Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to Discovery+ today, Thursday, March 11:
MY BEAUTIFUL STUTTER

Director:
Ryan Gielen

World Premiere:
Indyfest 2019

Select Festivals:
Heartland, Boston Kids, Napa Valley, Rhode Island

About:
A profile of several young people who stutter, focused on an organization founded to provide a safe space and inspire stutterers.

A lifelong stutterer, Taro Alexander founded SAY – Stuttering Association for the Young – as a way to help youth who stutter to gain self-confidence and meet peers to make them feel less alone. Two cornerstones of the organization are an annual gala, where SAY participants sing or speak, at their own time, unrushed; and Camp SAY, which gathers kids who stutter for a transformative couple of weeks. Ryan Gielen’s film focuses on a number of campers, ranging in age from 9-18, including Juliana, a young Latina who has been attending SAY events since 2007 and is now about to graduate high school; Malcolm, a young African American boy who has survived a horrific family tragedy and has a hard time at school; Sarah, who didn’t realize she spoke differently until she faced taunting at school; Emily, who draws support from her sister and mother and is all about self-affirmations; and Will, a tall high school senior who mentors Malcolm. Other subjects briefly resonate as well, demonstrating the safety these kids feel when around others like themselves. At the camp, they speak out at events, are very emotional, do some terrible interpretive dance performances, and act like normal kids, with individual profiles and interviews with parents interspersed to present a more rounded sense of their personalities. While feeling stretched thin at feature length, without a clear enough focus or driving narrative to justify its running time, this earnest film still remains likeable enough to resonate with viewers.

New to DVD this week:
ROCK CAMP: THE MOVIE

Director:
Doug Blush

Co-Director:
Renee Barron

World Premiere:
Key West 2020

About:
Music fans sign up to rock out with their favorite performers.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to DVD/VOD today, Tuesday, March 9:
THE PALINDROMISTS

Director:
Vince Clemente

World Premiere:
San Francisco DocFest 2020

About:
A profile of wordsmiths competing in the World Palindrome Championship.

While it draws the tiniest fraction of competitors as compared to Will Shortz’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the World Palindrome Championship is the Olympics of wordplay for a small but obsessed group of dedicated palindromists – individuals who write phrases, or even whole poems, that read the same both backward and forward (even if the results often are decidedly grammatically challenged or simply nonsensical). Filmmaker Vince Clemente chronicles the 2017 contest – only its second edition – while also profiling several competitors in the lead-up to the event, along with assorted other palindrome fans like singer Weird Al Yankovic and actor Danica McKellar, as well as some history. Given that the contest itself is not particularly cinematic, primarily consisting of scenes of competitors writing, with some awkward direct-to-camera reaction interviews, these earlier profiles help to capture the participants’ quirky personalities and something of what attracts them to palindromic pursuits. As a whole, however, while inoffensive and appropriately light, the film feels choppy and padded, suggesting that there’s not quite enough here to merit feature treatment.