Coming to POV this Sunday, March 24: GIRL MODEL
Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s exposé of the international modeling world made its world premiere at Toronto in 2011. Its fest circuit has included Camden, CPH: DOX, IDFA, SXSW, Cleveland, Full Frame, DOXA, and the Southern Circuit, among others, as well as a limited theatrical release.
I previously wrote about the film out of Toronto here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations
Coming to Stranger Than Fiction as the Spring Season opener this coming Tuesday, March 26: NO PLACE ON EARTH
Janet Tobias’ chronicle of Jewish families’ resilience and survival during the Nazi era made its debut at Toronto last year. It has gone on to screen at the Hamptons, where it picked up an audience award, IDFA, Martha’s Vineyard, and Miami, among others.
I previously wrote about the film out of Toronto here.
Filed under Documentary, Film
Paris’ documentary festival, Cinéma du Réel, opens tomorrow, Thursday, March 21, and runs through Sunday, March 31. Since 1979, the event has promoted non-fiction film at the famed Le Centre Pompidou and other locations around Paris. This year’s edition includes nearly forty new feature length documentaries, plus scores of shorts, retrospective screenings, panels, installations, and other special events. Although I’m not attending, the following offers some highlights from this year’s program: Continue reading
Filed under Documentary, Film, Film Festivals, Overviews, Recommendations
My coverage of non-fiction films from the just completed SXSW wraps up with this look at a few films each from four of the non-competitive sections of the festival, Visions, Special Events, SXGlobal, and 24 Beats Per Second – I previously wrote about Competition and Documentary Spotlight titles. Once again, I didn’t have the opportunity to see all the films in these sections that I was hoping to, and would single out a few that were also on my list – THE GREAT HIP HOP HOAX, THE PUNK SINGER, and BAYOU MAHARAJAH – that I’d like to catch elsewhere. Continue reading
Filed under Documentary, Film, Film Festivals, In Brief, Recommendations
Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, March 19: SOUL FOOD JUNKIES
Byron Hurt’s look at African American food and health premiered at Miami’s American Black Film Festival last Summer. It’s gone on to screen at Urbanworld and at numerous community screenings via ITVS, in addition to its broadcast premiere this past January.
I previously wrote about the film here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
Coming to HBO tonight, Monday, March 18: AMERICAN WINTER
Harry Gantz and Joe Gantz’s exploration of the personal side of the economic crisis made its world premiere last month at the Portland International Film Festival, where it took home the documentary audience award.
The film offers a survey of a range of different families in the Portland area as they struggle to make ends meet in the face of the Great Recession. The bridge between the eight families is the city’s nonprofit social services referral organization, 211info, which assists those in need with a variety of essential support, from locating housing to getting cancelled electricity service restored. Demonstrating quite profoundly the shrinking of the safety net that traditionally forestalled mass poverty and homelessness, these subjects contend with the lasting impact of the bursting of the housing bubble, the stagnation of US job growth, and the ineffectiveness of the healthcare system, all dealing a devastating blow to the stability of the middle class. The Gantzes’ film makes its point that everyone is affected by profiling subjects of different racial backgrounds, levels of unemployment or underemployment, and educational backgrounds, and it’s a testament to just how difficult their situations are that these families open their homes to the filmmakers’ cameras in what are clearly extremely stressful times. While this acknowledgement is welcome, the film overdoes it – with more than a dozen characters featured, it’s hard for the viewer to build up a sufficient rapport with one family before the Gantzes shift over to a second and then a third and a fourth in short order. While effective enough to be worthwhile in its present form, a deeper investment in fewer subjects could have raised this beyond the surface of a survey treatment into a overall more affecting portrait.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
This Wednesday, March 20, kicks off the 42nd annual New Directors/New Films. A co-presentation of the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the event runs through Sunday, March 31, and presents a very selective showcase of the work of international and US emerging filmmakers. Screening just over forty films – features and shorts combined – the series has a track record of championing the early work of now well-established filmmakers, from Pedro Almodovar to Spike Lee.
