Category Archives: Releases

New to DVD this week: XMAS WITHOUT CHINA

Alicia Dwyer’s look at the ubiquity of Chinese manufacturing in American products debuted at SXSW in 2013. Screenings followed at CAAMFest, LA Asian Pacific, Telluride Mountainfilm, Green Screens, Edmonton, and Wild & Scenic, among other events.

I included the doc in my SXSW coverage here.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, December 8: BORN THIS WAY

Shaun Kadlec and Deb Tullmann’s profile of gay and lesbian life in Cameroon bowed at Berlin in 2013. Its fest circuit also included Human Rights Watch, Durban, Frameline, Outfest, and LGBT fests in London, Seattle, Copenhagen, Sydney, and Boston, among others.

In the West African nation of Cameroon, like other parts of the continent, homosexuality is considered a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison. Those accused face persecution and ostracism from their community, forced to leave jobs and homes, and, in harsher cases, rape, physical violence, and murder. Los Angeles-based filmmakers Kadlec and Tullmann, learning about the persecution after meeting a Cameroonian physician who founded Alternatives Cameroun, the first LGBT center in his country, set out to chronicle the struggles and the triumphs of the young LGBT community that has been defiantly coming out of the shadows to fight for their rights. Against the hostile background, they film on the sly, even smuggling in a hidden camera to a courtroom to hear the case against accused lesbians, but for the most part they film their subjects more conventionally in safe spaces, such as the LGBT center. Several individuals are profiled, with the bulk of the focus on Gertrude, a devoutly religious lesbian raised by nuns who struggles to come out to her Mother Superior during the film; and Cedric, who is forced to find a new apartment after he is attacked one night. While the very well-intentioned film succeeds in its overarching mission to help increase visibility for gay and lesbians, it never quite digs deeply enough into Cameroonian society, culture, or history to contextualize just why homophobia is so rampant or to ascertain what possibilities there are for changing attitudes and laws.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, December 8: A FASTER HORSE

David Gelb’s love letter to the Ford Mustang premiered at Tribeca this Spring. It has held special one-night-only theatrical screenings as well as limited run engagements and a VOD release.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to VOD today, Tuesday, December 8: CAT SHOW

Donna Lipowitz’s affectionate profile of a woman and her feline companion’s travels debuted at the Netherland’s Docfeed fest earlier this year. it has also screened at AmDocs, Coventry, and the upcoming Together Disability fest in London later this month. FilmBuff now releases the doc across VOD platforms in the US, UK, Canada, and Ireland.

Carly is a young Irish woman who lives in Oxford with her five Persian Himalayan cats. Blind since birth, she has found acceptance, community, and a decidedly competitive streak in the quirky world of cat shows. Lipowitz’s hourlong portrait follows Carly as she tries to rack up points for her cat Tango on the circuit, traveling around the UK, Ireland, and Europe in a quest to become a champion. While the film doesn’t quite take enough advantage of the over-the-top cat show personalities and environment to prove particularly memorable, and demonstrates fairly basic filmmaking, it is blessed with appealing subjects – Carly is very pleasant and Tango is really cute – making for a likeably diverting, if unremarkable, project.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, December 4: BIKES VS CARS

Fredrik Gertten’s look at a transportation debate made its debut at the Tempo Documentary Festival earlier this year. It went on to screen at SXSW, Docs Against Gravity, Sydney, Melbourne, Transilvania, Big Sky, Sedona, SF Green, and DC’s Environmental fest, among others.

Couching an overarching environmental message in a perhaps too simplistic question of personal transportation choices, Gertten suggests a battle waged between cyclists and motorists in urban environments. Primarily focused on São Paulo and Los Angeles, where the “bikes” side of the equation are presented in a decidedly sympathetic light, the film also spends some time in Toronto and Copenhagen, while namechecking other cities. Regular cyclist deaths, often due to a lack of bike lanes and aggressive bus and car drivers, provide an unfortunate impetus for mobilization and lobbying by Brazilian activists, while LA’s historical catering to cyclists offers an intriguing background to Gertten’s portrait of community organizer Dan Koeppel. Strangely, despite offering Copenhagen as one of the utopian ideals for cyclists, the film’s profile of that city is through the lens of a frustrated taxi driver who must navigate the city streets while avoiding scofflaw cyclists, scoring some points for the “cars” side of Gertten’s film. Still, these are undercut by the striking statistics the film offers about the worrying growth of cars, cyclist deaths, the influence of the car/petrochemical lobbies, the insight of an engaging Brazilian urban planning professor, and even former Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s pandering to car-loving suburbanites. What remains problematic is the reductive argument at the core of the film, however, which willfully ignores the role that public transportation must play in any rethink of car culture, and that, for many, socioeconomic factors don’t make it quite so easy to choose between the only two options the film seems to present as viable.