantly congregated for their mother’s funeral following the discovery of a skeleton in the garden of their old family home. The story unravels as they find old 16mm home movies locked away. By watching the forgotten reels they discover shocking truths beneath their patchy childhood memories: secrets about their family, their parents, the identity of the skeleton, and the reasons behind their estrangement. 16mm of Innocence is a suspense novel with a dramatic and foreboding setting back in 1985: the Skeleton Coast of South West Africa, bathed in dense fogs that have wrecked thousands of ships over the years; and the former German colonial town of Luderitz – built on black rock and trapped between the vast Namib Desert on the east and the cold Atlantic Ocean on the west. As the siblings try to understand what has driven them apart, the story reaches back into South West Africa’s German colonial past and the harbouring of Nazi war criminals. Smith’s latest nail-biting thriller will appeal to fans of stories with shocking twists, as well as to fans of his previous books, The Secret Anatomy of Candles (Matador, 2012) and Huber’s Tattoo (Matador, 2014), which was runner-up in The People’s Book Prize 2015 for Fiction.

The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama is a collection of in-depth, substantive interviews with moving-image artists working "avant-doc, that is, making films that explore the territory between documentary and experimental cinema. The book uses the early history of the museum habitat diorama of animal life, specifically the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, as a way of rethinking both early and modern cinema document--and especially those recent filmmakers and films that are devoted to providing viewers with panoramic documentations of places and events that otherwise they might never have opportunities to experience in person. This international collection of 27 interviews follows on MacDonald's earlier Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford, 2015). The interviews, organized panoramically within the collection, are dense with information and insight, and readable by specialists and non-specialists alike. In most instances, these are the most in-depth and expansive-sometimes the first-interviews with these filmmakers. Together, these interviews offer an engaging panorama of the recent history and geography of cinema devoted to documenting the world around us, as well as an in-depth look at the challenges and accomplishments of filmmakers willing to go anywhere on the planet (or on the internet!) to document what they believe we need to see. MacDonald's general introduction provides an overall context for the collection, which includes interviews with Ron Fricke, Gustav Deutsch, Laura Poitras, Fred Wiseman, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Bill Morrison, Brett Story, Abbas Kiarostami, Lois Patiño, Dominic Gagnon, Erin Espelie, Yance Ford, Janet Biggs, Carlos Adriano, Craig Johnson, Ben Russell, Betzy Bromberg, James Benning, Maxim Pozdorovkin, along with several veterans of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (and with the executive directors of the distributor, Documentary Educational Resources, which has served the field of independent documentary for nearly fifty years)--each interview is introduced with MacDonald's overview of the interviewee's life and work. The book includes filmographies and selected bibliographies for all the filmmakers.

A Critical Cinema 5 is the fifth volume in Scott MacDonald's Critical Cinema series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English.

Annotation. This sequel to A Critical Cinema offers a new collection of interviews with independent filmmakers that is a feast for film fans and film historians. Scott MacDonald reveals the sophisticated thinking of these artists regarding film, politics, and contemporary gender issues. The interviews explore the careers of Robert Breer, Trinh T. Minh-ha, James Benning, Su Friedrich, and Godfrey Reggio. Yoko Ono discusses her cinematic collaboration with John Lennon, Michael Snow talks about his music and films, Anne Robertson describes her cinematic diaries, Jonas Mekas and Bruce Baillie recall the New York and California avant-garde film culture. The selection has a particularly strong group of women filmmakers, including Yvonne Rainer, Laura Mulvey, and Lizzie Borden. Other notable artists are Anthony McCall, Andrew Noren, Ross McElwee, Anne Severson, and Peter Watkins.