Category Archives: Releases

Coming to DVD and VOD tomorrow, Tuesday, August 25:
THE HOTTEST AUGUST

Director:
Brett Story

World Premiere:
True/False 2019

Select Festivals:
SXSW, Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, BAMcinemaFest, Sheffield, DOXA, Montclair, DokuFest, Open City Doc, Sarasota, Maryland

About:
An exploration of climate change and late-stage capitalism.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

New to VOD this week:
PARIAH DOG

Director:
Jesse Alk

World Premiere:
Big Sky Doc 2019

Select Festivals:
Krakow, Ashland, Cucalorus, DocPoint Helsinki, SF DocFest, DocPoint Tallinn, DocUtah, Docuwest, Woodstock, Kolkata, Mumbai

About:
An immersion into the lives of the street dogs of Kolkata, and those who care for them.

Shot on the streets of Kolkata, Jesse Alk’s experiential film focuses almost as much on his human subjects as on the canine ones. Both live on the margins of society in their own way, functioning as mirrors for one another. The dogs have had a long presence on India’s streets, and lead difficult lives. Attempting to provide some support are a handful of self-appointed caretakers – some more fleshed out by Alk than others – who themselves struggle to survive. While overall a downbeat project that may prove challenging for casual viewers, the film demonstrates a distinctive visual style and approach to storytelling.

New to DVD this week:
A TASTE OF SKY

Director:
Michael Lei

World Premiere:
CPH:DOX 2019

Select Festivals:
Tribeca, Washington DC Environmental, Haifa, Napa Valley

About:
A top European chef opens a fine-dining restaurant and cooking school in Bolivia.

Danish chef Claus Meyer, one of the leaders in New Nordic Cuisine and a co-founder of Noma, often recognized as the best restaurant in the world, opened Gustu in La Paz, in 2012, with the intention of making Bolivia the next hot spot for culinary travel. A foundational aspect of Gustu is a cooking school to create opportunities for local Bolivians to enter the industry. Filmmaker Michael Lei profiles two culinary students, Kenzo and Maria Claudia, as they learn their trade, confront the challenges of the high-pressure work, and try to forge a better future for themselves. While Meyer acknowledges and dismisses that his project might be dismissed as colonialist thinking, and that he himself might be positioned as a white savior, filmmaker Michael Lei’s unnecessary focus on the chef – and the risible decision to have Meyer’s own daughter interview him on camera – unfortunately lends the film a forced, promotional feel that ultimately undercuts whatever altruistic message it’s meant to impart.

Coming to virtual cinemas today, Wednesday, August 19:
COUP 53

Director:
Taghi Amirani

World Premiere:
Telluride 2019

Select Festivals:
London, CPH:DOX, Göteborg, Palm Springs, Vancouver, Mill Valley, Ashland, Taormina

About:
An exhaustive exploration of secrets behind the 1953 Anglo-American coup of Iran.

Often revelatory, particularly for Western audiences whose earliest reference point for Iran/American relations is the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, filmmaker Taghi Amirani’s comprehsnive look at the roots of the Iranian revolution in the 1953 coup that deposed popular prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh is a decade-long passion project. In ways both good and bad, it shows. To the film’s detriment is its excessive meta-filmmaking elements: Amirani (and, to a lesser extent, acclaimed editor Walter Murch) appears extensively throughout the film’s first half, detailing his research process, including superfluous scenes with him asking people if he can use the archival materials they are clearly providing him. While this first hour does provide necessary historical background and context for what follows, particularly in how the filmmaker discovered and pieced together uncensored transcripts for a 1985 British docuseries that prove key to the revelations that follow, there’s also a lot of material here that should have been cut. It’s no coincidence that things pick up in the second hour, after Amirani no longer appears on screen, underscoring that he did not belong in it in the first place and that the film’s meta elements likely could and should have been conveyed in a different manner. With Amirani out of the way, the film becomes a fascinating, layered examination of political intrigue, positioning the ouster of Mossadegh as the pivotal covert operation that emboldened both the UK and the US to intervene in and destabilize democratically elected governments around the world in the decades that followed.