Category Archives: Documentary

New to DVD this week: AMERICAN ARAB

Usama Alshaibi’s personal exploration of Arab-American identity had its world premiere at IDFA in 2013. It went on to screen at Big Sky, Chicago Underground, Cleveland, Stockholm, Revelation, Kansas City, and the San Francisco Arab Film Festival, among others.

Alshaibi, an Iraqi-born, US-based filmmaker, takes a largely autobiographical approach in this examination of the experiences of Arabs and Arab Americans in a post-9/11 American society. Narrating and sharing his life experiences, and those of his family, the director expresses an ever-present awareness of the difficult tightrope he, and others with a similar ethnic background, have been forced to walk, contending with Islamophobia both blatant and more insidious, conflicted feelings about assimilation vs tradition, and a shifting sense of identity influenced by complex geopolitical developments. While he surveys the stories of others, from a woman who had her hijab forcefully snatched from her head to a young Iraqi immigrant whose father was victimized by both insurgents and US armed forces, these are too slight and episodic to fully breathe, with the default focus returning to Alshaibi’s personal biography to diminishing returns for the project’s too brief running time. While the film is not wholly successful, it does pose provocative, worthwhile questions that would benefit from more extended consideration.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, February 10: LOVE & ENGINEERING

Tonislav Hristov’s look at an engineer’s attempts to hack dating debuted at DocPoint last year. It went on to screen at Tribeca, Hot Docs, Karlovy Vary, Sarajevo, Bergen, DOK Leipzig, Flahertiana, DokuFest Prizren, and Visions du Reel, among others. FilmBuff now releases the film on various VOD platforms, including Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, iTunes, Sony PlayStation, Vudu and Xbox Video.

Atanas, a Bulgarian engineer based in Finland, is confident that he has love figured out. After all, unlike his hapless colleagues, he’s married, while they struggle to even have a conversation with the opposite sex. Convinced he can apply science to the typically inscrutable laws of the heart, he offers to coach his four friends with the goal of finding them the perfect mate – even if he warns them they have to keep their expectations realistic: No models, but good companions. Hristov follows Atanas in his efforts to school his hopelessly nerdy guinea pigs, watching them through painfully awkward blind dates, scientific experiments, and counseling sessions with experts. As a whole, the result is a lighter, and sometimes humorous, exploration of the search for love, but it ultimately feels contrived and without any fundamental revelations that would make it particularly memorable.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, February 10: CALL FOR HELP

Lior Etziony and Michal Hanuka’s provocative look at renegade relief workers in Haiti debuted theatrically in NYC last week. It now comes to VOD platforms including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Xbox, and VUDU.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to PBS’s American Experience tonight, Tuesday, February 10: THE FORGOTTEN PLAGUE

Chana Gazit’s look back at the deadliest disease in recorded history makes its debut on the long-running PBS series tonight.

Once rampant, and responsible, at the start of the 19th Century, for the deaths of one/seventh of the world’s cumulative population, tuberculosis is among the many diseases that were reconceptualized and effectively treated within modern times, though it has shown an alarming recurrence in recent decades. Gazit’s film, hewing close to American Experience’s set format – exposition through a mix of excessive narration and supplemental expert talking heads – explores the realities of life – and death – with TB, or consumption, as it was more popularly known as, until its eventual cure. At its core is the story of Edward Livingston Trudeau, a physician who was diagnosed with the disease in 1873, and was urged to turn to the natural world for treatment, with popular wisdom linking fresh air with a potential cure. He founded a sanitarium at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, spawning imitators to cater to consumptives, and organized a laboratory to study the disease, eventually replicating the work of German microbiologist Robert Koch. Koch initially identified the cause of the disease as a bacterium, changing the way that consumption was viewed, leading to its rebranding as tuberculosis – based on the shape of the offending bacterium – and its being treated as a public health emergency, with some surprising impact on culture, from the introduction of Kleenex to the disappearance of beards and the shortening of women’s hemlines, all with the aim of stopping the easy transmission of germs. It’s information like this, and the earlier role of consumption in helping to populate Western cities, whose advertising campaigns initially wooed consumptives with claims of cures due to Los Angeles or Denver’s clean air, that provides the most interesting elements of Gazit’s otherwise competent but conventionally constructed film.

Coming to VOD tomorrow, Tuesday, February 10: LOVE ME

Jonathan Narducci’s look at Ukraine’s Internet bride industry debuted at the Florida Film Festival last year. Screenings followed at New Orleans, Hot Docs, Hot Springs, CNEX Doc, Newport Beach, and San Francisco DocFest, among others. Gravitas Ventures now releases the film across all major VOD and digital platforms.

Narducci’s film follows several American men, and one Aussie, as they seek love through modern technology via the matchmaking website A Foreign Affair, which connects suitors with Ukrainian women. While the service doesn’t promise brides – it instead facilitates online interactions, and, for a further fee, arranges trips to Ukraine for in-person social gatherings – many of the six men profiled in the film don’t seem to really understand the distinction. Their unrealistic expectations, and, frankly, their often very skewed view of the innocuous virtual correspondences they’ve begun with the site’s Slavic beauties, lend Narducci’s film its most watchable – though often cringeworthy -moments. While some of the men simply seem to be living in a fantasy world, this is sometimes exacerbated by less-then-genuine women eager to string along lovesick suckers, but, unsurprisingly, it’s more difficult to fully capture the former on camera. For other participants, they approach A Foreign Affair more cautiously, and often with more successful results. While generally engaging, the film’s biggest drawback is its glut of subjects – beyond the six would-be grooms (one or two too many, frankly), there are family members, dating site representatives, some of the women, and more heard from – and this survey structure makes the project feel overlong. While the awkwardness and Schadenfreude of the disastrous matches make this viewer friendly, mail order bride scams have been the focus of other documentaries before, so there’s not much new here, while the happier endings don’t really have much inherent drama.