Author Archives: basiltsiokos

Coming to theatres today, Friday, August 5: OLYMPIC PRIDE, AMERICAN PREJUDICE

Deborah Riley Draper’s look at the experiences of African American athletes at the 1936 Olympics made its bow at Los Angeles earlier this Summer. The doc also screened at the American Black Film Festival and the recently wrapped Traverse City Film Festival.

In 1936, just three years into the Nazi regime, Germany hosted the Olympic Games, and saw it as an propagandistic opportunity to take to the world stage and prove Aryan superiority. As popular memory would have it, Hitler’s plan was foiled by one pioneering athlete: African-American track-and-field wonder Jesse Owens, emblematic of America’s melting pot. Draper’s film serves as a corrective to this simplistic and partial history, turning her attention to the other seventeen African-American athletes who also traveled to Berlin to compete for Team USA. Importantly, the film is more than an argument to celebrate their long-forgotten achievements, as notable as they were; instead it contextualizes their participation in the Olympics within a still racially segregated America and which turned its collective back on the champions upon their return. While fairly conventional in its approach, the doc incorporates revealing archival footage as well as audio interviews with some of the athletes, as none is still surviving. Draper successfully conveys the controversies at play in the lead-up and throughout the controversial Games, which the US came close to boycotting; the Olympians’ surprising welcome reception in the Olympic Village; and the sad fates that befell many back home, decades before the struggle for Civil Rights firmly took hold.

Coming to VOD tomorrow, Friday, August 5: THE DWARVENAUT

Josh Bishop’s affectionate portrait of a Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed artist made its debut at SXSW earlier this year. It has gone on to screen at IFF Boston, SF DocFest, Calgary Underground, and Fantasia. It now comes to VOD platforms including iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, XBOX, and Vudu.

Going where no D&D player has dared to venture, the titular figure in Bishop’s often amusing film is Stefan Pokorny, a Dungeon Master-turned-game miniature designer. His company, Dwarven Forge, has made a killing among the D&D subculture by providing intricately detailed sets for gaming – modular pieces depicting the terrain of the game, from mazelike caves and dungeon playsets to his newest, most ambitious idea, Valoria, the fictional medieval city in which Pokorny has set his gaming adventures for decades. Having found great success via Kickstarter, Dwarven Forge has turned to the crowdfunding platform once again, but for some reason, this new design isn’t catching fire quite as quickly, putting the company’s fortunes in peril. As Pokorny contends with this literal countdown, Bishop also follows him to different gaming conventions. Although he is shown drinking to excess to a troubling degree at these events, it’s clear this outsider has found his tribe. The offspring of a Korean mother and white American soldier, he was adopted only to be returned into the system before an immigrant couple finally took him in. He reveals a difficult path to his present circumstances, where he’s been able to combine his artistic sensibilities with his gaming passion, and forge his own distinct path. Through his affable, if flawed, protagonist, Bishop celebrates the misfit in everyone.

New to VOD: CAN WE TAKE A JOKE?

Ted Balaker’s exploration of outrage, censorship, and stand up debuted at DOC NYC last year. Screenings have followed at Anthem, RiverRun, and Sarasota, among other events.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to PBS tonight, Wednesday, August 3: KOKO: THE GORILLA WHO TALKS

Jonathan Taylor’s look at the famed sign-language-using ape debuted on the UK’s BBC earlier this Summer. It now comes to American public television.

While Koko’s story has been the subject of other documentary programs over the past forty years, including Barbet Schoeder’s KOKO: A TALKING GORILLA, Taylor’s production benefits from the hindsight of time, chronicling the scope of Project Koko, which began in 1972 and continues to this day. While his crew gives a sense of Koko’s life now, they are also given access to extensive archival footage, much of it shot by Ron Cohn, co-founder of the Gorilla Foundation, who has been in Koko’s life since his colleague, Penny Patterson, began her study of animal communication while a graduate student at Stanford University. The film is as much about Patterson as it is her simian surrogate daughter, to whom she taught more than 1000 words using sign language, and who she believes has demonstrated the ability to communicate complex and abstract thoughts. While others who have studied animal communication have questioned her claims, Patterson has persevered, devoting her entire personal and professional life to Koko, even while her field has moved away from the study of interspecies communication. Limited by a too-short hourlong running time, Taylor’s film is unfortunately unable to approach this intriguing controversy in much depth before moving on to consider the difficulty Patterson has had in fulfilling Koko’s apparent desires to be a mother herself.

New to DVD: REQUIEM FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM

Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P Scott’s look at Noam Chomsky’s views on inequality debuted at Tribeca last year. Additional screenings have included IDFA, AFI Docs, Vancouver, Antenna, Adelaide, and DocPoint, among other events.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to PBS’s American Experience tonight, Tuesday, August 2: THE BOYS OF ’36

Margaret Grossi’s chronicle of the US rowing team that upset Hitler’s plans for Olympic gold makes its debut on the long-running public television strand. Special promotional screenings have been held in Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angles over the past month.

Timed to correspond with the upcoming Summer Olympics, and inspired by the New York Times bestselling THE BOYS IN THE BOAT by Daniel James Brown, Grossi tells the tale of the nine young men from the University of Washington’s rowing team who participated in the contentious 1936 Games, hosted by Nazi Germany, and their coach and shell builder who led them to victory. While the sport was widely popular across America at the time, this Pacific Northwest team differed from their East Coast counterparts, coming largely from poor and working-class backgrounds. Individual biographies, like that of Joe Rantz, reveal particularly poignant histories of poverty, abandonment, and resilience, in many ways serving as a microcosmic representation of a nation still contending with the Great Depression. While hewing close to the PBS strand’s conventional storytelling format, the film zeroes in on the U of W’s underdog story, revealing how the team beat the odds – even with stroker Don Hume nearly incapacitated by sickness – to claim the gold medal over Hitler’s Aryan athletes.