Hard to believe you can make an emotionally salient movie using photographic clippings from the New York Times but Letter To The Editor is a truly relevant look at the state of the modern news cycle which can be empowering, “fake” or scary as all hell.
Essentially a film of newspaper photographs, filmmaker Alan Berliner crafts a journey through 40 years of pictorial history pulled from the daily print editions of the New York Times. It is the musing of a self admitted news junkie while also being an ode to the death of the printed word during the rise of the digital age. It’s a reflection of the news, how it was, how it is and how it will be, with issues pulled from the headlines to the manipulation and devaluing the objective delivery of the events that affect us all.
It’s a rare to see something so personal and tender yet socially relevant and terrifying at the same time, but that’s exactly what Letter To The Editor is. Berliner sets us off on something very nostalgic; a vision almost pulled from a Norman Rockwell but the further the nostalgia goes down the rabbit hole the more we realize that we just might need a little bit of it back and that the devaluing of the news and arguably the truth is something we have to fight against at every turn.
In the modern news cycle, there’s nothing “fake” about Letter To The Editor as its damn near essential.
- Release Date: 9/8/2019
