Category Archives: Recommendations

Coming to theatres this Friday, August 15: A WILL FOR THE WOODS

Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale, and Brian Wilson’s look at the intersection of environmentalism and the funeral industry made its debut at Full Frame last year. It went on to screen at DOC NYC, New Orleans, AFI Docs, Sidewalk, DocuWest, Camden, Princeton Environmental, Big Sky, Cleveland, Sebastopol Doc, Atlanta, and San Francisco Green, among others.

I previously included the film in my AFI Docs coverage here.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, August 12: WE COULD BE KING

Judd Ehrlich’s portrait of a struggling high school football team premiered at Tribeca this Spring. It went on to be broadcast on ESPN and now comes to VOD via Tribeca Film.

Faced with a budget deficit in the hundreds of millions, the Philadelphia school district is forced to shut down two dozen schools, among them Germantown. Students from the nearly hundred-year-old high school find themselves in the precarious situation of joining their forty-year nemesis, Martin Luther King High. Despite a lack of any funding for school athletics, MLK’s administrators recognize the role of athletics as one of the few paths toward higher education for the African American student body, and continue their football program, merging the two rivals into a single team, run by volunteer coach Ed, who himself was laid off from his Germantown teaching job. Over the course of the tumultuous season chronicled in Ehrlich’s intimately observed film, the King Cougars must learn to set aside old grudges in order to score their first win in over two years – in the process serving as a symbol of the unity the merged school desperately needs. In charting the unexpected developments on and off the field, Ehrlich wisely concentrates on three main characters – in addition to the coach, players Dontae and Sal, both in danger of jeopardizing their opportunity for self-advancement – the former struggling with bad grades and a worse attitude, and the latter facing criminal charges for apparently being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Coming to VOD tomorrow, Tuesday, August 12: LOVE HOTEL

Philip Cox and Hikaru Toda’s inside look at a discreet Japanese cultural mainstay premiered at Hot Docs this Spring. The doc has gone on to screen at Melbourne, NY Asian American, and Biografilm. FilmBuff now releases the film on various VOD platforms.

The tradition of short-term stay hotels or teahouses that facilitate sexual encounters has a long history in Japan. As Cox and Toda’s intimate film demonstrates, however, a recent conservative turn in the government threatens to make them a thing of the past. Against this backdrop, the film focuses on a single establishment, Osaka’s Angelo Love Hotel. As its staff contends with the “entertainment police” and their increasingly restrictive regulations, the hotel hosts several patrons, including a middle-aged couple trying to jumpstart their lovelife, a pair of closeted gay lawyers seeking privacy, a lonely older man, and a dominatrix servicing unsatisfied married men. Liberated by their surroundings, these and other customers demonstrate surprising candor, making an argument for the value of such establishments in a society that tends to downplay individual desires.

Coming to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, August 12: DANCING IN JAFFA

Hilla Medalia’s exploration of a crosscultural Israeli/Palestinian dance program premiered at Tribeca last year. Other screenings included DocAviv, Sydney, Munich, and Jewish fests in Miami, Boston, London, Palm Beach, Calgary, San Francisco, DC, and elsewhere.

I previously wrote about the doc out of Tribeca here.

Coming to PBS’s Global Voices series this Sunday, August 10: DIAMOND IN THE DUNES

Christopher Rufo’s exploration of the unifying power of baseball makes its debut this weekend as part of the WORLD Channel’s international doc series.

Set in China’s Xinjiang Province, Rufo’s film follows Parhat, one of the region’s indigenous Uyghur Muslim minority, as the youth leaves his rural village for university in the big city. His mother explains that he’s discovered a game that’s foreign to the Uyghur people – baseball. Living a segregated existence from the Han Chinese majority, the only venue for cross-cultural exchange is the baseball diamond, with Parhat captaining the university’s integrated squad – and the only team in the province. As they train for an entire year to compete in a single game against a Tibetan team 2000 miles away, Rufo follows Parhat and his teammates against the backdrop of an ongoing ethnic separatist conflict in the region which threatens to dissolve the team. Providing a rare look at an ethnic minority in China, the film – and its likeable protagonist – goes beyond a simple baseball team profile to successfully demonstrates the potential of sports to bridge cultural and religious divides.

Coming to NYC’s Film Society of Lincoln Center tomorrow, Friday, August 8: WHAT NOW? REMIND ME

Joaquim Pinto’s personal essay on living with illness debuted last year at Locarno, where it claimed both FIPRESCI and Special Jury Prizes. It went on to screen at the New York Film Festival, Rotterdam, Vancouver, QueerLisboa, Hong Kong, Thessaloniki Doc, RIDM, Valdivia, DocLisboa, San Francisco, CPH:DOX, Edinburgh, and Seattle, among others. The Film Society’s week-long run comes in conjunction with a retrospective of Pinto’s previously directed films, as well as those he worked on as an acclaimed sound recordist and designer.

Over the course of nearly three hours, Pinto lays bare a year of his life – one marked by experimental treatments to keep both his HIV and Hepatitis C in check. Traveling between home in Portugal, clinic visits in Madrid, and a Summer farming project in the Azores, the director, his reticent husband Nuno, and their four expressive dogs figure in a compelling collage of sound and image, punctuated by Pinto’s running voiceover. With candor and vulnerability, he chronicles the effects of drugs on his system, and on his memory, the spectre of his mortality hanging over the entire project, brought into focus through reflections on past colleagues and mentors who have succumbed to AIDS. While this year-in-the-life conceit provides the film with a structure, it’s ultimately a loose one, with Pinto regularly indulging in welcome tangents through space and time, or shifting the focus away from himself to acknowledge the state of the world – such as the global financial crisis and conflict in Syria – or to reveal moments of sublime natural beauty, from the opening shot of a slug to a bee eating a hamburger to a dragonfly hovering around a blade of grass.

Coming to theatres tomorrow, Friday, August 8: THE DOG

Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren’s portrait of the real-life figure whose story inspired DOG DAY AFTERNOON had its world premiere at Toronto last year. It went on to screen at the New York Film Festival, Berlin, SXSW, Thessaloniki, Palm Springs, San Francisco, Cleveland, QDoc, and Montclair, among others.

I previously wrote about the film out of Toronto here.