Category Archives: Film

Coming to POV next Tuesday, July 26: MUGABE AND THE WHITE AFRICAN

Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson’s film had its world premiere at Hot Docs in 2009, and went on to play at a number of notable festivals, including London, IDFA, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Seattle, Hamptons, and Silverdocs. In addition to winning jury prizes at the latter two events, the documentary also won Best Documentary at the British Independent Film Awards, and was nominated for a BAFTA.

I wrote about the film out of Hot Docs for indieWIRE, saying:
MUGABE AND THE WHITE AFRICAN tackles another government and its repressive policies by focusing on the legal struggle of a white Zimbabwean farmer and his family to keep his land in the face of President Robert Mugabe’s corrupt and racist land reform policy. Exploring the question of what it means to be part of the white minority in an African country, the directors risk their own safety by secretly filming incidents of violence intended to intimidate whites off of their land.

Bailey and Thompson found a solid protagonist in 75-year-old Michael Campbell, an Australian-born, naturalized Zimbabwean. He refuses to bow down to Mugabe’s discriminatory practices, challenging the government’s program legally, and holding his ground despite threats of violence against him and his family. This well-crafted film simultaneously operates as a profile of Campbell, a tense legal thriller, and a decades-spanning history of the legacy of racist policies in the African nation.

Coming to NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction next Tuesday, July 26: BETTER THIS WORLD

Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega launched their insightful and disturbing examination of a trumped up case of domestic terrorism at SXSW this year, and made the rounds, screening at Full Frame, Hot Docs, Silverdocs, and picking up awards at both San Francisco and Sarasota.

I wrote about the film after its premiere here.

Note: Director Katie Galloway is scheduled to participate in a post-screening Q&A.

Coming to NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image as part of its Errol Morris’ America series this weekend, July 16-17: THE THIN BLUE LINE

Morris’ 1988 film is arguably among only a handful of documentaries of the past century that crossed over in something of a lasting way into the popular mainstream’s consciousness. Chiefly, this is due to its real world impact, helping to re-open the case it documents and exonerate an innocent man. While it resonated with the industry, winning numerous film critic circle awards, it was disqualified for an Oscar nomination due to a strange technicality, considered “non-fiction” instead of “documentary” for some reason.

The film details the investigation of the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood involving Randall Dale Adams, a drifter, and David Harris, a teen runaway. Through interviews and re-enactments based on witness and investigator testimony (innovative at the time), Morris reconstructs the different versions of Wood’s shooting death and builds a case against the prevailing theory that led to Adams conviction and death sentence. Morris’ storytelling techniques have since become commonplace, but, at the time, they brought a dynamism and immediacy to what might have been little more than a segment on a news magazine program. I’m almost always against the use of re-enactments in documentary, but there are always exceptions, and while Morris can’t be said to be the first to employ them, he incorporates them in a skillful and deliberate manner that, most importantly, fit the crux of his film – the crime investigation. But it’s a crime investigation that is highly stylized both in visuals and in its Philip Glass composed score – a film noir documentary that was elevated beyond the realm of a nightly news report to achieve an artfulness and potency that had direct, real life consequences.