Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, February 3: FOOD CHAINS

Sanjay Rawal’s investigation into unjust treatment of migrant farmworkers bowed at Berlin last year. Other festival stops included Tribeca, Guadalajara, Vancouver, Minneapolis St Paul, and Napa Valley.

I previously wrote about the film upon its theatrical release here.

Coming to PBS’s America ReFramed tonight, Tuesday, February 3: OUR MOCKINGBIRD

Sandra Jaffe’s exploration of race and class in America has had various work-in-progress and community screenings since 2010, including Sidewalk, Newburyport Doc, Roxbury, and the Boston Jewish film fests.

Using TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD as its focal point, Jaffe’s film considers the progress – and lack thereof – of race relations in the more than five decades since the publication of Harper Lee’s seminal novel. At its core is the collaborative staging of a play adapted from Lee’s singular work by two Birmingham AL high schools – one exclusively white, the other exclusively black – demonstrating the lingering shadow of segregation in areas of the South. While Jaffe follows the teens in their preparations, tackling the story’s themes of racism and injustice even as they navigate their first real encounters and friendships with peers of a different race, the filmmaker supplements their stories with those of familiar figures who speak to the influence and lasting impact of Lee’s book, from civil rights leaders like US Congressman John Lewis and cast members from the film adaptation, to US Attorney General Eric Holder and television journalist Katie Couric. Culminating with the successful mounting of the play – attended by Nelle Harper Lee herself – the film proves watchable, even if it occasionally meanders, attempting to cover too much territory in its relatively brief running time.

Coming to PBS’s American Experience and to DVD today, Tuesday, February 3: THE BIG BURN

Stephen Ives’ recounting of an infamous forest fire makes its debut on the venerable PBS program as well as on DVD.

In the Summer of 1910, an unprecedented wildfire claimed more than three million acres of forest in the Northern Rockies in about a day and a half. As the nascent – and overconfident – US Forest Service attempted to combat the blaze, calling upon several companies of African American recruits – the Buffalo Soldiers – to aid the effort, they found themselves facing the near-impossible task of reining in Mother Nature. As argued in Ives’ informative if conventionally structured film, which is based on historian Timothy Egan’s book, the grave lessons learned from the devastating blaze spurred Washington to expand the protection of the nation’s public lands, and to adopt policies to prevent its repetition – with both good and bad consequences. While the 1910 fire made legends of the valiant men who fought it, creating the image of the forest ranger as a selfless national hero, the standing order that resulted, to suppress every subsequent forest fire, may have unintentionally backfired, removing a natural, replenishing cycle of small wildfires and instead turning swaths of forest into fuel for larger, more destructive fires to again blaze out of control.