filmbriefs
Director · Cinematographer · Producer · Screenwriter · 1965

Kirsten Johnson

2
briefs
13:00
average
26 min
in total
On film.briefs2
13:00

Cameraperson

Kirsten Johnson · 2016

Cameraperson is a 2016 documentary assembled by cinematographer Kirsten Johnson from unused footage shot over twenty-five years on assignments across fifteen countries. Without narration or score, it constructs a self-portrait through lingering, unvarnished moments — births, courtrooms, landscapes, faces — revealing the ethics, labour and quiet persistence of looking. Directed and shot by Johnson, edited by Nels Bangerter, and produced by Abigail Disney, Johnson and Gini Reticker, it premiered at Sundance and won Sheffield Doc/Fest’s top prize.

13:00

Dick Johnson Is Dead

Kirsten Johnson · 2020

Kirsten Johnson’s documentary follows her father Dick, a retired psychiatrist with dementia, as she collaboratively stages elaborate, darkly comic fantasies of his death — falls, accidents, funerals, heaven. Shot with John Foster, the film shows each sequence alongside its making: rigs, doubles, direction, Dick’s quiet participation. It avoids exposition, clinical context or sentimentality, holding instead to a precise, unsentimental tenderness.