Category Archives: Documentary

New to DVD this week:
A PLASTIC OCEAN

Director:
Craig Leeson

Premiere:
Raindance 2016

Select Festivals:
Wildlife Conservation, Big Sky, Wild & Scenic, Barbados, Waimea Ocean Film Festival

About:
A journalist travels the world to explore the impact of plastic pollution.

Leeson, who serves as the film’s onscreen host, explains how he came to investigate our world’s plastic problem after fulfilling a lifetime’s dream to see the blue whale in its natural habitat. While on this whale watching expedition, he encountered some of the plastic waste that has been causing harm to ocean ecosystems for years now. This serves as the impetus to embark on a (likely not particularly environmentally-friendly) global odyssey to survey the dangers posed by our disposable-minded culture and plastic’s durability – not just on oceans but on land as well. Leeson and his collaborators, including free-diving champion Tanya Streeter, seen here delivering a TEDx talk, are clearly earnest, passionate advocates for humanity to change their ways, make better choices, and clean up the mess before it’s really too late for us all, but the film itself offers very little that hasn’t been explored in other documentary projects already with more focused and artful storytelling. Still, it’s a well-intentioned project that might help bring attention to an increasingly dire problem.

Now on VOD via Amazon Video:
JESUS TOWN, USA

Directors:
Billie Mintz and Julian T Pinder

Premiere:
Am Docs 2014

Select Festivals:
Hot Docs, Visions du Réel, RIDM, Sydney Underground, Heartland, Dokufest Kosovo

About:
Behind the scenes of a small town’s long-established, epically-staged annual passion play.

For nearly 90 years, the biblical story of Jesus has been faithfully recounted on a grand scale in the foothills of Oklahoma for the annual Holy City of the Wichitas Easter passion play. In its earliest days, the event apparently drew more than 200,000 spectators, but attendance has been in decline for decades. Mintz and Pinder’s briefly relate its history, but focus more on the challenges facing the community as they mount the latest staging – in particular, the actor who has long played Jesus has retired, prompting a search for a new Son of God. Enter Zack, a good-natured, rotund, long-haired misfit. The amateur is game for the role of a lifetime, but harbors a secret that could rock the community and which plays out through the course of the film – he no longer considers himself a Christian. Detailing a massive event that’s clearly a labor of love for all involved, but which can come off to outsiders as a quirky slice of Americana and/or Christian low-level zealotry, the filmmakers unfortunately err too much on the side of playing it for laughs. Overlaying the conventions of the mockumentary form on their real-life project, the result is at times strained, with some scenes feeling particularly staged and music as a whole doing disservice to their otherwise appealing subjects and themes.

New to VOD this week:
ACCIDENTAL COURTESY: DARYL DAVIS, RACE & AMERICA

Director:
Matt Ornstein

Premiere:
SXSW 2016

Select Festivals:
Cleveland, Atlanta, Nashville, Montclair, Bergen

About:
A portrait of an African-American man who befriends KKK members.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to the World Channel’s America ReFramed tonight, Tuesday, February 21:
70 ACRES IN CHICAGO: CABRINI GREEN

Director:
Ronit Bezalel

Premiere:
Black Harvest 2015

Select Festivals:
African Diaspora, Chicago International Social Change, Collected Voices

About:
A chronicle of an urban renewal project and gentrification.

Filmed over the course of two decades, Bezalel’s project explores the fate of Chicago’s Cabrini Green public housing projects. Developed between 1942 and 1961 to serve as housing for lower income working class families, a lack of upkeep and a rise in factors associated with poverty – crime, gangs, and drugs – contributed to Cabrini Green’s degradation in the 1980s and 1990s. Concurrently, the projects’ location, adjacent to Chicago’s in-demand lakefront communities, grew desireable for redevelopment, spurring Mayor Richard M Daley’s controversial plan to raze Cabrini Green’s towers and replace them with mixed-income housing. Bezalel’s film surveys the impact of this decision, from community organizers protesting the racial and class undertones of this plan to its uneasy implementation over the years that follow, including draconian restrictions that have had the (likely intended) effect of keeping out most of Cabrini’s past African-American residents. Unfortunately constraining this complex material to a far-too-truncated hourlong project, the director overly depends on overwritten narration that detracts from the stronger longitudinal observational footage featuring appealing subjects like teenager Raymond McDonald. Despite this, the film takes on a vital subject, and demonstrates over time the consequences of ill-thought out “urban renewal” programs that don’t take into account the communities which will be most affected.