Coming to TV on NatGeo this Saturday, January 25:
THE CAVE
Director:
Feras Fayyad
World Premiere:
Toronto 2019
Select Festivals:
DOC NYC, London, Hamptons, Camden, Double Exposure, Mill Valley, Heartland, Tallgrass, Virginia
Notable Recognition:
The doc has been nominated for the Academy Awards.
About:
A female doctor defies patriarchal expectations to lead an underground hospital in Syria.
I previously wrote about the doc here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
photo by Edward Burtynsky
Directors:
Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky
World Premiere:
Toronto 2018
Select Festivals:
Sundance, Berlin, Cleveland, Washington DC Enviro, Calgary, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Doc10, Docs Against Gravity, Sydney, Sheffield, Revelation Perth, Melbourne Doc, DokuFest
About:
A striking visual chronicle of human impact on the planet.
My pre-Sundance profile of the doc may be found here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Film Festivals, Recommendations, Releases, Sundance
Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, January 21:
THE FREEDOM TO MARRY
Director:
Eddie Rosenstein
Premiere:
Frameline 2016
Select Festivals:
DOC NYC, Hawaii, Savannah, Big Sky Doc, Sebastopol Doc, Jewish fests in SF, Boston, Denver, and Philadelphia, LGBT fests in Houston, Austin, Durham, Atlanta, Melbourne, Seoul
About:
A behind-the-scenes look at the fight to legalize same-sex unions in America.
I previously wrote about the doc here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
Coming to DVD today, Monday, January 20:
TRE MAISON DASAN
Director:
Denali Tiller
Premiere:
San Francisco 2018
Select Festivals:
DOC NYC, Cleveland, IFF Boston, Montclair, AFI Docs, Rhode Island, Heartland, Raindance, Cucalorus, Big Sky Doc, Thessaloniki Doc, NewportFilm
About:
A profile of three young boys whose parents are in prison.
I previously wrote about the doc here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
Coming to PBS’s AfroPoP today, Monday, January 20:
MY FRIEND FELA
Director:
Joel Zito Araújo
World Premiere:
Rotterdam 2019
Select Festivals:
London, Encounters, Cork, Jihlava, Johannesburg, Mill Valley, It’s All True
About:
Nigerian music icon Fela Kuti’s pan-African significance is explored by his biographer and friend.
Seeking to look beyond the typical, exclusively music-focused look at Fela Kuti that has emerged in the years since his death, Cuban director Joel Zito Araújo, working with Carlos Moore, explores Kuti’s wide-ranging influences, locating them within a larger pan-African consciousness and revolutionary spirit that touches on such figures as Malcolm X, Maya Angelous, Sandra Izsadore, and Patrice Lumumba. With Moore as a guide, and Kuti as a soundtrack, the film chronicles the musician’s career, clashes with the government, struggles with paranoia, and eventual death from AIDS-related illness in 1997. It’s an ambitious take, but, unfortunately, also a somewhat cluttered one, with Kuti getting lost at various times, and controversial aspects of his life too often glossed over. The result is an intriguing portrait, but not a particularly satisfying or successful one.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Releases
Coming to PBS’s Independent Lens today, Monday, January 20:
ACCEPT THE CALL
Director:
Eunice Lau
World Premiere:
Human Rights Watch NYC 2019
Select Festivals:
Woodstock, Singapore
About:
A Somali refugee reckons with his son’s arrest on terrorism charges.
Yusuf Abdurahman began a new life in Minnesota after leaving Somalia more than 25 years ago. In 2014, his teenage son Zacharia, who was born in the US, attempted to travel to Syria to support ISIS. Eventually, he plead guilty and was sentenced to a decade in federal prison. His father, struggling to understand what led his son to support a terrorist group, speaks with Zacharia via the phone in a series of candid, difficult conversations. In the process, Yusuf shares his experiences as a refugee and person of color in the US, while his son describes how his friends and he were recruited and radicalized through propaganda videos and books, as well as through personal contact, providing a much-needed sense of belonging, purpose, and importance. While such stories are sadly familiar, Lau’s intimate focus on a single father/son relationship is a smart choice, providing much-needed insight about such cases of radicalization while just as importantly humanizing a group to quickly dismissed and vilified in present-day American culture.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
Coming to DVD today, Friday, January 17:
BETTY: THEY SAY I’M DIFFERENT
Director:
Phil Cox
World Premiere:
IDFA 2017
Select Festivals:
Melbourne, Indielisboa, In-Edit, Revelation Perth, Festival Del Popoli, Indie Memphis
About:
On the pioneering but mysteriously short-lived career of 1970s funk queen Betty Davis.
