Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, March 22: NOMA: MY PERFECT STORM

Pierre Deschamps’ inside look at one of the best restaurants in the world made its bow at San Sebastian last year. Screenings followed at DOC NYC, CPH:DOX, Berlin, and the food-focused Tokyo Gohan fest, among others.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to PBS’ America ReFramed tomorrow, Tuesday, March 22: ROMEO ROMEO

Lizzie Gottlieb’s chronicle of a lesbian couple’s attempts to conceive a child had its world premiere at the Hamptons in 2012. Its fest circuit also included Frameline, Philadelphia QFest, Ft Lauderdale LGBT, Tampa LGBT, and Mix Copenhagen, among others.

After Lexy and Jessica got married, the couple began to plan their family. While they initially consider using a known sperm donor, they instead opt for an anonymous one, thinking it will make things easier, and deplete their savings to buy sperm online. As has become an increasingly worrying issue for countless would-be parents, the path to pregnancy didn’t end there. Gottlieb films the couple through frustrating attempts and heartbreaking false starts, pharmaceutical therapies, and concerns that maybe they just won’t be able to have their son, who they want to name Romeo, after all. While the film breaks no new ground – the topic of same-sex parents trying to have kids has been amply covered in several other documentaries – Gottlieb’s subjects are warm, appealing, and vulnerable, quickly garnering the viewer’s empathy and support.

Coming to NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction series tomorrow, Tuesday, March 22: AMONG THE BELIEVERS

Hemal Trivedi and Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s inside look at jihadist indoctrination premiered at Tribeca last year. It has also screened at IDFA, CPH:DOX, Sydney, AFI Docs, DMZ Docs, Vancouver, Tallgrass, Stockholm, Rio, Heartland, Human Rights Watch London, and St Louis, among other festivals.

Set within Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, Trivedi and Naqvi’s provocative film offers impressive access to a deeply polarizing figure, Abdul Aziz Ghazi, a darkly charismatic radical Muslim cleric who is in charge of the Red Mosque, a growing network of madrassas that take in orphaned and poor children to transform them into soldiers for Islam and against a secular Pakistan. Devoted to bringing sharia law to his nation, Ghazi is unapologetic about his militancy and his stance against the government – as the film recounts, in 2007, federal policies against the Red Mosque led to a standoff which claimed the lives of his immediate family and more than a hundred students. His extremism is fed to his charges, shown chillingly in the opening scene in which a young boy rehearses his lesson, a rote condemnation of infidels complete with exaggerated gestures. As interviews with other, older students later reveal, while the madrassa insists on the memorization of the Koran, the younger kids aren’t told what the verses even mean. As Ghazi’s opponents note, the students and their parents typically are not particularly religious – they’re just desperately poor, and the madrassas’ free education, lodging, and food are more than the government is able to provide, making them easy marks for recruitment. Still, despite his influence, Ghazi’s public defense of the Taliban’s massacre of Peshawar school children in 2014 led to a nationwide protests against religious extremism targeting the Red Mosque, providing tentative hope for a corrective to his corrosive views.

Coming to HBO tonight, Monday, March 21: EVERYTHING IS COPY

Jacob Bernstein and co-director Nick Hooker’s tribute to Bernstein’s acclaimed writer mother Nora Ephron premiered at the New York Film Festival last year. It went on to screen at Palm Springs and the Westchester Jewish film fests, and to a limited theatrical release beginning last weekend.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to theatres and to VOD today, Friday, March 18: THE BIRTH OF SAKÉ

Erik Shirai’s inside look at a small Japanese saké brewery premiered at Tribeca last year. It has since screened at Seattle, Provincetown, Dokufest Kosovo, San Sebastian, Milan, ZagrebDox, Philadelphia, Chicago, Antenna, Bend, Mar del Plata, Sidewalk, Palm Springs, Tallinn Black Nights, and Goteborg, among several others.

The Tedorigawa Brewery in northern Japan has been in operation for over 140 years, but is one of a relative few artisanal breweries still in operation in an industry that has turned to mechanization. Shirai documents the painstaking six-month process by which the beverage is made, immersing the viewer in the microcosm of the workers and their learned brewmaster. Living together at the brewery during this period, they forego time with their families in order to uphold the tradition of handcrafted saké, while also attempting to adapt their product to modern tastes. Bolstered by picturesque cinematography, Shirai offers an intimate perspective that pays respect to their diligence and sacrifice while quietly marking its potential impending disappearance.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, March 18: EVERYTHING IS COPY

Jacob Bernstein and co-director Nick Hooker’s portrait of Nora Ephron made its debut at the New York Film Festival last Fall. The doc also screened at Palm Springs and the Westchester Jewish film fests.

Bernstein, Ephron’s eldest son with her second husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein, constructs a straightforward but warmly engaging tribute of the celebrated writer/director. Weaving together archival personal footage, various media appearances of his mother, and interviews with family and illustrious friends and admirers, from Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, and Meg Ryan to Rob Reiner, Tom Hanks, and Gay Talese, among several others, the film relates how the daughter of mildly successful Beverly Hills screenwriters went from a mail girl at Newsweek to a famed magazine essayist for Esquire and The New Yorker before breaking in as a Hollywood screenwriter and later director, usually drawing from her personal experiences. Borrowing its title from an aphorism oft-stated by Ephron’s mother – essentially that anything that happens in ones life is fair game for use by a writer – the film makes much of her uncharacteristic decision to keep secret her diagnosis of leukemia, which claimed her life in 2012, but thankfully Bernstein doesn’t get too bogged down in this, choosing instead to celebrate his mother’s life and her deft skill in bringing humor to personal tragedies and triumphs alike through her clever writing.

Coming to Netflix tomorrow, Friday, March 18: MY BEAUTIFUL BROKEN BRAIN

Sophie Robinson and Lotje Sodderland’s candid look at the unexpected aftermath of a stroke had its world premiere at IDFA in 2014. The doc went on to screen at Sheffield, ZagrebDox, and at this year’s SXSW.

A deeply personal story, the stroke victim here is Sodderland herself. After she suffered an intracranial hemorrhage, the 34-year-old went missing, alarming her friends and family who finally tracked her down at a London hospital. While they are relieved that Sodderland has survived, they soon learn she has lost fundamental language capabilities making it difficult to express herself. She turned to filmmaker Robinson to help document her long recovery, as she tries to relearn to read and write despite the aphasia the stroke has left her with, and joins an experimental study to stimulate her brain in the hopes of creating neural pathways. All the while, Sodderland contends with strange, altered vision that lends a distinct, experiential visual texture to the film, and unexpected side-effects from her treatment. As she attempts to make sense of her new reality, this prompts a fascinating consideration of her very sense of self in the absence of memories or the kinds of communication that she relied on before the stroke, ultimately leading to a hopeful new approach to life.