by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent "Hello World,” is usually a newbie’s first line of code in programming, but as of Wikileaks Vault 7 data dump about CIA covert hacking on Mar. 7, followed by Julian Assange’s “Press Conference” on Mar. 9, the whole world is actually reeling, as in the wake-up call: Hello World! But fear not, leave it to the much-maligned Entertainment Journalists to tread where no investigative reporter dare to go. Later on, ...

As part of the 30th Anniversary celebration, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival will expand its ever popular director’s panel into the Outstanding Directors of the Year Award, presenting to some of the most talked about and innovative filmmakers from the past year. The tribute will begin at 8pm on Wednesday, February 4 at the Arlington Theatre and will be moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg. Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, spearheaded by the direc...

As part of the 30th Anniversary celebration, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival will expand its ever popular director’s panel into the Outstanding Directors of the Year Award, presenting to some of the most talked about and innovative filmmakers from the past year. The tribute will begin at 8pm on Wednesday, February 4 at the Arlington Theatre and will be moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg. Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, spearheaded by the direc...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent Just as the biggest breaking story drops in her lap, filmmaker Laura Poitras is thinking ‘why did he choose me?’ The ‘he’ in question is then 29-year-old Edward Joseph Snowden, an outsourced infrastructure analyst working for a subcontractor to the NSA. And the rest is history. Encrypted emails came out of the blue to Poitras almost exactly two years ago, January, 2013.  The implications for average netizens were ast...

  Nineteen-seventy-one was the year the American press lost its virginity. That June, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. But a lesser-known WikiLeaks antecedent took place three months prior, as captured in Johanna Hamilton's riveting documentary 1971. On the evening of March 8, eight anti-war protesters broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and made off with every document they could lay their hands on. The heist went down on the evening of the sensational Muham...