Category Archives: Releases

Coming to PBS’s POV tonight, Monday, August 12:
HAPPY WINTER

Director:
Giovanni Totaro

World Premiere:
Venice 2017

Select Festivals:
Hot Docs, IDFA, Docs Against Gravity, Zurich, DocPoint, ZagrebDox, Vilnius, Istanbul, Visions du Reel, Docaviv, AFI Docs, Edinburgh, Bergen, Antenna

About:
A revealing look at the economic crisis through the goings on at an Italian beach.

Set during a summer in Palermo, Giovanni Totaro’s largely observational film focuses on the vacationers on Mondello Beach. These Italian sun worshippers set up more than 1000 small cabins, personalizing them with decorations to create a home away from home, and, for many, to escape from the challenges of their real lives. Though suffering economic hardship due to the crisis of the past decade, families insist on keeping up appearances, while other beach denizens, like a man selling refreshments, struggles to earn as much money as he can before the end of the season. Perhaps most pointedly revealing these barely below-the-surface anxieties is the increasingly obvious campaigning of a would-be politician as he taps into xenophobia to rally support among his fellow beachgoers. The result is a disarming study in microcosm of modern day Italian society.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, August 9:
VISION PORTRAITS

Director:
Rodney Evans

World Premiere:
SXSW 2019

Select Festivals:
BAMcinemaFest, Sydney, Melbourne, BlackStar, American Black, Outfest, Frameline, Inside Out, LGBT fests in Vancouver, Seattle, Boston, and London

About:
A personal film exploring the lives and work of visually-impaired artists.

Director Rodney Evans, known for his Sundance award-winning fiction feature debut BROTHER TO BROTHER, is losing his eyesight due to retinitis pigmentosa. Given his visually-focused profession, he understandably has fears and concerns about his future as his field of vision continues to narrow. Tackling these anxieties – and the stigma of going blind – head on, Evans shares his experiences while also threading them together with those of three other creatives with visual impairment: photographer John Dugdale, writer Ryan Knighton, and dancer Kayla Hamilton. The result is both instructive for the director and for the audience. On a practical level, the film candidly addresses how Evans and the others experience disability and how they navigate a world that takes sight as a given, moving from attempting to pass as sighted to acknowledging how they have internalized societal stigmas. At the same time, Evans explores each artist’s creative process, how they have adapted to account for their vision impairment, and the revelations they have made about blindness as a different mode of perception that impacts their art.

Coming to VOD via OVID.tv today, Friday, August 9:
EL VELADOR

Director:
Natalia Almada

World Premiere:
New Directors/New Films 2011

Select Festivals:
Cannes, Silverdocs, FIDM, Jihlava, IDFA

About:
A meditation on life and death in Mexico.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

New to VOD this week:
RISKING LIGHT

Director:
Dawn Mikkelson

World Premiere:
Cinequest 2018

Select Festivals:
Melbourne, Cleveland, Minneapolis-St Paul

About:
Three stories explore resilience and forgiveness.

Director Dawn Mikkelson’s film interweaves three unrelated but thematically linked stories of injustice, grief, anger, and, ultimately, redemption. The strongest and most impactful of the three involves Mary, whose 21-year-old son Laramium was killed in 1993 by 16-year-old O’Shea. Years later, Mary lets go of years of anger and forges an unexpected bond with O’Shea as part of a restorative justice program, helping to heal both. The other threads in Mikkelson’s project involve Debra, the daughter of a mixed Aboriginal and white Australian couple, who was forcibly place by federal assimilationist policy into an abusive foster care system; and Kilong, a victim of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge who escaped from slave labor to become a refugee in the US, where he suffered from PTSD. While the latter two strands are not quite as well-developed as Mary’s, there’s certainly cumulative power in the film’s hopeful message, making this an imperfect but worthwhile project.

Coming DVD and VOD today, Tuesday, August 6:
AMAZING GRACE

Realized and Produced by:
Alan Elliott

Premiere:
DOC NYC 2018

Select Festivals:
Berlin, SXSW, True/False, AFI Fest, Full Frame, Pan African

About:
A landmark Aretha Franklin music concert film is released over forty years after it was filmed.

I previously wrote about the doc here.