Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to theatres and to VOD today, Friday, June 6: BURT’S BUZZ

Jody Shapiro’s portrait of the reluctant founder of Burt’s Bees had its world premiere at Toronto last year. Its festival circuit also included San Francisco, Ashland, Seattle, Panama, Wisconsin, Santa Barbara, and Sedona, among others.

I previously wrote about the doc out of Toronto here.

Coming to NYC’s Quad Cinema tomorrow, Friday, June 6: SMALL SMALL THING

Jessica Vale’s look at a disturbing case of child rape in Liberia had its world premiere at Palm Beach last year. It went on to screen at Dallas, Bronze Lens, Encounters, Warsaw, Baghdad, Toronto Black, LA Pan African, and Egypt’s Luxor fest, among others.

At the start of Vale’s film, Olivia, a nine-year-old, is brought in for medical treatment in a Monrovian hospital, suffering from malnourishment and a debilitating fistula. Her mother believed her condition to be caused by witchcraft, and kept her homebound for two years, but medical professionals soon determine that the cause is a horrific rape – by Olivia’s own cousin, when the girl was just seven-years-old. Sadly, the film reveals that child rape is no rare crime in Liberia. What’s worse, victims are often ostracized, made to suffer twice over as their community shuns them for causing trouble, as happens here. As Vale follows Olivia and her mother to their sad end, as they face obstacles in their search for justice, she lays out a compelling analysis about how Liberia’s violent past of civil war and child soldiers has led to a culture that tacitly condones rape. While Olivia’s story is moving (and has since inspired a scholarship to be founded in her name), Vale’s well-intentioned film is too conventional in approach, often unfocused, and unfortunately plagued with an overuse of narration and a corresponding tendency to speak for her subjects rather than allowing them to speak for themselves, ultimately making the doc less effective than it could have been.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, June 3: THE NEXT BLACK

David Dworsky and Victor Köhler’s look at the future of fashion made its debut last month on various online platforms. FilmBuff expands its reach, offering the doc on iTunes, Playstation, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, Vudu, and Hulu, among other VOD platforms.

Dworsky and Köhler’s mid-length takes a brief but often intriguing survey of potentially radical changes to the way clothes may be made, and to how consumers may relate to their fashion choices. Despite the playfulness of the doc’s title, these aren’t simple aesthetic choices to be switched out after the season, but rather seismic shifts in everything from materials, processes, functions, and the actions of individual purchasers. Among the subjects explored (introduced and bridged via a narrator who would grow increasingly tiresome if this was a longer project) are the creation of digital and biological couture – applying technology such as 3D printing or organic cultivation to create new types of materials or fabric, the development of smart clothing that can monitor biometrics, and the encouragement of environmentally sustainable practices, such as dry dyeing to eliminate water waste and pollution or a return to “slow fashion,” which encourages consumers to buy less, and to repair or recycle garments rather than dispose of them.