Penny Lane

Our Nixon was selected as the Closing Night Film at 42nd New Directors/New Films.

Penny Lane (born March 6, 1978) is an American independent filmmaker, known for her documentary films.

Her humor and unconventional approach to the documentary form, including the use of archival Super 8 footage and YouTube videos, have earned her critical acclaim.

Lane is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Lane was born in Lynn, Massachusetts.

She received a BA in American Culture and Media Studies at Vassar College in 2001 and an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2005.

She has taught film, video and new media art at Bard College, Hampshire College, Williams College and Colgate University.

Lane became interested in filmmaking and video art while she was working at Children's Media Project, a nonprofit youth media center in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Starting in 2002, she has made over a dozen experimental short films which span the worlds of video art and documentary film, including The Abortion Diaries, The Voyagers, Just Add Water and Normal Appearances.

Many of her short films are collected and distributed by VTAPE.

After encountering Charlatan, an authorized biography written by Pope Brock, in her local public library in 2009, Lane developed an interest in John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor who attempted to cure impotence via goat testicle transplantation in 1917.

The experimental documentary Nuts! mainly consists of animated reenactments and narration voiced by both actors and Brinkley himself.

“Brinkley’s story is not presented as the object of a neutral nonfiction gaze, but the opportunity for viewers to actively wrestle with the ethical and epistemological issues central to the narrative nonfiction form,” Lane wrote in the home page of NUTS!

The film is composed entirely of YouTube vlogs and does not answer the scientific question of the physiological causes of Morgellons—rather, it focuses on need for human proximity and unexplained suffering of the vloggers, as well as the specific formal and emotional qualities of 2010s era YouTube.

Filmmaker magazine named Lane one of "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2012.

Ella Taylor of NPR described Lane as "one of our foremost chroniclers of bizarro Americana."

In 2013, Lane released her first feature-length film Our Nixon.

The all-archival documentary featuring the never before seen home movies of Nixon staffers premiered at the 42nd International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2013, had its North American premiere at SXSW, and was selected as the Closing Night Film at New Directors/New Films.

It earned wide critical acclaim and numerous film festival awards at Seattle International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Nantucket Film Festival, and Traverse City Film Festival.

The archival footage inspiring Lane and Frye became the basis of 2013 released nonfiction film Our Nixon, directed by Lane and co-produced by Frye.

The documentary depicts a unique portrait of Richard Nixon and his closest aides, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman, and special assistant Dwight Chapin.

The film contains footage from 26 hours of Super 8 home movies filmed by Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Chapin, as well as relevant news broadcasts and interviews.

Among numerous films about the Nixon and Watergate era, Our Nixon stands out for its distinct, intimate perspective and the stylized all archival editing choice.

Our Nixon had its world premiere at the 42nd International Film Festival in Rotterdam and its North American premiere at 2013 South by Southwest.

The film screened at multiple film festivals, including Ann Arbor Film Festival, where it won the Ken Burns Award for “Best of the Festival,” and Seattle International Film Festival, where it won the Best Documentary Award.

On August 1, 2013, CNN broadcast the film, and Cinedigm handled the film's theatrical release.

The Wall Street Journal wrote that the "highly personal view of the Nixon years is, for obvious reasons, a sad and wrenching one - a film that is nonetheless filled with spirit, humor, and a bountiful sense of irony.” Amy Entelis, senior vice president for development for CNN Worldwide, praised the film for its “original material” and “unconventional” storytelling.

In 2016, the director's second feature-length film Nuts! a mostly-animated experimental documentary about con-man and quack, John Brinkley, world premiered at Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Editing.

Lane also released a companion project to Nuts! called Notes on Nuts!, a database of "footnotes" to the film in which she details over 300 instances of manipulation, tricky editing, and outright fabrications contained within the "mostly true" story in the film.

Lane wrote that the website "takes the provocation of the film much further by engaging in a kind of radical honesty about all the tricks, manipulations and outright lies to be found in my film, with the idea that in doing so I could expand out from this one (admittedly really strange!) case study to instigate a whole new conversation: what would happen if documentary filmmakers started to regularly use footnotes?"

Ann Hornaday wrote that Lane "might be documentary film's most compellingly cockamamie social historian," while Chris Plante wrote in The Verge in 2016, "Lane is the answer to a question more people should be asking: who's the great documentarian of this generation?"

Brian Frye introduced Lane to the Super 8 home movies confiscated by the FBI during the Watergate investigation.

Nuts! premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 22, 2016, and won the Special Jury Award for Editing in the U.S. Documentary Competition of the festival.

The documentary premiered theatrically on June 22, 2016, at Film Forum in New York.

Rolling Stone named Nuts! one of the 12 best movies they saw at Sundance 2016, saying “the fact that it’s all true didn’t stop Lane’s film from ending with the best twist of this year’s fest.”

In 2017, Lane was admitted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Critics have often noted Lane's use of humor and unique approach to the documentary form.

Museum of the Moving Image chief curator David Schwartz organized her first major retrospective in 2018, writing "in the past few years, Penny Lane has quickly emerged as a major documentary filmmaker."

Lane's third feature-length documentary The Pain of Others (2018), an all-archival documentary about the controversial illness known as Morgellons, world premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam and was later screened at BAMcinemaFest, Maryland Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest.

Lane returned to Sundance in 2019 to premiere her fourth feature-length documentary Hail Satan?, concerning the birth and rapid rise of The Satanic Temple.