Category Archives: Film

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.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, February 6: CALL FOR HELP

Lior Etziony and Michal Hanuka’s candid look at a ragtag group of relief workers makes its debut at New York City’s Cinema Village this weekend.

The devastation of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti drew the attention of the world. While many major nonprofit organizations descended on the island nation to assist in the relief efforts, the crisis also attracted the attention of unaffiliated individuals and unregistered groups, willing to jump into the trenches and help where larger forces might be stymied by bureaucracy. Etziony and Hanuka focus on a handful of such mavericks, who dub their makeshift NGO Global DIRT (Global Disaster Immediate Response Team). With the intention of assisting those Haitians who would otherwise slip through the cracks, Global DIRT, under the leadership of Adam, a young American Marine, his fellow soldier Sully, and student nurse Lauren, bends the rules to get supplies to those who seem in most need. Working with other young volunteers, including recovering alcoholic Like and photographer Stacey, the ramshackle group is followed as they answer the call to service – even if their methods are questionable and, arguably, might create more trouble than good, given a general lack of oversight and followup to the work that they do. While the filmmakers do an admirable job of fleshing out their subjects on the ground, exploring the various motivations – both practical and selfish – that led them to Haiti, the most intriguing element of the film, a self-reflexive follow up two years later, back in the States, is unfortunately given short shrift.