Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to PBS’s WORLD Channel as part of its #MyBlackHistory programming tonight, Wednesday, February 8:
BLACK WOMEN IN MEDICINE

Director:
Crystal Emery

Premiere:
NYC’s Cinema Village (August 2016)

Select Festivals:
Pan African Film Festival

About:
A consideration of the history of and challenges facing African-American women in the medical profession.

A response to the slow progress made in diversifying the United States’ base of physicians, with less than 5% African American representation – and, further, only 2% African American women doctors nationwide – Emery’s project is an earnest attempt to provide positive images and push back against stereotypes. Its natural venue is educational settings, where the stories of its subjects – both older pioneers and recent medical school graduates – can serve as inspiration for young African American women otherwise lacking in role models in medicine – in the words of one of the trailblazers here, former Surgeon General Dr Jocelyn Elders, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Beyond this worthwhile function, however, the doc is otherwise clunky and non-cinematic, abandoning more focused profiles of a small handful of promising subjects to instead stage dry, somewhat repetitive group panel discussions that unfortunately feel more like outtakes from a public access television program.

New to DVD and VOD this week:
ZIMBELISM

Directors:
Jean François Gratton and Matt Zimbel

Premiere:
International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) 2016

Select Festivals:
Hot Docs, Salem, Shanghai

About:
A profile of the career and work of documentary street photographer George Zimbel.

Jean François Gratton and Matt Zimbel – George’s son – offer an appreciation of the photographer’s career, highlighting some of his more notable work, including a celebrated series on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street in the 1950s and a series of travel shoots for the New York Times Magazine, including work that helped make public plans for a hydro plant in Storm King which sparked resistance that ultimately stopped the project. While acclaimed as a humanist photographer of everyday people, and with Zimbel here downplaying the importance of celebrity portraiture such as iconic images of Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate and a series on retired President Truman, the film nevertheless oddly places an undue focus on the latter, creating a strange tension that is never fully explained. The filmmakers make use of Zimbel’s 1960 campaign photos of JFK and Jackie Kennedy as a thread throughout the film, a bone of contention in a rights claim against the New York Times. This is illustrated here somewhat too repetitiously through a series of back-and-forth letters between Zimbel, who demands the return of a photo that was licensed for a one-time use but was never returned to him, and the Times‘ officious-sounding legal department, which insists the photo is their property. Having left NYC life long ago for an extended stint in Canada’s Prince Edward Island and later Montreal, Zimbel is still productive, shown walking around taking photographs, and maintaining the life of a freelancer – though he bemoans the state of the modern world and its privacy laws which limit his documentary street photography work.

New to VOD via Microsoft this week:
ORANGE SUNSHINE

Director:
William A Kirkley

Premiere:
SXSW 2016

Select Festivals:
BFI London, Newport Beach, Maui, San Sebastian, Athens, SF DocFest

About:
The story of 1960s Southern Californian drug culture via the recollections of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the biggest smugglers of LSD and hash of the time.

Kirkley’s sprawling film focuses on several of the founding members of the Brotherhood, particularly Johnny Griggs and his wife Carol. After an encounter with LSD connected Griggs to a sense of the divine, he felt emboldened to turn on the entire world, abandoned his typical suburban existence, and began to indoctrinate friends. After he drugged the initially resistant Carol’s orange juice, she too was along for the ride, and the newly formed community fell into becoming the biggest suppliers of LSD in the country. Once the substance was deemed illegal, they formed a church to try to protect themselves and to spread their message of enlightenment, moving to Laguna Beach and forming the Mystic Arts World psychedelic emporium, a sort of Southern Californian Haight Ashbury. Timothy Leary joined their group, finding a kindred spirit in Griggs, but as their notoriety grew, they became the target of surveillance, eventually leading several members to live on the run under assumed identities before the law finally caught up to them. Kirkley maintains a loose tone throughout, and while this matches the subjects’ freewheeling utopian mission, it also leads to a sense of anecdotal excess at times in what otherwise is a generally entertaining tale.

New to VOD via Microsoft this week:
PUTUPARRI AND THE RAINMAKERS

Director:
Nicole Ma

Premiere:
Melbourne 2015

Select Festivals:
Hot Docs, New Zealand

About:
An aboriginal man recounts his family’s decades-long fight to regain their native claim to ancestral land.

Ma’s film focuses on Tom Lawford, whose aboriginal name is Putuparri, whose people were uprooted from their land by white Australians. While elders like his grandparents were directly affected, and have felt a longing to return for decades, younger generations like his own have been left rootless, disconnected from language and culture, and prone to drug and alcohol abuse. After the Australian government acknowledged past Aboriginal mistreatment and affirmed their sovereignty, they began hearing land claims. With his family making such a claim for their ancestral homeland of Kurtal, Putuparri experienced a reconnection with his culture, including traditional rainmaking rituals, and has since become a leader for his people. The film details how Putuparri oversaw a convergence of Aboriginals that resulted in the painting of a massive map delineating various native lands – a canvas that has traveled throughout the country and helped set boundaries for land claims. Because Kurtal itself has not been officially recognized, however, Putuparri continues his struggle. While Ma has taken on a worthwhile topic, her use of Putuparri as a narrator makes the project feel overextended as a whole, and too rooted in the past, robbing the film of a forward-moving dynamism.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, February 7:
FORCED PERSPECTIVE

Director:
Nick Cavalier

Premiere:
Cleveland 2015

Select Festivals:
Beverly Hills, Atlanta Doc

About:
A profile of artist Derek Hess.

I previously wrote about the doc here.