Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, October 10:
LIYANA

Directors:
Amanda Kopp and Aaron Kopp

Premiere:
Los Angeles 2017

Select Festivals:
BFI London, Mill Valley, Citizen Jane, Durban, Hot Springs Doc, Denver, Bahamas, Palm Springs, Oxford, Southern Circuit, Toronto Black, Zagreb Dox, Miami, NY Children’s, Ashland, Cleveland, Montclair, NY African, Blackstar

About:
Swaziland orphans collectively create an adventure folk tale.

The Kopps’ film centers on a storytelling workshop run by Gcina Mhlophe at a rural home for orphans. Drawing from their own harrowing experiences, several of the young residents develop the titular character, and spin her narrative, one involving starkly realistic travails like violence and HIV, the death of the heroine’s parents, and an adventure to rescue her brothers from kidnappers. As they tell the camera their story, the very cute kids often ham it up, while semi-animated sequences (sort of) bring Liyana’s adventure’s to life – the effect, even if deliberate, is not wholly successful and seems unfinished. The film’s approach to covering otherwise wellworn and dark territory is certainly creative, though a little of this goes a long way, and the filmmakers don’t complete trust in the audience to fill in the blanks themselves.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, October 5:
THE GREAT BUSTER

Director:
Peter Bogdanovich

Premiere:
Venice 2018

Select Festivals:
Telluride, Chicago, Deauville, Mill Valley

About:
A tribute to comic screen legend Buster Keaton.

While most silent film stars have sadly faded into obscurity, Buster Keaton, together with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, has been able to maintain a level of awareness within popular film culture. Peter Bogdanovich presents a fairly comprehensive overview of Keaton’s life and career, in a film that is perfectly conventional aside from its strange structure. Bogdanovich, who serves as a narrator and offers commentary on the several clips of Keaton’s work on display here, splits the film into three parts. The first details Keaton’s early life, marked by a career as a child actor in vaudeville, before his emergence in two-reelers as a partner for Fatty Arbuckle. In an unusual decision, Bogdanovich then skips over the prime of Keaton’s career, the ten features he made, which include THE GENERAL and STEAMBOAT BILL, JR, to instead delve into the performer’s generally sad fate in the post-sound era through to the end of his life. Only after his death does the director revisit and extol the 1920s features through extended clips and commentary that at times feels more like a film school seminar. Supplementary voices throughout the film run the gamut from the obvious – actual friends of Keaton like Dick Van Dyke – to the curious but understandable – physical performers like Johnny Knoxville – to outliers like Werner Herzog or SPIDERMAN: HOMECOMING director Jon Watts.