Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, July 1: A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON

Les Blank’s Leon Russell music doc, completed in 1974, recently made its debut at SXSW. It has since screened at AFI Docs and BAMcinemaFest prior to its theatrical release.

Originally commissioned by folk rocker Leon Russell but caught up in legal troubles, likely due to the artist’s dislike of the final film, Blank’s unruly portrait went unreleased for over four decades. After the filmmaker’s death, his son brokered an agreement with Russell to remaster and finally release the film, long heralded as a “lost” classic by Blank fans. While I’m generally an admirer of Blank’s work, I remain generally uninterested in music docs, and I have no idea who Russell is – following viewing this portrait, that hasn’t changed much: as far as music portraits go, this one is an odd duck. Fans of Russell will likely appreciate the performance footage, but bristle, perhaps as Russell himself did, at Blank’s seeming lack of focused concentration on his ostensible subject – the filmmaker is as likely to train his camera on the demolition of a building in Tulsa, a sunset, or a group of parachuters as he is to following the musician around. This free-association, slice of Americana approach yields some lovely moments of local color – such as an early interview with an older neighbor couple, or a little girl insisting on singing Three Dog Night at a wedding – but in the end proves more frustrating than not compared to Blank’s other, better-known works.

Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, July 1: MALA MALA

Dan Sickles and Antonio Santini’s ostensible portrait of the trans experience in Puerto Rico debuted at Tribeca last year. Other fest appearances have included Provincetown, Austin LGBT, Sydney’s Queer Screen, and Miami LGBT.

Sickles and Santini turn their attention to an excessive nine subjects, creating a survey which is ultimately bogged down by its surfeit of characters and a lack of focus. Despite most media touting the doc as a look at the Puerto Rican trans community, the film actually includes three non-trans-identifying drag queens, four self-identified MTF (one not even Puerto Rican), one woman who refuses the trans label, preferring gender dysphoric instead, and one token FTM who, while sympathetic, barely appears. This strange conflation of trans and drag is significant insofar as one major thread involves the efforts of the trans subjects to mobilize their community to support an anti-discrimination law – it’s telling that those who participate in the Butterflies Trans Foundation are not drag queens, but the other trans-identified characters. While characters like the gender-dysphoric Soraya, or Samantha, whose transition has been temporarily halted, at least afford an opportunity to consider questions around gender, age, and the body, the inclusion of the forgettable drag queen characters feels extraneous, or worse, an excuse to include footage of lip-sync performances to try to spice up the proceedings. Beyond being ill-fitting, it’s a shame, as two of the trans subjects are compelling enough to carry the film all by themselves: Ivana, a self-possessed spokeswoman for the community, and Sandy, a sex worker who’d love to be able to support herself with more traditional employment.

Coming to PBS today, Tuesday, June 30: 1913: SEEDS OF CONFLICT

Ben Loeterman’s look back at the origins of Middle Eastern strife made its festival debut at the Middle East Scholars Association fest in DC last November. In addition to an extensive series of educational and community screenings, the film has also been featured at the Global Peace, Atlanta Jewish, and Houston Palestine film fests.

As noted by his film’s title, Loeterman focuses his attention on a discrete period of time in Palestine’s history which is posited here as integral to the seemingly intractable quagmire of Israeli/Palestinian relations that has developed over the past century. Notably, this pre-World War I period is concerned with the Ottoman Empire, not the later British rule which began in 1917 which has often been the subject of more scrutiny in its role in later historical developments. The world of Palestine as detailed in Loeterman’s docudrama is a land where a majority population of Muslims coexisted generally peacefully with both Christian and Sephardic Jewish minorities, with all groups adopting an overarching sense of Ottoman identity. This begins to change in response to other global forces, chiefly the mass influx of Ashkenazi Jews to Palestine, seeking to escape persecution. As argued here by scholars, in contrast to the generally assimilated Sephardic Jews, this wave of new Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe steadfastly held to their own identities, language, and culture, espousing Zionism to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, and in so doing, alienated Arab neighbors, who responded in kind. While the film’s subjects speculate that a peaceful solution may have been possible, the outbreak of World War I extinguished this hope. Loeterman attempts to liven up what is at heart a talking heads heavy historical doc with dramatized re-enactments featuring monologues from contemporary figures. While the authenticity of their writings is appreciated, the use of actors in period garb are ultimately just additional talking heads in period costume, and an awkward distraction from the more compelling history lesson offered here, including not quite enough on Noah Sokolovsky’s recently rediscovered 1913 documentary, THE LIFE OF THE JEWS OF PALESTINE.

Coming to iTunes today, Tuesday, June 30: ANTARCTIC EDGE: 70° SOUTH

Dena Seidel’s climate change profile debuted at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival earlier this year. It went on to screen at the International Wildlife and Minneapolis film fests before its theatrical release this Spring.

I previously wrote about the doc here.