Coming to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, April 14:
EAST LAKE MEADOWS: A PUBLIC HOUSING STORY
Director:
Sarah Burns and David McMahon
World Premiere:
PBS broadcast (March 2020)
About:
The history of an Atlanta public housing community.
I previously wrote about the doc here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
Coming to PBS’s Independent Lens this coming Monday, April 13:
BEDLAM
Director:
Kenneth Paul Rosenberg
Premiere:
Sundance 2019
Select Festivals:
DOC NYC, Double Exposure, Hot Springs, Martha’s Vineyard, Pan African, Boston Jewish, ReelAbilities
About:
An exposé of America’s failure to properly care for the mentally ill.
I profiled the doc before Sundance here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases, Sundance
New to DVD this week:
THE COLD BLUE
Director:
Erik Nelson
Premiere:
AFI Docs 2018
Select Festivals:
New York, Traverse City
About:
A meditation on war composed of archival film of B-17 bombers shot by William Wyler.
I previously wrote about the doc here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
New to DVD/VOD this week:
CITIZEN K
Director:
Alex Gibney
World Premiere:
Venice 2019
Select Festivals:
Toronto, London, Warsaw, AFI Fest, Hamptons, Rio
About:
An exploration of post-Soviet Russia through oligarch-turned-dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
I previously wrote about the doc here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
Coming to PBS today, Tuesday, April 7 and next Tuesday, April 14:
THE GENE: AN INTIMATE HISTORY
Directors:
Chris Durrance and Jack Youngelson
World Premiere:
PBS broadcast (April 2020)
About:
A far-ranging history of the discovery and research into the human genome.
Based on the eponymous book by Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, and executive produced by Ken Burns, this two-part, four-hour documentary provides viewers with a crash course in genetic science, tracing its development from the pioneering 19th century studies of Gregor Mendel to the mapping of the human genome and more recent, thorny questions around genetic manipulation through technologies like CRISPR. Threaded alongside this history – which, while informative, is presented in a conventional, educational PBS style of expository narration, talking heads, and graphics – are various profiles of individuals facing challenges due to genetic diseases, bringing a human angle while also demonstrating the wide implications of the science being discussed. The project’s expanded form allows room to address the complex ethical issues involved, and to contextualize them with considerations of how genetic science has been perverted in the past through eugenics, and how this could resurface through modern genetic tinkering. This is critical, as shown in the disturbing development which serves as the film’s bookend, the November 2018 announcement that a Chinese researcher defied an agreed upon moratorium on clinical gene-editing to alter twin baby girls in vitro to be unable to contract HIV.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
Coming to PBS today, Monday, April 6:
BROKEN PLACES
Director:
Roger Weisberg
World Premiere:
Kansas 2018
Select Festivals:
Cinequest, United Nations Association
About:
The impact of early childhood trauma is explored via longitudinal portraits incorporating the filmmaker’s decades-long documentary career.
Oscar-nominated director Roger Weisberg draws from his previous projects of the 1980s-2000s, incorporating footage of children and teen subjects and following up with them in the present day as young adults to demonstrate the impact of traumatic experiences and of unstable homes on health and well-being. The central question is why some children succumb to adversity while others persevere, measured by ACES – Adverse Childhood Experience Scores – which have been shown to not only contribute to repetitions of cycles of poverty and violence, but also to negative health consequences. Weisberg’s longitudinal portraits include individuals who have suffered negative outcomes, like Yvonne and Bobby, a harried African American mother living in poverty and her most troubled son, who have experienced depression and further biological health consequences, continuing into the next generation; as well as those who have managed to persevere, like Daniela, who met her ex-husband in a group home as a teen and became a teen mother, but has been unwilling to let her own children fall into the same cycle, as has happened to her ex. The story of brothers Danny and Raymond, who were neglected and abandoned by their drug addicted mother, illustrate that children in the same traumatic environment can have very different outcomes from one another. Advances in the measurement of the impact of ACES have allowed for better early intervention, which has a cascading benefit both socially and economically. While the stories are affecting, Weisberg’s filmmaking approach feels very dated, employing voice of God narration and talking heads that result in a project that looks like it was made in the 1980s rather than today.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Releases
Coming to The WORLD Channel’s Reel South today, Monday, April 6:
F11 AND BE THERE
Director:
Jethro Waters
World Premiere:
Austin 2018
Select Festivals:
Full Frame, RiverRun
About:
An exploration of photographer Burk Uzzle’s acclaimed 65-year career.
