Category Archives: Releases

Coming to DVD and VOD today, Tuesday, July 21: THE MAMA SHERPAS

Brigid Maher’s look at modern midwifery across America debuted as part of a benefit event in Los Angeles this past May. After a limited theatrical release, Bond/360 now brings the film to DVD and to VOD platforms including iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Instant Video, and VUDU.

Maher’s film has two interrelated concerns: to highlight the work of nurse midwives and to showcase how they can help reverse the worrisome trend toward unnecessary Cesarean births in the United States. As established within the film, Maher came to this topic from her own personal experience, having delivered her first child by C-section but unwilling in her second pregnancy to put her body through the pain of recovery from another Cesarean while trying to care for a newborn and a four-year-old. In the jargon of midwifery (which the film sometimes takes for granted, assuming it’s preaching to the converted), her goal was a VBAC, vaginal birth after Cesarean. Her research into modern midwifery practices led to a successful birth, and opened Maher’s eyes to the prevalence of nurse midwives, midwives who work within the hospital system, and thus able to draw upon not only traditional midwifery practice but, where necessary, modern obstetrics. As Maher profiles various types of approaches taken by a range of nurse widwives, and introduces audiences to expectant families, she reveals the troubling statistics about C-sections, which speaks to the pathologization of pregnancy, as well as to simple impatience and lack of comprehensive training of such eventualities as vaginal breech births, one of which is shown successfully on camera here. While Maher’s conventional film tends much more to the informational than to the artful – and is saddled with a truly unappealing and muddled title which conjures up images of an ethnographic study of Tibetan mountain climbing families – it accomplishes its educational objectives, reframing the viewer’s understanding of natural approaches to childbirth.

Coming to DVD today, Tuesday, July 21: LOVE ME

Jonathan Narducci’s exploration of the mail order bride business had its world premiere at the Florida Film Festival last year. It went on to screen at New Orleans, Hot Docs, Hot Springs, CNEX Doc, Newport Beach, and San Francisco DocFest, among others.

I previously wrote about the doc upon its VOD release here.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, July 17: STEAK (R)EVOLUTION

Franck Ribière’s quest for the world’s best steak had its world premiere at San Sebastian last year. It has gone on to screen at Tribeca, Seattle, Göteborg, Vilnius, and BAFICI, among other events.

This ode to beef takes the first-time director, whose family raises cows in eastern France, on a trip around the world to countdown the top ten steaks he encounters, motivated by a palate-awakening experience after sampling a Peter Luger porterhouse. In contrast to his nation’s obsession with lean beef, Ribière comes to understand the need for fat marbling to impart flavor, and soon sees that perhaps the French way has been off all along. Traveling with Parisien butcher Yves-Marie Le Bourdonnec, he investigates famed beef from Argentina to Spain, Japanese kobe to Scottish Angus, learning of the loving care and regional techniques that help account for variations in taste. While overlong and too often slowly paced at close to two hours, this doc accomplishes its simple objective: providing a tour for meat-loving foodies and a personal, idiosyncratic ranking that is sure to inspire those viewers to conduct their own taste tests.

Coming to NYC’s Rooftop Films this Friday, July 17: FIELD NIGGAS

Khalik Allah’s immersive look at life on the Harlem streets made its debut at True/False earlier this year. It has also screened at Sarasota, Maryland, and FID Marseille.

Street photographer Allah trains his camera on the people he runs across at the corner of 125th St and Lexington Ave at night, primarily African Americans, many who speak plainly about using alcohol, drugs, or K2, a popular smokeable synthetic cannabis-like substance, and about a life of poverty in a society that remains unmistakably racist. Aesthetically, Allah makes the unusual choice of disrupting the synchronization of his sound and images – interviews with his subjects play over fragmented, often slow-motion, visuals, never quite synching up – making for an unsettling but somewhat hypnotic effect, at least initially. Within short order, however, this trick, and the film as a whole, feels like an extended, and ultimately repetitive, experiment that hasn’t been fully thought through, netting the same returns at 15 minutes as it does at its full 60 minute running time. Matters are not helped at all by Allah’s running commentary, which grows more intrusive and less interesting as the film proceeds, devolving into self-indulgent semi-mystical philosophizing. It’s unfortunate, as the director clearly has an eye, producing breath-taking moments of unexpected beauty and ugliness within the same frame, and his subjects themselves would seem to have much more of substance to say.

New to VOD and to select theatres this week: CAFFEINATED

Hanh Nguyen and Vishal Solanki’s exploration of the speciality coffee world debuted at Santa Barbara earlier this year. It has also screened at the Amsterdam Coffee Festival and has had limited theatrical bookings in Germany. FilmBuff now releases it on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Xbox, Vudu and all major cable providers, as well as a limited theatrical run.

Focusing on coffee in a comprehensive manner, this film takes viewers around the world, tracing the development of the beverage from the picking of the fruit and cultivation of the bean to its enjoyment by end users in a generally conventional survey approach. Whether accompanying coffee buyers as they visit farmers in coffee producing nations like Nicaragua, interviewing coffee house patrons as they happily wax poetic about their addiction, or learning about the development of micro-roasters from coffee historians, Nguyen and Solanki and their subjects treat coffee with such reverence it borders on the pathological, at least for non-coffee culture audiences. For their target audience, however, they have made a very slick-looking documentary – essentially coffee porn – that will be consumed happily and smoothly.