Author Archives: basiltsiokos

Coming to PBS’s Independent Lens tonight, Monday, November 23: MIMI AND DONA

Sophie Sartain’s portrait of a mother and daughter debuted at the Dallas VideoFest last year. It also screened at Thin Line, Sebastopol Doc, ReelAbilities, and several community screenings around the country.

Sartain’s film explores the relationship between her maternal grandmother Mimi, 92, and her intellectually-disabled aunt Dona, 64, as they reckon with the latter’s difficult transition out of the home she’s known her entire life into an assisted care facility. Exploring not only the complex bonds between these two women, but also her mother’s own complicated history with her mother and sister, the director creates a portrait of interdependence that also ends up being informed by other family members’ experiences with autism – including the filmmaker’s own concerns about her young son. While on the whole technically rough, Sartain manages to capture a poignant sense of the impact of separation on both mother and daughter.

Coming to VOD today, Friday, November 20: TRANSFATTY LIVES

Patrick O’Brien’s chronicle of life with ALS had its world premiere at Tribeca, where it won an audience award. Other fest appearances have included Hot Docs, MIlan, DOK Leipzig, and Poland’s American Film Festival. It now comes to VOD platforms via FilmBuff.

Prior to this project, O’Brien fancied himself an Internet personality and a DJ, and made a few throwaway short films. After he is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and given a projected life expectancy of 2-5 years, he begins filming his experiences, documenting the increasingly debilitating impact of his condition, ultimately directing others to film scenes when he himself no longer physically able. Indicative of ALS’ progression, O’Brien’s narration shifts over the course of the film from the filmmaker’s voice to a computer-aided text-to-speech. Conceived as a letter to his son, who he conceives during the course of filming but is never able to hold, this voiceover provides a candid, often self-deprecatingly funny, view of the director’s changing reality – one that despite its tragedy, never gets particularly maudlin, and even sometimes hits genuine emotional uplift, as when he eventually finds a care center specifically designed for ALS sufferers. Often fairly rough in its approach – understandable given the circumstances, but also indicative of O’Brien’s general level of talent – the project does benefit substantially from the shaping influence of veteran documentary filmmaker Doug Pray, who serves as a screenwriter and producer here.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, November 20: FRAME BY FRAME

Alexandria Bombach and Mo Scarpelli’s made its debut at SXSW this Spring. It has since screened at Hot Docs, BFI London, AFI Docs, Ashland, Camden, Seattle, Nashville, Cleveland, Dallas, Telluride Mountainfilm, Sidewalk, Citizen Jane, New Orleans, and Documentary Edge, among others.

Under the Taliban, photography was forbidden in Afghanistan, viewed as an affront to Islam. In the years since the regime’s ouster, photography has made a comeback, capturing a nation still rebuilding and in many ways reckoning with its recent past. Bombach and Scarpelli profile four photojournalists as they demonstrate the importance of capturing images of their country and its people, both to bear witness to present day concerns and to resist the repression of the past regime and its insidious continued influence. Most interesting of the four subjects are husband and wife Massoud Hossaini and Farzana Wahidy – he is the most acclaimed, a Pulitzer Prize winner for a harrowing photo of a child taken after a religious procession was bombed; she controversally focuses on Afghan women in her work, including the disturbing prevalence of self-immolation or forced immolation of women. The other pair of photographers here offer perspectives both veteran and neophyte, but don’t carry the emotional heft of either Hossaini or Wahidy’s work, who likely could have carried the well-produced project by themselves.