Burk Uzzle began his photojournalism career in the 1950s. By 1961, at the age of 23, he became the youngest photographer to work for Life magazine, and later was an influential member of the Magnum collective. Through his career, he has captured iconic images, from Woodstock to the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr, with a particular focus on the 1960s civil rights struggle. In his awkwardly named film – which reflects Uzzle’s two key bits of advice for photographers, which aperture to use and to simply be present – director Jethro Waters accompanies the near-octogenarian on his current projects, documenting the African American community in his native North Carolina, as well as landscapes across the country, while discussing his process. Waters brings a string visual style to mirror his subject, but stumbles when it comes to the film’s overbearing, distracting score, marring an otherwise compelling artist portrait.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Releases
Coming to PBS today, Friday, April 3:
THE WINDERMERE CHILDREN: IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Directors:
Guy Arthur and Francis Welch
World Premiere:
British TV broadcast (January 2020)
About:
Child survivors of the Holocaust reflect on a rehabilitation program in which they took part in the UK.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, British philanthropist Leonard Montefiore developed an innovative but untested program to rehabilitate and resocialize youth traumatized by their experiences of the Holocaust. Working through the Central British Fund charity, which assisted Jewish refugees, he selected 300 young survivors of Theresienstadt, some as young as three years old, and had them flown to the British countryside in August 1945. Taking up residence in an abandoned aircraft factory near Lake Windermere, the youth spent the next four months being nurtured by counsellors and volunteers using pioneering child psychology and art therapy techniques, in addition to physical education and the freedom to explore their bucolic environs. Guy Arthur and Francis Welch’s doc is a companion to a fiction feature, also debuting on PBS, about their experiences, recounted here through interviews with survivors and select clips from the dramatization. While hewing close to the conventions of Holocaust documentary, and affecting due to the emotional testimony of its subjects, there’s added interest from the unusual story of the Windermere project and the focus on giving the young survivors a way to process their grief and emerge with a sense of hope despite the horrors through which they lived.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
New to DVD/VOD this week:
SKIN DEEP: THE BATTLE OVER MORGELLONS
Director:
Pi Ware
World Premiere:
Awareness Film Fest 2019
Select Festivals:
Cleveland
About:
An investigation into a mysterious and contested skin condition.
Morgellons is characterized by skin irritation, the feeling of things creeping beneath the skin, and sores that often are said to be accompanied by the growth of strange, sometimes colorful fibers. It’s also a condition that is typically self-diagnosed after online searches, and has had very little support from the medical establishment, which generally has concluded that it is a form of delusional parasitosis without a physiological etiology. In his fairly conventionally constructed film, which includes superfluous reenactments and tangential personalia, director Pi Ware profiles several individuals who suffer from Morgellons, as well as their advocates, resulting in a project that largely seems sympathetic with their perspective, while also giving some space to physicians who subscribe to the psychiatric explanation of the condition. While it’s a worthwhile question as to what the underlying causes are for Morgellons, this focus on its origins/”realness,” and the distrust and hostility that emerges because of it – as demonstrated by a frustrated sufferer screaming at a doctor at a small Morgellons conference towards the end of the doc – misses the bigger point, too briefly addressed here: Ultimately, regardless of whether or not Morgellons has a biological component, the suffering is real and worthy of being addressed and not dismissed.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Releases
Coming to DVD/VOD tomorrow, Friday, April 3:
IT STARTED AS A JOKE
Directors:
Julie Smith Clem and Ken Druckerman
World Premiere:
SXSW 2019
Select Festivals:
Nantucket, BAMcinemaFest, IFF Boston
About:
A love letter to the world of stand-up comedy through the decade-long story of an unlikely event.
I previously wrote about the doc for Nantucket’s program, saying:
In 2008, comedian Eugene Mirman and director Julie Smith Clem jokingly launched the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, an alternative to stuffy mainstream comedy events. Over the next decade, the festival became a nurturing environment for the likes of Mike Birbiglia, Michael Ian Black, Jim Gaffigan, Kristen Schaal, Kumail Nanjiani, Janeane Garofalo, and Bobcat Goldthwait. This funny and surprisingly moving film celebrates the final festival and its founder, whose personal experiences demonstrate the healing power of comedy.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
what (not) to doc 