The Disclosure President
2016 · 13m · United States
Directed by Elizabeth Lo
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Stephen Bassett, the only American lobbyist of his kind, hopes for a seismic shift with the 2016 US Presidential Elections.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lo takes the presidential biography—probably the most exhausted form in documentary—and somehow makes it *weirder*, more intimate, less what you'd expect; it's the kind of formal restraint that actually subverts the genre instead of genuflecting to it.
A quietly rigorous piece of biographical cinema that trusts ellipsis and montage over exposition, positioning itself in a lineage of essayistic portraiture where what's *not* said becomes the film's formal argument.
The decision to let silence and spatial framing do the psychological work instead of relying on talking heads or voice-over—that single commitment transforms a 13-minute runtime into something that feels complete and deliberately constructed, not abbreviated.
Reviews
Her work to date has focused on people and communities at the margins of society... Steven's form of marginalization was pretty foreign to me. And I knew that the kind of topic the UFO story would be, I wouldn't be able to observational in my mode of filmmaking.