Category Archives: Recommendations

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, April 5: OF MEN AND WAR

Laurent Bécue-Renard’s raw exploration of the impact of PTSD on veterans debuted at Cannes in 2014. Screenings followed at IDFA, Göteborg, DocPoint, Documentary Fortnight, ZagrebDox, True/False, Full Frame, Visions du Réel, Documenta Madrid, San Francisco, DOXA, Sydney, AFI Docs, Human Rights Watch, and DOK.Fest Munich, among others.

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

Coming to VOD tomorrow, Tuesday, April 5: WHO TOOK JOHNNY?

David Beilinson, Suki Hawley, and Michael Galinsky’s investigation of a mother’s decades-long search for her missing son debuted at Slamdance in 2014. The doc also screened at Big Sky, Brooklyn, Maryland, Chicago Underground, and Newport Beach, among other events. FilmBuff now releases the film on VOD platforms.

Noreen Gosch has been searching for her son Johnny since the then twelve-year-old vanished from his Des Moines neighborhood during his paper route in 1982. Despite being the first missing child whose photo was featured on the side of a milk carton, Johnny was never found. Hampered by regulations that necessitated a 72-hour wait period, authorities turned up no clues and instead suspected he ran away, angering Noreen and setting her on a life-long quest to discover what happened. While sensitively exploring the toll of her mission on the still-grieving mother, the filmmakers also carefully detail the prevailing theory on Johnny’s fate – a disturbing conspiracy that suggests he, and other missing children, were the victims of a human trafficking ring catering to well-connected pedophiles. At the same time, a late revelation from Noreen introduces an intriguing ambiguity that colors the entire film, calling to mind other 1980s-era scares around child abduction and abuse – day-care hysteria, Satanic ritual panic – that have nevertheless left a lasting impact on parents of irrational fear and distrust.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, April 1: CATCHING THE SUN

Shalini Kantayya’s look at initiatives to expand solar energy had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival last Summer. Screenings followed at Big Sky, Washington DC’s Environmental, San Francisco Green, Twin Cities, and Australia’s Transitions, among others.

Recognizing the potential in renewable energy to provide not only a means to kick oil dependence but to generate much-needed employment and revenue, initiatives have emerged in cities both at home and abroad to tap into solar power. Kantayya’s film surveys the landscape of the solar boom, both on the local level, as she explores how the city of Richmond CA turns to training programs as a means to fight high crime rates, unemployment, and the dangers of a nearby Chevron refinery; and on the global scale, as Chinese solar entrepreneur Wally Jiang dreams of expanding his successful business to other countries. Demonstrating the US government’s resistance to the adoption of sensible renewable energy policies, well-represented here by both historical precedent – President Carter’s installation of solar panels on the White House and their immediate removal when President Reagan took office – and the rise and fall of the film’s subject Van Jones – who finds himself moving from the SF Bay Area’s Green for All program to serve as President Obama’s Special Advisor on Green Jobs and instantly attacked by the rightwing – the doc instead sees hope in grassroots initiatives that change local behavior and create demand among the people that will prove harder and harder to ignore.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, April 1: GAYBY BABY

Maya Newell’s portrait of LGBT families debuted at Hot Docs last year. The film went on to screen at DOC NYC, London, Melbourne, Sydney, Documentary Edge, Warsaw, and DOK Leipzig, among other fests.

I previously wrote about the film for DOC NYC’s program, saying:
Gus is obsessed with wrestling, perhaps disturbingly so. Ebony is nervous about nailing her audition to a performing arts school. Matt, raised with religion, is flirting with atheism. Graham has to contend with his difficulties reading and a family move to Fiji. They’re all very different preteens, but they have one thing in common – they have same-sex parents. Maya Newell’s beautifully composed film reveals both the challenges of same-sex parenting and the refreshing commonalities shared by every family.

Coming to NYC’s Metrograph for a week run as part of its Three Wiseman series this Friday, April 1: TITICUT FOLLIES

Frederick Wiseman’s controversial study of a Massachusetts prison asylum had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1967. The documentary faced legal challenges by the state almost immediately, which successfully prevented its general release until 1991, though it did initially screen in European fests including Mannheim-Heidelberg and Florence’s Festival Dei Popoli in 1967. This newly restored print entered the festival circuit at Toronto last year.

Wiseman’s debut film fittingly began his interest in documenting institutions, in this case the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater. Borrowing its title from the name of the disturbing musical talent show foisted upon the inmates which bookends the film, this observational portrait unflinchingly reveals the horrific treatment and lack of empathy that existed in this setting. While individuals or their diagnoses are rarely identified, their lack of differentiation underscores the inadequacies and abuses of their care by prison and hospital officials. Neglected when they’re not being actively ridiculed or maltreated, these men seem destined to wither away, hopeless, as Wiseman’s camera, and, by extension, the audience, bear witness to their suffering.