Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to theatres today, Friday, December 4: BIKES VS CARS

Fredrik Gertten’s look at a transportation debate made its debut at the Tempo Documentary Festival earlier this year. It went on to screen at SXSW, Docs Against Gravity, Sydney, Melbourne, Transilvania, Big Sky, Sedona, SF Green, and DC’s Environmental fest, among others.

Couching an overarching environmental message in a perhaps too simplistic question of personal transportation choices, Gertten suggests a battle waged between cyclists and motorists in urban environments. Primarily focused on São Paulo and Los Angeles, where the “bikes” side of the equation are presented in a decidedly sympathetic light, the film also spends some time in Toronto and Copenhagen, while namechecking other cities. Regular cyclist deaths, often due to a lack of bike lanes and aggressive bus and car drivers, provide an unfortunate impetus for mobilization and lobbying by Brazilian activists, while LA’s historical catering to cyclists offers an intriguing background to Gertten’s portrait of community organizer Dan Koeppel. Strangely, despite offering Copenhagen as one of the utopian ideals for cyclists, the film’s profile of that city is through the lens of a frustrated taxi driver who must navigate the city streets while avoiding scofflaw cyclists, scoring some points for the “cars” side of Gertten’s film. Still, these are undercut by the striking statistics the film offers about the worrying growth of cars, cyclist deaths, the influence of the car/petrochemical lobbies, the insight of an engaging Brazilian urban planning professor, and even former Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s pandering to car-loving suburbanites. What remains problematic is the reductive argument at the core of the film, however, which willfully ignores the role that public transportation must play in any rethink of car culture, and that, for many, socioeconomic factors don’t make it quite so easy to choose between the only two options the film seems to present as viable.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, December 4: ONLY THE DEAD

Michael Ware and William Guttentag’s personal experience of the Iraq War made its world premiere at Sydney this Summer. The doc has also screened at Melbourne, New Zealand, and Telluride.

Constructed as an essay from Ware’s perspective, the film follows the war correspondent as he arrives in Baghdad in 2003 to report on the war for CNN and Time Magazine. Collecting footage over the next decade, Ware offers his reflections via narration on the invasion and the morass of occupation while loosely following the trajectory of al Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after the notorious jihadist sends the journalist a videotape claiming credit for brutal crimes. While the film is notably concise, there’s a looseness to the proceedings that never quite coheres, and Ware’s incessant musings have a tendency to grate. At the same time, he captures a harrowing and visceral experience of the front line of battle, often with a disturbing amount of hauntingly graphic violence on display that offers little respite from the brutality of modern-day warfare.

Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, December 4: THE MESSENGER

Su Rynard’s exploration of the plight of the songbird in the modern world had its world premiere at Hot Docs this past Spring. Other fest appearances have included Jackson Hole Wildlife, Vancouver, Mill Valley, Reykjavik, Calgary, and Bergen.

A response to the alarming decline in the population of songbirds, Rynard’s film travels around the world to explore some of the causes, from pesticides and light pollution to climate change and predators, human and feline alike. The film features beautiful lensing, including standout slow-motion sequences of various birds in flight, and profiles a wide-range of avian champions, from activists fighting against poaching (already well-covered in EMPTYING THE SKIES) to scientists employing the latest technology to track the songbirds’ migration patterns to a remarkable degree of accuracy never before possible. Rynard gets the point across that these melodious creatures are imperiled, and that their fates are intertwined with our own, but the survey approach taken here makes the film feel too episodic and at times scattered, diminishing from the greater impact that some of these vignettes might otherwise have.

Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, December 2: SOUND OF REDEMPTION: THE FRANK MORGAN STORY

NC Heikin’s story of a jazzman’s fall and rise bowed at the Los Angeles Film Festival last year. It has also screened at Hot Springs Doc, Palm Springs, Virginia, Vancouver, Atlanta, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Sound + Vision fests.

After seeing Charlie Parker play, seven-year-old Frank Morgan – the son of musician Stanley Morgan of the Ink Spots – was bitten by the jazz bug. Within a few years, he was acclaimed as a sax prodigy, and began touring in the late 1940s as a teenager for the likes of Billie Holiday. As a young African-American man attempting to come up at a time of overt racism and segregation, many opportunities were blocked for Morgan, precipitating desperate decisions and setting him off on a path of heroin addiction and crime that would see him incarcerated for the greater part of three decades. But, as signaled by Heikin’s film title, his fall wasn’t Morgan’s end, with prison offering the surprising possibility for music to help him get clean and refocus via the prison band, the San Quentin All Stars. Once released, he continued on the straight and narrow, recording a long-overdue second album, performing, and speaking out against drugs and crime. This often-familiar redemption trajectory is creatively, if somewhat awkwardly, set against a 2012 tribute concert at San Quentin, celebrating Morgan’s life and music five years after his death, with a surfeit of talking heads offering insight into the compelling performer’s story.