What’s A Mistress Dispeller? Find Out As Doc Talk Podcast Goes Inside The Camden International Film Festival

Matthew Carey
·2-min read

There’s only so much you can do when you catch your spouse stepping out on you – cry, get a divorce, forgive.

In China, they’ve come up with an additional option when such circumstances present themselves (an admittedly not infrequent scenario for couples all around the world). There, you can hire someone to “intervene” in the love triangle, in surreptitious fashion.

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This phenomenon is explored in Mistress Dispeller, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival before heading to TIFF for its international premiere and on to the Camden International Film Festival for its U.S. premiere. At Camden, Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast caught up with director Elizabeth Lo, who shared insights about her intriguing new film and how she negotiated its inherent ethical considerations.

At CIFF, located on Maine’s bucolic central coast, we also talked with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Petra Costa, who brought Apocalypse in the Tropics to Camden following its world premiere in Venice. The film documents the growing might of evangelical Christians in Brazil’s politics. They’re building a Christian nationalist movement that will sound distinctly familiar to those keeping an eye on parallel developments in far-right corners of the American political scene. (In fact, Costa shows how famed Baptist minister and evangelist Billy Graham helped lay the groundwork for the movement through a pilgrimage he made to the South American country in the 1970s, during Brazil’s military dictatorship.)

Camden has become one of the most important all-documentary festivals in the world. For our report from the field on the 20th edition of the festival, we also met with Sean Flynn, the newly appointed artistic director of the Points North Institute, which puts on CIFF (Flynn co-founded Points North with Ben Fowlie and Caroline von Kühn). He discusses how the festival has become a magnet for major talent and major films – this year alone included the latest documentaries from Costa, Johan Grimonprez (Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat), Daniel Roher and Edmund Stenson (Blink), Stephen Maing and Brett Story (Union), Ted Passon (Patrice: The Movie) and more. In recent years, CIFF has welcomed Oscar winners Laura Poitras, Alex Gibney, Asif Kapadia and Cynthia Wade and other notable filmmakers including Chris Smith, Alex Pritz and the legendary Frederick Wiseman.

Flynn also talks about how Points North and CIFF are supporting filmmakers at every level — emerging and established — in what has been an especially challenging time for the nonfiction film business.

That’s on the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Deadline’s Documentary Editor, Matt Carey. The pod, a 2024 Webby Awards honoree, is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.

Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.

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