The increasingly prestigious Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, recently named an Academy Award qualifier (as we reported in February) and set to take place October 10-19, has named writer and film critic Lauren Wissot its new programming director. Wissot, a former programming director at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, is also a contributing editor at Filmmaker Magazine, a writer for venues like Slant Magazine and the author of “Under My Master’s Wings: One Year in the Life of a Female Submissive,” which she describes on her blog as a “memoir about her time spent as the personal slave to a gay-for-pay stripper.”

“I am absolutely thrilled to be programming this festival,” Wissot said in the festival’s press release sent out this afternoon. “To be working with a festival that combines an intimate, small town vibe with the cache that comes with being the oldest nonfiction fest in the U.S., not to mention an Academy Award-qualifying festival…I mean, why wouldn’t I be excited? For a programmer, it doesn’t get much better than that. The possibilities are endless.”

Advertisement