Coming to theatres this Friday, June 30:
THE SKYJACKER’S TALE
Director:
Jamie Kastner
Premiere:
Toronto 2016
Select Festivals:
CPH:DOX, Victoria
About:
A convicted murderer hijacks a passenger plane to escape to Cuba.
Ishmail Muslim Ali and four accomplices were convicted of killing eight people at a Rockefeller family owned country club in the Virgin Islands in 1972. After years in prison, and on the way back from the VI on a failed appeal in 1984, he managed to hijack a plane and reroute it to Cuba, where he has lived a free man ever since, even starting a family. With extradition on the horizon, Ali agrees to give his version of these events to Canadian documentarian Kastner, who, as in his previous work, unfortunately relies on theoretically stylish but actually quite clunky re-enactments and distracting faux period music to tell the bulk of the story. Beyond these aesthetic choices, the director employs a haphazard, unnecessarily convoluted chronological structure, and seems to go out of his way to valorize his antihero without bothering to convince the viewer that Ali was wrongfully convicted.
what (not) to doc 