For a brief time in the early 1970s, Betty Davis was the queen of funk. Though unfairly better known as Miles Davis’ wife, she released three albums and attracted notoriety for her raunchy lyrics and suggestive stage antics. By the end of the decade, however, she left the music industry and moved to Pittsburgh. Director Phil Cox explores Davis’ career, making an argument for her importance and influence on those that followed, and approaches her disappearance as a great mystery. Unfortunately, the film – clocking in at under an hour – doesn’t allot enough room to fully develop either of these threads, opting instead for teases of Davis’ presence and unnecessarily obtuse semi-experimental flourishes, leaving her to remain an intriguing but still elusive figure in the end.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Releases
New to DVD this week:
THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING
Director:
Nathaniel Kahn
Premiere:
Sundance 2018
Select Festivals:
Nantucket, True/False, CPH:DOX, Provincetown, New Zealand, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Athens, Adelaide
About:
A privileged look into the intersection of high art and commerce.
My pre-Sundance profile of the doc may be found here.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Film Festivals, Recommendations, Releases, Sundance
Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, January 15:
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.
In his latest film, Alex Gibney tells the unusual story of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s transformation from plutocrat to thorn in Putin’s side, but that’s just one level of this smart, dense, and intriguing project. The prolific director’s larger intent, and one that he successfully fulfills, is to cogently detail the development of Russia after the USSR from a nascent democracy to an autocratic state, using Khodorkovsky’s background as a guide. Tracing his ascent in the wild chaos of the early 1990s, when he amassed a fortune by taking advantage of his countrymen on the road to privatization of the nation’s most valuable resources, the film explains how Khodorkovsky and his small circle of fellow oligarchs began to exert political influence, and essentially handpicked minor KGB official Putin to succeed Yeltsin. But the shifty new president started to clash with the oligarchs, seizing back power, and eventually arresting the critical Khodorkovsky on trumped up charges and subjecting him to ridiculous show trials before sending him to Siberia. Emerging after a decade of imprisonment with unexpected moral authority – given his past – Khodorkovsky now supports pro-democracy efforts while living in exile in London, deeply critical of the increasingly authoritarian turn Russia has taken over Putin’s seemingly endless reign. Gibney paints a complex portrait of the man and his country, in all of its contradictions, making for a satisfying and thought-provoking film.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
Coming to theatres today, Friday, January 10:
EARTH
Director:
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
World Premiere:
Berlin 2019
Select Festivals:
IDFA, Sheffield, Docaviv, Docs Against Gravity, Dokufest, BAFICI, Guanajuato, Camden, Hamptons, Diagonale, Moscow, San Francisco Green
About:
An exploration of terrestrial locations impacted by humanity in the Anthropocene.
Geyrhalter’s work is known for its careful composition and static camera, creating often breathtaking tableaux. In his latest film, he visits seven sites of large-scale mining and construction in the US, Canada, and various locations in Europe, including a salt mine turned into a radioactive waste storage repository. In addition to capturing the massive nature of these locations, and the dramatic changes wrought by humanity on their landscapes, Geyrhalter zeroes in on a more microlevel, interviewing various construction workers, engineers, and, in the final stretch, an indigenous Canadian protestor, about their roles relative to this transformative – and largely destructive – activity. Through his gentle probing, he yields philosophical and ethical reflection, in addition to frankly practical acknowledgement of the world’s insatiable desire for more as the main driving force for the scale of such work.
Filed under Documentary, Film, Recommendations, Releases
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