Author Archives: basiltsiokos

Coming to DVD next Tuesday, July 19: THE KIDS GROW UP

After a successful festival and theatrical run, Doug Block’s follow up to 51 BIRCH STREET made its cable premiere on HBO last month. Now, his personal reflection on his relationship with his daughter makes its way to DVD.

My take on the film can be found here.

Coming to POV next Tuesday, July 19: BIBLIOBURRO: THE DONKEY LIBRARY

Carlos Rendón Zipagauta’s documentary has screened at a number of film festivals in shorter versions, spreading the story of Colombian Luis Soriano and his mobile lending library. With next week’s upcoming POV screening, Soriano’s efforts will get a much larger audience.

Rendón Zipagauta’s film follows Soriano as he and his donkey trek over dangerous terrain to bring books, and the love of learning, to children in rural communities. Spending his weekends on this mission for over a decade, the elementary school teacher is single-handedly helping to make a change in his fellow countrymen, encouraging the next generation to become educated and to better their situation and their country in return. As he makes his rounds, his conversations with his donkey provide needed information – an unexpectedly clever yet natural exposition device. BIBLIOBURRO tells a simple, but truly inspirational, story. Soriano and his burro make for immediately likeable subjects, and like Jennifer Arnold’s A SMALL ACT, his actions demonstrate how the simplest idea or action can affect lasting change.

To find out more about the POV screening on PBS, click here.

Coming to theatres this Friday, July 15: TABLOID

Errol Morris’ latest project debuted at Telluride and Toronto last Fall and has since screened at a number of events leading up to its theatrical release via IFC Films. The doc opens in NY, LA, SF, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Chicago, and DC this Friday, and expands nationwide next week. It opens “Errol Morris’ America,” a month-long retrospective of Morris’ work at NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image, tonight at 7pm.

In 1977, Kirk Anderson, a Mormon missionary, went missing in the UK, allegedly abducted by a former beauty pageant winner, Joyce McKinney. When the tabloids got ahold of the story, they ran with it, printing salacious stories about the “Mormon sex in chains case,” and jubilantly painting McKinney as a sex-crazed predator. In her defense, McKinney denied the accusations, claiming that they were involved romantically, and that Anderson joined her of his own free will, but later fabricated the abduction story out of religious guilt. Morris delves into this sensationalistic story, but also specifically focuses on how that sensationalism was actually concocted in the UK tabloids, providing a fascinating look into the mechanics of celebrity, infamy, and scandal. Morris’ films and essays have long engendered stimulating conversation and careful consideration. Along with only a handful of other directors, he has often successfully crossed over from a core of self-selecting cinephiles to reach more general movie-goers, helping to expose broader audiences to the possibilities and diversity of documentary film. With its unusual and salacious background story, his latest has the potential to strike a chord with a younger audience reared on reality TV and celebrity scandal – but, at the same time, to show those viewers how such a story can also be well-told. It’s also just a lot of fun – the twists and turns of McKinney’s life make for a tale that truly is stranger than fiction. The protag has had the tendency to show up at past screenings and debate certain aspects of how she has been represented, so audiences might be in for a show not only on screen but also offscreen…

Note: Errol Morris will be present for the screening tonight at MoMI.

Coming to HBO next Monday, July 11: LOVE CRIMES OF KABUL

Tanaz Eshaghian goes into a women’s prison in Afghanistan to reveal the perpetrators of “moral crimes” in her latest film, which had its world premiere at Hot Docs. It joins a select number of projects to share the spotlight of the HBO Documentary Films Summer Series.

I previously included my thoughts on the film out of Hot Docs here.