Six feature docs are included in this year’s lineup, as well as one hybrid project. I’ve previously written about Sarah Polley’s exceptional non-fiction debut, STORIES WE TELL, and about Joshua Oppenheimer’s divisive but must-see THE ACT OF KILLING. I’ll be covering ND/NF’s closing night film, Penny Lane’s engrossing look at the Nixon administration, OUR NIXON (pictured), in my third SXSW post tomorrow.
I haven’t yet seen the remaining doc offerings, but hope to have a chance to do so before the end of the series: Lyubov Arkus’ ANTON’S RIGHT HERE (pictured), a personal chronicle of the filmmaker’s relationship with a severely autistic teenager; Libbie D Cohn and JP Sniadecki’s PEOPLE’S PARK, which draws the viewer through the various goings on at a public park in China through a single tracking shot; and Eryk Rocha’s JARDS, a cinematic duet between the filmmaker and his subject, acclaimed Brazilian singer/songwriter Jards Macalé. Finally, Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s THE SHINE OF DAY continues the pair’s string of hybrid documentary/dramas with an unconventional study of two performers.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Film Festivals, Overviews, Recommendations, Releases
Continuing my roundup of SXSW documentary (I wrote about Competition films last week here), today’s post looks at the festival’s non-competitive Documentary Spotlight section. Of the nineteen films in this category, I sadly only got to see seven. I’m especially sad to have missed I AM DIVINE, BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, TINY: A STORY ABOUT LIVING SMALL, REWIND THIS!, THE NETWORK, MEDORA, and this section’s Audience Award winner, AN UNREAL DREAM, but I’ll hopefully get to catch up with those elsewhere on the circuit soon. I’ll cover the remaining sections in a post tomorrow. Continue reading
Filed under Documentary, Film, Film Festivals, In Brief, Recommendations
Coming to NYC’s Maysles Cinema for a one-week run beginning tonight, Monday, March 18: 108 (CUCHILLO DE PALO)
Renate Costa Perdomo’s personal investigation into Paraguay’s history of homosexual repression made its world premiere at Berlin in 2010. It has played extensively on the fest circuit, claiming awards at BAFICI, Guadalajara, Krakow, Docslisboa, Havana, and RIDM, among others.
Costa’s starting point is the mysterious death of her uncle, Rodolfo, fifteen years earlier. In the course of making sense of his passing by interviewing her father, Rodolfo’s brother, and friends and neighbors, Costa learns of the aspects of his life that were not discussed by her family, and, in fact, were indicative of a larger societal elision. Rodolfo had an alter ego, a secret gay life, under a dictatorship that severely punished such deviations from societal norms. Alfredo Stroessner’s regime, in fact, developed a blacklist outing the titular number of gay men, a number that as a result has become a derogatory term – one matched by the second part of the film’s title, translated as “wooden knife,” an implication of uselessness and lack of manly power. As Costa angrily confronts her father about his knowledge of his brother’s suffering, he retreats into religion and passes the buck, making for simultaneously provocative and frustrating scenes. Given her familial connection to her topic, Costa oscillates between the journalistic and the indulgently personal, and suggests that there’s something more unexpected to her findings than there actually is – Rodolfo’s story is, sadly, not particularly surprising, even if the specificity of Paraguay’s repression may be unfamiliar to viewers. However, for Costa, there’s a sense of genuine revelation, which ultimately makes the film work – but more on a personal level than as a work of investigative documentary filmmaking.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Releases
In the aftermath of the devastating 2011 Japanese earthquake and resultant tsunami, strangers attempt to build a bridge of memory by locating the owners of the debris that washes ashore across the expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
The footage of the March 11, 2011 catastrophe became immediately well-known, with 20,000 casualties and whole villages claimed by the sea. Over the past two years, 25 million tons of debris has slowly been floating across the ocean toward North America. Among this flotsam are people’s memories. Directors Nicolina Lanni and John Choi’s film aims to follow the various individuals locating these lost objects – beachcombers, water sports aficionados, scientists – as they identify their finds and attempt to reunite them with their owners. In so doing, they hope to provide a sense of hope and a connection with a past completely uprooted by natural disaster. Continue reading
Filed under Documentary, Film, In the Works
