Throughout Richard Nixon’s presidency, three of his top White House aides obsessively documented their experiences with Super 8 home movie cameras. Young, idealistic and dedicated, they had no idea that a few years later they’d all be in prison. This unique and personal visual record, created by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin, was seized by the FBI during the Watergate investigation, then filed away at the National Archives, and forgotten for almost 40 years. OUR NIXON is an all-archival documentary presenting those home movies for the first time, along with other rare footage, creating an intimate and complex portrait of the Nixon presidency as never seen before.

Maysles Documentary Center spotlights the first four feature documentaries of filmmaker Penny Lane, who over the last decade has distinguished herself as a vital voice in contemporary nonfiction film & video. Defined by an eclectic use of formal techniques and a burning intellectual curiosity, Lane’s body of work reveals a consistent preoccupation with the nature of truth, communicated with a wry sense of humor — an epistemological cheek. In 2016, she launched “Notes on NUTS!”, an exhaustive online compendium of annotations to her third feature. By ranking the film’s various claims and implications on a “truth scale”, Lane acknowledged and deconstructed the obfuscations of fact made by documentarians in pursuit of a good story. Her latest film, HAIL SATAN?, incorporates her first use of direct footage to profile The Satanic Temple, an organization as adept at using funny in defense of facts as the filmmaker herself. 

OUR NIXON is available free of charge May 28-June 4 alongside 3 other films by Penny Lane, including the new release HAIL SATAN?

Join us for a Zoom conversation on Saturday, May 30 at 1PM EDT with Penny Lane to dive deeper!