Coming to theatres today, October 24: ALGORITHMS
Ian McDonald’s look at blind chess players in India bowed at the International Film Festival of India in 2012. It has also screened at Moscow’s Sports Films festival, Mumbai’s Shorts and Docs fest, the World Chess Championship, Kathmandu’s Film South Asia, Durban, and Sydney, among others.
Focusing on three players, McDonald’s film follows the young men’s efforts to win various competitions between 2009 and 2011 and to fulfill the dreams of their coach, Charudatta Jadhav, who himself became a chess legend after he went blind as a teenager. The latter, frankly, emerges as a much more intriguing screen presence than any of the boys – while McDonald profiles the players and their families at home, this doesn’t yield much beyond a surface sense of their personalities and some information on the cause of their visual impairment. Jadhav, on the other hand, seems an eternal optimist, but one with a single-minded mission – to cultivate someone, anyone, to live out his legacy and, ideally, to prove that blind chess players can and should be able to play – and win – over sighted players. The film never really gets there, though – none of the players seems particularly prodigy-level, losing as much as they win, and McDonald’s camera primarily remains observational, tracking their tactilely focused gameplay, rather than delving into how – or if – their blindness impacts the way they approach the game. The film’s unfortunate title is also never addressed, leaving the well-lensed black-and-white project feeling frustratingly inconsistent.
what (not) to doc 