Category Archives: Releases

Coming to theatres today, Tuesday, October 3 through Thursday, October 5:
MULLY

Director:
Scott Haze

Premiere:
Austin 2015

Select Festivals:
Hot Docs, Africa World, Winnipeg, Bentonville, Virginia

About:
A portrait of a Kenyan businessman turned advocate for street children.

Charles Mulli (also apparently spelled Mully), grew up an orphan, abandoned to the streets by his family. He worked his way out of poverty, eventually amassing a fortune in the transportation industry before turning his energies to rescuing orphans and other disadvantaged children as part of his nonprofit, Mully Children’s Family. Haze’s film allows Mulli to tell his story, using an excessive amount of reenactments to illustrate his overly dramatic recitation, as well as an over the top score. Often hagiographical and overtly religious, the film unfortunately feel less like a documentary and more like a promotional tool, detracting from the more interesting elements of the story of an unusual extended family and on the personal costs of charity – most strongly expressed by the more complex reflections of the subject’s biological children, who seem to have felt sacrificed to the demands of their father’s larger charitable mission.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, September 29:
THE PATHOLOGICAL OPTIMIST

Director:
Miranda Bailey

Premiere:
Manhattan Film Festival 2017

About:
A portrait of Andrew Wakefield, vilified by the media and by the medical community for his now discredited stance about linkages between vaccines and autism.

Wakefield was at the center of a controversy at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival when an uproar over the inclusion of VAXXED, a film he directed, ultimately resulted in its being pulled from the lineup because of dubious medical claims. While Wakefield’s supporters classified the move as censorship, his detractors instead held the opinion that the film was a work of propaganda that should never have been programmed in the first place. Bailey’s film begins long before this episode, following the now unlicensed doctor as he reckons with the aftermath of his debunked vaccine claims by filing an anti-defamation suit against the British Medical Journal and journalist Brian Deer in Texas, funded largely be a loyal fanbase of anti-vaxxers, who view Wakefield as a hero who gives them hope. Through the well-made film, which focuses almost exclusively on Wakefield and his wife Carmel – positioned here as some sort of default expert, given how much screen time she is allotted – the frankly unlikeable couple defend each charge against Wakefield and play the martyr, blaming a collusion of Big Pharma and a corrupt media for all their ills. Bailey, for her part, never explicitly takes a side, but in providing such controversial subjects as the Wakefields with a platform to continue to espouse their, at best, misunderstood, at worst, deliberately misleading, views, without any real challenge from medical professionals, she treads on ethically troubling terrain.

Coming to VOD tomorrow, Friday, September 29:
COPWATCH

Director:
Camilla Hall

Premiere:
Tribeca 2017

About:
A profile of members of a citizen’s rights group dedicated to exposing police abuses.

Hall’s film focuses on We Copwatch, a loosely organized network of concerned individuals who have made it their mission to bear witness to police activity – and abuses – by exercising their legal right to film them. Not surprisingly, law enforcement doesn’t seem particularly responsive to this idea, particularly when We Copwatch activists capture such disturbing footage like the chokehold arrest of Eric Garner which then goes viral. The film checks in with Ramsey Orta, who witnessed that galvanizing incident, and ended up in jail for his trouble, as well as Kevin Moore, who filmed the arrest of Freddie Gray. Hall struggles to find the proper balance between telling the personal stories of her subjects and chronicling their copwatching activities, making for a not wholly satisfying project compared to other recent films addressing similar themes.