Category Archives: Documentary

New on DVD this week:
HOMELAND: IRAQ YEAR ZERO

Director:
Abbas Fahdel

Premiere:
Visions du Réel 2015

Select Festivals:
New York, Rio, Lussas Doc, Hamburg, Yamagata Doc, Doclisboa, CPH:DOX, Jihlava, Mar del Plata, Cinema Vérite, Göteborg, True/False, Vilnius, BAFICI, Taiwan Doc, Dokufest Kosovo, Vienna

About:
Life in Iraq, before and after the 2003 American-led invasion.

Split into two distinct sections – “Before the Fall” and “After the Battle” – Fahdel’s epically-lengthed yet intimately-scaled film provides viewers with a look at the activities of several Iraqis, many of them his own family members, in the lead up to and in the aftermath of the initial 2003 attack. Taking a loose, observational approach, the film feels more like a home movie at times, and serves as a survey rather than creating in-depth portraiture. This actually suits it well, particularly in the first part, which captures individuals who don’t have a full sense of what’s to come but think they have seen it all before. Digging wells to deal with expected resource shortages, and taping windows to prevent glass shattering, they seem practical rather than concerned, and otherwise try to go on with their everyday lives, seemingly comfortable enough despite the reminders that they’re living in a repressive regime. The tone changes in the project’s second half, with an Iraq overrun with foreigners, frustrations beginning to mount over disruptions in daily life, and, of course, reckoning with lives lost – including, as revealed in the film’s conclusion, one of its most engaging young subjects. It’s a deeply humanistic, and often difficult to watch, time capsule of a nation forced to contend with the tragedy of war.

New to VOD this Sunday, February 26:
NIGHT WILL FALL

Director:
André Singer

Premiere:
Berlin 2014 (work-in-progress), Sheffield 2014 (official world premiere)

Select Festivals:
Jerusalem, Telluride, CPH:DOX, IDFA, Hamptons, Traverse City, Documentary Edge, Jewish fests in Moscow, Warsaw, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Vienna, Las Vegas, and Copenhagen

About:
The story behind a long-abandoned Allied documentary revealing the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.

As WWII began to come to a close and British, Russian, and American troops liberated German concentration camps, uncovering the atrocities that had been committed there, military cameramen captured film footage as evidence and for propaganda purposes. The plan, as Singer’s impactful film reveals, was to create a documentary, GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS FACTUAL SURVEY, under producer Sidney Bernstein of Britain’s Ministry of Information, to demonstrate the realities of the camp to audiences worldwide, including Germans who might otherwise try to deny the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity. Bernstein called on his friend Alfred Hitchcock, already well-established in Hollywood by this time, to serve as a supervising director, but beyond offering some helpful advice, the latter’s role was limited. Ultimately, despite Bernstein’s best efforts, the documentary stalled and was eventually shelved, a victim of political expediency in the face of the need to win the public’s favor back toward Germany as a Cold War ally. The project wouldn’t be completed and restored until 2014. Singer’s compelling but fairly straight-forward chronicle of SURVEY’s origins, development, and censorship includes difficult, necessary footage from that film while laying out its history via very British television-styled narration, and interviews with cameramen, camp survivors, and experts.